Conflict Profile: Afghanistan

After three months I am blogging about NATO in Afghanistan,
I decided to make some clear with a presentation of the conflicts what Afghanistan had to go through.
Afghanistan – 24.12.2004
Conflict Profile: Afghanistan by Peace Reporter

FIGHTING FACTIONS:

1979-1989: Soviet (and Government) troups v. Mujaheddin warriors (backed by the United States)

1989-1996: combat between Mujaheddin, Tagiki, Uzbeki, Hazari and Pashtun groups

1996-2002: governing Taleban (backed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) v. Mujaheddin, Tagiki, Uzbeki and Hazari resistance groups united in the Northern Alliance (backed by Russia, India, Iran, Tagikistan and Uzbekistan).

2002-present day: American and Government troups (Hamid Karzai’s Government) v. Taleban resistance groups and Hezb-i Islami militia (under the leadership of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar) in the south-east along the boarder with Pakistan; the Uzbeki militia groups of Jumbesh-i Milli (led by Abdul Rashi Dostm) v. The Tagiki militia groups of Jamiati-i Islami ( led by Mohammad Ustad Atta) in the north.

VICTIMS: 1.5 million victims from 1979 until 2001 (400,000 of whom were victims of mine explosions). Estimated 14,000 during the American intervention at the end of 2001 (at least 10,000 Taleban fighters and about 4,000 civilians). 15-20,000 civilian victims who died in the months following the conflict through illness or hunger caused by the war should be added to this total. Other 4,500 (of which 1,122 since January 2004 ) died through fighting and terrorist attacks during the three years of “post-conflict” . Most of the victims are fighters of the Taleban resistance (526), followed by Afghani soldiers and policemen (311), civilians (179), international aid workers (48), US soldiers (48) and NATO soldiers of the ISAF contingent (5).

BONES OF CONTENTION: Afghanistan is the biggest Opium producer in the world (Afghani heroin provides three quarters of t western markets) and it is also rich in emeralds and other precious stones. The country is, however, strategic because of the gas pipelines and the commercial corridors (roads and railways) which run through it linking the ex-Soviet states of Central Asia with Pakistan and India.
Huge deposits of uranium have also been discovered and could become the cause of further conflict.

WEAPONS SUPPLIERS: The Afghani army receives is supplied by thewest (principally the USA and Great Britain). The Taleban resistance is supplied by Pakistan. The Mujaheddin are supplid by Russia, India, Iran, Tagikistan and Uzbekistan. Both the Taleban and the Mujaheddin are financed by the illegal commerce of opium.

PRESENT SITUATION: Following president Hamid Karzai ‘s consultations for forming the new Government, resulted in the nomination of many reformist members, the prospect for foreign troops to stay in Afghanistan for an undefined period of time could become a realistic one.
On December 17 an insurrection of prisoners of war in Kabul’s prison, stopped by the Afghani special forces, caused death to 9 people: 4 detainees, 4 prison’s guards and an Afghani soldier.
On December 19 the Taleban guerrilla fighters have attacked a check-point of Afghani army west of Kandahar, killing 4 soldiers, 1passer-by and 1 guerrilla fighter.

Unilateral War – Afghanistan War did not take place.

Since two days I cannot stop thinking about the unilateral characteristic of this war.
Not the Afghanistan War.
The war that a bunch of western countries is doing in the Middle East.
I talk about Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine.
However Iraq and Afghanistan are the two wars that show the unilateral characteristic of this war better.
It has never happened before in any war tactics that a country would attack another and be sure not be attacked back. When, during the Second World War, Britain bombed Germany it was bombed back.
However today I walk London and I see how people do not think, even from far, to be in a war. Britain, though, is in a war. Britain is in war.
What I know is that if Britain would get bombed tomorrow by an Iraqi this will be just identified as a fundamentalist terroristic attack. I agree, terrorism is wrong – it is a horrible thing. I will always fight against terrorism in my soul. However I wonder which one is the difference (in terms of wrongness) of a desperate (or brainwashed) Iraqi (or Pakistani, Afghani etc) who comes to London to blow himself up and kill innocent civilians and the troops of US and NATO bombing civilians on a daily base?
Is there any of the two that is “less bad”?

