ANP candidate Syed Masoom Shah on his way to the hospital after an Apr. 14 bomb attack in Charsadda, a town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, that injured four people. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, May 10 2013 (IPS)

If you can’t beat them, at least innovate. That seems to be the lesson that Pakistan’s Awami National Party (ANP) has drawn from its predicament.

Exhausted of being at the receiving end of an endless barrage of bomb and suicide attacks by Taliban militants, the party has turned to technology for succour.

It is using the Internet to reach out to the electorate across its various constituencies in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, its main support base.

ANP leader Mian Iftikhar Hussain told IPS what a blessing it was to be able to reach the people through Skype ahead of the May 11 elections.

“Through it, we can reach the electorate without putting our lives in danger,” he said. Technology has helped them protect not just their own lives but also those of the people who come to listen to them.

Hussain, a former information minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, lost his only son, Mian Rashid Hussain, in a terror attack by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in October 2010.

The ANP, which has been in power in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one of Pakistan’s four provinces, for the last five years (2008-2013), had earned the wrath of the outlawed TTP due to its firm stand against Islamist militancy.

It has paid a high price. Around 800 of its leaders and workers have fallen prey to attacks by the TTP in the past five years. And the violence has only worsened in the run-up to the elections.

The ANP remained its primary target, but the other liberal parties – such as the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and the Pakistan People’s Party – have also been victims of its ire. Bombs and suicide attacks on ANP and MQM candidates and offices became the order of the day.

“It was the ANP (provincial) government which took the most successful military action against militants in the Swat district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” said Muhammad Jamil, who teaches Pakistan Studies at the University Public School in Peshawar. “The TTP had ruled Swat from 2007 to 2009 till it was evicted by the ANP-led government in 2010.”

Swat is also where the brave Malala Yousafzai comes from. The 14-year-old was shot in October last year by the Taliban for championing the cause of girls’ education.

The ANP, Jamil told IPS, was the only party carrying out an “open and brave campaign” against the Taliban, which made it the focus of their violent agenda.

“The TTP is afraid it could face more stern action if the ANP is voted to power again. It is therefore making every attempt to keep the party away from election and to pave the way for parties which have a soft spot for the Taliban,” he added.

It may not quite succeed, given the ANP’s ability to get around obstacles. First, its women leaders took charge where the more prominent candidates could not canvass, going from village to village soliciting women to vote for their candidates and trying to persuade men to do so as well.

Now it has included the internet in its armoury to circumvent the militants and communicate with its supporters.

And people have taken very well to seeing their leaders communicate with them on internet, said ANP leader Bushra Gohar.

“Our workers appreciate the new move because the ANP couldn’t put the lives of workers on the razor’s edge by holding public meetings. Via Skype, we are able to communicate our message to the people in an atmosphere of peace,” she told IPS.

“Many of our candidates have wanted to be present physically in public meetings but could not because of the threat from militants,” she added. “The use of internet has resolved our problem.”

Hussain turned to Skype again in Taro locality, some 15 kilometres from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa capital Peshawar, to spread his own and the party’s message.

Ali Haider, who organised the Skype address, said it was an unqualified success. “We are planning more such meetings where ANP’s leaders and candidates can address the people on Skype. These are very safe,” he said.

“Where there is a will, there is a way,” Sanaullah Khan, a Mardan-based ANP worker, told IPS. “We have been listening eagerly to the speeches being delivered by our leaders via Skype.”

Former Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister and ANP leader Ameer Haider Khan Hoti is contesting the national assembly seat from his hometown. Having survived a suicide attack on Feb. 15, 2013 in Mardan, he, like the others, could not campaign in person for the elections.

People are organising Skype speeches for him as well in Mardan.

Khan said they had also been working on developing the party’s webpage and were posting regular election updates on Facebook.

“The response is unprecedented because a majority of our leaders have also opened Twitter accounts to send their message to the workers,” he said.

Muhammad Namir, a schoolteacher in Mardan, was among those who heard Hoti’s speech on the internet on May 3. The leader, Namir said, recounted the many projects his government had executed in the five years of its rule and asked the people to give their vote to the ANP’s candidates again in this election.

“Party workers say that the use of internet has saved them from attacks,” Namir told IPS. “For public meetings, you have to make arrangements. But for an internet campaign, all that is required is a laptop.”

The ANP has also been using songs to motivate the masses,” said Muhammad Shoaib, a local journalist in Swabi. ANP candidates have survived three terror bids in Swabi, the fourth most populous district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The party’s election songs have elevated the people’s mood. The ANP put out an album of 11 Pashto songs for the election campaign. Sung by well-known singer Gulzar Alam, the songs reinforce the themes of peace, democracy and progress – the very things the ANP is promising to the electorate.

“The songs are enticing the people because they relate to the protection of Pakhtun soil,” Shoaib said. The Pakhtun population forms a majority in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

In an electoral battleground bloodied by the militants, the songs seem to be more than a small comfort.

When European Union foreign ministers discuss a proposal to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation, Bulgaria’s Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov will present his government’s case for linking two suspects in the Jul. 18, 2012 bombing of an Israeli tourist bus to Hezbollah.

But European ministers who demand hard evidence of Hezbollah involvement are not likely to find it in the Bulgarian report on the investigation, which has produced no more than an “assumption” or “hypothesis” of Hezbollah complicity.

Major revelations about the investigation by the former head of the probe and by a top Bulgarian journalist have further damaged the credibility of the Bulgarian claim to have found links between the suspects and Hezbollah.

The chief prosecutor in charge of the Bulgarian investigation revealed in an interview published in early January that the evidence available was too scarce to name any party as responsible, and that investigators had found a key piece of evidence that appeared to contradict it.

An article in a Bulgarian weekly in mid-January confirmed that the investigation had turned up no information on a Hezbollah role, and further reported that one of the suspects had been linked by a friendly intelligence service to Al-Qaeda.

The statement made Feb. 5 by Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov referred to what he called a “reasonable assumption” or as a “well-founded assumption”, depending on the translation, that two suspects in the case belonged to Hezbollah’s “military formation”.

Underlining the extremely tentative nature of the finding, Tsvetanov used the passive voice and repeated the carefully chosen formulation for emphasis: “A reasonable assumption, I repeat a reasonable assumption, can be made that the two of them were members of the militant wing of Hezbollah.”

The host of a Bulgarian television talk show asked Tsvetanov Feb. 9 why the conclusion about Hezbollah had been presented as “only a guess”. But instead of refuting that description, Tsvetanov chose to call the tentative judgment a “grounded hypothesis for the complicity of the Hezbollah military wing”.

The reason why the senior official responsible for Bulgarian security used such cautious language became clear from an interview given by the chief prosecutor for the case, Stanella Karadzhova, who was in charge of the investigation, published by “24 Hours” newspaper Jan. 3.

Karadzhova revealed how little was known about the two men who investigators believe helped the foreigner killed by the bomb he was carrying, but whom Tsvetanov would later link to Hezbollah. The reason, she explained, is that they had apparently traveled without cell phones or laptops.

Only two kinds of information appear to have linked the two, according to the Karadzhova interview, neither of which provides insight into their political affiliation. One was that both of them had led a “very ordered and simple” lifestyle, which she suggested could mean that they both had similar training.

The other was that both had fake Michigan driver’s licenses that had come from the same country. It was reported subsequently that the printer used to make the fake Michigan driver’s licenses had been traced to Beirut.

Those fragments of information were evidently the sole basis for the “hypothesis” that that two of the suspects were members of Hezbollah’s military wing. That hypothesis depended on logical leaps from the information. Any jihadist organisation could have obtained fake licenses from the Beirut factory, and a simple lifestyle does not equal Hezbollah military training.

But Karadzhova’s biggest revelation was that investigators had found a SIM card at the scene of the bombing and had hoped it would provide data on the suspect’s contacts before they had arrived at the scene of the bombing. But the telecom company in question was Maroc Telecom, and the Moroccan firm had not responded to requests for that information.

That provenance of the SIM Card is damaging to the Hezbollah “hypothesis”, because Maroc Telecom sells its cards throughout North Africa – a region in which Hezbollah is not known to have any operational bases but where Al-Qaeda has a number of large organisations.

Morocco is also considered a “staunch ally” of the United States, so it is unlikely that the Moroccan government would have refused a request from the United States to get the necessary cooperation from Moroccan Telecom.

Senior Bulgarian officials have remained mum about the SIM Card, and
Karadzhova was sacked as chief prosecutor shortly after the interview was published, ostensibly because the interview had not been approved.

On Jan. 17, the sister publication of “24 hours”, the weekly “168 Hours”, published an article by its editor, Slavi Angelov, reporting that the Bulgarian investigators had failed to find any evidence of Hezbollah involvement.

Angelov, one of the country’s premier investigative journalists, also wrote that one of the two suspects whose fake IDs were traced to Beirut had been linked by a “closely allied intelligence service” to a wing of Al-Qaeda.

The story, which is not available on the internet but was summarised on the “24 Hours” website, earned a brief reference in a Jan. 17 story in the “Jerusalem Post”. That story referred to Angelov’s sources for the information about the Al-Qaeda link as unnamed officials in the Interior Ministry.

The Angelov story’s revelation that Bulgaria had no evidence linking Hezbollah to the bus bombing was also headlined by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the same day.

By the time the investigation’s four-month extension was due to expire on Jan. 18, there was no question among investigators that they needed much more time to reach any meaningful judgment on who was responsible for the bombing. Chief prosecutor Karadzhova told “24 Hours” there was “no obstacle to the deadline being extended repeatedly”.

But by mid-January, international politics posed such an obstacle: the United States and Israel were already pointing to the Feb. 18 meeting of EU foreign ministers as an opportunity to get action by the EU on listing Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation. Washington and Tel Aviv wanted a conclusion from the Bulgarians that could be used at that meeting to force the issue.

A meeting of Bulgaria’s Consultative Council for National Security to consider extending the investigation, originally scheduled for Jan. 17, was suddenly postponed.

Instead, on that date Foreign Minister Mladenov was sent on an unannounced visit to Israel. Israel’s Channel 2 reported after the meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his National Security Advisor Yaakov Amidror that Bulgaria had given Israel a report blaming Hezbollah for the bus bombing.

The office of the Bulgarian foreign minister and Prime Minister Boyko Borissov both issued denials Jan. 18. Borissov said there would be no comment on the investigation until “indisputable evidence has been discovered”, implying that it did not have the needed evidence yet.

Nevertheless, over the next three weeks, the Bulgarian government had to negotiate the wording of what it would say about the conclusion of its investigation.

The decision to call the conclusion an “assumption” or even the weaker “hypothesis” about Hezbollah was obviously a compromise between the preference of the investigators themselves and the demands of the United States and Israel.

The timing of that decision is a sensitive issue in Bulgaria. Prime Minister Borissov told reporters in Brussels Feb. 7 that he had decided to “name Hezbollah” after investigators had found the SIM card at the site of the bombing. That would put the decision well before Karadzhova gave her interview Jan. 1.

And in any case, the discovery of the SIM card could not have caused the investigators to veer toward Hezbollah but would have called that hypothesis into question.

Tsvetanov admitted that the Hezbollah “assumption” had been adopted only “after the middle of January”. That admission indicates that the decision was reached under pressure from Washington, not because of any new evidence.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

In the late afternoon of Apr. 3, 2011, in the Pakistani city of Dera Ghazi Khan, an annual Sufi Muslim religious festival at the shrine of the 13th century saint Ahmed Sultan was hit by twin suicide bomb attacks which killed over 50 people and left more than 120 wounded.

As an eyewitness described the immediate aftermath of the bombings, “people started running outside the shrine. Women and children were crying and screaming. It was like hell”.

The bombers had struck a few minutes apart, instantly turning the atmosphere of festivity and prayer into a scene of carnage and horror. As crowds of worshippers fled in terror, an elderly woman ran into a young boy out of whose hands dropped a grenade. His name was Umar Fidai, a 15-year-old, and he was the third intended suicide bomber that day.

Fidai’s explosive vest had failed to detonate and as his handlers had instructed, he was attempting to kill himself and as many others as possible with the grenade they had provided him as a backup.

The Taliban denied responsibility for this 2011 attack in Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

In his own words in an interview later given to the Pakistani media, “There were three policemen standing close by, and I thought if I killed them too, I would still make it to heaven… At the time I detonated myself, thoughts of my family were not in my mind, I was only thinking about what the Taliban had told me.”

Fidai was shot and wounded by police and failed in his mission. But he is only one of the hundreds of other children that the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) are believed to have brainwashed and utilised as suicide bombers in their ongoing war with the state.

Brainwashing young people

Most are impressionable children from poor families who are indoctrinated through networks of religious schools which provide the only hope of advancement in isolated regions poorly served by the Pakistani government – although many are also procured through outright kidnapping and coercion by armed gangs.

Once in the hands of the TTP, the brainwashing of these sheltered, naive and suggestible young people for the organisation’s military goals proceeds. In Fidai’s words, “I thought that there would be a little bit of pain, but then I would be in heaven.”

A significant majority of suicide bombers in Pakistan are believed to be between the ages of 12 and 18, with some studies putting the number near 90 percent. Pakistani Taliban commander Qari Hussain has boasted that his organisation recruits children as young as five years old for suicide attacks, saying that “Children are tools to achieve God’s will, whatever comes your way you sacrifice it.”

There are an estimated 2,000 madrassas in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, a small yet significant percentage of which are believed to be involved in the brainwashing and indoctrination of young boys into militancy.

Students in these schools receive free board and education, something which on its face appears to be a remarkable opportunity for poor and isolated children whose parents cannot afford to send them to good schools, but which ultimately comes at a terrible price to both them and Pakistani society.

In one high-profile incident in early 2012, a convoy of cars carrying children, some as young as six, was intercepted while it was en route to religious schools where the children were allegedly to be trained as suicide bombers – the rationale for their utilisation being that they were “gullible” as well as less likely to be physically searched by police at checkpoints.

In a recent study by Hussain Nadim for the Islamabad-based National University of Science and Technology, several interviews were conducted with rescued child suicide bombers whom he described as being “not particularly religious, nor motivated by supposedly Islamic ideas, and (who) had no substantial animosity toward the United States or the Pakistan Army – they knew very little about the world outside their small tribe…

“The lack of access to TV, Internet, and formal education meant they were almost completely oblivious to such massive events as 9/11, and as such they were unaware of where and what exactly the United States was.”

In this context, such isolated and impressionable young people were highly susceptible to intensive brainwashing by Taliban militants who would make young recruits spend weeks watching videos of atrocities and of foreign troops raping women and girls – a fate which they said would await their own female relatives if they did not carry out suicide operations against Western and Pakistani government targets on behalf of the TTP.

