Archive for the week ending 1st February 2008
Attacks on British return to Basra
Violence returned Thursday to the southern city of Basra, where militants pummeled Britain's airport base with 20 rockets and British gunners answered with volleys of artillery. Civilians were killed and wounded in the crossfire.
The attack was a troubling reminders that recent improvements in Iraqi security are fragile and far from deeply rooted. The Basra battle also exposed potential security gaps around Iraq's second-largest city less than two months after a scaled-down British force handed over control to Iraqi police and military. Rival Shiite factions are locked in fierce struggles for dominance in Basra and the rest of the oil-rich south.
Associated Press, 31/1/08
US completes base on Pakistan border
Another piece of the United States' regional jigsaw is in place with the completion of a military base in Afghanistan's Kunar province, just three kilometers from Bajaur Agency in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
The new US base is expected to serve as the center ofclandestine special forces' operations in the border region. The George W Bush administration is itching to take more positive action - including inside Pakistan - against Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda militants increasingly active in the area and bolstering the insurgency in Afghanistan.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has officially rejected US proposals to expand the US presence in Pakistan, either through unilateral covert CIA operations or by joint operations with Pakistani security forces, but this is not necessarily the end of the matter, especially as the situation in Afghanistan deteriorates.
Asia Times, 30/1/08
British army halves training for troops
Nearly 1,000 new army recruits face having their combat training cut by half so that they can be rushed to the battlefields of Afghanistan. The "exceptional" measure is being proposed by senior officers to meet a serious shortage in manpower.
It would affect those infantry battalions being earmarked to fight in the country next year. One senior defence source admitted that the new recruits would not be properly qualified to fight since they would receive only 50 per cent of the basic training usually given to qualified combat infantrymen.
"I would be very nervous of having to deploy with this limited level of expertise and experience in the frontline companies," the source said. He added that such a scheme could undermine the reputation of the Army.
The Times, 31/1/08
US seeks 'non lethal separation' of Taliban
According to Colonel Martin Schweitzer, brigade commander of Task Force Fury, one of two US combat teams operating in the eastern part of Afghanistan, the "kinetic" emphasis on killing the enemy that once dominated US thinking has gone. He argues the key to security is to deny "anti-coalition militants" - as the US prefer to call the Taliban - the support of the local population.
"Every time that we have had to kill people or injure bad guys to try to separate the people from the enemy, it's always a couple of steps back. Even if it was the right guy, it's a step back because most of these villages have never seen their government trying to provide for them."
Now, he says he is seeking to perform the "separation non-lethally". US efforts to revive the province's virtually dormant legal system followed the realisation that "bad guys" were being released from custody almost as quickly as they were being apprehended - unsurprisingly, given the corruption in a system where judges are paid just $50 a month.
Major Robert Broadbent, command judge advocate for Task Force Fury in Khost, says there is no time to wait for the UN or other agencies to tackle the problem.
US soldiers insist they are acting as mentors, rather than as a neo-colonial administration, and are working with the Afghan army and police to allow them to take responsibility for security one day.
Financial Times, 30/1/08
Bush glosses over Afghan school violence
In his State of the Union address, President Bush called Afghanistan a young democracy where children go to school and Afghans are hopeful.
But he didn't mention the violence that has killed 147 students and teachers, and closed 590 schools in the last year -- almost as many as the 680 the U.S. has built.
Newsday, 30/1/08
White House rethinking Iraq troop cuts
Four months after announcing troop reductions in Iraq, President Bush is now sending signals that the cuts may not continue past this summer, a development likely to infuriate Democrats and renew concerns among military planners about strains on the force.
Mr. Bush has made no decisions on troop reductions to follow those he announced last September. But White House officials said Mr. Bush had been taking the opportunity, as he did in Monday's State of the Union address, to prepare Americans for the possibility that, when he leaves office a year from now, the military presence in Iraq will be just as large as it was a year ago, or even slightly larger.
New York Times, 30/1/08
Western policy in chaos in Afghanistan
Lord Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader who became the international community's high representative in Bosnia, withdrew his application for the role of UN envoy to Afghanistan in the face of Afghan objections, leaving western policy in chaos.
America and Britain had been lining Ashdown up for a senior role since October, and believed they had the support of the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, and the Afghan president, Karzai.