Look at the londoners, they walk, they do their business, they move weightless funds with the click of a mouse and decide the sort of the world. And, they feel safe. The war, if there is any, is quite far.
Baudrillard stated: “the Gulf War did not take place.”
Today I want to remember him and say: “The Iraq and Afghanistan wars did not take place.”
War on terror is a huge, infinite, reality show. You can print millions of pictures of dead Iraqi and stick them around the walls of London and londoners will still think that is a new idea of Benetton to sell more – they would think it is an advert, like the one of the movie in which Bush was killed.

We are lost. We need to find our souls back, if it is possible.
I am nothing, I am a tiny small girl, but I feel I have to say I am sorry to all Afghan and Iraqi people – I am sorry.
I just hope they will be more evolved than what western people are and understand that through violence we cannot build a better world.
I just hope that all the (justified) anger they feel deep inside will flourish in a force to shape this world in a peaceful way and not into a push to further destruction.
I hope they will able to follow Beauty better than what western did and do.

Good night.

Mullah Dadullah has been killed

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (CP) – Coalition forces have dealt the insurgency in Afghanistan a “serious blow,” NATO said Sunday as it confirmed the death of the man known to some as the “butcher of Kandahar” – top Taliban military commander Mullah Dadullah.

Dadullah, a senior military lieutenant of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, was killed Saturday in the southern province of Helmand during a U.S.-led operation that also involved NATO and Afghan troops, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, said in a statement.

In short, what is labelled as Taliban insurgency is a popular resistance to the foreign occupation of Afghanistan

by Abid Ullah Jan
(Saturday, May 12, 2007)
“The ground realities as reported by non-Muslim writers and analysts confirm that Taliban were the least evil then and they are the least evil today. Most unfortunately, as Muslim writers, we are damned if we draw a similar conclusion.”

We have entered an age in which work of Muslim writers is kept under microscope and they are hounded for stating the obvious facts. Writing about the ground realities in Afghanistan falls under the categories, where negating official reports from Washington and London is considered as pro-Taliban, pro-terrorism and pro-Al-Qaeda.
It has, therefore, become necessary to rely on the isolated reports from non-Muslim writers and analysts, who dare report the situation as it is. These reports confirm what was mis-reported earlier.
Reporting on the deteriorating security environment in Afghanistan, Chris Sands of The Independent quoted ordinary Afghans, saying, “The difference between when the Taliban were in government and now is the same as the difference between land and sky. Now we are sick of life and if we are sick of life, how can we enjoy it? What is the meaning of life for us? At that time it had meaning, now it is nothing.’” (May 10, 2007).
Another Afghan compared the present state of affairs in Afghanistan with the Taliban era in these words: “’Yes, we want the Taliban back,’ said Haji Abdul Rahman, a tribal elder. ‘OK, they had some negative points, but they had a lot more positive points than the Karzai government. If Mullah Omar once said, ‘Stop cultivating poppies,’ no one would do it all over Afghanistan. Forget about Karzai — even if his grandfather and father came back from the grave and came together with all the coalition forces, they could not stop poppies being grown.’” (Chris Sands, April 1, 2007).
Yet another Afghan says: “I can only talk about Kandahar city. I think life under the Taliban was very good. If we did not have a full stomach, we could at least get some food and go to sleep. If we went out somewhere, there were no problems. How about now? If we go out, we don’t know if we will arrive home or not. If there is an explosion and the Americans are passing, they will just open fire on everyone.”
These reports simply vindicate those Muslim writers who reported in late 1990s that the law and order situation in Afghanistan was at its best in the past 25 years.
Interestingly Afghans are more fearful of the US and NATO forces today than they were of the Taliban five years ago. Note the opening lines of Chris Sands April 8, 2007 report: “Faiz Mohammed Karigar, a father of two, fled Kandahar when the Taliban held power in Afghanistan because he was against their restrictions on education. Now he wants the fundamentalists back.
‘When the Taliban were here, I escaped to the border with Iran, but I was never worried about my family,’ he said. ‘Every single minute of the last three years I have been very worried. Maybe tonight the Americans will come to my house, molest my wife and children and arrest me.’”

Amnesty International – Hanefi

Amnesty International is working on Hanefi’s case.
Soon we will be hearing news.

numbers

21 civilians killed in a NATO air raid over the night.