‘Fear of losing mothers and sisters’

Furthermore, Nadim’s study concluded that most residents of the tribal areas where the Pakistani Taliban operate had little understanding or knowledge of the “War on Terror” being fought in their region, and were themselves allies of neither the Taliban, the West, or the Pakistani government.

Those young people who have agreed to take part in suicide bombings have in many cases done so particularly “out of fear of losing mothers and sisters” – a fear impressed upon them by their militant handlers’ extensive psychological manipulation.

Unbeknownst to them when they enrol their children in what are ostensibly religious schools, parents are denied access to their children once in the hands of the Taliban – a separation which is coercively enforced when parents realise that their young sons are being indoctrinated by their religious teachers in preparation for militant operations.

One parent described how he repeatedly pleaded with the Taliban to return his child but was denied. “We were threatened and told that the kids were working for a noble cause,” he said.

Cut off from parental contact, young, isolated children are easily susceptible to the influence of surrogate authority figures such as religious clerics in their madrassas. Many are told that they are acting in the name of Islam and will receive the reward of heaven if they successfully carry out their missions.

Studies of those rescued have also shown that most suffer from physical injuries, nightmares and trauma. Indicative of the cynicism with which they are exploited by militant organisations that see them as expendable, child suicide bombers are often sold to other groups and individuals wishing to carry out attacks for prices starting at 7,000 dollars – a grotesque financial utilisation of manipulated children by armed gangs.

In the words of Lahore-based researcher and psychologist Anees Khan, “These young boys are as much the victims of terrorism as those they kill. They are victims of the most brutal exploitation.”

Umar Fidai, despite losing his arm and suffering extensive burns to his body, is glad that he survived and did not successfully carry out his bombing mission.

After he was made to understand the true nature of the acts he was carrying out and the mainstream Islamic perspective, which stands unequivocally against both suicide and the murder of innocent civilians, he said to a Pakistani reporter from his hospital bed: “I am so grateful, because at least I have been saved from going to hell.

“I am in a lot of pain, but I know there are many people in hospital even more severely injured than me and I am so sorry for what I did… I now realise suicide bombing is un-Islamic… I hope people will forgive me.”

*Murtaza Hussain is a Toronto-based writer and analyst focused on issues related to Middle Eastern politics.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the editorial policy of Al Jazeera or IPS.

By Ahmed Usman
KANO, Nigeria, Oct 16 2012 (IPS)

Locals in the city of Maiduguri in the northeastern Nigerian state of Borno have intensified their calls for the military to withdraw from the town, the stronghold of the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram, after claims that they are being maltreated and abused.

The people residing in Maiduguri have been paying a heavy price for the Islamists’ guerrilla war, as the security forces accuse them of non-cooperation and shielding the Islamists.

“We are terribly disturbed by the wave of incessant retaliatory attacks by security forces on us,” local resident Bulama Abbagana told IPS.

“Even if we were in a state of war with a rival country, civilians should not be killed and maimed in the way the military is doing,” Abbagana angrily told IPS over the phone.

Boko Haram, whose name means “western education is sin”, has for the past three years been attacking government institutions, including suicide bombings of the United Nations building in the capital, Abuja. The worst attack was the Jan. 20 assault at the ancient city of Kano that claimed over 180 lives.

Boko Haram has adopted a Taliban style approach and is alleged to have links with Al Qaeda in North Africa. They want to impose Islamic law in a country sharply divided between a majority Muslim north and Christian south.

One resident who does not want his name in print for fear of reprisals told IPS: “We wish to be left with Boko Haram, we would have incurred less trouble than with the military.”

Maiduguri, the headquarters of Boko Haram activity in Nigeria and the staging point for the insurgents, appears to have become a battleground.

The most recent attack was on Monday, Oct. 15 when sustained strikes on the city by government soldiers resulted in a number of bomb explosions and the lockdown of the city centre. On Sunday, Oct. 14 the city was rocked by a roadside blast and two separate gun attacks that killed at least four people including a local chief, residents and the military said.

Prior to this, on Oct. 8, indiscriminate shooting allegedly committed by the members of the Joint Task Force resulted in further violence.

It is claimed that Nigerian troops in Maiduguri went berserk after their patrol vehicle was hit with an Improvised Explosive Device, killing two soldiers, including a lieutenant, and injuring others. They were alleged to have started shooting indiscriminately in a densely-populated area of Lagos Street.

Residents say over 30 people were killed in the assault, and houses, businesses and shops were burnt down and vandalised.

“If you see the level of damage on our burnt houses and shops, you may shed tears,” Bana Modu, whose own house suffered severe damage, told IPS.

The feud between Nigerian security forces and residents in Maiduguri has reached its climax, with both sides pointing a finger of blame at each other.

The security forces claim that residents are not helping in the fight against Boko Haram. In several instances, the military have complained bitterly, accusing civilians of colluding with the attackers, as Islamists have launched attacks on them from rooftops and trees.

In turn, local residents complain that the security forces regard every person in civilian clothes as an enemy.

“Whenever there is a bomb explosion, the security used to besiege the area and beat any one found in their way. Some are killed in the process,” banker Abubakar Mohammed told IPS over the phone.

Businesses here have been crippled in the last three years.

“Many people have fled the area. I don’t have anywhere to go, but I could have left to escape from the attacks from two fronts: Boko Haram and the security forces,” Msheliza Dalwa told IPS.

The government of Borno state, where the crisis erupted in 2009, has shown no interest in withdrawing the troops, and has merely urged the security forces to respect individuals.

“Believe me, if the federal government withdraws the Joint Task Force from Borno, all of us will be chased out of the state by insurgents,” state Governor Kashim Shettima said, addressing journalists on the topic of the recent assault.

Shehu Sani, president of the Civil Right Congress, a local human rights group in Nigeria, told IPS: “The Nigerian security forces have been using disproportionate force which we see of equal magnitude with that of Boko Haram.”

According to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, no fewer than 2,800 people have been killed in the attacks largely claimed by the Islamists since the violence began in 2009. A report released by the global rights watchdog last week says Boko Haram’s assaults could be described as crimes against humanity.

“We will be happy to punish those committing wanton killings before the International Criminal Court so that those involved will not go free,” Ibarhim Badamasi, a resident in Maiduguri, told IPS.

The Joint Task Force is accused of embarking on house-to-house searches to hunt down the insurgents, and is alleged to have engaged in secret detentions.

“Some people arrested are dying in military cells without food, even the way people are being tortured could lead to the death of many,” a suspect arrested and subsequently released told IPS on condition of anonymity.

The security forces have denied committing killings and torture while restoring order. In a press statement to reporters, Lieutenant Colonel Sagir Musa said his men did not kill or assault civilians.

“There are no established or recorded cases of extra-judicial killings, torture, arson and arbitrary arrests by the JTF in Borno state,” Musa said in a statement.

“Very few cases of unprofessional conduct by some personnel are documented and those concerned have been punished while others are undergoing legal processes and Court Marshal,” he added.

The JTF has declared success in the fight against Boko Haram. It claims to have arrested over 60 members on Oct. 7 and killed a commander called Bakaka or “one-eyed man”, who is said to be close to the group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau. It also claimed to have killed the sect’s spokesman, Abu Qaqa.

However, in a video message posted on YouTube, Shekau refuted the claims of Qaqa’s death. He only admitted that some members have been killed and their wives arrested by Nigerian forces.

A recent report by a U.N. panel of experts highlights the connection between the recent political instability in Côte d’Ivoire and Mali, and suggests that radical Islamists with links with Al Qaeda’s North Africa branch are attempting to strengthen their presence across Africa, Boko Haram included.

On May 18, some 800 women in Sri Lanka’s northern region will hold Hindu religious ceremonies for the welfare of thier husbands who disappeared or surrendered to the military as it moved in to mop up nearly three decades of armed Tamil separatism.

“These women continue to live in hope even though many of those Tamil men may have died in the last days of the fighting,” says Shreen Abdul Saroor, a prominent rights activist working with conflict-affected women in northern Sri Lanka.

“On the other hand, even if they do acknowledge that their men have died, they don’t want to be known as widows as that could result in them being seen in a negative light in the community,” Saroor explained to IPS. “They prefer to be known as single women or as women heading households.”

Traditionally, Hindus consider widows to be inauspicious and the religion does not favour remarriage. Tamils, who form 12 percent of Sri Lanka’s 20 million population, mostly follow Hinduism while Sinhalese, who make up 74 percent of the population, are predominantly Buddhist.

According to government estimates, the ethnic conflict has widowed 59,000 women, the bulk of them in the Tamil-dominated north and east.

With rehabilitation tardy and options to earn money few, many women have been compelled to resort to sex work to earn a livelihood and provide for their families.

“We try to wean them away from sex work but they say they have no choice,” says an activist asking not to be named for fear of reprisal. “We provide the women with condoms and give advice on contraception as protection.”

The government is selective about permitting non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to work in the north. Only NGOs involved in development work – housing, livelihood development and infrastructure – are allowed in, while those that raise awareness on issues like peace, trauma or women’s rights are discouraged.

“The moment you say you are from an NGO, there are issues,” says Saroor who is founder of the Northern Mannar Women’s Development Federation and the Mannar Women for Human Rights and Democracy.

Saroor, one of four winners of the first ‘N-PEACE’ award, instituted by the United Nations Development Programme last year, says abuse of girl children is now a major problem in the north and with 26 cases recorded in the last three months alone. Many more cases go unreported.

The N-PEACE (Engage for Peace, Equality, Access, Community and Empowerment) strategy supports women in leading community recovery and peace building in the networked countries of Nepal, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste.

There is concern that the atmosphere of uncertainty, caused by lack of resources, broken families and the absence of responsible males, has impacted the security of young girls.

“In one case, a nine-year-old was abused. Women say they are scared to leave their homes fearing for the safety of their children. So how do we provide them a livelihood?” Saroor asked.

The problems of women in northern Sri Lanka are enormous with their inability to speak out a major hurdle in the post-conflict healing process.

“They have no opportunity to tell their stories,” says Shanthi Sachithanandam, executive director of the Viluthu Centre for Human Resource Development that works with conflict-affected women. “There is an urgent need for counselling.”

The government has repeatedly denied charges by Western countries and international human rights groups that large numbers of civilians were killed in crossfire and aerial bombing in the months leading to May 2009.

Journalists were not permitted into the war zone and NGOs and humanitarian agencies asked to leave, with the result that there are no independent versions of what may have happened in the killing fields of the north.

In March, the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council passed a United States-proposed resolution calling for implementation of recommendations made by Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) as a measure of accountability.

The LLRC, appointed by the government to look into issues relating to the conflict from February 2002 to May 2009, called for a probe into allegations of deliberate attacks on civilians and the prosecution of those responsible.

Rights groups working with war widows and mothers who lost their loved ones, fear repercussions if they dare to speak out publicly on sensitive issues.

When Seela (not her real name) spoke to reporters some weeks ago about a northern village where women have turned to sex work en masse, she and other members of her organisation received threats.

“These women are very vulnerable. We are very concerned about their plight and want to help them liberate themselves from this trap but there is not much we can do without support from the state,” she told IPS.

Seela said the lack of awareness of birth control methods has led to illegitimate babies being born and reports of spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Visaka Dharmadasa, founder and chair of the association of war affected women and parents of soldiers missing in action, said a clearer picture would emerge when a survey being conducted by her organisation is completed in June.

“No comprehensive study has been done on the software issues (fate of the missing and trauma) in the north and the east. Only the hardware (infrastructure and development) is being addressed,” she said.

“Widows of (government) soldiers are better off economically than widows in the north and the east, but in both cases social and psychosocial issues have not been tackled. These are major challenges,” Dharmadasa said.

According to Sachithanandam rehabilitation in the north has been difficult with loans for livelihood development and empowerment failing to reach the intended beneficiaries.

“Multilateral agencies say women are key to post-war reconstruction. But the women are confined to the house because of young children,” said Sachithanandam. “Small loans given for goat-rearing or poultry-raising vanish when the animals die and the women are back to square one.”

That, says Saroor, is the point when women look at sex work as an option.

The LLRC report drew attention to the plight of Tamil widows. “Their lives are often lonely and insecure, and they are treated as a symbol of bad omen in their own social circles.”

Problems start with the definition of widowhood. While widows elsewhere in the country have marriage certificates to prove marital status, women in the north are unable to produce documents because of the destruction of official records during the war.

Military spokesman Brig. Ruwan Wanigasooriya told IPS that of 11,995 suspected rebel cadres who surrendered in May 2009, with 10,874 have been rehabilitated and reintegrated into civilian life.

Another 852 are in detention with investigations continuing or undergoing rehabilitation ahead of release while 13 had died of natural causes, the spokesman said.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s claim of a “secret deal” between Iran and Al-Qaeda, which had become a key argument by right-wing activists who support war against Iran, has been discredited by former intelligence officials in the wake of publication of documents from Osama bin Laden’s files revealing a high level of antagonism between Al-Qaeda and Iran.

Three former intelligence officials with experience on Near East and South Asia told IPS they regard Treasury’s claim of a secret agreement between Iran and Al-Qaeda as false and misleading.

That claim was presented in a way that suggested it was supported by intelligence. It now appears, however, to have been merely a propaganda line designed to support the Barack Obama administration’s strategy of diplomatic coercion on Iran.

Under Secretary of Treasury David S. Cohen announced last July that the department was “exposing Iran’s secret deal with Al-Qaeda allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory.” The charge was introduced in connection with the designation of an Al-Qaeda official named Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions.

The Treasury claim has been embraced by the right-wing Weekly Standard and others aligned with hardline Israeli views on Iran, as primary source evidence of an alliance between Iran and Al-Qaeda.

But Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia, told IPS the allegation of a “secret deal” between Iran and Al-Qaeda “has never been backed up by any evidence that would justify such a term” and that it is “a highly misleading characterisation of interaction between Iran and Al-Qaeda….”

Pillar said the recently released bin Laden documents “not only do not demonstrate any agreement in which Iran condoned or facilitated operations by Al-Qaeda, they contradict the notion that there was any such agreement.”

“I’ve never seen anything that suggests that happened,” said another former intelligence official, referring to an Iran-Al Qaeda agreement. “I’m very sceptical about that.”

A third former intelligence official said Treasury’s “secret deal” claim “doesn’t pass the BS test” and noted that it is perfectly aligned with the Obama administration’s policy of pressure on Iran.

The official said the Treasury Department’s push for its “secret deal” line is emblematic of a larger split in the intelligence community between those for whom intelligence is secondary to their role in “counterterrorism” policy and the rest of the community.

“The counterterrorism types are like used car salesmen,” the former official told IPS. “They are always overselling something. They have to show that they are doing important work.”

