A US-Sponsored Terror Network: Death Squads in Afghanistan

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Quote:Death Squads in Afghanistan
April 27th, 2010
By FRANCIS SHOR

It should no longer be a matter of dispute that US Special Forces in Afghanistan are responsible for an increasing number of murders, whether part of targeted extra-judicial killings or the result of bad intelligence. From the attack on a bridal shower in Gardez on February 12, 2010 that killed numerous civilians, including two pregnant women, to the growing list of executions of insurgents in the Kandahar area, Special Forces have become the US military version of death squads.

As noted in an April 25 article in The New York Times, the offensive against supposed Taliban forces in Kandahar has already commenced, with the “opening salvos of the offensive…being carried out in the shadows by Special Operations forces.” It’s as if Dick Cheney, who asserted that the US would have to operate in the shadows in prosecuting its global war on terror, is still the guiding political force behind such military operations, notwithstanding the fact that the Obama Administration has dispensed with references to the war on terror. Nonetheless, it is terror, promoted by Washington policymakers and perpetrated by Pentagon planners, that is spreading throughout Afghanistan.

On a certain level, it should not be at all surprising that military campaigns under the command of Gen. Stanley McChrystal engage in such terrorist tactics. Death squads and ethnic cleansing were part and parcel of the “surge” strategy that McChrystal oversaw in Iraq. Now, in Afghanistan, the promulgation of what’s called the Joint Prioritized Engagement List (JPEL) gives license to execute extra-judicially anyone whose name shows up on the list. If bribing or coercing Afghan tribal leaders fails to convince them that they need to align with the occupiers against indigenous insurgents, they may then be consigned to the JPEL.

While the residents of Kandahar are almost unanimous in their resistance to any US/NATO direct assault on the city, the US military is trying to erode insurgent strength by stealth attacks on the outskirts. As reported in the aforementioned article in The New York Times, McChrystal will rely on Afghan military and police forces to undertake much of the actual operation in the city itself. Given the track record of the Afghan government forces, especially in the recent Marja campaign, this may only lead to desperate US military intervention which, in turn, will lead to more civilian deaths.

Creating more enemies in the indigenous population of Afghanistan and Pakistan will obviously complicate the long-term US imperial interests in the region, whether geopolitical or economic, the latter based on guaranteeing pipeline priorities for the US and its allies in the region. China, in many respects, has been outmaneuvering the US in closing economic deals, even with the Afghan government. Thus, beyond the disaster capitalism that benefits vulture corporations like Halliburton and KBR, the US seems to be administering self-inflicted wounds with its addiction to war.

Too few voices in Congress are prepared to kick that addiction, especially given their role in what William Grieder has called an “iron triangle” of interests, nurtured by the lobbyists of defense industries. With some exceptions, Congress refuses even to acknowledge the detrimental effects of the on-going military operations. We need to demand hearings on the rules of engagement and votes on immediate military disengagement.

Let’s face it: at some level we are all now part of that war addiction. Desensitized by aggressive and racist video games and facing a precarious future, young men and women join the military in the belief that their service will be rewarded, only to be confronted with what social psychologist Tracy Xavier Karner calls a “militarization of feeling.” Acting out of that feeling and with a hair-trigger mentality, many of these soldiers can rationalize killing even women and children. Although a few refuse to be instruments of imperial murder and others return to civilian life ready to denounce what they were forced to do, too many become victims themselves, either physically or psychologically.

Whether regular soldiers or Special Forces, many veterans of US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have succumbed to near-epidemic rates of suicide. Being ordered to slaughter civilians, even inadvertently, must weigh heavily on one’s mental make-up. Furthermore, as occupiers in foreign lands and as enforcers for imperial depredations, it must be nearly impossible to escape the ghosts of past military operations.

Meanwhile, US citizens are bombarded with both heavy-handed and subtle messages that reinforce the false belief these soldiers are “our” troops and not the imperial instruments designed by the Pentagon. Whether at sporting events or ads in movie theatres and on television, the solemn link between the military and the citizenry is hammered home. Perhaps, one reason that the Pentagon tries to do everything in its power to deny and then suppress pictures and stories, like those exposed on Wikileaks, is because they make that link more tenuous.

