The Dominion - Afghanistan

Canada, Afghanistan, and Wikileaks

Tim McSorley — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 10:27:33 +0000

Multi-Billion Dollar Mining Boom

Moira Peters — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 04:24:08 +0000

From the archives: the economics of war and empire in Afghanistan

Two years ago, in State of Mine—our 2008 special issue on the Canadian extractive industry—the Dominion published an article by Michael Skinner about the international bidding war for Afghan minerals. Skinner cites a 2002 US Geological Survey report detailing over 1,000 mineral deposits in Afghanistan, and Soviet geological studies from the 1970s that led to large-scale mining operations in the country.

We thought—given the New York Times just broke the "news" about a trillion dollars in minerals in Afghanistan—that we would, ahem, dig up this piece for our readers.

****

BAMIYAN, AFGHANISTAN—On a brilliant sunny afternoon in July, 2007, my research partner Hamayon Rastgar and I climbed Shahr-e Gholghola, a tiny but strategically-located mountain that incongruously juts upward in the center of the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan’s central province, Bamiyan. Our guide was a geologist I’ll call Aziz.

Aziz led us through the minefields that guard the approach to Shahr-e Gholghola to reach the strategic lookout above. From the mountaintop we surveyed the incredibly verdant Bamiyan Valley bounded by the famous cliffs of Bamiyan to the north, the snow-capped mountains of the Koh-e Baba Mountains to the south, and looking downstream along the Bamiyan River to the east, the red cliffs of Shahr-e Zohak. A chain-smoking Afghan soldier, posted on sentinel duty to keep watch over the NATO airbase below and guard the BBC broadcasting equipment installed atop the mountain, kept us under his bored gaze. But we didn’t climb Shahr-e Gholghola just to admire the spectacular view. Aziz wanted to tell us his story of war, empire, and mining in Afghanistan with the Bamiyan Valley as his dramatic backdrop.

Some of the richest mineral deposits in the world, said Aziz, exist within a few kilometres of where we stood. Many more deposits are scattered throughout the rest of Afghanistan. A promotional brochure distributed by the Afghanistan Ministry of Mines claims the Hajigak iron deposit in Bamiyan contains 1.8 billion tonnes of ore with a concentration of 62 per cent iron. There is also abundant coal nearby that can be used for the coking process and to generate electricity, making this a world-class site for mine development.

Since antiquity, Afghanistan has been a source for gems and semi-precious stones, metals, and marble. Small-scale artisanal mining has always existed to supply jewelers and metal industries. A Soviet geological survey conducted in the 1970s led to some development of large-scale industrial mining, but most of these developments stalled after 1992 during the upheavals of the American-backed Mujaheddin regime, and then the Taliban regime after 1996. The Soviets also developed natural gas extraction, which helped to fuel the Soviet economy and provided the Afghan economy with a significant portion of its foreign trade.

In 2002, the US Geological Survey (USGS) published a list of more than 1000 deposits, mines, and occurrences in Afghanistan to confirm the country’s wealth of mineral and hydrocarbon resources. Among the minerals found in abundance are gold, copper, iron, mercury, lead, and rare metals such as cesium, lithium, niobium, and tantalum. Tantalum, which is also known as coltan, is a rare element essential in the manufacture of cell phones, computers, and digital cameras. Lithium is necessary for high-tech batteries, specialty glasses and ceramics, and for some high-performance metal alloys. Niobium is used in steel alloys. According to Afghan geology expert John Shroder, writing for online geography journal GeoJournal in 2007, oil and natural gas reserves identified by the USGS far surpass earlier Soviet estimates.

Aziz said he fears most Afghans could be condemned to even greater suffering if these resources are developed by giant transnational companies. Looking over the Bamiyan Valley, we can see that productive and sustainable agriculture fills every available niche in a delicate balance of nature. It is an extremely fragile environment, similar to the arid American southwest. Building a railway through the valley, spewing toxic waste into the atmosphere during the smelting process, and dumping tons of slag onto the watershed would have an incredibly destructive impact on the delicate ecological balance that has been maintained for millennia by local farmers. Aziz reminded us of the genocidal slaughter of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas as they were displaced to make way for economic development and the ecological destruction that resulted from resource extraction. Recognizing that, to this day, resource extraction practices continue to disrupt social and environmental systems, Aziz fears for the future of the Hazara people of Bamiyan and all Afghans throughout his country.

****

As part of its economic liberalization and privatization strategy, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is directing the sale of every Afghan state enterprise in transportation, communications, manufacturing, and resource extraction. Any potentially profitable sector of the Afghan economy is overseen by the agency.

In October 2006, the British Agencies Afghanistan Group announced that privatization of the Jawzjan gas field was beginning and that deals had already been signed to privatize the Karkar-e Dodkash coal mine in Baghlan, a fluoride mine in Uruzagan, a gold mine in Herat, a precious stones mine in Nuristan and cement factories in Ghori and Parwan.

In November 2007, the huge Aynak copper deposit, which is approximately 35 kilometres southeast of Kabul, was auctioned under the USAID plan. According to an article in GeoJournal, the Aynak deposit is estimated to contain more than 11 million metric tons of recoverable copper.

For centuries, if not millennia, artisanal copper mining was practiced at Aynak. In the 1980s, Soviet geologists and engineers began exploration and preliminary mine development of the 28-square-kilometre Aynak copper field, but the Soviet miners were forced to leave when the Soviet military withdrew in 1989. In August and September 2008, the Afghanistan Ministry of Mines tendered four more mine sites for auction: the Feranjal barite deposits in Parwan, the Da Eman coal deposits in Bamiyan, the Namakab coal deposits in Takhar and the Ghorian iron deposits in Herat.

While the privatization program is overseen by an office of USAID, the ultimate decision to accept a winning auction bid rests with the Afghan government. However, there are questions about whether the Karzai government has the power to make autonomous decisions. Some Afghan critics complain that American, British and Canadian diplomatic and military advisers act as Karzai’s shadow cabinet.

For example, a team of Canadian Forces advisers called SAT-A (Strategic Advisory Team Argus) is embedded within Karzai’s presidential offices. During Karzai’s September 2007 visit to Canada, documents acquired under the Access to Information act suggested that Karzai’s speech to the Canadian Parliament was written by the SAT-A.

Ironically, Aynak was technically not privatized in accordance with liberalization doctrine—it was sold to a Chinese state enterprise, China Metallurgical Group, for an astounding US$3.5 billion. The principals of Vancouver-based Hunter-Dickinson, who thought they would win the bidding process with an offer in the neighbourhood of $2 billion, were not pleased by the outcome, according to a Canadian government source. Other bidders on the Aynak deposit were Phoenix-based Phelps Dodge, London-based Kazakhmys Consortium, and a subsidiary of Russia’s Basic Element Group.

Awarding the Aynak mine deal to the China Metallurgical Group may be a shrewd strategic move from the perspective of Canadian advisers. A considerable portion of the extraordinary Chinese bid is earmarked for constructing a 400-megawatt power plant to feed the mine and its smelters, the development of a nearby coal mine to feed the power plant, and construction of Afghanistan’s first railway, which will stretch from Western China through Tajikistan to the Aynak mine and on to Pakistan. The political and commercial risk of investing in Afghanistan makes it unlikely a private company would undertake an infrastructure project of the scale needed to develop the Aynak deposit. The American, Canadian, and British governments operate state-financed insurance schemes to protect investors from political risk in foreign investments, but they will not insure investments of this massive scale. Considering the high degree of influence American, Canadian, and British diplomats and military advisers have inside the Afghan government, it is conceivable that working out the deal with China Metallurgical Group could have been a deliberate strategy designed to shift the burden of infrastructure development to the Chinese state. Private companies from the NATO states can potentially benefit from the surplus capacity of the Chinese coal mine, power plant, and railway to service the many other mines and development sites yet to be sold.