The actual text of the Jul. 28, 2011 “designation” of Yasin al-Suri suggests that the claim of such a “secret deal” is merely a political spin on the fact that Iran dealt with al-Suri on the release of prisoners.

It says that Yasin al Suri is an Al-Qaeda facilitator “living and operating in Iran under agreement between Al-Qaeda and the Iranian government”. Iranian authorities, it said, “maintain a relationship with (al-Suri) and have permitted him to operate within Iran’s borders since 2005”.

The designation offers no other evidence of an “agreement” except for the fact that Iran dealt with al-Suri in arranging the releases of Al-Qaeda prisoners from Iranian detention and their transfer to Pakistan.

The official notice of a 10-million-dollar reward for al-Suri on the website of the “Rewards for Justice” programme under the Diplomatic Security office of the State Department also indicates that the only “agreement” between Iran and Al-Qaeda has been to exchange prisoners.

“Working with the Iranian government,” it said, “al-Suri arranges the release of al Qaeda personnel from Iranian prisons. When al Qaeda operatives are released, the Iranian government transfers them to al- Suri, who then facilitates their travel to Pakistan.”

Neither the Treasury Department nor the State Department, which joined the February 2012 press briefing on the reward for finding al- Suri, referred to the fact that Iran had been forced to deal with al- Suri and to release Al-Qaeda detainees in order to obtain the release of the Iranian diplomat kidnapped by Pakistani allies of Al-Qaeda in Peshawar, Pakistan in November 2008.

In one of the documents taken from the Abbottabad compound and published by West Point’s Counter-Terrorism Center last week, a senior Al Qaeda official wrote, “We believe that our efforts, which included escalating a political and media campaign, the threats we made, the kidnapping of their friend the commercial counselor in the Iranian Consulate in Peshawar, and other reasons that scared them based on what they saw (we are capable of), to be among the reasons that led them to expedite (the release of these prisoners).”

In response to the IPS request for clarification of the “secret agreement” claim, John Sullivan, a spokesman for the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, declined to answer any questions on the subject or to allow IPS to interview Eytan Fisch, the assistant director of the Terrorism and Financial Intelligence office.

In briefing journalists on al-Suri last February, Fisch had again invoked the alleged Iran-Al Qaeda “secret agreement” last February.

Sullivan defended the Treasury Department’s position on the issue, however, against criticism based on the publication of the bin Laden documents. “We based our action on Yasin al-Suri on a broad array of information that far exceeds what was recently made public,” Sullivan said in an e-mail to IPS.

Asked about the hint by the Treasury spokesman that department officials used still-classified material as the basis for the claim of a “secret agreement”, former national intelligence officer Pillar called it “disingenuous”.

The origins of the Treasury Department’s “secret deal” claim indicate that it was intended to generate press stories that would increase political and government support for pressure on Iran through economic sanctions and military threats.

The designation of Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions Jul. 28, 2011 did not have any impact on Al-Qaeda funding. The objective was to allow Treasury to generate press coverage of its charge of a secret Iran-Al Qaeda agreement. The timing of the move coincided with a shift in Obama administration strategy from diplomatic engagement to maximising pressure on Iran.

During the period when neoconservatives were pushing for an explicit policy of support for regime change in Iran during the first George W. Bush administration, U.S. officials frequently talked as though any Al-Qaeda presence in Iran was evidence of Iran’s cooperation with the terrorist organisation.

But as ABC News reported on May 29, 2008, Bush administration officials were acknowledging privately that they were not complaining about Iranian policy toward Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran, because Iran had “kept these al Qaeda operatives under control since 2003, limiting their ability to travel and communicate”.

One official said Al-Qaeda officials under Iranian control, “some of whom are quite important,” were “essentially on ice”.

Israel has continued, however, to use its relations with friendly news media, especially in the UK, to generate disinformation about alleged joint Iranian-Al Qaeda planning for terrorist actions.

Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News carried a story Feb. 15, 2012 citing “intelligence sources” from an unnamed state as suggesting that Iran had been supplying Al-Qaeda with “training in the use of advanced explosives” as well as some funding and a safe haven “as part of a deal first worked out in 2009….”

The report quoted the intelligence sources as saying that Iran wanted to use the threat of Al-Qaeda retaliation against Western targets as “revenge for any military strike against Iran’s nuclear capabilities”.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

The optics surrounding the Barack Obama administration’s “Enduring Strategic Partnership” agreement with Afghanistan and the Memorandums of Understanding accompanying it emphasise transition to Afghan responsibility and an end to U.S. war.

President Barack Obama addresses the press from Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan, May 1, 2012. Credit: White House photo by Pete Souza

But the only substantive agreement reached between the U.S. and Afghanistan – well hidden in the agreements – has been to allow powerful U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to continue to carry out the unilateral night raids on private homes that are universally hated in the Pashtun zones of Afghanistan.

The presentation of the new agreement on a surprise trip by President Obama to Afghanistan, with a prime time presidential address and repeated briefings for the press, allows Obama to go into a tight presidential election campaign on a platform of ending an unpopular U.S. war in Afghanistan.

It also allows President Hamid Karzai to claim he has gotten control over the SOF night raids while getting a 10-year commitment of U.S. economic support.

But the actual text of the agreement and of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on night raids included in it by reference will not end the U.S. war in Afghanistan, nor will they give Karzai control over night raids.

The Obama administration’s success in obscuring those facts is the real story behind the ostensible story of the agreement.

Obama’s decisions on how many U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan in 2014 and beyond and what their mission will be will only be made in a “Bilateral Security Agreement” still to be negotiated. Although the senior officials did not provide any specific information about those negotiations in their briefings for news media, the Strategic Partnership text specifies that they are to begin the signing of the present agreement “with the goal of concluding within one year”.

That means Obama does not have to announce any decisions about stationing of U.S. forces in Afghanistan before the 2012 presidential election, allowing him to emphasise that he is getting out of Afghanistan and sidestep the question of a long-term commitment of troops in Afghanistan.

The Bilateral Security Agreement will supersede the 2003 “Status of Forces” agreement with Afghanistan, according to the text. That agreement gives U.S. troops in Afghanistan immunity from prosecution and imposes no limitations on U.S. forces in regard to military bases or operations.

Last month’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on night raids was forced on the United States by Karzai’s repeated threat to refuse to sign a partnership agreement unless the United States gave his government control over any raids on people’s homes. Karzai’s insistence on ending U.S. unilateral night raids and detention of Afghans had held up the agreement on Strategic Partnership for months.

But Karzai’s demand put him in direct conflict with the interests of one of the most influential elements of the U.S. military: the SOF. Under Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. war strategy in Afghanistan came to depend heavily on the purported effectiveness of night raids carried out by SOF units in weakening the Taliban insurgency.

CENTCOM officials refused to go along with ending the night raids or giving the Afghan government control over them, as IPS reported last February.

The two sides tried for weeks to craft an agreement that Karzai could cite as meeting his demand but that would actually change very little.

In the end, however, it was Karzai who had to give in. What was done to disguise that fact represents a new level of ingenuity in misrepresenting the actual significance of an international agreement involving U.S. military operations.

The MOU was covered by cable news as a sea change in the conduct of military operations. CNN, for example, called it a “landmark deal” that “affords Afghan authorities an effective veto over controversial special operations raids.”

But a closer reading of the text of the MOU as well as comments on by U.S. military officials indicate that it represents little, if any, substantive change from the status quo.

The agreement was negotiated between the U.S. military command in Kabul and Afghan Ministry of Defence, and lawyers for the U.S. military introduced a key provision that fundamentally changed the significance of the rest of the text.

In the first paragraph under the definition of terms, the MOU says, “For the purpose of this Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), special operations are operations approved by the Afghan Operational Coordination Group (OCG) and conducted by Afghan Forces with support from U.S. Forces in accordance with Afghan laws.”

That carefully crafted sentence means that the only night raids covered by the MOU are those that the SOF commander responsible for U.S. night raids decides to bring to the Afghan government. Those raids carried out by U.S. units without consultation with the Afghan government fall outside the MOU.

Coverage of the MOU by major news media suggesting that the participation of U.S. SOF units would depend on the Afghan government simply ignored that provision in the text.

But Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters flatly Apr. 9 that Karzai would not have a veto over night raids. “It’s not about the U.S. ceding responsibility to the Afghans,” he said.

Kirby would not comment on whether those SOF units which operated independently of Afghan units would be affected by the MOU, thus confirming by implication that they would not.

Kirby explained that the agreement had merely “codified” what had already been done since December 2011, which was that Afghan Special Forces were in the lead on most night raids. That meant that they would undertake searches within the compound.

The U.S. forces have continued, however, to capture or kill Afghans in those raids.

The disparity between the reality of the agreement and the optics created by administration press briefings recalls Obama’s declarations in 2009 and 2010 on the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq and an end to the U.S. war there, and the reality that combat units remained in Iraq and continued to fight long after the Sep. 1, 2010 deadline Obama he had set for withdrawal had passed.

Fifty-eight U.S. servicemen were killed in Iraq after that deadline in 2010 and 2011.

But there is a fundamental difference between the two exercises in shaping media coverage and public perceptions: the Iraq withdrawal agreement of 2008 made it politically difficult, if not impossible, for the Iraqi government to keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond 2011.

In the case of Afghanistan, however, the agreements just signed impose no such constraints on the U.S. military. And although Obama is touting a policy of ending U.S. war in Afghanistan, the U.S. military and the Pentagon have public said they expect to maintain thousands of SOF troops in Afghanistan for many years after 2014.

Obama had hoped to lure the Taliban leadership into peace talks that would make it easier to sell the idea that he is getting out of Afghanistan while continuing the war. But the Taliban didn’t cooperate.

Obama’s Kabul speech could not threaten that U.S. SOF units will continue to hunt them down in their homes until they agree to make peace with Karzai. That would have given away the secret still hidden in the U.S.-Afghan “Enduring Strategic Partnership” agreement.

But Obama must assume that the Taliban understand what the U.S. public does not: U.S. night raids will continue well beyond 2014, despite the fact that they ensure enduring hatred of U.S. and NATO troops.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

In a major address here Monday, John Brennan, the U.S. official in charge of counterterrorism, formally admitted that the United States engages in attacks using armed unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as “drones”.

But, Brennan argued, the drones programme is “legal”, “ethical” and “wise”.

The speech, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, marks the first official public discussion of the U.S.’s highly secretive drones programme. Overseen by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the programme has been stepped up significantly under President Barack Obama.

Brennan’s presentation comes amidst a barrage of events marking the one-year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, with President Obama making much of the event as the 2012 presidential campaign heats up. According to Brennan, “President Obama has instructed us to be more open with the American people about … using remotely piloted aircraft.”

However, that newfound openness has not included an explanation of how potential drone targets are vetted.

Brennan defended the programme in part because, he said, it targets only those individuals who are known to pose a “significant threat” to the United States and constitute a “legitimate … lawful target”.

But he refused to elaborate on how that process of scrutiny takes place. “How we identify an individual naturally involves intelligence sources and methods, which I will not discuss,” Brennan said in prepared remarks.

That type of secrecy, say observers, leaves in the dark one of the most central issues at stake in the U.S. drone programme.

“Unfortunately, John Brennan’s speech today did little to assure us that the U.S. is only targeting those individuals that are directly participating in hostilities against the United States, perform a continuous combat function with Al Qaeda or its affiliates that are targeting us, or pose an imminent threat of harm to the United States,” Daphne Eviatar, a lawyer and researcher with Human Rights First, told IPS.

“Those are the legal requirements for any targeted killing in this context. Brennan, like others in the administration before him, said that the United States is following international law without explaining how it decides whether the individuals or groups of people targeted meet the legal requirements.”

On Sunday, Brennan had already made waves by admitting publicly that civilian deaths are an inevitable part of counterterrorism operations. That issue strikes at the heart of much of the criticism that has built up against the U.S. use of armed unmanned aerial vehicles over the past half-decade.

“For a long time, the narrative was that drones were only killing militants,” Shazad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer, told an international conference on drone warfare that took place in Washington over the weekend.

In Waziristan, in western Pakistan, he reported, “more than 3,000 people have been killed in 300 drone strikes.” Given the lack of independent monitoring, it is unclear what percentage of those people were civilians.

Akbar’s mere presence at the conference was a surprise, and underscored the longstanding secrecy that has surrounded the U.S.’s use of drone technology. Since 2010, Akbar and the organisation he founded, the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, have been representing the families of non-militants allegedly killed by U.S. drone strikes.

For that work, Akbar said, he had been unable to get a U.S. visa for the past 14 months. Ahead of this weekend’s conference, the U.S. State Department is said to have relented only at the last minute.

“President Obama would like us to believe that there are no civilian victims to drone attacks,” Akbar said. “In that, I think he is lying to his own nation.”

Brennan’s talk lauded the “astonishing precision” of U.S. drone technology, but Akbar’s experience on the ground is different.

“There is no truth behind the suggestion that drone strikes are very precise,” he said, proceeding to show documentary proof of several cases of children who were killed while in buildings neighbouring targeted structures.

“Drone strikes are targeting daily life,” he noted. “Attacks take place around dinnertime, breakfast, at night – there doesn’t seem to be any thought given to how to minimise civilian casualties.”

These are just some of the human rights aspects surrounding this new form of warfare, but there are critical political issues unfolding as well.

Relations between the U.S. and Pakistan have been at a dangerously low ebb since two dozen Pakistani soldiers were killed in a drone attack last November. The freeze has included the Islamabad government’s cutting of critical NATO resupply routes through Pakistani territory.

High-level bilateral discussions restarted only late last week, when a U.S. delegation including Special Envoy Marc Grossman arrived in Islamabad. Already, however, relations have soured again.

Grossman’s visit came on the heels of the unanimous approval by the Pakistani Parliament of a set of recommendations, months in the making, on how to redefine the U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

These included a demand for a full apology from the U.S. for the November 2011 deaths, as well as an immediate halt to drone strikes within Pakistani territory.

But following initial meetings with Grossman last week, Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar complained that the U.S. was not “listening … the language is clear: a clear cessation of drone strikes.”

By Saturday, the talks had broken down, reportedly over the U.S.’s refusal to offer a full apology for the November 2011 deaths.

By Sunday, a far stronger message was sent. After a break in attacks of nearly a month, a U.S. drone killed three to four suspected militants at an abandoned girls’ school in Miramshah, in North Waziristan.

On Monday, without making any direct reference to these recent events, John Brennan affirmed that the U.S. “respects national sovereignty and international law”.

Analysts speaking with IPS called the new attack an “embarrassment”, given the timing. Others suggest that the strikes have put an end to the possibility of reopening the NATO supply lines anytime soon.

