Aug 10, 2012
Washington Post: Life and War in Afghanistan [2 Aug, 2012]
Anyone know where I can find more pictures of Afghanistan in the summer?
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Washington Post: Life and War in Afghanistan [2 Aug, 2012]
Anyone know where I can find more pictures of Afghanistan in the summer?
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According to Faizal Mahmud, the deputy head of Panjwai’s council of elders, the villagers claimed the soldiers arbitrarily detained them, lined them up, and forced them to walk in front of the soldiers for over a mile, through roads believed to be packed with explosives by the Taliban.
The story was corroborated by many other villagers contacted by phone by National Public Radio. ”They brought in people from all the villages on the sides of the main paved road. The Taliban had told us not to go through this way because there were a lot of mines. All of the road to the next village was mined. But the soldiers told us to keep walking in front of them,” a villager named Hamidullah told NPR.
“They kept telling us to show the mines. We said we didn’t know where the Taliban planted mines. Then they told us to move forward to the next village, on the way if anything happens, you are responsible for the consequences. We kept praying, oh, God, save us,” another participant named Ahmad told NPR.
Based on interviews with current and former U.S. military officials with knowledge of the strategic thinking behind the raids, as well as Afghans who have been caught up in the raids, the authors of the study write that large numbers of civilians are being detained for brief periods of time merely to find out what they know about local insurgents — a practice the authors suggest may violate the Geneva Conventions on warfare.
[...]
The report notes that many Afghans interviewed said nighttime operations had targeted a number of compounds simultaneously, in some cases covering entire villages.
[...]
An average of 19 raids per night were conducted during the period from December 2010 through February 2011, according to data published by Reuters last February. But a senior U.S. military adviser interviewed for the report in April 2011 said that as many as 40 raids were taking place in a single night.
[...]
Most of those civilians targeted or swept up in night raids are released within a few days, according to the report. That assessment is consistent with the revelation, reported by IPS in September 2010, that roughly 90 percent of the individuals who were said by ISAF in August 2010 to have been “captured insurgents” were in fact released either within two weeks of initial detention or within a few months after being sent to Parwan detention facility.
The authors of the report conclude that deliberately targeting and rounding up civilians who are not suspected of being insurgents merely to exploit possible intelligence value “may constitute an arbitrary deprivation of liberty” and thus “inhumane treatment” in violation of Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.
Officials had already announced that they would retain control of the Parwan Detention Center north of Kabul well beyond the planned 2012 transfer date because of concerns that the Afghan legal system is still too weak. But U.S. officials recently said they intend to solicit contractors to help expand the facility’s capacity from about 3,500 beds to 5,500 beds.
That’s the way LogCap III operated for almost a decade. And while KBR had to compete with other companies to win the umbrella contract in December 2001, it didn’t have to compete for any of the subsequent work, which totaled over $37 billion by the end of July 2011.
As an ongoing series by the Center for Public Integrity shows, Pentagon dollars flowing into no-bid contracting has exploded over the past 10 years of war. But KBR’s LogCap contract shows that sole-source contracts aren’t the Pentagon’s only way of limiting competition. There’s also umbrella-type contracts, like LogCap, that allow the government to buy unspecified goods and services over long periods of time.
On paper, LogCap is competitive, because it was initially open for multiple bids. So when the Pentagon says it competitively awards more than 60 percent of its contracting dollars, that includes money spent on LogCap.
Remember that Halliburton and KBR are under the same Carlyle Bush-Cheney-Saudi umbrella.
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Andrey Avetisyan, Russian ambassador to Kabul, said: “Afghanistan needs many other things apart from the permanent military presence of some countries. It needs economic help and it needs peace. Military bases are not a tool for peace.
“I don’t understand why such bases are needed. If the job is done, if terrorism is defeated and peace and stability is brought back, then why would you need bases?
“If the job is not done, then several thousand troops, even special forces, will not be able to do the job that 150,000 troops couldn’t do. It is not possible.”
Data on almost 200 terrorist groups worldwide between 1997 and 2006 show that U.S. military assistance correlates with a 67 percent increase in the duration of terrorist campaigns in the country receiving the aid.
Blair does not say whether this widespread Pakistani perception about civilian casualties is based in fact; if anything, he insinuates that this "belief" is grounded in the much-discussed affection which Pakistanis allegedly harbor for fabricated anti-American conspiracy theories. While the Pakistani perception is significant unto itself regardless of whether it's accurate -- the belief about drones is what fuels anti-American hatred -- it's nonetheless bizarre to mount an anti-drone argument while relegating the impact of civilian deaths to mere "belief," all while avoiding informing readers what the actual reality is. Discussions of the innocent victims of American military violence is one of the great taboos in establishment circles; that Blair goes so far out of his way to avoid discussing it highlights how potent that taboo is.