Such a meshing of economic and geopolitical strategies fits with the strategic agenda outlined in the 2008 US National Defense Strategy (USNDS). It outlines America’s strategy to economically engage China and Russia, while still relying on the old Cold War era strategy of containment by NATO forces as a military backup. This latest strategic statement outlines how the US “will develop strategies across agencies, and internationally, to provide incentives for constructive behaviour while also dissuading them [China and Russia] from destabilizing actions.” Strategists in the NATO states are concerned with controlling the growth of Russia and China in Central Asia as these two emerging powers increase their level of mutual co-operation through the Shanghai Co-operation Organization and the Russia China Security Partnership. Allowing China to make a huge and extremely risky investment, for which success is entirely dependent on a continued NATO military occupation of Afghanistan on China’s border, may be a cunning tactic as part of the engagement-containment strategy outlined in the USNDS 2008.

Many Afghans—from cab drivers, shopkeepers and day labourers to intellectuals—told us they believe the privatization of Afghanistan’s resource wealth is one among many factors in the strategic geopolitical and economic calculus the leaders of the NATO states use to rationalize their war in Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s undeveloped resource wealth is no secret to Afghans, even if most Canadians outside the mining industry remain ignorant of the fact.

****

Like many Afghans, Aziz is sceptical of an Afghan government controlled by warlords that was first established by military force and backed by American aid in 1992, and re-established by American and NATO forces in 2001. This government cannot survive without the support of foreign military forces. He doubts such an arrangement will protect Afghans from the destructive practices of foreign mining companies, whether these companies are based in the powerful NATO states or elsewhere. Among the many warlords prominent in Afghan politics and business are Rashid Dostum and Ismail Khan.

Since 2001, Dostum has held numerous influential positions in government and business including the office of Minister of Defence. Dostum is alleged by Human Rights Watch to have committed numerous war crimes since the 1980s, including while he led the Northern Alliance as the ground forces for the American-NATO invasion in 2001. Khan was a captain in the Afghanistan National Army when he led the Islamic revolution in Herat in March 1979. Khan’s Islamic revolutionary forces received covert support from the US during that year. Human Rights Watch alleges that Khan committed war crimes and crimes against humanity since first seizing power in 1979 and throughout his participation in the Northern Alliance. Khan was appointed Minister of Energy by Hamid Karzai in 2004.

Before the NATO states chose to support the Northern Alliance in 2001, Human Rights Watch, among other agencies, repeatedly warned that the Northern Alliance, as well as the Taliban, committed widespread and systematic crimes against humanity that included targeted civilian killings, indiscriminate bombardment of civilian areas, summary executions, torture, rape and sexual abuse, and the use of child soldiers.

****

As we soaked in the breathtaking view of the Bamiyan Valley, a man I’ll call Zahir joined our conversation. Alexander the Great’s army, he said, is believed to have occupied the valley for four years after sweeping through the Persian Empire. From here, Alexander moved south to invade India. The Greek legacy can be found in remnants of art and architecture still scattered about the valley. We could also see Shahr-e Zohak to the east.

In the 13th century, the grandson of Genghis Khan was killed there. The Khan set his army on a genocidal rampage through the valley in retaliation. We could see, carved into the cliffs north of Bamiyan, the two empty colossal niches that, until March 2001, had housed the largest Buddha statues in the world. The destruction of the Buddha statues is portrayed in the West as an act of religious fanaticism by the Taliban. According to Zahir, however, the destruction was a calculated act of cultural cleansing and ethnic subjugation of the Indigenous Hazara people. This deliberate process of ethnic subjugation began at least as early as the late 17th century when the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s army first defaced the East Asian facial features of the Buddha statues. Zahir suggests the Buddha statues were defaced because they resembled the features of local Hazaras, although this is a contentious theory.

At the base of the Bamiyan cliffs, we could see the ruins of the famous bazaar of Bamiyan destroyed during battles in the early 1990s between the Hazara Islamic Unity Party and the National Islamic United Front. The United Front became better known as the Northern Alliance when these forces were used as NATO’s ground troops to take Kabul, in 2001.

Both Aziz and Zahir told us they are fearful the historical subjugation of the Indigenous Hazara will continue and could intensify when mining companies move into Bamiyan. When empires compete over resources, ethnic groups are often enlisted as proxy forces in the fight for wealth.

The Hazara people, Zahir told us, like all the people of the almost two dozen distinct Indigenous ethnic groups scattered throughout Afghanistan, have a deep psychological attachment to their land. They know only too well the brutal history of invading armies that threatened their lives, their livelihoods, and their traditional claims to their land. During our travels, many Afghans, from all walks of life and different ethnic groups, told us they regard the current NATO occupation no differently than previous occupations by the Soviet military, the British military, or any of the other imperial armies that have invaded Afghanistan.

Leaders of the NATO states claim the current occupation of Afghanistan is different from previous imperial occupations. But the question remains as to how the current occupying forces will deal with Afghanistan’s natural resources: who will get access, who will benefit, and whose livelihoods and land will be sacrificed to mining? Recognizing the long global history of extractive industries—including the domestic and global practices of Canadian extractive industries—our two Afghan friends told us they are not hopeful that the Indigenous peoples who will be affected by mining development will be fairly compensated or that the environment will be adequately protected.

Michael Skinner is a researcher at the York Centre for International and Security Studies with the Afghanistan Canada Research Group (ACRG). In 2007, Skinner and his research partner Hamayon Rastgar travelled throughout Afghanistan, where they listened to Afghans from all walks of life who do not have a voice in the Western media.

Recent critiques of the NYT article have been written by Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic and by Paul Jay on The Real News Network.

The Ethnography of an Air-Strike

Tim McSorley — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 05:54:49 +0000

Canada’s military academics in the Afghan war and at home

MONTREAL—In the age of counterinsurgency and the battle for “hearts and minds,” cultural knowledge is valuable currency for the military intelligence business. The desire for cultural intelligence in Afghanistan and Iraq has led Canada and the United States to implement hybrid military-academic programs meant to mimic anthropological research, mapping the “human terrain” of a battlefield.

These programs have led to serious concerns among social scientists in general, and anthropologists in particular, about the possible militarization of their practice, and the erosion of the creditability of their work.

According to Robert Albro of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), there is a fear among academics that the military wants to “plug into” anthropological knowledge without engaging in a dialogue that respects the work, ethics and history of the discipline. Anthropologists in Canada and the United States worry that their discipline could go the way of physics after the creation of the atomic bomb in World War II, weaponizing knowledge at a cost to anthropology as well as the cultures and people it studies.