Even as President Barack Obama touts his progress in extracting the U.S. from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his administration appears to be deepening its covert and military involvement in strife-torn Yemen.

Washington is worried about recent advances by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), particularly in the southern part of the country.

Since the failed “Christmas Day” bombing by an AQAP-trained Nigerian national of a U.S. airliner over Detroit in December 2009, the group has been regarded here as a greater threat to the U.S. homeland than its Pakistan-based parent.

Quoting senior officials, the Wall Street Journal and other major U.S. publications reported Thursday that the administration has relaxed constraints on both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon in conducting drone strikes against suspected AQAP- affiliated militants in the Arab world’s poorest nation.

Henceforth, the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which conduct parallel counterterrorist campaigns in Yemen, will be able to strike suspected militants whose precise identity may not be known but whose “behaviour” suggests that they are either “high-value” operatives or engaged in plots to strike U.S. interests.

Such assessments will be based on intelligence acquired from such sources as informants on the ground, aerial surveillance, and phone intercepts, as well as circumstantial evidence regarding their associations, according to the reports.

The new guidelines are apparently a compromise between those in the administration who favoured that the previous policy of authorising strikes only against positively identified militants who appeared “kill list” and others, including CIA director Gen. David Petraeus (ret.), who wanted a further easing of the rules of engagement.

They are raising concerns among some experts that Washington is slipping ever more deeply into a conflict – or a series of conflicts – it knows relatively little about.

“There is a dangerous drift here, and the policymakers in the U.S. don’t appear to realize they are heading into rough waters without a map,” wrote Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen specialist at Princeton University and editor of the Waq Al-Waq blog.

“In Yemen, drones and missile strikes appear to have replaced comprehensive policy,” he noted. “…Since late 2009, the number of U.S. strikes in Yemen have increased and, as the strikes have grown in frequency, AQAP has grown in recruits.”

“What does the U.S. do if AQAP continues to gain more recruits and grow stronger even as the number of missile strikes increase?” he asked. “Does the U.S. bomb more? Does the U.S. contemplate an invasion?”

Other critics have worried that escalating the drone war in Yemen, where the U.S.- and Saudi-engineered resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh in February has so far done little to calm the country’s many regional, tribal, political and sectarian conflicts, could further poison public opinion against the U.S. much as it has in Pakistan. The CIA has carried out more than 250 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2009, according to the Long War Journal website.

Many of those were so-called “signature” strikes against targets whose observed behaviour, or “pattern of life”, suggested that they were active members of either the Afghan or Pakistani Taliban insurgencies. Under the prevailing rules of engagement, the CIA did not have to know either the precise identity or importance of the target before ordering a strike.

According to published accounts, Petraeus has repeatedly requested similar rules of engagement for the CIA, which works closely with JSOC, in Yemen.

He reportedly pressed his case with increasing urgency as militants and tribal militias allegedly associated with AQAP, which, according to U.S. officials, has adopted the name of Ansar al-Sharia, expanded their control over several southern provinces in the last months of Saleh’s reign and in the immediate aftermath of his replacement by Vice President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi.

His pleas were initially rebuffed, but Obama reportedly approved the new rules – which some officials have been quoted as calling “signature lite” – earlier this month. They give the two agencies authority to target unknown individuals and groups whose “pattern of life” suggests that they are “high-value” targets or are plotting against U.S. interests.

Officials argue that the new rules are justified in part by improved CIA and JSOC intelligence-gathering capabilities on the ground in recent months. Because Washington did not want to be seen as supporting an unpopular dictator as Saleh tried to hang on, it reduced its presence in the country – among other things pulling out most of its military personnel – thus making intelligence collection more difficult.

Better intelligence, according to these officials, should reduce the possibility that civilians will be hit by missile or drone strikes.

They also argue that looser rules of engagement are essential to help the Hadi government is to regain control over the southern provinces of Abyan, Shabwa and Bayda from AQAP and Ansar al Sharia.

Indeed, the tempo of such strikes has sharply increased in recent months. At least three suspected AQAP-affiliated individuals were reportedly killed in a drone strike in the southern city of Mudiyah Thursday. Two other strikes were carried out since last weekend, including one that killed a senior AQAP commander, Mohammed Said al- Umdah, in northern Yemen and another that killed at least three other suspected militants in Shabwa province, according to the Long War website.

The website reported at least 13 U.S. air and missile strikes in Yemen since Mar. 1 this year, compared to only 10 in all of 2011, the best known and controversial of which killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American imam whose on-line sermons on behalf of Al-Qaeda were considered particularly effective in gaining Anglophone recruits and who was alleged by the administration to have also played leadership role in operations directed against the U.S.

While Awlaki was on the CIA’s “kill list”, a second U.S. citizen slain in that strike, Samir Khan, was not.

Washington had hoped that Awlaki’s death would constitute a major blow to AQAP’s recruitment and direction. But many Yemen experts argued that his importance to the organisation had been greatly exaggerated, and Johnsen noted Thursday that the group’s threat to the U.S. “has grown stronger …even after the death of Anwar al- Awlaki, which apparently surprises some people.”

“…I believe drones and air strikes should be used extremely sparingly and only in situations where the U.S. knows beyond a shadow of a doubt who it is hitting,” he wrote. “Now, the U.S. will say that is what it is doing, but tens of strikes in four months and a number of mistakes in the past three years suggest that these strikes have neither been sparing or surgical.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

As International Labour Day approaches, rights groups in Pakistan are redoubling their efforts to win freedom for six incarcerated union leaders in Faisalabad, the country’s textile hub, who are currently serving a combined jail term of 590 years for supposedly violating the country’s ‘anti-terror’ laws.

Union leaders now in jail. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS.

The representatives of power loom workers – namely Akbar Ali Kamboh, Babar Shafiq Randhawa, Fazal Elahi, Rana Riaz, Muhammad Aslam Malik and Asghar Ansari – were charged with attacking a factory, injuring its owners and burning it down on Jul. 20, 2010, charges that all six individuals have denied.

Still, police were forced to add clauses from anti-terror laws to the report and the court ruled based on evidence and witnesses made available by the complainants, and now the labour activists are languishing behind bars.

The Lahore High Court (LHC) accepted an appeal against their conviction but so far no hearing date has been announced.

To keep the issue in the public eye, the Labour Party of Pakistan (LPP) organised a lecture at the prestigious Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) on Apr. 16 to present the details of the case to a larger audience.

Meanwhile, the Labour Qaumi Movement (LQM), the party to which the jailed leaders belong, is gearing up for a massive rally in Faisalabad on May 1 to demand that the case be repealed.

In actual fact, the six unionists were not terrorists but leaders of the LQM-sponsored strike involving roughly 100,000 power loom workers who were demanding a 17 percent wage hike, says Farooq Tariq, spokesman for the LPP.

He claims only a godown of the said factory was purposely burnt (some allege by the factory owners themselves) to teach the striking workers a lesson.

Still, it was the workers who were arrested, supposedly for indiscriminate firing to create fear, destroying public property and kidnapping people for ransom, all acts punishable under anti-terrorism laws in Pakistan.

“The message was clear: if this can happen with LQM leaders, anyone daring to assume this role in future must be ready for similar treatment,” Tariq said.

He laments the fact that dictators, the ruling elite, feudal lords and a host of other actors are manipulating the country’s anti-terror laws with impunity to silence voices of dissent, target groups demanding their rights and punish rivals in politics.

Thousands of lawyers were arrested for terrorism charges during former president Pervez Musharraf’s regime for participating in the movement for restoration of the judiciary, Tariq said, adding, “I myself was booked under terrorism charges four times just for organising protests. Today, I stand cleared in all of them.”

Families of the jailed leaders are in distress and LPP is raising 5,000 rupees (about 55 dollars) per month for each family’s sustenance.

No labour rights

The power looms sector in Faisalabad city, also known as the Manchester of Pakistan, is the backbone of the country’s economy, which is overwhelmingly dependent on the textiles sector.

Of the estimated 300,000 power looms, 200,000 are based here and set up mostly in the form of small units in houses.

Workers operating these units are paid per ‘pick’, a unit of measurement for the cloth produced, rather than a fixed wage, explained Anis-ul-Haq, spokesman for the All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA).

He said the situation worsens when there is no electricity to power the looms for 14-16 hours each day, meaning zero income for the workers.

This sector cannot afford to make alternative arrangements, like captive power plants and generators, for the simple reason that a typical power loom owner has as many as four to eight power looms at his disposal.

The prolonged electricity load-shedding and inflation has a lot to do with protests organised by workers, claims Rana Tahir, Faisalabad president of LQM. He condemned the labour leaders’ harsh sentence, saying power loom owners and political leaders prepared this ploy to weaken LQM, which had supported an LPP candidate in by-elections for a provincial assembly seat in April 2010.

Tahir challenged the contents of the First Information Report (FIR) registered against the six leaders and clarified that, in fact, guards at the factory shot at protesters first.

The demonstrators’ subsequent reaction caused a bullet to hit a nearby motorbike, sparking “a fire that spread and burnt the cloth lying in the godown.”

Tahir also told IPS that it took police three days to add anti-terror clauses to the complaint, while the factory allegedly burnt by the accused took almost the same time to start fully functioning again. “Doesn’t this show things are doubtful?” he asked.

Akram Ghauri, chairman of the All Pakistan Cotton Power Looms Association, is not convinced by this version of events and has no sympathy for the jailed labour leaders.

“What they did to the factory and its owners is worth condemnation,” he said, calling the leaders blackmailers who effectively held power loom owners and workers hostage by refusing to agree to any proposals.

Ghauri says LQM even threatened workers willing to work on weekends for wages 50 percent higher than those offered during weekdays.

“Now we are in peace, and hold talks with the genuine labour body – the Workers Union of Faisalabad – whenever required.”

Despite his reaction, the registration of a case against the unionists under anti-terrorism law is a phenomenon backed by little public support.

Zulfiqar Shah, joint director of the Pakistan Institute for Labour Education and Research (PILER) believes commercial and industrial disputes should be decided in appropriate fora.

He believes there were certain circumstances that led to the clash between Faisalabad workers and the factory owners and the strike was not a premeditated move.

Now, the same anti-terror laws are being invoked in the case of protesting power loom workers in the port city of Karachi. Shah told IPS the only difference is that these workers have been booked under extortion charges.

Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) Director I A Rehman has also condemned the misuse of anti-terror laws against labourers and the administration of such a severe punishment.

Even hardened criminals involved in heinous crimes have never been awarded such severe punishments, he said, and urges the state to give people their constitutional right under Article 17 of the Constitution of Pakistan, which promises, “Every citizen shall have the right to form associations or unions subject to any reasonable restrictions imposed by law in the interest of sovereignty or integrity of Pakistan, public order or morality.”

When war-torn Somalia was also ravaged by a drought-induced famine last year, which killed tens of thousands and displaced over a million people, international media was quick to blame the Islamist Al-Shabaab for blocking humanitarian assistance from reaching its zone of control in southern Somalia.

Ken Menkhaus, political science professor at Davidson College in North Carolina, blames the USA Patriot Act for blocking aid to Somali famine victims Credit: Linus Atarah/IPS

But according to Ken Menkhaus, professor of Political Science at Davidson College in North Carolina, the United States’ counter-terrorism laws played an equally central role in obstructing assistance from reaching famine victims in desperate need of aid.

Speaking here in a seminar on Wednesday, organised by the Department of the Study of Religions at Helsinki University, Menkhaus said humanitarian organisations suspended food aid delivery to drought- struck areas controlled by Al-Shabaab for fear of violating the USA Patriot Act.

Congress passed the Act in 2001 as part of its response to the Sep. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon and under it, anyone who provides material benefits, even if unwittingly, to a designated terrorist group, could face the most severe penalties.

Given that Al-Shabaab – the Somali cell of the militant Islamist Al-Qaeda, fighting the Federal Transitional Government (FTG) in Somalia and controlling vast swathes of the south except the capital Mogadishu – is designated a terrorist organisation by the U.S., humanitarian groups were fearful that an accusation of ‘aiding terrorists’ could damage their entire organisation.

Thus many reached the conclusion that they were too vulnerable to operate in Al-Shabaab-controlled areas.

Though the group undoubtedly prevented assistance from reaching starving famine victims based on its claim that food aid was a Western conspiracy to drive Somali farmers out of business, Menkhaus, a specialist on the Horn of Africa, believes that was not the end of the sordid story.

“There are plenty of western countries, including my own government, who would like to see the conversation stop right there and say it was all Al-Shabaab’s fault.” However, the other bottleneck was U.S. policy, which “de facto criminalises any transactions in southern Somalia,” he said.

Other countries have similar laws, but since the U.S. supplies the bulk of food aid to Somalia, it has the heaviest impact on the country.

In a twist of tragic irony, “suspension of food aid into southern Somalia was the only thing that the U.S. government and Al-Shabaab could agree on, to the detriment of (millions) of Somalis,” Menkhaus told IPS.

In reality, the U.S. could have issued a waiver, protecting relief agencies from counter-terrorism laws; similar waivers have been issued for relief agencies in southern Lebanon and the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territories, where Hezbollah and Hamas operate respectively.

But in the case of Somalia, Menkhaus believes the U.S. administration did not want to give its Republican opponents any political leverage on the eve of upcoming presidential elections by appearing too “soft on terrorism”.

Instead, the U.S. government prepared a document that purportedly gave relief agencies protection from the law but which, upon close examination by legal experts, was found to contain no such protections, leaving those humanitarian agencies vulnerable to attack under the Patriot Act.

Recent forecasts indicate that Somalia could soon be facing another drought, which could produce yet another food crisis in the country this year. There is now an urgent need for preemptive decisions, by the U.S. government in particular, to avoid another humanitarian catastrophe, Menkhaus said.

Al-Shabab waning?

A Somali national working with an aid agency on the ground in the south of the country, who did not want to be identified because of concern for his safety, told IPS that Al-Shabaab is gradually losing support as increasing numbers of Somalis are beginning to resent the group’s forcible recruitment policy and suicide bombings.

Formed in 2008 to resist the invasion of neighbouring Ethiopian forces, Al-Shabaab was once a popular movement, seen as a legitimate force to oust an invading army in the face of the FTG’s inaction. It had also brought law and order to several regions torn asunder by warring gangs of warlords.

However, Menkhaus said that the group has been seriously weakened by multiple military defeats at the hands of the 12,000 African Union peacekeepers in the country; and its tactic of deploying suicide bombers among the civilian population is alienating much of the group’s former support base.

Abdi-Rashid, who did not want his full identity revealed, accused Western governments of exacerbating what he described as the “politicisation of aid in Somalia”, whereby the humanitarian agenda is becomes secondary to the political agenda.