NGO Emergency hospitals taken by Karzai

source: Peace Reporter

While the Italian defense minister is visiting Afghanistan Karzai’s government takes back, occupy the Hospitals of NGO Emergency in Afghanistan.
One could be given to another NGO while another one could be used, they said, as NATO base.
This is a violent non -justified action, just a follower of all the previous ones.
And none says anything – not even the Italian defense minister. Those hospitals are built with the money of Italian citizens who donated to Emergency not to support NATO.

Afghanistan and Iraq – a same war

I invite all my readers to READ this piece “Afghanistan and Iraq: the same war”
by David Orchard and Michael Mandel that I found posted on this blog. I also want to thanks the owner of that blog for doing such an amazing job.

Four years ago, the U.S. and Britain unleashed war on Iraq, a nearly defenceless Third World country barely half the size of Saskatchewan. For 12 years prior to the invasion and occupation, Iraq had endured almost weekly U.S. and British bombing raids and the toughest sanctions in history, the “primary victims” of which, according to the UN Secretary General, were “women and children, the poor and the infirm.” According to UNICEF, half a million children died from sanctions-related starvation and disease.

Then, in March 2003, the U.S. and Britain possessors of more weapons of mass destruction than the rest of the world combined attacked Iraq on a host of fraudulent pretexts, with cruise missiles, napalm, white phosphorous, cluster and bunker-buster bombs, and depleted uranium (DU) munitions.

The British medical journal The Lancet published a study last year estimating Iraqi war deaths since 2003 at 655,000, a mind-boggling figure dismissed all too readily by the British and American governments despite widespread scientific approval for its methodology (including the British government’s own chief scientific adviser).

On April 11, 2007, the Red Cross issued a report entitled “Civilians without Protection: the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis in Iraq.” Citing “immense suffering,” it calls “urgently” for ” respect for international humanitarian law.” Andrew White, Anglican Vicar of Baghdad, added, “What we see on our television screens does not demonstrate even one per cent of the reality of the atrocity of Iraq …” The UN estimates two million Iraqis have been “internally displaced;” another two million have fled largely to Syria and Jordan, overwhelming local infrastructure.

An attack such as that on Iraq, neither in self-defence nor authorized by the United Nations Security Council, is, in the words of the Nuremberg Tribunal that condemned the Nazis, “the supreme international crime.” According to the Tribunal’s chief prosecutor, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, such a war is simply mass murder.

Most Canadians are proud that Canada refused to invade Iraq. But when it comes to Afghanistan, we hear the same jingoistic bluster we heard about Iraq four years ago. As if Iraq and Afghanistan were two separate wars, and Afghanistan is the good war, the legal and just war. In reality, Iraq and Afghanistan are the same war.

That’s how the Bush administration has seen Afghanistan from the start; not as a defensive response to 9-11, but the opening for regime change in Iraq (as documented in Richard A. Clarke’s Against all Enemies). That’s why the Security Council resolutions of September 2001 never mention Afghanistan, much less authorize an attack on it. That’s why the attack on Afghanistan was also a supreme international crime, which killed at least 20,000 innocent civilians in its first six months. The Bush administration used 9-11 as a pretext to launch an open-ended so-called “war on terror” in reality, a war of terror because it kills hundreds of times more civilians than the other terrorists do.

That the Karzai regime was subsequently set up under UN auspices doesn’t absolve the participants in America’s war, and that includes Canada. Nor should the fact that Canada now operates under the UN authorized International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mislead anyone. From the start, ISAF put itself at the service of the American operation, declaring “the United States Central Command will have authority over the International Security Assistance Force” (UNSC Document S/2001/1217). When NATO took charge of ISAF, that didn’t change anything. NATO forces are always ultimately under U.S. command. The “Supreme Commander” is always an American general, who answers to the U.S. president.

Canadian troops in Afghanistan not only take orders from the Americans, they help free up more U.S. forces to continue their bloody occupation of Iraq.

civilians are only numbers?

by Strife! a friend of the blog’s owner.