In late 2008 the Canadian Forces launched a new counterinsurgency initiative in Afghanistan. Entitled the White Situational Awareness Team (WSAT) program—named for military colour codes of red for enemy, blue for friendly and white for civilian. It is similar to the controversial Human Terrain Teams (HTT) deployed by the United States military in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2007. HTTs are the on-the-ground research arm of the United States’ Human Terrain System (HTS) which, according to military sources, is “designed to meet the military’s requirements for socio-cultural knowledge across a spectrum of operations that the US may encounter in today’s world.” Each HTT is made up of five members, three military personnel and two civilians, while each WSAT includes two military intelligence officers and three civilian Department of Foreign Affairs employees.

Critiques of HTS range from calls for its immediate and complete halt, to recognizing an inherent value while denouncing program management. Plagued by scandal, HTS has been caught in a firestorm of internal and external discontent. According to a former employee who spoke confidentially to The Dominion, HTS, in its current form, cannot function as a war-fighting system, and those who should be concerned with its ineffectiveness are more concerned with selling the perception that it works.

Anthropologists in the United States have pushed back. The AAA, founded in 1902 and the largest professional association of anthropologists in North America, published a public statement on HTS in October 2007 calling HTS an “unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.”

The Network of Concerned Anthropologists (NCA) was founded by eleven academics in 2007 to resist the militarization of anthropology. In 2009, the NCA published The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual: Or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society in response to the publication of US Army US Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, a document the NCA calls “faking scholarship.” They directly counter the military’s declaration of success, writing, “[T]here is no evidence, as some supporters have claimed, that the program saves lives.”

In fact, even as these programs are developed, casualty rates have continued to increase year over year. According to a report from the Integrated Regional Information Networks, a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 6,584 civilians were killed in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2009. In the first ten months of 2009, they estimated that over 2,000 civilians had been added to that total.

“We modelled our approach upon that taken by physicists critical of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative,” said Roberto Gonzalez, founding member of the NCA. “After much discussion, we decided to take collective action and produce a statement of our objections to developing trends in the militarization of anthropology.”

The statement has since garnered 1,000 signatures from anthropologists and other like-minded scholars, including a number of Canadian anthropologists, declaring non-participation in all counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. Although not opposed to “all work with military and civilian policy makers,” the NCA is “staunchly opposed to HTS.”

One of these Canadian signatories is Dr. Maximilian Forte, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, and member of the steering committee for Anthropologists for Justice and Peace.

“I am totally opposed to the use of anthropologists and other social scientists in any situation where combat, counterinsurgency, or even the psychological and cultural manipulation of other societies is concerned,” said Forte. “If academics align themselves with the national security state, they diminish the relevance and credibility of their work, and potentially endanger the reputations and lives of all other academics.”

Anthropologists for Justice and Peace was founded in 2009 with a mandate to work in solidarity with civil society, anti-war activist groups, and Indigenous communities, and “call[s] on anthropologists to radically rethink the nature of their position in local communities, to decolonize ethnography, and to re-conceive the nature of the research process so that ethics are not a minor, procedural consideration.”

The NCA and AAA both identify ethics as a major issue within HTS, citing an absence of any code of ethics for both researchers and the use of knowledge collected. The Human Terrain program attempts to approximate anthropological fieldwork methods where we develop intimate and constructive relationships with research subjects, Robert Albro told The Dominion, but does so operating in a state of ethical exception.

“Leadership [of HTS] has at different times and ways stated it doesn’t need to follow United States ethics,” said Albro.

The NCA has a similar position, writing that “the HTS program violates scientific and federal research standards mandating informed consent by research subjects.” Both are referring to the Common Rule, an ethical regulation which enshrines the protection of human subjects in scientific and medical research.

The AAA code of ethics promotes responsibility by anthropologists in the field, specifically toward the subjects of their research. At the heart of this code, Albro cites a “do no harm” ideology. This creates a problem if research is feeding military intelligence and facilitating the kill chain. Additionally, anthropological ethics state that research should be shared openly, especially with the fieldwork subjects. In the HTS, research immediately becomes classified, creating what Albro calls an issue with “social scientists working in secrecy.”

HTS adopts the language of anthropology and trains recruits in the basics of fieldwork,
yet only six PhD anthropologists, of over four hundred employees, are serving in the program. According to Zenia Helbidg—a former HTS recruit, who was fired for pointing out some of the program’s shortfalls to superior officers—HTS is “hiring anyone with a degree which they can sell as social sciences.”

There is concern that deploying the army approximation of anthropologists, clad in fatigues with a gun in hand, gives the image of bringing the full force of the military to bear in a fieldwork situation and fundamentally skews power dynamics between researchers and the communities they study.

“One [blowback] is to recast anthropologists as servants of empire, and as the eyes and ears of the national security state,” Canadian anthropologist Maximilian Forte told The Dominion. “Many anthropologists already, in the best of times, have been suspected of being intelligence agents. These developments will only solidify that perception, and could potentially put the lives of anthropologists abroad at risk.”

The most public example of this was on November 5, 2008, when Paula Loyd, a member of HTT AF4, was doused in a flammable liquid and set on fire while interviewing residents of the village of Chehel Gazi, 80 kilometers west of Kandahar city. She later died in a United States medical facility.

A United States military statement described the incident noting that one of Loyd's HTT co-workers shot and killed her assailant, sparking questions about why a United States civilian is carrying a weapon while deployed as part of an active military counterinsurgency operation. Lloyd’s team was embedded with Task Force 2-2, a United States unit deployed under the command and purview of the Canadian Forces Task Force Kandahar. The Canadian Forces made no public comment on the incident.

The situation in Canada is exasperated by the fact that any social scientist deployed with the Canadian military is a federal employee first, and an academic second.

“Their [WSATs'] job seems to be no different from that of HTS, except that for now the civilians they use are government employees, not academics,” Forte told The Dominion. “They have breached a barrier however: the idea that social and cultural knowledge can be useful for counterinsurgency, at least that door has now been opened in Canada”

Inquiries to the Canadian Forces were not returned by press time.

Academics, and their research, become part of the military intelligence machine in a system where, according the Canadian Forces COIN manual, “[R]egardless of what agencies are used to undertake activities, much of the assessment in support of operations will come from military intelligence staff.”

This places academia in a position which, according to Dr. Forte, mistakes “service to the state as service to the people—a mistake that is a hallmark of classic fascism.”

To date, the debate about military influence in anthropology and other social sciences remain chiefly in Unites States, but that could be changing. A well attended panel entitled “The Use of Culture and Anthropology in Counter-insurgency and Peacekeeping Operations” at the Canadian Anthropological Society’s 2009 conference, along with the foundation of groups like Anthropologists for Justice and Peace, are evidence of growing momentum against the military’s attempts to drape a green beret on the ivory tower.

Human intelligence programs represent a dangerous step towards “cultivating a dependency on the national security state, and on military funding, to build prestige, prominence and power,” according to Dr. Forte. “This will diminish the space of independent, critical intellectual endeavours, and ultimately create momentum against academia as a safe space in which to produce knowledge that challenges dominant assumptions.”

Cameron Fenton is an intern at The Dominion and an anthropology student at Concordia University in Montreal.

Embedded Anthropologists

Malalai Joya: Canada must withdraw troops from Afghanistan immediately

Tim McSorley — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 15:20:17 +0000

I have just completed a two-week speaking tour across Canada, bringing a message to the great people of this country: The people of Afghanistan are fed up with the occupation of their country and with the corrupt, Mafia-state of Hamid Karzai and the warlords and drug lords backed by NATO.