Huge importance has been heaped on the civil war and the “security situation”, much of it with good reason: by 2008 Somalia was the most dangerous place in the world for humanitarian aid workers.

“One-third of all humanitarian casualties occurred not in Afghanistan or in Iraq but in Somalia,” Menkhaus said.

Still, this was no excuse to allow famine victims to perish en masse, he stressed.

“Long term development work should still go on in spite of the conflict” to secure people’s basic human rights to tangible things like “schools and drinking wells”, Abdi-Rashid told IPS.

If such long-term issues are ignored much longer, there will be serious consequences not only for Somalia but for the entire region.

“These famines – the ones we had last year and the one we may have in 2012 – are producing seismic changes (including) the loss of viable livelihoods in rural southern Somalia, sending waves of people across the borders into Kenya and Ethiopia,” added Abdi-Rashid.

The Kenyan refugee camp of Dadaab, with a population of 520,000, is now Kenya’s third largest city, and completely unsustainable.

Meanwhile, destitute nomads and farmers who can no longer find livelihoods in rural areas are drifting into urban centres. These people, who come with no technical skills into a barren employment landscape, are forming huge slums of several hundred thousand people in villages that previous housed only a few thousand residents.

“This is a time bomb for Somalia because not only Al-Shabaab but any armed group or criminal gang (will) find ready recruits in these sprawling urban slums,” Abdi-Rashid concluded.

Sunday’s well-orchestrated – if unsuccessful – attacks by Taliban forces on Kabul and three provincial capitals in eastern Afghanistan could further shake ebbing public confidence in the U.S. and its allies that their strategy for securing Afghanistan is working.

Billed as the opening of the Taliban’s spring offensive, the attacks also raise new questions about the timing and pace of the planned U.S. withdrawal from the country, as well as the fate of a longer- term strategic agreement that is currently being negotiated between Kabul and Washington.

Just a week before the attacks, an ABC News/Washington Post poll showed that public support for the war in Afghanistan had plunged to an all-time low, with only 30 percent of respondents saying that they believed the conflict was worth fighting. It was the first poll in which a majority of self-identified Republicans agreed with that proposition.

Moreover, 62 percent of respondents said they believed that most Afghans oppose what the U.S. is trying to do there.

Tuesday’s announcement by Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard that Australia will accelerate its planned withdrawal from Afghanistan strikes yet another blow at Washington’s hopes of retaining help from its Western allies through the end of 2014, the deadline that NATO agreed last year for the final departure of all NATO combat troops.

Citing improvements – despite Sunday’s attacks – in the security situation in Afghanistan, Gillard pledged to have sent most of her country’s 1,550 troops in Afghanistan home by the end of 2013.

That timetable was similar to the one adopted in January by President Nicolas Sarkozy for the withdrawal of almost 4,000 French troops after four French soldiers were shot and killed by an Afghan recruit in one of the worst of a growing number of incidents of what has become known as “Green on Blue” attacks. Until then, Paris, along with the rest of NATO, had pledged to stay through the end of 2014.

Whether others will also speed up their own withdrawal plans is likely to be the subject of much corridor talk later this week when NATO defence ministers meet in Brussels and again at next month’s NATO summit in Chicago where Obama is expected to press his fellow- leaders to commit as many troops as possible until the end of 2014 and as many advisers and as much money as possible beyond that date.

Obama himself has pledged to withdraw some 22,000 of the remaining 90,000 U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan by the end of September. But how quickly to withdraw the remaining 68,000 troops between then and the end of 2014 remains a source of heated debate both within the administration and between Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

Backed by most Democratic lawmakers, Vice President Joe Biden and Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, reportedly favour a relatively quick pace that would reduce U.S. troop levels to about 40,000 by mid-2013. But military commanders, supported by most Republicans in spite of the new poll findings, have pressed for a halt to further withdrawals after this fall through the “fighting season” in 2013.

The U.S. “will need significant combat power through the end of 2013,” said Gen. John Allen, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, recently.

Sunday’s attacks are certain to feed this debate, as have other recent debacles, including the accidental burning by U.S. soldiers of copies of the Quran outside Bagram Air Base and the murderous nighttime rampage of one disturbed U.S. soldier who killed 16 civilians, including nine children, near Kandahar.

The attacks, which most analysts have said bore the hallmarks of the Taliban’s Pakistan-based Haqqani faction, included three discrete assaults in Kabul, and two in Jalalabad, one in Gardez, and another in Pul-e-Alam in the eastern part of the country where the U.S. has tried to build up its forces over the last several months.

Altogether, only 39 Taliban fighters – almost all of whom were eventually killed – took part in the attacks, but, as noted by officials here, each assault must have required help from dozens of others who provided intelligence, weapons and ammunition, logistics, and other forms of support in order for such a complex operation to be carried out.

In Kabul, considered the safest city in the country, the attacks brought normal life and commerce to a halt for as much as 18 hours. While the Afghan army and police bore the brunt of the fighting – 11 servicemen were killed – the battle in Kabul was brought to an end only after several U.S. helicopter gunships repeatedly strafed construction sites occupied by the insurgents.

It was the most fighting that has taken place in the capital since the U.S.-led offensive chased the Taliban out of power in the fall of 2001. The U.S. embassy and a NATO base there came under attack last September, but the fighting then was much less protracted and intense.

While there is little question that the size and scope of Sunday’s attacks caught Afghan government, U.S., and NATO officials by complete surprise, demonstrating what Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office called “an intelligence failure for us and especially for NATO”, officials and analysts were divided about their implications for the debate in the U.S.

Allen and those who oppose a rapid withdrawal expressed satisfaction with the response and performance of the Afghan government forces.

“No one is under-estimating the seriousness of today’s attacks,” Gen. John Allen, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, said in a statement. “Each attack was meant to send a message: that legitimate governance and Afghan sovereignty are in peril. The (Afghan security forces) response itself is proof enough of that folly.”

Max Boot, a prominent neo-conservative military analyst, argued in ‘Commentary’s’ Contentions blog that the attack was actually a sign of weakness on the part of the Taliban, noting that “the insurgents had to stage their attacks from abandoned buildings, which suggests they do not have too much support in the capital.”

But others said the attacks marked a show of strength on the part of the insurgency and pointed to the reliance by the Afghan security forces on U.S. and Western advisers who accompanied them in the course of the day, as well as the apparent necessity of engaging U.S. gunships in the battle, at least toward the end of the fighting.

“While this wasn’t the (1968) Tet offensive (by the Viet Cong in Vietnam), if they can pull off something like this in what is supposed to be the safest part of Afghanistan – and attack three other cities at the same time – it’s not very encouraging,” one administration official told IPS. “And it isn’t going to help boost public support for the war.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

As foreign troops trickle out of Afghanistan, local police or private security contractors have filled the gaps in Kabul. Credit: Giuliana Sgrena/IPS

By Giuliana Sgrena
KABUL, Apr 7 2012 (IPS)

Though the United States’ announcement to pull its troops from Afghanistan by 2014 was celebrated by most Afghans as the imminent end of a protracted and controversial foreign occupation, there are lingering questions about the outcome of such a withdrawal.

Specifically, experts and lay people alike are asking whether it will make the country safer for democracy or more vulnerable than ever to violence and extremism. Others are sceptical that the country will ever be free of U.S. presence in a geographically strategic country, close to Iran, Pakistan and Central Asia.

More than ten years since the arrival of foreign troops to ‘fight terrorism’, Afghan people are openly questioning the U.S’ ‘real goal’ when it entered the country.

“The goal of the (U.S) was not to fight terrorism, even though they killed (former Al-Qaeda chief) Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda is still here and spreading throughout the region (into Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, etc), which is useful for the U.S. because they will be asked for help and can use it as an excuse to remain in the region,” Naseer Fayaz, a renowned journalist, told IPS.

Though U.S. President Barack Obama announced the withdrawal of a portion of the stationed troops by the end of 2014, few are hopeful that this will lead to any lasting change on the ground.

“They (the U.S.) will never leave Afghanistan because it is very important from geographic and strategic points of view. The U.S. strategy is a long term one, they are here to control the area from Iran to Central Asia,” Fayaz stressed.

“They use Al-Qaeda to stay here, while negotiating with some jihadists to reach their goals,” he added.

Wadeer Safi, a law professor in the Kabul University, believes that foreign troops will remain on Afghan soil for another reason, one that is actually relevant to the country’s civil society.

“The U.S. will not leave Afghanistan before realising their goal of putting a government based on transparency and social justice into place. This is not the case up to now; criminals are still in power. They should be put on trial,” Safi told IPS.

If “foreign troops leave the country in the hand of fundamentalists, Afghanistan will become a narco state linked to Pakistan,” the professor said, a speculation supported by the fact that the majority of global opium poppy – 123,000 of 195,000 hectares in 2010 – was cultivated in Afghanistan. The country also relies on the drug trade for a third of its gross domestic product (GDP).

Furthermore, Afghanistan is the second most corrupt nation in the world after Somalia, making many people pessimistic about the country’s political future.

Regardless of this concern, the majority of the country is in favour of a withdrawal of all troops. After the massacre in Kandahar and outrage over the Quran burnings at the U.S.-run Bagram military base, tensions swept through the country, penetrating even Kabul, where foreign troops have been replaced by the Afghan army and police.

But “few people trust the Afghan police, who are divided based on ethnic groups,” said Fayaz, adding that diplomats and businessmen have turned to private, often foreign, security contractors for protection.

Embassies are completely surrounded by cement walls and entry is forbidden to Afghans who do not have a special permit.

The presence of warlords and their militias is a danger that could be exacerbated by the exit of foreign troops; though for now, hostilities have been suspended due to power sharing.

Some experts believe that a full withdrawal will lead to the outbreak of civil war; others doggedly hold onto the view that according U.S. troops the label of ‘saviour’ is mere propaganda.

“The U.S. wants to sell more weapons to the Afghans. But the origin of the Afghan problems is the occupation and the warlords in power. Only corrupt people want the troops to stay. Foreign occupations never bring democracy. The people (of a country) must struggle for freedom,” Malalai Joya, a member of the previous Loya Jirga (the Afghan parliament), told IPS.

“But it is not easy to struggle against occupation,” said Baseer, chief of the shura (tribal council) of Khewa in Dar-e-Noor (the village of light), close to the city of Jalalabad.

“Even if 99 percent of the people are against occupation, it is difficult to show your opposition because you will be labelled by the government as Taliban,” with all the consequences such a denouncement entails, Baseer told IPS.

“We need time, we have struggled against the soviet occupation, against jihadis, the Taliban and now we are facing (another) new occupation. We are with the people and we try to solve their problems, that is why we are still here,” he stressed.

He added that if a civil war breaks out, it will be the result of billions of dollars arriving in Afghanistan from outside the country “for a few rich people to build their villas”, not because of the departure of U.S. troops from Afghan soil.

Kabul bears all the signs of this new ‘blood money’, where massive villas have sprung up alongside traditional mud house surrounded by open sewers, highlighting the increasing gap between a handful of wealthy people and the vast majority of the country’s poor.

Hafiz Rashid, leader of the secular Solidarity Party of Afghanistan, told IPS, “People want peace, they don’t want more fighting and for that reason they will accept any puppet government the U.S. will impose on Afghanistan.”

In any case, he added, the U.S. will not retreat completely, but simply reduce the number of their troops remaining in the military bases.

During a meeting with a group of war victims held in the old city of Shari-kua and attended mostly by war widows who are asking for justice, it became clear these groups are willing to accept the presence of foreign troops “if that means peace,” said Fatma, a widow whose husband was killed by a rocket during the post 1992 civil war that shook the country.

“I am worried about the last events (at the Bagram Air Base) where the U.S. soldiers burned the Quran. But if they respect our religion and they can help us, we are not against them,” she said.

A new report released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) Friday contends that the dearth of meaningful reform in the protection of human rights and the rule of law in Yemen threatens political stability as the fledgling transitional government copes with a deteriorating economy and continued violence.

“While Yemen’s new government has taken several promising steps, the repressive security apparatus of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh remains largely intact,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW’s Middle East and North Africa director, after observers met for two weeks in Sanaa.

“Civilian leaders reiterated that they cannot move forward on accountability and reform of the security services so long as Saleh continues to play a hand in directing various security forces there,” Whitson added.

Since last December, when Saleh and his political supporters were granted legal immunity in exchange for a new government under President Abu Rabu Mansur Hadi, the progress made thus far is insufficient, according to the report.

Some of the reforms in Yemen, the poorest member country in the Arab League, include a draft law that would open investigations into last year’s government abuses and the authorisation for a new office of the United Nations Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights in the country.

But after a number of interviews with senior government officials, civil society leaders and other witnesses, HRW found that large gaps remain in government accountability, arbitrary detentions, children forced into the military, and judicial and legal reforms.

No government or security officials have been charged with crimes that left hundreds of Yemeni citizens dead during last year’s anti- government protests.

“Events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya show that removing an authoritarian leader is only the first of many difficult steps…The best way for Hadi to gain the support of all Yemenis is to ensure their grievances are addressed,” Whitson went on to say.

Regional experts have suggested that Saleh has retained a strong influence in Yemeni politics, which has only exacerbated the violent rivalries between different factions vying for power.

“So far, all signs point to Saleh’s unwillingness to give up his influence, especially as long as his political rivals remain active and in a position to dominate Yemen… Their continued presence represents a threat to the emergence of a stable political order in the country,” Princeton Professor Bernard Haykel wrote for majalla.com last week.

With extremely high levels of unemployment, food shortages, dwindling foreign exchange reserves, and an economy almost entirely dependent on neighbouring Saudi Arabia for food and oil subsidies, Yemen’s stagnant economy is just as worrying for some analysts as the growing political instability.

On Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved 93.75 million dollars in assistance to Yemen to “address its urgent balance of payments needs”. Other governments and international organisations such as the U.S., the European Union and the United Nations are in the process of securing additional funds in economic and humanitarian assistance to Yemen.

“The Fund-supported program will help the authorities tackle pressing economic challenges while giving them time to formulate their medium- term strategy to address structural issues,” Nemat Shafik, chair of the IMF’s executive board, said on Wednesday.

“The role of donors is crucial. Financing needs are likely to remain large as the political crisis has worsened poverty and unemployment conditions and severely impacted tax revenues,” Shafik added.

Some experts argue, however, that without an end to Yemen’s political instability, the economic situation is unlikely to improve.

In a report published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Tuesday, regional specialist Dr. Charles Schmitz emphasised that structural economic reforms such as a revised tax system, more investment in human capital programmes, an enhanced partnership between the government and private business, and proper management of Yemen’s non-hydrocarbon natural resources will all work to promote economic growth.