In my country, Italy, some days ago a 23 years woman has been killed in the tube by an umbrella. It was a horrible and horribly futile death.
I believe each one of us, when seeing this, should make something to stop this sort of events from happening/
I wonder, though, are we really persons?
Socially and Economically speaking, my possible death, as the death of this woman, is invisible – it does not change anything to the order of the world’s system.
Therefore: we are not persons, we are minor social parts, we are clients, we are economic resources.
Mussolini once said: “I need a hundred of martyrs in order for me to speak at the table of the history”.
Today everyone recognize these words as terrible,right? But then we look at facts, at the daily killing of civilians and we see that perhaps for someone that is.. the way.
Innocent dead means food for hatred and war. Like the staff for the sheperd the innocent are instrument for social manipulation.
Killing someone is defined as wrong, usually. However it looks like if it is civilians fo certain ‘unlucky’ nations to die, it is fine.
We are not considered as people anymore, we are only numbers in bullettin, news on tv, customers, human resource and when protecting us costs more than the what I produce as income than my death is insignificant.
Always Mussolini said: “we have to take them off the liberty that otherwise they would use to kill us.”

Karzai is angry. About time.

 

Alisa Tang, Associated Press

Published: Wednesday, May 02, 2007

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghans can no longer accept civilian deaths from international military operations, President Hamid Karzai said Wednesday amid reports 51 villagers were killed during a U.S.-led offensive against the Taliban in western Afghanistan.

Despite claims that women and children were among the dead, the U.S. military insisted it had no reports of civilian casualties.

But rising public anger was evident as students staged a fourth day of anti-American protests in an eastern city over civilian deaths.

Karzai met with NATO, U.S. and European Union officials, telling them that “civilian deaths and arbitrary decisions to search people’s houses have reached an unacceptable level, and Afghans cannot put up with it any longer,” according to a statement from his office.

During an earlier news conference, Karzai said Afghans had reached their limit after the years of conflict since the Taliban’s ouster in a U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.

“The intention is very good in these operations to fight terrorism,” Karzai told reporters. “Sometimes mistakes have been made as well, but five years on, it is very difficult for us to continue to accept civilian casualties . . . the way they occur.”

The U.S.-led coalition said the military operation in western Herat province was conducted between Friday and Sunday by U.S. and Afghan troops in the Zerkoh Valley and killed 136 suspected Taliban rebels in the deadliest fighting in Afghanistan since January.

The bloodshed sparked angry anti-U.S. protests earlier this week by villagers. Mohammad Homayoun Azizi, chief of Herat’s provincial council, said two council members who visited the area along with Afghan police and intelligence officers reported that 51 civilians had been killed.

Azizi said the bodies were buried in three locations and included women and children. The dead included 12 relatives of a man named Jamal Mirzai, he said.

A man being treated in a hospital Wednesday said he was wounded by an air strike that did not hit any insurgents. “There were no Taliban. Ten of my relatives have been killed, including two of my cousins,” said the man, who gave only his first name, Mohammed.

Osman Kalali, a legislator who was part of the investigative delegation, said they did not see any Taliban or other rebels among the dead. “The casualties were women, children, this kind of people,” he said.

Civilian deaths have deepened Afghans’ distrust of international forces and of the U.S.-backed government as they try to combat a resurgent Taliban — itself accused by human rights groups of indiscriminate attacks that often kill noncombatants.

“We do everything we can to prevent civilian casualties in our operations, and we have no reports of civilian casualties in that operation” in Herat, said a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, Maj. Chris Belcher.

Officials in Italy, which has troops with NATO in Herat, have criticized recent operations there, amid concerns that civilian deaths could make Italian soldiers a target.

“Military operations that hit the civilian population risk alienating that same population,” the ANSA news agency quoted Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema as saying.

UN officials were in the region for their own investigation into the “possible displacement of people and possible indiscriminate use of force,” said Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the UN mission in Afghanistan. He provided no details on their findings.

In Afghanistan’s east, meanwhile, students burned a U.S. flag during the latest in a string of protests in Jalalabad over the killings of five people, including a woman and teenage girl, during a coalition-led raid over the weekend.

According to an Associated Press tally, 151 civilians have been killed by violence in the first four months of this year, including at least 51 blamed on NATO and the U.S.-led coalition.

The AP count does not include the most recent civilian casualties reported in Herat.

The last large-scale civilian deaths were in October when between 30 and 80 civilians were reported killed during NATO air strikes in Panjwaii, a volatile district in southern Afghanistan. NATO said a preliminary inquiry found 12 civilian deaths.

A recent Human Rights Watch report said NATO and U.S. military operations killed at least 230 civilians last year. However, most of the 900 civilian combat fatalities during 2006 were from insurgent attacks, it said.