On behalf of the suffering people of Afghanistan, I offer my condolences to the families here who have lost their loved ones. I believe these fallen soldiers, themselves, are the victims of the wrong policy of your government. The families of Afghan civilians killed in this war share your feelings of loss.

If we turn these sorrows into strength, we can end this war. Bringing the troops home at the end of 2011 is too late; the troops should be withdrawn as soon as possible, before more Afghan and Canadian lives are needlessly lost.

Today, it has become an open secret that the Canadian government of Stephen Harper has been complicit in the torture of countless innocent Afghans. This is just one reason people in Kandahar and across my country are tired of this war.

It is clear now that the real motive of the US and its allies, hidden behind the so-called "war on terror", was to convert Afghanistan into a military base in Central Asia and the capital of the world’s opium drug trade. Ordinary Afghan people are being used in this chess game, and western taxpayers’ money and the blood of soldiers is being wasted on this agenda that will only further destabilize the region.

The recent so-called election in Afghanistan tells you all you need to know about what kind of "democracy" has been imposed by the occupation. It is ridiculous to Afghans that the Harper government and Defence Minister Peter MacKay have called this process a "successful election".

Even the cats of Afghanistan laugh at this kind of statement, because everyone knows that this was the most fraudulent election possible. Before the vote, people on the streets predicted the outcome with a proverb, "It will be the same donkey with a new saddle." In the end, in fact, we have seen that even the saddle—Karzai—is not new.

Now that Karzai has been inaugurated again, the nature of his government is more obvious than ever. Both of his new vice-presidents, Fahim and Khalili, are warlords with the blood of innocents on their hands. In Kandahar, where Canadian troops have been stationed for years, Karzai’s brother is reported to be involved in drug trafficking, and the New York Times recently reported that he’s been receiving regular payments from the American CIA.

So do not be deceived by talk of Karzai cleaning up corruption. His appointment of a new anticorruption team is a case of the rabbit being put in charge of the carrots.

Torture, drug trafficking, the continued rule of warlords and fundamentalists—these are the only things that this war has brought Afghans. Today, our people are being vicitimized by two enemies: the occupation forces bombing us from the sky, and the warlords and their Taliban brothers-in-creed.

If the troops withdraw, it will be easier for Afghans to fight one enemy and to determine our own future. It is the duty of the Afghan people to work for freedom and democracy; these values can never be donated to us by the very foreign powers who—after nearly three decades of funding various fundamentalists are arming warlords and other criminals—are responsible for many of the problems Afghanistan faces today.

While I am opposed to the policy of the Canadian government in Afghanistan, I have been very moved by the support of ordinary people across this country, from Victoria to Halifax. Having spoken to big public meetings in cities right across this country, it is clear that the Canadian people are fed up with their government's policy in Afghanistan. Let's raise our voices together to end this unjust and devastating war.

Malalai Joya was the youngest woman elected to the Afghan Parliament in 2005. She has recently completed a cross-Canada book tour in support of her new political memoir, written with Vancouver writer and activist Derrick O'Keefe, A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice. This article originally ran on straight.com. Re-printed with permission.

Malalai Joya

Chief Executive Officer, Afghanistan

dawn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:16:37 +0000

Internationally sponsored elections reflect warlords’ power over Afghanistan

KABUL—Shahla Ata is a strong woman on shaky foundations.

“I think that Afghanistan needs a tough president. I don’t see that toughness and seriousness in the men but I see it in myself,” Doctor Ata said at her office in south Kabul before the August 20 ballot. “In America Obama brought a big change. I want to bring such a revolution.”

Ata, whose support lay mainly in urbanized Kabul, “knew she did not have any chance of winning” Afghanistan’s second presidential election, said Kabul based analyst Walliullah Rahmani. Her dream of bringing a revolution to Afghanistan was beset on all sides with problems, as was the election, which was marred by widespread fraud, low voter turnout and violence.

Many believe the democratic experiment, seen as a yardstick for international progress in the country, was oxymoronic given that most power still lies in the hands of warlords and military commanders. As the challenges of incorporating a democratic system into an archaic feudal society become increasingly obvious, plans are emerging for a chief executive position that could allow a civil administration more control.

Most of the presidential candidates were not taking part to win: out of 41, only three were serious contenders: incumbent Hamid Karzai, renowned World Bank economist Ashraf Ghani, and former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.

“Apart from the main contenders, all the candidates have other motives. They are either trying to gain reputations or gain votes in constituencies that will help them bargain for concessions and positions of power later on,” said Sulaiman Aeyamat from Afghanistan’s Centre for Research and Policy Studies, during the run up to the election.

The large number of candidates reflects a country divided along tribal, ethnic, and religious lines. Many villages and communities voted in blocks under the direction of village elders, local power brokers, and religious leaders. The latter focused their support on those with the most clout. In a failing state such as Afghanistan, those who control arms and men direct the votes.

This is why Karzai recruited warlords such as Muhammed Fahim, who wields considerable influence over the Tajiks in Afghanistan. Fahim was going to run against Karzai but switched sides when he was offered the vice-presidential ticket. Aeyamat expected a number of the candidates to drop out and direct their supporters to vote for one of the main contenders, in return for political favors. Ten candidates stood down before the end of the election.

It looks as if Karzai benefited most from such deals. He also benefited from maintaining good relations with influential powerbrokers not involved in the political race, such as the infamous Uzbek warlord Abdul Dostum. Karzai’s main presidential rivals and international observers are currently lambasting him, alleging corruption. Thousands of votes are being recounted or thrown out.

Politician and women’s activist Massouda Jalal made an historic attempt to become Afghanistan’s first female president in 2005. She said the only good thing about the elections is the opportunity to show people how democracy is supposed to work.

“It is has been eight years [since the fall of the Taliban], and we don’t have rule of law in the country,” Jalal said at her home in Kabul in July. “The strong candidates belong to the previous commandership system. They will flush that system with money and they will be successful. It will all continue for another five years.”

Opinions differ as to whether a country looking for peace and development is helped by military figures, left over from Afghanistan’s myriad wars, dominating civil government.

“Military commanders are usually multi-talented. A military person can work as a police commander; he can be a teacher or a governor. I don’t see any problem with that. But a civilian person cannot be a military commander,” said former presidential candidate Abdul Salem Rocketi.

A former high-level Taliban commander turned M.P., Rocketi gained the moniker for his prowess with RPGs during the Soviet occupation. He was one of many candidates with a military background expected to gain from the election.

Gholam Guord Jailani, former president of the Afghan Olympic committee, doesn’t share Rocketi’s view. He said that since the appointment of General Mohammed Zaher Aghbar to head of the committee decisions have been made differently.

“Instead of someone with a sporting background, we have a person with a military background. He is making decisions independently and ideas are not being shared. The committee is losing its reputation,” said Jailani.

At the Tourism Ministry, a clerk, who did not wish to be named, was also critical of military figures owing their roles to patronage.

“During the wartime they had the guns, now they have the money. I spent five years at university, for what?” he said with tears in his eyes. “[My superior] comes in when he wants and does not do his job properly. I can do the job better than him, but I cannot argue because of his position.”

There is growing concern both in Afghanistan and abroad about the efficacy of an “elected” Kabul administration influenced by military commanders. This has led to increasing reports of a chief executive position being created within the government. The position would be similar to that of a corporate CEO.

The unelected seat would allow the US and Afghanistan to bypass the web of allegiances and power sharing that causes so many of the problems faced by the US and Afghan governments.