On the other hand, as long as the citizenry does nothing to translate its outrage into real-world action, the daily outrages perpetrated in our name in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other sites of US military intervention will continue. With Congress soon to vote on a supplemental bill for 33 billion dollars more for the war in Afghanistan, we must mount an organized campaign at every level to raise the political cost to prosecute the war. We must find a way to act both individually and collectively to stop being the enablers of US death squads.

Francis Shor is the author of Dying Empire: US Imperialism and Global Resistance. A website for the book can be found at http://www.dyingempire.org

http://www.counterpunch.org/shor04272010.html

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Quote:Does the US military want Afghanistan to get even nastier?
By Jon Boone
Thursday 8 December 2011 19.59 GMT

In Afghanistan, insurgents are growing ever more sadistic in their attacks, as the suicide bombing of pilgrims in Kabul showed. But could the US war machine actually want to provoke the Taliban?


Even by Afghanistan's high standards, the massacre of Shia worshippers in Kabul on Tuesday 6 December was an act of stomach-churning brutality. A suicide bomber posing as a pilgrim on Ashura, one of the holiest days of the calendar of Shia Islam, had inveigled his way into the middle of a packed crowd of men, women and children. Witnesses watching from the rooftop of the nearby Abu Fazal shrine said body parts flew up into the air near the epicentre of the blast when the unknown bomber detonated himself.

The clearing smoke revealed a scene strewn with lifeless and often mangled bodies, lying in circles around the blackened area of tarmac where the bomber had stood. A young girl who had somehow miraculously survived was snapped by a photographer wailing into the air. Among the 55 killed there were no police officers or soldiers or anyone who might remotely be considered a "legitimate" target of the Taliban-led war against the Afghan government.

The Taliban itself was quick to condemn the attack in strong terms, while an extremist Pakistan-based movement called Lashkar- e-Jhangvi al Almiv has been fingered. If it really was a unilateral operation launched without the consent of the Taliban's leadership it is another worrying sign of how the insurgency in Afghanistan is spinning out of control, becoming crueller and ever more willing to inflict horrendous damage on ordinary civilians.

But not everyone thinks such horrors are an entirely bad thing. Indeed, some within the US war machine have long argued the emergence of a nastier insurgency could be really quite useful for Nato's war aims. So useful, in fact, that foreign forces should try to encourage such behaviour.

One of them was Peter Lavoy, a former chairman of the US National Intelligence Council, the body that examines data from across the US government's intelligence gathering machine and turns it into high-grade analysis that is rarely discussed publicly. At a closed-door meeting with ambassadors at Nato headquarters in Brussels in December 2008, Lavoy spelled out a strategy for winning the war in Afghanistan that has never been uttered publicly: "The international community should put intense pressure on the Taliban in 2009 in order to bring out their more violent and ideologically radical tendencies," he said, according to a State Department note-taker in the room. "This will alienate the population and give us an opportunity to separate the Taliban from the population."

His words, which we only know courtesy of WikiLeaks, are extraordinary because they have been proven at least partially right. They also differ fundamentally from the publicly stated strategy in Afghanistan. Known as population-centric counterinsurgency, or Coin, the fundamental principle is that foreign forces should try to keep ordinary Afghans safe from insurgents and thereby win their support.

The idea that Nato may actually be trying to make the population less secure appalls observers. "It just goes completely against the ethos of the American military to take more risks in order to protect civilians," says John Nagl, a retired lieutenant-colonel who co-wrote the US army's field manual on countering guerrilla warfare. "I find it hard to believe elements of the US military would want to deliberately put more risk on to civilians."

But behind the scenes, powerful voices continue to argue for a harder-edged strategy that makes the lives of ordinary Afghans more miserable, not less. Michael Semple, a regional expert on the Taliban, says it is an outlook he runs across in discussions with Nato officials: "I have heard serious, thinking officers articulate the idea that provoking Taliban fighters into acts of extreme violence against the population could be taken as a sign of Coin progress, prior to the final victory when the people turn against them."

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Full Article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec...en-nastier

Some more Anti-US Sentiment being built abroad. Whether manufactured by outside forces (in and outside the US military/corporate government), a product of radical Islam or a combination of both, it isn't getting any better for Afghans.