High-level British sources believe that Karzai changed his position as he faced mounting objections from Pashto-speaking warlords and after advice given to him by Khalilzad, a former US ambassador to both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Khalilzad is himself a Pashtun. British sources suggested that contrary to the official US position, Khalilzad had been warning Karzai that Ashdown was an interventionist figure and would weaken his authority still further.
Ashdown had spoken to Karzai about the appointment and agreed his job description, which would have been to coordinate the roles of Nato, the UN and the EU. But in the past week Karzai started to turn against the British, accusing their forces of losing their grip in the south of the country in the fight against the Taliban, and then making it clear to Gordon Brown and Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, that he would not support Ashdown's appointment.
Some British officials said Karzai's decision to withstand the clear US demand for Ashdown will strengthen him with some Pashtun tribes in the short term. No one in British circles is accusing Karzai of corruption, but with the loss of support of the former Northern Alliance, the Afghan president is increasingly dependent on drug traffickers and warlords to maintain his political base.
British sources say they have no idea at this stage how they will repair the damage caused by the Afghan president's sudden change of heart, but without a clear alternative authority figure to Karzai, the west will have to soldier on with the current president for at least another year.
Guardian 29/1/08
Canada threatens to withdraw from Afghanistan
Canada has threatened to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan early next year unless NATO provides significant reinforcements. The country's conservative government says NATO needs to provide another 1000 soldiers as well as helicopters and other material to bolster its forces stationed in and around the southern city of Kandahar.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is frustrated by the refusal of other NATO member states to provide military personnel and says NATO's credibility and future is at stake.
The Dutch government experienced similar problems last year. After prolonged haggling, some NATO members, including France and Slovakia, finally agreed to provide troops. Shortly thereafter, The Hague extended its participation in the Afghanistan mission.
Radio Netherlands, 29/1/08
Bush's rose coloured spectacles
U.S. President George W. Bush offered relatively upbeat assessments of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that failed to address how hard it may be for his successor to stabilize them, analysts said.
In his final State of the Union speech on Monday, the outgoing Republican president argued that over the past year Iraq has seen declining violence and growing political reconciliation among its main Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish ethnic groups.
In Afghanistan, he described "a nation that was once a safe haven for al Qaeda" as "a young democracy where boys and girls are going to school, new roads and hospitals are being built, and people are looking to the future with new hope."
In both cases, analysts said Bush painted an unduly rosy picture and omitted key factors that threaten their stability.
Reuters, 29/1/08
UK forces 'deteriorating'
A failure to recruit more troops from ethnic minorities because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is adding to the "unacceptable" burden on Britain's frontline forces, warns a report to the Defence Secretary, Des Browne.
The conflicts are putting huge strains on the armed services, undermining morale and sparking an exodus of experienced personnel, says the report by a committee of MPs. The performance of the forces was "deteriorating" after seven years in Afghanistan and nearly five in Iraq, and urgent steps must be taken to reduce the overstretch, according to the Defence Select Committee.
"We are deeply concerned that the armed forces have been operating at or above the level of concurrent operations they are resourced and structured to deliver for seven of the last eight years," said the MPs.
One way of easing the strain would be to recruit more soldiers, sailors and airmen, but the MoD has admitted that it is failing to meet its recruitment targets among ethnic minorities. The MoD has admitted that this shortfall could be due to "prevalent views on current operations among ethnic minority communities and concerns about ethnic imbalances and racism in the armed forces in general".
Independent, 28/1/08
Pakistan rebuffs greater US involvement
Pakistan has rejected a bid by the top two US intelligence officials to win more access for the CIA in tribal areas where Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other militants are active, The New York Times reported Saturday.
Citing unnamed officials briefed on the secret visit January 9 by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and General Michael Hayden, the CIA director, the Times said Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf "rebuffed proposals to expand any American combat presence in Pakistan, either through unilateral covert CIA missions or by joint operations with Pakistani security forces."
"Instead, Pakistan and the United States are discussing a series of other joint efforts, including increasing the number and scope of missions by armed Predator surveillance aircraft over the tribal areas, and identifying ways that the United States can speed information about people suspected of being militants to Pakistani security forces," the report said.
AFP, 27/1/08
British have made matters worse in Afghanistan
Britain and Afghanistan fell out in spectacular fashion yesterday after President Karzai accused his British allies of bungling the military operation in Helmand and setting back prospects for the area by 18 months.
Mr Karzai, Britain's key ally in Afghanistan, had little praise for the efforts of the 7,800 British troops deployed in his country. Most are in the restless southern Helmand province, where Britain has invested billions of pounds in trying to defeat the Taleban, bolster central government authority and begin reconstruction.