A draft report obtained by Kabul’s 8am paper in mid-June said the holder would have the power to “monitor the activities of ministers” involved with defense, foreign policy, counter terrorism, finance, and security. He would also have the power to propose “dismissing, or firing or changing of any official.”

In May, the New York Times reported that senior unnamed US and Afghan officials had revealed that previous US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, was in talks with Hamid Karzai about taking up the role. Both Khalilzad and the Karzai administration have denied discussing the controversial position, which would increase US control over the government in the long term.

Former World Bank executive Ashraf Ghani has been offered the position repeatedly. He has refused saying it was “not workable” in a democratic system, and decided instead to run against Karzai. The offer, however, is still being discussed between Karzai and Ghani, with the Americans’ encouragement.

For Massouda Jalal, the ethical implications of creating an independent political position, are outweighed by the potential to affect the pervasive alliances of the still strong military government.

“The chief executive position is a good idea”, she said. “There have been many military men given support in the government [since the fall of the Taliban], why not let someone else have a chance? We are in the primary stage of government building and it will allow experts to strengthen the leadership.”

Ryan Fletcher is a freelance journalist based in England. He recently traveled to Afghanistan.

Canada's Ambassador to Afghanistan

Election worker in Kandahar

Afghanistan's Troubled Election

Ariel Nasr — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:37:27 +0000

The Afghan Election Complaints Commission (ECC), with Canadian UN appointee Grant Kippen at it's helm, has published the first results of it's investigation into fraud in the presidential election, held on August 20th. On Thursday the commission announced it would throw out the ballots from 83 Afghan polling stations, where there is definite evidence of fraud. 51 of the problem stations were in Kandahar, 27 in Ghazni, and five in Paktika, according to ECC press releases. Of the 2300 complaints the ECC has received, the largest group concern irregularities at the polls, including ballot box stuffing. Other common complaints include allegations of intimidation, and lack of access to the polls, particularly for women. The ECC investigation is ongoing and could result in a fresh election.

Currently, as vote tallying continues, the three front runners in the presidential election are the incumbent Hamed Karzai with 54.1%, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah with 28 %, and Ramazan Bashardost with 9.2 %. 91.6% of polling stations have been tallied, so the counting is almost done, but further investigations into fraud could change things significantly. According to electoral law, if Karzai doesn't receive at least 50% of the valid votes, there will have to be a run-off election this fall. If enough ballots are invalidated as a result of the ECC investigation, Karzai could lose his current winning position, and fall below the necessary 50%.

Butcher and Bolt

dawn — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:45:30 +0000

Why "special forces" fail in Afghanistan, from Churchill to Obama

VANCOUVER—With the ongoing enlargement of US forces in Afghanistan—expected to include a 29 per cent increase in special forces—observers reasonably expect a corresponding rise in violence in that country. But if history is any guide, the augmented firepower may also bring more of a particular brand of counterinsurgency.

As early as 2007, reports emerged of a vicious special forces attack on civilians in Helmand province. Villagers from Toube, in a remote area near the Pakistan border, claimed that foreign special forces along with Afghan soldiers entered the village in a helicopter late at night and proceeded to enter homes and kill civilians on the spot.

Locals interviewed by Afghan journalists "spoke consistently of soldiers breaking down doors, shooting children and cutting throats," and claimed as many as 18 civilians were killed. The accusations were ignored by the international press.

In Winston Churchill's day, such tactics were known as "butcher and bolt" operations and involved indiscriminate attacks on Pashtun villages, leaving crops and homes burned. Circa 1897, the young Churchill's unit, stationed on the edge of British India, were practitioners of the art. Later in his career, Churchill would recommend their use, by name, against the coastal towns of occupied Europe.

But savagery against the Afghan enemy was a feature of British policy from day one, going back to the First Anglo-Afghan War, whose failures would be repeated twice more at 40-year intervals.

The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in 1842 with a storm of English revenge for an infamous incident where the British garrison forces at Kabul were massacred as they retreated. The "Army of Retribution," led by General Nott, was duly dispatched from British India for the purpose of "re-establishing our reputation," in the words of the Governor General. With their reputation at stake the British forces set to work, and several months of savagery reached its climax in an attack on a village north of Kabul where British-led forces killed every adult male and raped and killed many women.

The Second Anglo-Afghan War saw General Roberts' still-remembered "reign of terror" in Kabul. In 1880, as the war was winding down, Pashtun forces met the British in Helmand in the Battle of Maiwand, wiping them out. The retreating Brits then occupied the city of Kandahar, ousting its 8000 civilian inhabitants while they prepared retribution.

Despite history's lessons, and in the face of Afghan opposition, US president Barack Obama is going to ramp up the war. "Most of the Afghans interviewed," writes veteran correspondent Pamela Constable, "said they would prefer a negotiated settlement with the insurgents to an intensified military campaign."

Skeptical responses to the surge don't end with its civilian recipients. Even some American officers and military theorists who championed the surge doctrine's use in Iraq are "divided" over its applicability in Afghanistan, according to counterinsurgency specialist Andrew Exum.

Neither is it the case that troop surges have not yet been tried in the current conflict. The results have been consistent—namely, an increase in insurgent violence commensurate with the build-up of foreign troops in the country. Civilian casualties have inevitably followed the surge in violence, hence the opposition of the Afghan population to another troop surge. There is little reason to expect a different result this time around.

This apparent disconnect between tactics and expected results has spread, along with the war, into Pakistan. A recent New York Times report cites "CIA veterans" in Pakistan who warn that Predator strikes "won't undermine, and may promote, the psychology of anti-American militancy" which is already on the rise.

While civilian casualties are widely considered the most important determinant of success for the counterinsurgency effort, there too the US-led war machine is out of touch. While we are regretful when we kill civilians, goes the Pentagon line, we must remember that we do so by accident. The Taliban, on the other hand, do so on purpose, revealing the depths of evil in which they lurk.

Yet Pashtun civilians see it decidedly differently. In their view, violence against civilians is mainly the fault of the US/NATO occupation. As a correspondent with substantial recent experience in the country explains, "[I]t does not matter if the victim was killed by the Taliban, US forces or Nato soldiers. Relatives of the dead now usually blame the government and the occupation for their loss."

Nor does the highest law of the land support the Pentagon stance. International law makes no distinction between deliberate attacks on civilians, which western military leaders often accuse the Taliban of committing, and indiscriminate attacks. "From the standpoint of the law of international armed conflict," notes a leading legal scholar, "there is no genuine difference between a premeditated attack against civilians (or civilian objects) and a reckless disregard of the principle of distinction; they are equally forbidden."

None of this vital context gets coverage or commentary in the mass media, which prefers stories about helpful occupation soldiers whose victory is imminent. Amnesty International's recent assessment of the war in Afghanistan might therefore shock any North American news editor: "Violations of international humanitarian and human rights law were committed with impunity by all parties, including Afghan and international security forces and insurgent groups. All sides carried out indiscriminate attacks, which included aerial bombardments" by NATO and US-led forces.

In spite of impending violence and disaster, the Obama administration and its international partners will persevere in bringing more misery to a terrorized land. As the staid publication The Economist predicted last year: "If America fails in Afghanistan, as it might, it will be remembered there for killing children."

Dave Markland lives in Vancouver where he organizes with StopWar.ca and edits a blog at stopwarblog.blogspot.com.