“Yemen’s economic problems are real, but they are not caused by an absolute, irreparable shortage of resources. Rather it is Yemen’s contentious politics and its lack of institutional development that constitutes the main obstacle to surmounting economic difficulties,” the Schmitz wrote.

“Ultimately, long-term success depends on the Yemeni state, not on outside help from the U.S. or the Gulf countries – though they can play a critical role in helping to stabilise the Yemeni economy in the short term,” the report goes on to say.

While the U.S. commended the negotiated political transition brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) last year, U.S. policy remains focused on its support for counterterrorism operations in the country and, in what U.S. officials have begun to emphasise more frequently, countering Iran’s alleged influence in Yemen.

Speaking at a GCC forum in Saudi Arabia last week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserted that Iran has been undermining “regional security” with “interference” in both Yemen and Syria.

One substantial component of the U.S.’s campaign against organisations affiliated with Al-Qaeda in Yemen is an increasing number of drone attacks.

According to a study published last week by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the number of U.S. drone strikes, cruise missile attacks and naval bombardments in Yemen now rivals the intensity of a similar covert campaign against militants in Pakistan, with up to 35 attacks since May 2011 that have resulted in the deaths of an estimated 55-105 Yemeni civilians.

After suspending 150 million dollars in military aid to Yemen during the uprisings last year, U.S. officials have stated that they plan to seek authorisation for nearly 75 million in military aid to resume this year. Yemen has received nearly 316 million dollars in civilian aid since 2007.

“The U.S. government has no business resuming aid, overt or covert, to security forces that are implicated in murdering Yemen’s citizens and refuse to accept accountability for these abuses…Direct military aid to these forces could undermine the government’s ability to ensure accountability and bring peace and security to the country,” HRW’s Whitson said.

“The U.S remains focused on supporting a peaceful political transition in Yemen, and will continue to address the needs of the Yemeni people by delivering humanitarian and economic aid and providing security assistance as requested by the National Consensus Government,” the State Department said in a press release on Monday, after a senior level delegation, which included U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Ambassador Jeffery Feltman, returned from Yemen last week.

“We want to help the people of Yemen. They are in great need of development assistance and other forms of help so that they can begin to realise the benefits of a new government that wishes to try to help them,” Clinton said last week during her trip to Riyadh.

Suicide bombers act in the name of Islam – but clerics deny them even last rites over such killing of others and themselves that they see as un-Islamic.

Mourners attend the funeral procession of a suicide bomber in Pakistan. But such killers are denied last rites. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

Religious scholars in Pakistan say suicide bombers are likely to suffer eternal damnation rather than go to paradise because their acts, blowing themselves up and others, invite the wrath of Allah (God).

“Most suicide attackers act on the misconception that their acts receive the pleasure of Allah, but the fact is they are killing and injuring innocent Muslims,” said Maulana Muhammad Rehman, a prayer leader in a mosque in the Khyber Agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

The seven agencies of the FATA, which border Afghanistan, are the breeding ground for young suicide bombers who are trained and indoctrinated by the Taliban before being sent out to blow up civilian or military targets in either country.

“According to Prophet Muhammad – peace be upon him – killing one person amounts to killing the whole of humanity because there is no way to forgive killers,” Maulana Rehman, 50, told IPS.

“Pakistani Taliban regularly kidnap or lure poor teenagers into madrassas or seminaries where they are brainwashed into becoming suicide bombers, often by using videos showing Muslims under oppression in Kashmir, Iraq and Afghanistan,” Rehman said.

“Their trainers tell them that jihad (holy war) is imperative and that they would go to paradise after killing many infidels and non-believers in Islam, but this is totally wrong.”

Rehman said he was particularly saddened by the trend in which suicide bombers have been attacking mosques and funeral ceremonies to maximise casualties.

Anwarullah, a prayer leader in Mardan, in the border province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), warns that “all those blowing themselves up and killing innocent Muslims wouldn’t find a place in paradise as promised by their trainers.

“There’s no second opinion that suicide attacks aren’t allowed in Islam. It is crystal clear that those disobeying divine commandments and opting to become suicide bombers would land in hell which hosts infidels,” he said.

Qari Jauhar Ali, a cleric in Charsadda, one of the 25 districts of the KP province, said suicide bombers are unfortunate because they cannot be given proper burial rites. “They are neither given a ritual bath nor are proper rites performed as they are lowered into their graves,” Ali told IPS.

In the Bannu district of KP, religious scholar Maulana Muhammad Shoaib says he is particularly sorry for 17-year-old Ahmad Ali, who had blown himself up in an attack in January in Peshawar, because he did not receive a proper funeral, and nobody condoled.

Religious leaders who speak up against suicide bombing are themselves singled out for attacks by the Taliban in an attempt to silence inimical interpretations of the holy scriptures.

Top scholars killed in recent years on orders from the Taliban included Mufti Sarfaraz Naeemi, Muhammad Farooq Khan and Maulana Hasan Jan. All of them were openly critical of suicide bombings.

Dr. Muhammad Shafique at the forensic science department of the Khyber Medical College told IPS that while unidentified bodies at blast sites were routinely buried for DNA identification later, the facility was denied to suicide bombers.

“We never bury the remains of suicide bombers recovered at blast sties but use them for forensic purposes,” he said.

In Shafique’s experience most people disapprove of suicide bombers and stay away from their funerals. “Suicide bombers have turned thousands of innocent people into orphans.”

Abdul Jamil, father of Abdul Shakoor who blew himself to attack a NATO convoy in Kandahar in April 2010, says he considers himself an unlucky father for not being able to perform funeral rites for his son or hold mourning for him.

“People perform funeral ceremonies even for those dying in other countries and who cannot be brought back to their native villages for burials, but I was denied this,” Jamil said.

A resident of Surkh Dheri in Charsadda, Abdul Shakoor disappeared in January 2010. Three months later, a group of Taliban informed his father that his son had been martyred in Kandahar and that he had gone to paradise.

“I couldn’t believe that the Taliban could walk into a mosque early in the morning to give me the shattering news. To my displeasure, they kept congratulating me, but I am still cursing them for what happened to my son,” he told IPS.

“Offering condolences to relatives of the deceased is an important act of kindness, but I am very unlucky that I didn’t receive a single mourner over the death of my only son,” Jamil said. “Because people disapprove of suicide attacks, nobody offered me condolences.

“Dying in this way is painful for parents who are not hopeful of seeking Allah’s mercy for their sons since they are blowing themselves up in contravention of Islamic injunctions,” he said.

Muslims regard the attending of funerals and helping with the preparation of bodies for burial as an important communal obligation.

Maulana Abdul Ghafoor of Peshawar, capital of KP, says that washing the body prior to shrouding and burial, according to instructions given by the Prophet, is obligatory.

Nonexistence of graves is another concern for survivors. Gul Rehman, a daily wager whose son, Ahmad Ali, chose to die as a suicide bomber, is certain that the dead must be given a three-day mourning and be buried in a proper grave until the day of reckoning.

By Correspondents and - -
DOHA, Mar 26 2012 (IPS)

Ilker Basbug, Turkey’s former army chief, has gone on trial on charges of leading a terrorist group accused of plotting to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Basbug raised a clenched fist and waved to supporters as the trial opened at the Silivri high security prison complex in Istanbul on Monday.

Basbug, chief of staff from 2008 to 2010, is accused of being a leader of a shadowy network dubbed “Ergenekon”, behind a string of alleged plots against the Erdogan government.

His lawyer, however, said at the weekend that the case targeted not only Basbug but also “the Turkish armed forces and even, in political terms, the state”.

“This is perhaps the longest and most seismic operation in Turkish judicial history,” said Al Jazeera’s Anita McNaught, reporting from Istanbul.

“It dates back to 2007 when the Turkish government said they had uncovered evidence of a shadowy organisation called Ergenekon, which had been plotting for several years and in many ways and forms in collaboration with the Turkish military and judiciary to overthrow the democratically elected government of Turkey.”

She said the resulting arrests, trials and detentions “have continued to climb up the ladder of seniority in Turkey until finally they reached the man who headed the Turkish armed forces between 2008 and 2010.”

Basbug branded the case against him as tragicomic when he was first detained in January. “He calls it psychological warfare,” McNaught said.

Turks split

The trial encroaches on sensitive territory in a country that saw three coups in the second half of the 20th century.

The military has viewed Erdogan, a man with roots in political Islam, and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) with deep suspicion since it was first elected in 2002.

Since then the AKP has built up a huge majority in parliament, reformed the judiciary and used its authority, bolstered by economic success, to strip the military of the power it has enjoyed to make or break governments.

Dressed in a dark suit and tie, Basbug was the first of 29 defendants to confirm his identity to the bench of three judges on Monday. His answers to judges were to the point.

He waved to several co-defendants who called out to their former chief, and raised a clenched fist as a sign of solidarity with one old colleague also on trial.

The case against him features websites allegedly set up by the military to spread “black propaganda” against the government until 2008.

Basbug is the most senior officer among hundreds of secularists facing conspiracy and terrorism charges.

“There are really two views in Turkey now, of what exactly this trial is about,” Al Jazeera’s McNaught said.

“There are people in Turkey who do believe – and there is as much evidence to sustain this – that there was an undercover group working in various forms … but there are many Turks now who completely doubt the legitimacy of this whole process.

“So you have a country split about whether these trials are actually genuine or whether they are a witch-hunt for the political opponents of the Turkish government.”

* Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Excerpt:

“The murderer is gone, and now it’s us who will have to live with the consequences.” That’s how a Muslim shopkeeper summed up for IPS the death and legacy of the man suspected of murdering seven people in three separate attacks in France.

Marine Le Pen. Credit: A. D. McKenzie

The leader of the far-right Front National party, Marine Le Pen, was among the first to slam “Islamic fundamentalism” and to claim that she had been right all along to warn of its dangers.

“I’ve been saying for 10 years now that the risk of Islamic fundamentalism is under-estimated in France,” she told members of the foreign press at a briefing in Paris Thursday, as she continued her campaign ahead of the two-round presidential elections in April and May.

“(Merah) has an absolutely caricaturist profile: a man arrested many times, against whom several complaints had been lodged, who had a radical religious comportment, and who had travelled to Afghanistan for training,” she added.

The authorities say that Merah, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, was the killer who gunned down a 30-year- old rabbi, his two young sons and an eight-year-old girl Monday morning as they gathered at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse. He also seriously wounded a 17-year-old boy who has been hospitalised.

Earlier this month, the gunman shot dead three French soldiers in two separate incidents, and injured a fourth. The three murdered soldiers were of North African descent, and the wounded man was of Caribbean origin, according to French media reports.

The funerals of those killed were held Wednesday – in France for the soldiers, and in Israel for the Jewish victims. The ceremonies were attended respectively by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, even as police lay siege to Merah’s apartment in what would become a 32-hour standoff.

Officials said that Merah claimed to be a member of the terror network al-Qaeda and that he had told police he acted to “avenge” the killing of Palestinian children by Israel.

After the school shootings, Sarkozy temporarily suspended his re-election campaign, but by Thursday he was echoing his challenger Le Pen when he said that France would take punitive measures against “Islamic indoctrination”. Le Pen had said that “war must be waged against religious fundamentalism.”

Le Pen told journalists that she was “not at all” fearful that her words would stigmatise the Muslim community. “We have launched a call for French Muslims to fight at our sides,” she said, adding that Muslims themselves were often the “first victims” of radicalism.

“They are the victims of those who threaten women and girls because they’re not veiled,” she said.

The French media had initially speculated that the killings might have been linked to neo-Nazi groups. Le Pen said such speculation had been a ruse to tarnish her party, the Front National.

“I was not however comforted by the fact that it wasn’t the work of neo-Nazis because I have nothing to do with neo-Nazi tendencies, neither from near or far,” she said.

Le Pen has rejected the labelling of her party as “far-right”, describing herself instead as a “patriotic candidate”. But she has been responsible for making Muslim dietary practices an issue in the campaign by claiming that millions of French people have been consuming halal meat without being aware of it.

The ritual slaughter of animals, for halal and kosher meat production, thus became another divisive topic in France, following a law enacted last year to ban the burqa and other full-face Muslim veils.

Some believe that the halal debate was a means to get votes by targeting the country’s estimated five million Muslims, and leaders of several religious groups here have joined forces to denounce this apparent policy.

A statement last week by the Conference of Heads of Worship in France (CRCF), which comprises representatives of the Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist faiths, protested against the “instrumentalisation” of religion in democratic debate.

The group said that while it would not review “the troubling and stigmatising polemics” regarding religious dietary practices, it wanted the campaign to address the challenges facing the country such as education, employment, poverty and national unity.

Following Monday’s shooting at the school, the Council of Christian Churches in France (CECEF) said it “shared the pain of the Jewish community” and hoped that the incidents of “extreme violence would not shatter harmony” between the various communities in France.

“We must keep harmony and accord firmly rooted in the values of respect and fraternity, which are the foundations of French society,” the group said in a statement signed by the respective leaders of the Protestant Federation of France, the Roman Catholic Bishops’ Conference and the Assembly of the Orthodox Bishops of France.

Nadjia Bouzeghrane, the Paris bureau chief for Algerian daily El Watan, told IPS that France “had a problem” with Islam because of the French colonialist past.

“Most Muslims are peaceful, they practise their religion in a pacifist way,” she said. “The violence doesn’t reflect what they believe. Along with all the soul-searching, France also needs to look at its policies of integration.”

A Parisian grocer of Moroccan origin, who gave his name as Mohammed, told IPS that many Muslims already felt ill at ease in France and that the killings would exacerbate those feelings.

Sarkozy, meanwhile, has been meeting with Jewish and Muslim groups who have been calling for unity. Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, condemned the murders and said that Muslims felt “stupefaction and revulsion” and were “saddened and worried” by the actions of “criminals”.

“There shouldn’t be a blending of these killings and Islam,” he said.

The Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Berheim, said the “monster” who committed the crimes wanted the Jewish and Muslim communities to be at war, and he urged politicians not to try to capitalise on the incidents.

For her part, Le Pen said it was up to French Muslims to reject Islam fundamentalism and show that they support the values of their country.

By IPS Correspondents and - -
KABUL, Afghanistan, Mar 21 2012 (IPS)

The increasing influence of a conservative circle within President Hamid Karzai’s palace has impeded progress in signing a crucial strategic agreement with the U.S. to chart the relationship beyond 2014, officials and analysts have said.

Their outspoken anti-U.S. views have frustrated Karzai’s diplomats negotiating with U.S. officials, often resulting in messy clashes.