"There was one part of the country where we suffered after the arrival of the British forces," Mr Karzai told a group of journalists at the Davos Economic Forum.
"Before that we were fully in charge of Helmand. When our governor was there, we were fully in charge. They came and said, 'Your governor is no good'. I said 'All right, do we have a replacement for this governor; do you have enough forces?'. Both the American and the British forces guaranteed to me they knew what they were doing and I made the mistake of listening to them. And when they came in, the Taleban came."
The Times, 25/1/08
US-backed militias under attack
American-backed Sunni militias who have fought Sunni extremists to a standstill in some of Iraq's bloodiest battlegrounds are being hit with a wave of assassinations and bomb attacks, threatening a fragile linchpin of the military's strategy to pacify the nation.
At least 100 predominantly Sunni militiamen, known as Awakening Council members or Concerned Local Citizens, have been killed in the past month, mostly around Baghdad and the provincial capital of Baquba, urban areas with mixed Sunni and Shiite populations, according to Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani. At least six of the victims were senior Awakening leaders, Iraqi officials said.
Born nearly two years ago in Iraq's western deserts, the Awakening movement has grown to an 80,000-member nationwide force, four-fifths of whose members are Sunnis. American military officials credit that force, along with the surge in United States troops, the Mahdi Army's self-imposed cease-fire and an increase in Iraqi security forces, for a precipitous drop in civilian and military fatalities since July.
But the recent onslaught is jeopardizing that relative security and raising the prospect that the groups' members might disperse, with many rejoining the insurgency, American officials said.
New York Times, 24/1/08
US can't manage mercenaries
With even more U.S. contractors now in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. military personnel, government officials told Congress yesterday that the Bush administration is not prepared to manage the contractors' critical involvement in the American war effort.
At the end of last September, there were "over 196,000 contractor personnel working for the Defense Department in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Jack Bell, deputy undersecretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness.
Contractors "have become part of our total force, a concept that the Defense Department must manage on an integrated basis with our military forces," he also said in prepared testimony for a hearing yesterday of the Senate homeland security subcommittee.
"Frankly," he continued, "we were not adequately prepared to address" what he termed "this unprecedented scale of our dependence on contractors."
Washington Post, 25/1/08
Army finds itself innocent
The military has concluded that the killing and abuse of civilians by British troops in Iraq was not widespread but the fault of a few rogue soldiers.
Brigadier Robert Aitken, who carried out a three-year investigation into the abuses in 2003 and 2004, effectively gave the army a clean bill of health in a report released on Friday, saying that while a "tiny number" behaved extremely badly, the vast majority showed "courage, loyalty and integrity".
His findings will anger the families of four Iraqis killed at the hands of British soldiers in southern Iraq, including the relatives of Baha Musa, a young hotel worker who died under interrogation with 93 injuries to his body.
Twenty-one British soldiers and officers have been court-martialled over the deaths, but only one soldier has been convicted after he pleaded guilty.
Reuters, 25/1/08
No further charges over killed civilian
No further criminal charges are likely against individuals involved in the death of Iraqi prisoner Baha Mousa, the government is expected to announce.
Mr Mousa died from asphyxiation in British army custody in Basra in 2003, and suffered 93 injuries to his body.
A court martial acquitted six out of seven servicemen, while another was jailed for a year for mistreatment.
BBC News, 25/1/08
Iraq forced to hold 'rolling elections'
Iraq will hold "rolling elections" around the country because the security situation is too poor for a nationwide poll to be policed properly, the deputy prime minister said today.
Voting will start this year for local government representatives, Barham Salih said, beginning in Sunni areas where demand was strongest.
"I am personally in favour of a rolling election because it will be less taxing on the system," he said.
"I expect this will happen sometime soon because demand from local communities is growing," he said.
The Times, 24/1/08
US Asking Iraq for Wide Rights on War
With its international mandate in Iraq set to expire in 11 months, the Bush administration will insist that the government in Baghdad give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations and guarantee civilian contractors specific legal protections from Iraqi law, according to administration and military officials.
This emerging American negotiating position faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from Iraq, with its fragmented Parliament, weak central government and deep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state, according to these officials.
At the same time, the administration faces opposition from Democrats at home, who warn that the agreements that the White House seeks would bind the next president by locking in Mr. Bush's policies and a long-term military presence.
New York Times, 25/1/08