Helmand Afghanistan Sand

Helmand Afghanistan Mountains

The ongoing outsourcing in Afghanistan

Amy Miller — Fri, 29 May 2009 13:54:23 +0000

outsourcing.jpg

The ongoing outsourcing in Afghanistan

Canada’s Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Kandahar, Afghanistan will not be put in harms way, despite the oft-repeated political promise that all of Canada’s ground troops will be withdrawn by 2011. The responsibility of the security of these specialists-contractors themselves- will instead be provided by private companies, who will need to go through a selection process, according to Canada’s Ambassador to Afghanistan Ron Hoffmann who spoke to journalists via video-conference, earlier this week.

This is not the first time that the Canadian government has decided to hire private security companies in Afghanistan. The British based firm, Saladin Security , has been protecting the Canadian Embassy in Kabul for many years, while many Afghan contractors including warlords, have been hired to protects convoys of Canadian personnel or provide a "security cordon" for high risk situations, such as roadside bombs going off.

Intellectual Author

dru — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Michael Ignatieff's potent mix of imperialism and human rights

HALIFAX–During his time as a professor of human rights at Harvard, Michael Ignatieff became something of a sensation in the US foreign policy establishment and elite circles. He wrote frequently for The New York Times Magazine, where his articles were featured on the cover no less than four times, with titles like "Could We Lose the War on Terror?," and "American Empire: The Burden."

Ignatieff's articles for the Times take the view that US military operations constitute an "Empire Lite," and "America's entire war on terror is an exercise in imperialism."

His written work strikes the tone of an unflinching observer, describing power relations in their stark reality. "The relationship between the locals and the internationals is inherently colonial," he writes of NGOs and troops in Afghanistan in "Nation Building Lite" in 2002.

"The unpleasant underside of nation-building is that the internationals' first priority is [...] increasing their budgets and giving themselves good jobs. The last priority is financing the Afghan government."

Following his usual pattern, after identifying the problem, Ignatieff goes on to endorse this reality as the only apparent recourse for "failed states."

"Imperialism used to be the white man's burden. This gave it a bad reputation. But imperialism doesn't stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect," Ignatieff writes in the same article.

"Nations sometimes fail, and when they do, only outside help – imperial power – can get them back on their feet."

It is, he concludes, the "kind of imperialism you get in a human rights era."

At that time, Ignatieff backed the US bombing and invasion of Iraq, and repeatedly made the case for it by invoking human rights as a motivating factor.

In 2007, after he began his political career in Canada, and after close to a million people were killed in Iraq, he nominally recanted his views – again in the Times Magazine.

Concluding his apologia, Ignatieff recasted his support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a pitch for his political leadership. "Democratic peoples," he writes, "should always be looking for something more than prudence in a leader: daring, vision and – what goes with both – a willingness to risk failure."

During the same period, Ignatieff was intimately involved in developing the "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P), a doctrine guiding the use of "humanitarian intervention" in "failed states." According to one insider, Ignatieff was one of three who drafted the initial R2P report. In a 2008 promotional video, Ignatieff explains that R2P is "the idea that if a country is unwilling or unable to protect its own people, if it's responsible for ethnic cleansing or massacres, or if it's denying relief aid to its own people, then another country should step in and help."

While R2P is theoretically intended to prevent genocidal massacres, critics maintain that giving powerful countries the go-ahead to invade "failed states" will inevitably be abused.

In a long exposé published by UpsideDownWorld.org, Researcher Anthony Fenton makes the case that the overthrow of Haiti's democratically elected government was actually the first "test case" of R2P. Fenton points to a history of activities aimed at destabilizing Haiti's government – which had resisted the excesses of externally imposed "reforms" – undertaken by US and Canadian governments. During the campaign of destabilization, Fenton notes, R2P was frequently invoked in discussions about Haiti.

In memos sent by the Canadian Embassy in Porte-Au-Prince in the weeks leading up to the coup acquired by Fenotn via an access to information request, Ambassador Kenneth Cook speculated that the international community "will have to consider the options including whether a case can be made for [R2P]."

The government of Canada has refused to release uncensored memos from the time of the coup itself.

In February 2004, Canadian troops invaded Haiti while President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was physically removed from the country by US Special Forces. Most elected officials were forced into hiding. The violence that followed dwarfed even the most puffed-up human rights concerns cited to justify the coup.

A study by The Lancet, a top international medical journal, estimated 8,000 people were murdered and 35,000 were raped in the post-coup period. During the same time, Canada had been overseeing Haiti's police force, which was a principle source of post-coup violence.

Since the 2004 coup, Haiti is seldom mentioned by R2P advocates. Fenton writes, "Dozens of papers, panels, symposiums, and conferences seem to have studiously avoided Haiti when discussing R2P [since the coup]."

One exception to the silence about R2P in Haiti stands out.

"Stabilization efforts in Afghanistan, Haiti and Iraq are testing grounds," writes policy analyst and R2P advocate Stephen Baranyi, "for fourth generation peace operations and approaches in fragile states."

"One problem is that the strategic interests of major Western powers – and not R2P criteria like massive human rights violations – drove decisions to intervene in these cases."

The credibility of R2P is "damaged," writes Baranyi, by "de facto collaboration with paramilitary leaders" and a lack of "open debate."

In calling for an "open debate," Baranyi is alone.

Ignatieff has been applauded by some for his candor in examining the results of the Iraq invasion he once backed. In the case of Haiti, however, there has been none of the introspection or public self-questioning that have proven to be such an effective component of Ignatieff's rhetorical arsenal.

As Liberal leader, Ignatieff continues to advocate for R2P. He now mentions Burma, Zimbabwe and Sudan as possible candidates for R2P interventions. The "test case" of Haiti is no longer cited.

Former Prime Minister Paul Martin remarked of Ignatieff, with unwitting insight: "Michael has inherited both a very deep understanding of Canada's role in the world and of, in fact, the kinds of upheavals that the world is capable of thrusting upon unsuspecting populations."

Dru Oja Jay is an editor with The Dominion.

Ignatieff at Conference

Canadian Drones Patrol Afghan Airspace

dawn — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:19:45 +0000

Unmanned warplanes stretch the definition of "nation building"

MONTREAL–War is rising to new heights over Afghanistan. Flying thousands of feet over the frontlines of Kandahar are several new unmanned military planes recently activated by the Canadian Army.

Beyond reach of the human eye, the advanced spy aircraft, the Heron, will monitor territory throughout southern Afghanistan from dizzying altitudes, delivering information for military strikes.

In early December two Afghans were killed in a targeted attack by Canadian forces on the basis of information gathered by the spy drones. According to military officials the Afghans killed were members of the Taliban. However, this has not been independently verified.

Far beyond the visual capacities of local Afghan authorities, the Heron will provide hyper details on human movements and activities allowing "ground forces to see...in real time [the] images acquired by the aircraft's sensors on a laptop on the ground," according to the Canadian Army.

Highly advanced spy aircrafts hovering over Afghanistan, collecting information on local movements, serve as a poignant reminder of Canada's role as a foreign military force in the country, operating beyond the domain of 'nation building' or reconstruction efforts.

Canada’s multi-million dollar unmanned spy airplanes are a direct result of recommendations stemming from the Conservative-government-initiated commission on Canada’s role in Afghanistan, headed by former Liberal cabinet minister John Manley. The commission's report paved the way for the controversial extension of combat operations until 2011.