On Mar. 8, a day before Afghanistan and the United States signed an agreement to gradually transfer control of prisons to the Afghan government, Jawid Ludin, the deputy foreign minister, and Karim Khurram, Karzai’s chief of staff, were summoned to brief Karzai ahead of a video conference with U.S. President Barack Obama. Also in the room were General John Allen, the U.S. commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Kabul.

Just minutes before the call between the two leaders, Karzai left the room for a break, according to three separate sources inside the palace. In the following few minutes, in a confrontation that reportedly verged on physical violence, Khurram and Ludin accused each other of spying – one for Pakistan, the other for the United States. They were split up by the NATO commander and the U.S. ambassador.

Accusations

It all began with a complaint from General Allen, the palace sources said. The U.S. embassy and NATO declined to comment for this article.

General Allen reportedly stated that the prisons would be gradually handed over, one of Karzai’s preconditions to signing a long-term strategic agreement on wider issues. But the Afghan government’s media wing must tone down its anti-U.S. rhetoric, Allen insisted.

The Government Media and Information Center (GMIC) falls directly under the authority of Khurram, Karzai’s chief of staff.

Ludin, one of Karzai’s chief negotiators, turned to Khurram and reiterated the general’s point – that such comments hindered negotiations with the U.S.

Khuram, according to the palace sources, said GMIC was only defending Afghanistan’s interests – which Ludin took as an insult.

What Khurram insinuated, an official close to Ludin said, was that the foreign ministry was betraying Afghanistan in negotiations with the US.

Ludin said he would take it upon himself to stop GMIC from making such statements, to which Khurram reportedly responded: “Not even your father can do that.”

“You are a spy for the Americans, you do whatever they tell you,” Khurram told Ludin at the meeting, according to one official.

Ludin, in return, accused Khurram of spying for Pakistan. At that point, General Allen and Ambassador Crocker are said to have stepped in to prevent a physical confrontation.

Ludin declined to comment for this article. Khurram, after hearing about the premise in person, promised an interview, but then refused to answer his phone.

“Diplomacy was set aside,” one senior government official told Al Jazeera about the meeting. “They turned to the Afghan way of arguing.”

When Karzai returned to the room, the video-conference went ahead. The prison deal, gradually transferring control to the Afghan government over six months, was signed before the cameras of the world’s media the next day, as planned. But the reported confrontation underlines how divided President Karzai’s inner court is, with regard to the nature of the long-term relationship with the United States.

Divided palace

“It has been one and half years that the palace has been fractured into two groups,” said analyst Abdul Waheed Wafa, the director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University.

“On the one side, you have people who say: ‘We have not achieved what we want, but we need to stick with the internationals because the alternative is chaos.’ Then the other elements – they are against night raids, and against a long-term U.S. and international presence.”

The strategic agreement is supposed to provide Afghanistan – a poor country that requires foreign donations for roughly 90 percent of its annual budget – some assurance to continue its new beginning after decades of war. More importantly, the support of the U.S. would bolster Afghan standing in a volatile region, where the country’s neighbours have long been accused of interfering in its internal affairs.

For the U.S., a longer presence in Afghanistan would ensure that it could operate against “threats to U.S. national security”, by being able to go after the sanctuaries of those who it believes would use violence against U.S. interests.

But the increasing influence of the conservative chief of staff, and his clashes with what he sees as pro-U.S. elements within Karzai’s circle and beyond, has hindered progress to such a point that, in recent weeks, the U.S. announced “it is more important to get the right agreement than to get an agreement”. Some interpreted that as the U.S. expressing a decreasing interest in the commitment.

Wafa said the announcement was a bluff that put pressure on the Afghan negotiators, who then compromised, tabling certain preconditions for separate discussions.

“The change of tone in the U.S. was partly to pressure Afghans,” said Wafa. “But some Afghans believe it is true – that these people (U.S. officials) are fully frustrated, the U.S. public opinion is against the war, even some senators who were staunch supporters of the war are now saying it is hopeless. That those who wanted an exit got an excuse – that look, the Afghans don’t want us, they don’t want to sign a long term commitment.”

Three issues have been of contention in the negotiating process: U.S. control over Afghan detainees, night raids, and permanent military bases. The two sides agreed to remove the issues of prison transfer and night raids from the strategic agreement, allowing them to be discussed separately.

The prison transfer was signed on Mar. 9, while the memorandum over night raids is being finalised this week, according to an official at the national security council. But the contentious issue of military bases still looms large.

The argument on Mar. 8 was not just a spur of the moment event. Those views were repeated in subsequent interviews.

“Khurram clearly has an agenda – and he wants to disturb any progress in the relations with the U.S.,” an official close to Ludin insisted days after the incident. The other side was no different.

“Absolutely, there are circles that see their sustenance in the West’s benefits, and they don’t think about the nation,” said Ghulam Gilani Zwak, the director of Kabul’s Afghan Research and Consulting Center. “They insist on not negotiating and bargaining, and their actions are slave-like.

“But there are others who have the interest of the nation in mind, who don’t want the repeat of what Dr Abdullah Abdullah and Younus Qanooni signed with the U.S. in December 2001, bringing our independence under question.”

Zwak was referring to an alleged agreement signed between the U.S. government and representatives of the northern alliance, then an anti-Taliban group holed up in the north, which helped the U.S. topple the Taliban. But the “status of forces” agreement that stands now, giving U.S. military personnel immunity from criminal prosection by Afghan law, was actually signed with Karzai’s transitional government in 2003, a U.S. congress report says.

The foreign ministry’s dysfunction is much spoken about in Afghanistan. Zalmai Rasul, an aging foreign minister, has been called a passive operator without much foreign policy experience. Ludin, a former spokesman and chief of staff to Karzai, shoulders most of the responsibility in the foreign ministry, where many appointments are allegedly based on kinship.

“Our foreign policy weakness is that we haven’t had a stable foreign policy, a clear vision. It’s all been reactionary, ad-hoc,” said Wafa.

Ahmad Shuja, a Washington-based Afghan analyst, believes the palace repeatedly steps on the toes of the diplomats, making it difficult for them to do their job.

“Karzai’s statement, his dynamism, eclipses the efforts of the foreign ministry to set policy. It is diplomacy ‘Afghanistan style’ – not policy in the conventional sense.”

And Khurram’s tight grip over the president in the past year has made the job much more difficult for diplomats like Ludin, said analysts.

Frustrations

A controversial former minister of culture, Khurram took over the post of Karzai’s chief of staff in early 2011 – a position that has held increasingly more power in the country, particularly under Khurram’s predecessor, Omar Dawoodzai.

During his stint as culture minister, Khurram was known as a strict censor of television programmes.

Shuja believes Khurram’s seemingly anti-U.S. views stem from two sources.

“His political ideology is shaped by his alignment with Hizb e Islami, and that seems to figure in his calculations,” he said.

Led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Hizb e Islami began as a political party that fought the Soviets. It played a major role in Afghanistan’s bloody civil war in the 1990s, and now is considered the third (and weakest) faction of the anti-U.S. insurgency.

“But also, let’s not forget that they have been trying to reach out to the insurgency. Delaying the signing of a strategic pact will help them in appeasing the Taliban,” added Shuja.

In purging the GMIC, which is largely funded by the U.S. embassy, the new chief of staff announced his intention to control the government’s message. Frustrated with Khurram’s control, the U.S. embassy cancelled funding for a brief period and withdrew its advisers from the media group.

Khurram also issued a warning to the president’s press staff, ordering them not to allow U.S. advisers in press conferences, one palace official tols Al Jazeera.

The U.S. embassy declined to comment for this story. But a U.S. official based in Kabul confirmed the frustrations with the palace.

“For the embassy, it is hard to get any access inside the palace since the chief of staff changed,” the official said.

Khurram has at least three private newspapers, a television channel and a radio station under his control, directly or indirectly, one official – who formerly worked for him – said.

“The message is not just an anti-American one, but also divisive internally,” said Khurram’s former colleague. “His brand of conservative Pashtunism strengthens the notion that all Pashtuns are unilateralist and conservative by nature.

“The president’s non-Pashtun allies have been increasingly isolated. The damage that Khurram has inflicted on President Karzai’s image in one year – his enemies could not have done the same.”

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera. Reporting by Qais Azimy in Kabul, Afghanistan and Mujib Mashal in Doha, Qatar. Follow them on Twitter: @QaisAje, and @MujMash.

Excerpt:

By Ashfaq Yusufzai and - -
PESHAWAR, Mar 17 2012 (IPS)

Not so long ago, Gul Pana’s pursuit of a career as a professional singer in Khyber Pakthunkhwa (KP) province would have invited certain death at the hands of the Taliban.

Fans defy the Taliban to attend a music concert at Nishtar Hall in Peshawar. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

“I enjoy music and, at the same time, I am able to earn money for my family through singing,” the pretty young diva tells IPS. “The people cannot be kept away from listening to songs.”

Cultural activities were unthinkable in KP as long as the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) or United Council of Action – an alliance of religio-political parties – ruled the province from 2002 to 2008 with backing from the Taliban militia.

After the MMA lost elections held in 2008 to the left-wing, socialist Awami National Party (ANP), bombing attacks by the Taliban on CD shops, cinemas and schools in KP and the adjacent Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) increased briefly.

On the night of Jan. 2, 2009, the Taliban brutally executed Shabana, a popular female dancer in Swat and strung up her body from an electric pole. That year, local singer Ghani Dad was killed in Swat while he was returning home from a music session.

But the tide began changing against the Taliban after the Pakistan army launched operations against militancy in the region in 2009 and the United States military stepped up drone strikes targeting top Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders holed up in Pakistan’s northwest.

“We have opened the 600-seat Nishtar Hall for cultural activities and want to defeat terrorism through music and art,” Mian Iftikhar Hussain, KP’s culture minister, tells IPS.

Hussain wants to reverse the policies of the former MMA government which banned musical concerts and other cultural events, considering them to be un-Islamic.

Hussain says the revival of music and cultural activities was also part of the government’s campaign to send across the message that the Pashtuns are a liberal people and opposed to terrorism.

Over two-thirds of KP’s 21 million people are Pashtuns, an ethnic group that straddles the Pakistan- Afghan border and provides the main support base for the Taliban.

“The Nishtar Hall, which remained closed for six consecutive years, now regularly hosts events where enthusiasts enjoy music, drama and other activities,” Hussain said, indicating the most visible sign of the government’s determination.

Reviving cultural programmes across the province has been welcomed by the entertainment-starved Pashtuns, known to be traditionally fond of music, art and dance.

“We came to watch our favourite singers and dancers. The night was fun-filled and we enjoyed ourselves,” said Zawar Ali, a resident of Mardan, one of the 25 districts of KP.

Ali, who attended the musical night at the Nishtar Hall along with 10 of his friends, said he was thankful to the ANP-led government for defying the Taliban, who have now taken to attacking mosques and funerals.

On Mar. 11, a suicide bomber attacked a funeral ceremony in Badhber village, on the outskirts of Peshawar, killing 15 mourners and narrowly missing his target, ANP politician Khush Dil Khan.

Pakistan began to be directly affected by terrorism after the ouster of Taliban rule in Afghanistan by the U.S. towards the end of 2001, as part of the war-on-terror following the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington.

When their government was toppled in Kabul, the Taliban’s leadership crossed over the porous border into Pakistan and concentrated in the FATA from where they began targeting government installations, schools and music and CD shops.

“Taliban destroyed 600 music and CD shops in KP over the past five years. They also forced several singers to leave the province,” said Sher Dil Khan, president of the KP CD Shops Association.

“With a new government ruling KP, attacks on CD shops have stopped,” Khan said.

“During Taliban days, the majority of the singers, dancers and other people related to showbiz left the province,” said Gulzar Alam, a crooner, who fled to Karachi himself. Gulzar and other singers are now signed up for back-to-back cultural programmes.

The government has even started construction for an art academy where talented youths will be provided training in singing, dancing and playing musical instruments.

“About 100 youths have expressed willingness to undergo training in different genres and we are going to start training programmes very soon,” said KP’s director for culture, Pervaiz Khan Sabatkhel.

The province has been traditionally rich in music and art. “People organised musical events to celebrate their weddings and other festive occasions. They cannot be forced to stop listening to music or watching dramas…it has always been a part of their lives,” Sabatkhel said.

Minister Hussain says his government is providing security to the CD shops and singers so they can carry on their business fearlessly.

“We have broken the command and control system of the Taliban and they cannot come back. We hope that art and culture activities will increase in the days to come,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 12 2012 (IPS)

While U.S. officials insisted their counterinsurgency strategy is still working, Sunday’s pre-dawn massacre by a U.S. staff sergeant of 16 people, including nine children, in their homes in Kandahar province has dealt yet another body blow to Washington’s hopes to sustain a significant military presence in Afghanistan after 2014.

The massacre was perpetrated by one individual acting entirely on his own, the Pentagon said Monday. But it was the latest in a series of recent incidents, including the dissemination on the Internet of a video showing four U.S. soldiers urinating on the corpses of dead Afghans and the apparently inadvertent burning of copies of the Quran outside a U.S. military base, that have stoked popular outrage against U.S. and other foreign troops.

It also took place amid indications that the U.S. electorate and Congress are increasingly disillusioned with what last year had already become the longest war in U.S. history.

A new Washington Post/ABC public opinion poll released Sunday found that 60 percent of respondents now believe the Afghan war was not worth fighting, close to an all-time high in the decade-long war.

Moreover, only 30 percent of respondents said they believed most Afghans support U.S. and NATO efforts in their country; 55 percent said they believed that most Afghans oppose the foreign presence.

The massacre also took place just after Washington and the government of President Hamid Karzai had finally agreed on one of two key points of contention that have stood in the way of the signing of a strategic partnership agreement that would permit Washington to retain a substantial military advisory force and possibly access to several key bases after 2014, the deadline by which foreign combat troops are to have left Afghanistan.

The two sides reached an agreement last week on transferring some 3,200 suspected Taliban insurgents detained by U.S. forces at the Parwan prison at the U.S.-controlled Bagram air base to Afghan custody over the next six months.

Under the accord, the U.S. will retain a veto over whether specific detainees could be released by Afghan authorities so long as U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan. In addition, the two sides agreed that Washington will retain custody of non-Afghan prisoners believed to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

Yet to be resolved, however, is Karzai’s demand that night raids be ended against alleged Taliban targets by U.S. Special Forces. The raids, which U.S. military officials say have resulted in the capture or killing of thousands of Taliban fighters in recent years, have also been cited by many Afghans and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as perhaps the most important cause of local discontent with the U.S. military presence.

Sunday’s massacre, which did not involve Special Forces, took place in three villages in Kandahar’s Panjwai district, a Taliban stronghold until U.S. “surged” troops into the region as part the counterinsurgency strategy adopted by President Barack Obama in late 2009.