"There simply are not enough troops to ensure that the job can be properly done in Kandahar province...We hope that this [report] is not a poison pill," said Manley at a media conference after the release of the report. The report specifically outlined Canada’s acquisition of “high-performance unmanned aerial vehicles for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” before February 2009 as a condition to extend the mission.

According to multiple opinion polls, the majority of people in Canada oppose the war in Afghanistan. It was the technicalities of war, however, and not the essential nature or context of the Canadian military presence in the country that were the subject of critique in the government-sponsored report.

“Operations on the ground in Afghanistan are easier for the Canadian government to present in their narrative of humanitarian war,” said Sophie Schoen, a Montreal-based anti-war activist with Block the Empire.

However, according to Schoen, “Canada’s military role in the sky makes it clear that the mission is not humanitarian. [The recent] expansions of military capabilities in the air is indicative of the real nature of Canada’s mission in Afghanistan and our role as an occupying force.”

Operating from the skies allows Canada a huge technological advantage over local guerrillas in southern Afghanistan. The advantage of aerial combat is especially important in light of recent events that suggest the US-backed government in Kabul is losing political control over major regions in the country, including Kandahar, where Canadian forces are stationed.

Last June, militias staged a spectacular jailbreak at the main prison in Kandahar, freeing up to 1,000 prisoners by blowing through the prison walls with explosives. This action set a new benchmark for the growing capacities of rebels in southern Afghanistan.

Hundreds have been killed in southern Afghanistan this past year, while US and Canadian military officials – as in Iraq – continue to ignore demands from human rights organizations that they keep records on civilian deaths.

“The number of civilians killed by the international forces in Afghanistan remains significantly underreported,” stated Amnesty International in a 2008 report.

“Taliban is a label applied to any male over 18 that the Canadian Army kills in Afghanistan, a term that is so broadly applied it is absurd,” said Schoen. "Generally this term, Taliban, is used without any verification and is used to cover up killings carried out by Canadian forces."

The spy drones that fly over Kandahar providing details for Canadian military strikes are adding another military layer to the thousands of foreign troops already occupying the country.

After decades of conflict in Afghanistan and thousands of civilian deaths since the 2001 US-led invasion, one key point has been clearly repeated by progressive voices inside Afghanistan: military-driven solutions delivered by foreign forces will not provide safety or stability for the country.

“We need liberation, not occupation,” said Malalai Joya, celebrated member of the Afghan Parliament, in a recent interview. “Afghans have a long history of fighting foreign occupation and if the[...]occupation lasts longer we may witness many mass resistance movements against it.”

A version of this article was originally published by the community newspaper, Sada al-Mashrek, based in Montreal.

Stefan Christoff is a community organizer and journalist based in Montreal and a member of Tadamon!, a collective of social justice activists in Montreal working for justice in the Middle East.

HighwayOfHeroes

Canadian Hypocrisy, CSIS, and Omar Khadr

dawn — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:14:23 +0000

The July 15 release of seven hours of footage of a CSIS agent interrogating Omar Khadr is the first footage released of an interrogation at Guantanamo, and the first time that footage of a CSIS interrogation has been made public.

Toronto-born Khadr has been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay since 2002. He was 15 years old when he was accused of throwing a grenade that killed SFC Chris Speer in Afghanistan.

Romeo Dallaire is quoted in today's Guardian saying: "[Canada has] worked for years to assist other nations in eradicating the use of children in conflict. But our own country doesn't even want to recognise that our own citizen (is a child soldier). No matter what his politics are, it's totally irrelevant."

Chiming in on behalf of the small but powerful extreme right, hyper militarized Canuck class, the National Post editorial board had this to say today, in an editorial titled Keep Khadr Where he is: "...the question becomes, do we trust an American military tribunal to dispense justice? Frankly, we do."

This situation is so terrible, and so wrong in so many ways.

Click here for information on writing your MP & the PM demanding that Khadr be transferred from US to Canadian custody.

Mission Extended

hillarybain — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:00:36 +0000

Pro-US panel was key in extending Afghan mission

Buoyed by the recommendations of a government-appointed blue-ribbon panel, on March 13 Canada's parliament approved a motion to extend its combat mission in Afghanistan until the end of 2011.

The outcome of the motion was effectively predetermined, as the two largest parties in the House of Commons -- the Liberals and the governing Conservatives -- agreed on the wording of the resolution in the weeks leading up to the vote.

Conservative Defence Minister Peter MacKay called the vote "historic" and applauded the "bipartisan consensus" it achieved. Liberal leader Stéphane Dion characterised the resolution as "basically the Liberal motion on Afghanistan."

The political debate about the motion to extend the mission was shaped by the Independent Panel on Canada's Future Role in Afghanistan, a study group appointed by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and led by former Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister John Manley.

The Manley Panel, as it came to be known, was created by the prime minister in October 2007 and foreshadowed the importance of the parliamentary vote on Afghanistan, which took place within the context of a Conservative minority government. Without approval from the Liberal members of parliament, the Conservative confidence motion would not have passed, thus bringing down the government and forcing a federal election.

For their part, the Liberals were hard-pressed to vote against the Afghanistan intervention given that it was Liberal governments that brought Canada into the mission in 2001 and into the heart of the counterinsurgency war in Kandahar in 2005.

The motion passed 198-77, with the New Democratic Party and Bloc Québécois in opposition. NDP leader Jack Layton criticised the "carte blanche" the motion afforded and urged Canadians to "remember this during elections."

During the vote, protestors in the House of Commons public gallery chanted, "End it, don't extend it," while demonstrations against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan took place in more than 20 cities across Canada on Saturday, March 15.

While the Manley Panel was bipartisan in affiliation, its members shared an essential vision of the importance of Canada's integration with the United States. Stephen Clarkson, a professor of political economy at the University of Toronto, said the panel "was clearly selected on the basis of reliably delivering a pro-US interpretation of the Canadian interest."

The panel included three senior officials from the era of Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, including: Derek Burney, a key architect of the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement; Jake Epp, a former cabinet minister and oil executive; and Paul Tellier, former head of the Canadian National Railway and Bombardier Inc.

The fifth panel member, former journalist Pamela Wallin, recently served as the Canadian Consulate General in New York. For his part, Manley's significant efforts to integrate Canada-US security apparatuses with Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge after the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, earned him TIME Magazine Canada's "Newsmaker of the Year" in December 2001.

"They are all either conservative Liberals, or Conservatives who have an involvement in the United States-Canada relationship," said Clarkson, who has written extensively on US-Canadian political and economic relations and is the author of Uncle Sam and Us.

"Since Canada's role in Afghanistan is so obviously connected to Ottawa's desire to please Washington, it was very unlikely they would recommend anything other than staying in Afghanistan," he said.

Shortly after the publication of the panel's report, the Manley committee's executive director, Elissa Goldberg, was appointed Canada's top civilian representative in Kandahar, where she said she will be facilitating the "overall leadership and strategic direction" of Canada's mission.

The significance of the report on the outcome of the vote was clear. Defence Minister Peter MacKay immediately pointed to the "important work of the Manley Panel [which] formed the basis for members of parliament to draw upon." Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier called the report "key" to the vote and said it was "appreciated internationally."

Bernier told reporters on Parliament Hill that the motion allowed the prime minister to go to the upcoming NATO summit in Bucharest "with a strong mandate in his pocket." The Bucharest meeting is considered an important strategy session for NATO, as the security conditions continue to deteriorate in Afghanistan.

The motion that passed in parliament stated that the "extension of Canada's military presence in Afghanistan is approved by this House expressly on the condition that NATO secure a battle group of approximately 1,000 to rotate into Kandahar, no later than February 2009."

The parliamentary extension also calls for Canada to secure transport helicopters and improved unmanned aerial surveillance drones, something the Manley Panel also recommended to reduce the number of casualties of Canadian soldiers. Since 2002, 82 Canadians have been killed in Afghanistan; 31 of the last 33 combat fatalities resulting from roadside bombs.

Speaking at a conference of senior government officials and policymakers in Brussels on Sunday, MacKay pushed his request for additional NATO troops in Canada's area of responsibility: "Come up with a thousand troops and you get to keep 2,500," he said, referring to the number of Canadian troops stationed in Kandahar.

US President George W. Bush said that he intends to use the Bucharest summit to persuade allies to ramp-up the fight in the south. "We're mindful of their request and we want to help them meet that request," Bush said of the Canadian contingency.

Retired Canadian Major-General Terry Liston said that the troop request is simply a political gesture, far short of what NATO generals on the ground say is required. "Just in Kandahar province, according to American [counterinsurgency] doctrine you'd need about 16,000 soldiers," he said. "It's a drop in the bucket, the 1,000."

Meanwhile, in anticipation of the so-called fighting season in Afghanistan, the US has sent an additional 3,600 Marines on a seven-month deployment to southern Afghanistan. The Marines, about half of whom have already arrived in the country, will operate under Canadian Major-General Marc Lessard and NATO's Regional Command South, which includes Helmand and Kandahar provinces -- the heart of the Afghan insurgency.

A report by the United Nations secretary-general earlier this month detailed a sharp increase in insurgent activity in 2007, an average of 566 incidents a month, compared with 425 a month in 2006. Data from the United States Central Command indicates a concurrent rise in NATO and US airstrikes during that same period –- 2,926 bombs dropped in 2007, up from 1,770 in 2006. More than 8,000 people were killed last year, including at least 1,500 civilians, the U.N. said.

A version of this article was published by IPS

Fighter Plane in Afghanistan

Malalai Joya on Canada's Afghan Mission

Stuart Neatby — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:11:54 +0000

Rabble.ca's Derrick O'Keefe recently gathered a significant statement by Malalai Joya, one of the more courageous and heroic political figures in Afghanistan today. She makes the memorable statement below about the billions of dollars in military spending and aid money which has effectively been squandered in Afghanistan by the run-away corruption of the Karzai government.

The Congressional Budget Office says that the U.S. will spend $2.4 trillion over the next ten years on the "war on terror." If they instead spent this money properly and honestly, not only would Iraq and Afghanistan be made into heaven but, also, world poverty would be eliminated.

Definitely worth the read!

Freedom of Expression in Afghanistan

dru — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 03:58:44 +0000

Restrictive laws, self-censorship keep criticism to a minimum

After the collapse of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, as President Hamid Karzai came to power, one of the promising things he did was to declare freedom of the media.

Soon a Media Law was ratified ensuring more freedom of the media under which individuals could run independent papers, publications, radios and TVs. But still some of the articles in the Media Law were controversial and could still bring all other articles of the media law under question. Under such articles, no one has the right to write or say anything that is considered against "national interests." But there is no clear definition of what national interests are that journalists must not touch. In the media law it is also stated that no one can write or say anything that affronts Islam. Such articles can easily be misused by the enemies of free media.

Under the media law a commission was set up to deal with journalistic violations of the media law, however, because the minister of information and culture himself chaired the commission, the decisions of the commission in most cases were biased in favour of those in power. The commission soon came under severe criticism after which some other
representatives from civil society organizations were included among its membership. This again did not work due to the face that the minister still headed up this commission and the independent members were a minority.

The government itself has proved not to be in favour of freedom of expression. Proof of this can be found in the Press Guidelines paper that was distributed to the free media runners last year in which it was stated that no media could run information about suicide attacks of the Taliban on the news headline, nor could they criticize the US-lead coalition, and no one could air and publish news that would decrease people's morale and spirit.

This letter was distributed by the Afghan intelligence to the media and came under severe criticism after President Karzai, in his speech in Madrid conference, highlighted freedom of the media in Afghanistan as one of the greatest achievement of his administration. Interestingly, the spokesman of the president later claimed that he did not know that the intelligence had issued such a letter. This could mean that there are still fragments of power in Afghanistan and powerful individuals in the government that can unilaterally take individual action against journalists and the free media.

Self-censorship is another big enemy of freedom of expression in Afghanistan, one that prevents writers and journalists from expressing certain things. As an example, recently Afghanistan's last king Zahir Shah passed away. All private TV channels felt forced to make exclusive programmes about him and in the ensuing round table discussions only people who would speak in favour of the king were invited. No one could utter a word about his negative points. The fear among the media was that Zahir Shah has been declared the Father of the Nation in Afghanistan's constitution, and those who dared speak against him could be arrested on the charge of insulting him.

I remember a few years ago, when Dr. Sima Samar, the head of Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission, had spoken of secularism in her interview with a Canadian newspaper. Soon after her interview was made public in Afghanistan, papers belonging to the Mujahiddin denounced her heavily and attacked her in several articles, describing her as the "Salman Rushdie of Afghanistan" meaning the enemy and insulter of Islam in Afghanistan. She could do nothing but keep quiet and wait for the media noise to cool down. Finally, all she could say to the media was that her words have been misunderstood and that she hadn't meant to insult Islam. Even after this noise died down, she had to keep bodyguards in her presence at all times, and was forced to severely restrict her movements.

But perhaps the biggest challenge to independent media in Afghanistan is the lack of unity among the so called defenders of freedom of expression in Afghanistan. There are several organizations in Afghanistan working in the field of defending freedom of expression: Afghanistan PEN centre a branch of International PEN, Centre for International Journalism, Committee to defend Afghan Journalists, Afghanistan National Journalists Union and others. It is very important for all of these organizations to be united and to defend each other's rights. Unfortunately, many of them have their own ethnic and linguistic divisions which prevents them from unifying. Only if they are able to unite, despite their differences, and defend each other's rights to freedom of expression, can one be hopeful for the future of freedom of expression in this country. Otherwise, this notion will be just a fragile dream.

The fighters of freedom of expression are in dire need of moral support from the international community. Currently there are some elements within the Afghan parliament and government trying to revise the media law in order to enforce more restrictions upon journalists and free thinkers.

As Canada is one of the main countries involved in Afghanistan's reconstruction, I believe Canadians can play an important role by urging their government officials, particularly those who visit Afghanistan, to keep reminding the Afghan president of his obligations to protect freedom of the media in the country. Such a pressure from the international community, including Canada, can prevent the Afghan government from taking the wrong decisions to repress free media and strangle the throat of freedom of expression.

Waheed Warasta is the Executive Director of the Afghanistan PEN Centre in Kabul. He also served as coordinator of the Open Media Fund for Afghanistan.

Kids with Radio

About that Poll

dru — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:46:52 +0000

The Canadian Peace Alliance has a few things to say about the recent poll (trumpeted by the Globe and La Presse) that ostensively shows Afghans supporting the occupation.