According to various reports, a 38-year-old army staff sergeant who had served several tours of duty in Iraq and was deployed to Afghanistan in December left his base in the early morning hours, walked to a nearby village, and broke into three houses in a 500- metre radius, shooting and stabbing its residents, including young children. He then returned to his base where he surrendered and is now under detention.

According to the Pentagon account, the base authorities sent troops aboard helicopters to treat and evacuate the wounded, thus fuelling rumours that more than one rogue soldier was involved in the attacks.

“This latest assault was reportedly the work of a single soldier, but many Afghans won’t believe or care that it was not another routine U.S. raid. The effects are the same,” according to Ann Jones, author of the 2006 book “Kabul in Winter” and a prominent critic of U.S. counter-insurgency tactics in Afghanistan.

“U.S. officials miss the point entirely, insisting this massacre was a one-off tragedy, when Afghans know something like it will happen again any day.”

Top U.S. officials, including Obama, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, and top military commanders issued a number of statements of regret since the incident, promising to fully investigate what took place and hold anyone responsible accountable.

Speaking at the U.N. Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also noted that Washington has “had a difficult and complex few weeks in Afghanistan” but stressed that “our steadfast dedication to protecting the Afghan people” remained unchanged.

But, while some officials expressed relief that the massacre had not yet sparked the kinds of violent demonstrations – or apparent revenge killings by Afghan troops against U.S. soldiers – that followed the Quran burning, independent analysts said it was bound to add to the mutual distrust that has become increasingly evident in recent months.

“Coming right after the unintentional desecration of Qurans and the deaths of several NATO soldiers from rogue Afghan soldiers, this latest tragedy will further inflame anti-foreign sentiment in Afghanistan and strain ties between President Karzai(‘s) government and his NATO allies,” wrote Bruce Reidel, a former top CIA South Asia analyst and an architect of Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the Daily Beast Monday.

The killings “will increase pressure to find a political solution to the Afghan war,” he noted, adding that the fact that the Taliban have not renounced peace talks and have agreed to open an office in Qatar to facilitate negotiations in spite of these incidents were favourable signs.

But Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistan expert on Afghanistan who enjoys some influence in policy-making circles here and also favours peace talks with the Taliban, wrote in the Financial Times Monday that the Western forces in Afghanistan are facing a “crisis of confidence” and that Karzai’s “desire to seek a strategic partnership agreement with the U.S. is becoming more and more unacceptable to the Afghan people.”

The latest incident will also add to the war fatigue here.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, a foreign policy hawk who has called, among other things, for bombing Iran, admitted Sunday after news of the massacre reached Washington that the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is “not doable” and that Washington’s intervention there was “probably counter-productive”.

Unlike Democrats and independents, who have been consistently more sceptical about the war, Republicans in the latest poll were evenly split on whether the war was worth fighting, and some Republican lawmakers were balking at the proposed budget for Afghanistan next year before the latest incident.

The soldier, whose name will not be released pending completion of an ongoing investigation, was reportedly taking part in a “village stabilisation” operation, a key part of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy that seeks to win over village elders and organise local police forces.

His home base, where his wife and two children reportedly live, is at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Washington. That is the same home base of the so-called “kill team”, a unit led by another staff sergeant that killed at least three Afghan civilians in separate incidents and then cut off their body parts as trophies in 2009.

Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs was convicted of murder and other crimes and sentenced to a life term by a military tribunal at the base last November, but he could be freed in as little as 10 years.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Excerpt:

By David Elkins and - -
WASHINGTON, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

Two days after U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder outlined the statutory justifications for “targeted killings”, civil liberties groups here continue to question the legality of the Obama administration’s policy, particularly as it applies to the rights and very lives of both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals.

The use of drones for targeted assassinations in Yemen and elsewhere has created a storm of controversy in the United States and beyond. Credit: Northrop Grumman/CC by 2.0

Holder argued that the distinction between due process – the right guaranteed to U.S. citizens that the government cannot deprive life without due process of law – and judicial process – the system of military courts used to try suspected terrorists during a time of war – was an important one.

“The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process… These circumstances are sufficient under the Constitution for the U.S. to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen abroad – but it is important to note that the legal requirements I have described may not apply in every situation,” Holder noted.

Although the Obama administration has stated publicly that its policy to assassinate U.S. citizens and foreign nationals allegedly involved with terrorist organizations does not fall outside of legal bounds, the actual decision-making process – how, when and under what circumstances – through which authority is granted remains classified.

The debate over targeted killings reignited in December 2011 when President Obama signed into law a bill that included language reaffirming the executive’s right “to use all necessary and appropriate force” in combating terrorism.

“We have had all of these arguments since 2010. They are inadequate,” Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who specialises in international dispute, told IPS.

“This is the global war on terror with a new name – the same global war on terror that President Obama dismissed on the campaign trail” in 2008, O’Connell added. “The U.S. has always had a policy against targeted killing for legal, moral and strategic reasons. None of these reasons have changed.”

An increase in attacks – and in debate

Obama has doubled the number of drone attacks conducted by the previous U.S. administration in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The most notable case of officially sanctioned assassination came in September 2011, when a U.S. drone killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and senior operative of al- Qaeda’s affiliate organization in Yemen.

Since 2009, the number of civilian and militant deaths from such attacks has been hotly contested by government officials and outside groups.

Officials in the U.S. Department of Justice and intelligence agencies have declined to release government memos describing the justification and details of drone operations abroad, despite a recent motion filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) under the Freedom of Information Act for publication.

The speech is “ultimately a defence of the government’s chillingly broad claimed authority to conduct targeted killings of civilians, including American citizens, far from any battlefield without judicial review or public,” Hina Shamsi, a specialist in national security issues for the ACLU, said in a statement on Monday.

She called the speech “a gesture towards additional transparency”.

International law

Holder also argued that certain legal principles “do not forbid the use of stealth or technologically advanced weapons”, such as covert operations and unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, used to kill militants and foreign nationals suspected of posing an “imminent threat” to U.S. national security.

But the use of such methods has set controversial precedents that may violate international law, Laura Pitter, a specialist on U.S. counterterrorism policy for Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

“The reason it’s important to comply with international law is that there are standards that all countries use when applying lethal force so that countries like Russia and China, when they have these technologies, all apply the same standards,” Pitter explained.

While the speech provided the clearest insight to date regarding the administration’s legal framework for assassinations of U.S. citizens, Holder avoided detailing the implications of such a policy for foreign nationals.

“[The speech] deals with what would be justified for a U.S. citizen,” said Pitter. The fact that it didn’t address non-citizens leaves “little basis for determining whether the U.S. is meeting its legal obligations when it conducts these operations in regard to non-citizens,” she added.

“Each targeted killing that occurs takes place in different circumstances, and all of it is secret because it’s being conducted by the CIA…We’ve called for a long time for them to be conducted under military authority, which has greater transparency,” Pitter added.

The search for justification

Holder’s speech briefly touched on sovereignty issues related to the drone campaigns – a point of bitter disagreement between U.S. and Pakistani officials – and cited the fundamental legal principles guiding the use of force during wartime, including those of proportionality and humanity, statutes ostensibly put in place to avoid excessive “collateral damage” and “unnecessary suffering”.

“He mention[ed] a right to attack states that are ‘unable or unwilling’ to control criminality on their territory. There is simply no such right in international law,” Mary O’Connell, the Notre Dame professor, added.

As human rights groups and some Congressional leaders remain adamant that the White House publicly declare, in concrete terms, its assassination policy in a broader context that includes a legal justification for killing both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals, drone operations continue in many countries around the globe.

“The most important point to note for this entire debate is how perverse and warped it is that we’re even having this ‘debate’ at all,” wrote Glenn Greenwald, a writer specialising in constitutional and civil rights, wrote Tuesday on his Salon.com blog.

“It should be self-negating – self-marginalizing – to assert that the president, acting with no checks or transparency, can order American citizens executed far from any battlefield and without any opportunity even to know about, let alone rebut, the accusations.”

Excerpt:

By Ashfaq Yusufzai and - -
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Mar 4 2012 (IPS)

With no money to see a doctor, Gul Lakhta,50, had resigned himself to blindness when a ‘mobile hospital’ drove into his village in the Bajaur Agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), on Pakistan’s rugged border with Afghanistan.

At a mobile hospital camp Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

After the United States-led coalition forces toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001 its leaders fled across the border to the FATA and adjacent areas, bringing with them their fundamentalist ideology and culture of violence.

Before long, the Taliban had unleashed a campaign of bombings against their hosts, targeting schools, health facilities, markets, government buildings and forces, bringing life to a virtual standstill in the seven agencies that make up the FATA.

“In the process, Taliban militants also destroyed 60 health facilities, forcing patients to travel to Peshawar and beyond to seek treatment for even minor ailments,” said Dr Niaz Afridi, head of the MHP in the FATA.

The government allocates Pakistani rupees 60 million (660,000 dollars) per year for the programme and there are plans to expand it, Afridi said.

These clinics-on-wheels have proved a blessing for the patients because they are well-equipped and manned by dedicated teams. Currently they provide treatment to 90,000 patients annually.

“We also organise medical camps in areas which are inaccessible by the regular medical workers and our medical teams visit the remotest areas to reach the patients and provide diagnosis and treatment free,” Afridi said.

Dr Nauman Mujahid, development officer for health services in the FATA, said the MHP is manned by a staff of 150, including physicians, surgeons, gynaecologists and other specialists like ophthalmologists and dentists.

Each vehicle is equipped with a generator that powers a mobile operation theatre, a dental unit, x-ray and ultrasound machines and laboratories that allow for quick diagnostics.

“Critically-ill patients who require hospitalisation are referred to tertiary care centres in Peshawar,” said Mujahid.

The programme started with the South Korean government donating 14 mobile clinic units in 2003 to help the people in the insurgency-hit areas of the FATA.

Although the process of the rebuilding damaged health outlets is in progress, the MHP will, because of its popularity, continue to operate in the FATA with a fleet that was augmented in 2010 by the government.

Mobile hospitals are particularly effective in ensuring that patients who need to be on drug regimens lasting several months get their doses. This is especially so in the case of tuberculosis (TB) patients who, if improperly treated, can develop drug resistant strains that can endanger a community.

Waqar Ali, 46, who was diagnosed with TB at a free medical camp in North Waziristan three months ago, is now on medication he must take for eight months. “I am feeling better and do my farming like normal people,” he told IPS.

Authorities take care to notify people in areas where the camps are going to be held about a week in advance. Often announcements are made from the mosques.

Talking to IPS, Dr Bilqees Qayyum, a gynaecologist on the rolls of the MHP, says that people often come to the medical camps in droves with a variety of complaints.

“Besides running camps to treat patients routinely, we also rush to the areas hit by outbreaks of diseases, like measles, gastroenteritis and diarrhoea,” she said. “We were the first to reach the Hazara division in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) when it was hit by a massive earthquake in 2005.”

The MHP played a significant role in providing medical assistance to people displaced by military operations directed against the Taliban in Swat in 2009.

In the following year, MHP proved its mettle by providing emergency medical services to people affected by floods in the Nowshera and Charsadda districts of KP.

“Our highly trained doctors, paramedics and nurses have been awarded commendation certificates by government for their excellent performance in emergencies,” Qayyum said.

In 2011 MHP surgeons carried out operations on 13,000 patients and the numbers continue to grow, Dr Fawad Khan, director of health services in the FATA, told IPS.

“Given the success of the MHP, the KP and Punjab (provincial) governments have requested us to put in place a similar programme for them,” Khan said. “Our teams already visit these provinces in emergencies,” he added.

Excerpt:

By - - and Correspondents
DOHA, Qatar, Feb 15 2012 (IPS)

Two Iranians have been arrested and charged with plotting a bomb attack in Bangkok, according to Thailand’s foreign minister.

Thai officials said on Wednesday they believed the incident in the Thai capital could be linked to recent attacks on Israeli diplomats in India and Georgia.

A man carrying an Iranian passport lost his legs and injured four other people in a Bangkok neighbourhood on Tuesday when grenades he was carrying apparently exploded by accident, police said.

Referring to the Iranians arrested in connection with the incident, Surapong Tovichakchaikul, the Thai foreign minister, said: “They are charged with causing an illegal explosion in a public area and attempting to kill police officers and members of the public.

“We cannot say yet if it’s a terrorist act, but it’s similar to the assassination attempt against a diplomat in India.”

The injured suspect, identified as Saeid Moradi, was in stable condition in a Bangkok hospital, although he remained unconscious after 10 hours of surgery, Suparung Preechayuth, a hospital surgeon, said.

Police said he had been charged with illegal possesion of explosives, causing explosions, attempted murder and assaulting a police officer. Two other men shared the rented house with him.

One person was arrested at Bangkok’s international airport on Tuesday but he has not yet been charged.

Malaysian arrest

Another person was arrested on Wednesday afternoon at Kuala Lumpur airport in neighbouring Malaysia as he tried to board a flight to Tehran, Malaysian police said.

The suspect, in his thirties, had apparently evaded authorities at Bangkok airport and flown to Malaysia.

Police Inspector-General Ismail Omar said he was arrested on intelligence from Thai authorities and was being investigated for “terrorism activities” related to the Bangkok bombings.

Asked whether the explosives used in India and Thailand were the same, a senior Thai security official said they both had the same “magnetic sheets”.

“The individual was in possession of the same magnets and we are currently examining the source of the magnet,” Wichian Podphosri, the secretary of Thailand’s National Security Council, said.

In the Bangkok attack, one explosive device went off in the bomber’s home. Another was thrown at a taxi that would not take one of the men who left the house following the explosion.

The third blew off the man’s leg when he tried to throw it at police and it either went off before he could throw it or it hit something and ricocheted back at him.

Netanyahu’s remarks

Reacting to the latest developments, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, accused Iran of targeting diplomats, saying that if the world did not stop Iran’s “aggression”, the attacks would spread.

“It harms innocent diplomats in many countries and the nations of the world must condemn Iran’s terror actions and demarcate red lines against Iranian aggression,” he said.

“If such aggression is not stopped it will spread to many countries.”

Iran has denied any involvement in the blasts, saying Israel often made such accusations.

Iranian state TV quoted Ramin Mehmanparast, the country’s foreign ministry spokesman, as saying that Israel was behind the explosions.

“The main goal of the Zionist regime is to conceal its real essence in carrying out terrorist acts particularly assassinating Iran’s scientists,” the state news agency IRNA quoted Mehmanparast as saying.

“We are not accepting, we are denying this and I don’t know how they (the Israelis) can assume within a short time of one hour that to say who has done this,” Iran’s ambassador to India, Seyed Mehdi Nabizadeh, said, referring to the New Delhi attack.

“It has happened in India. If India’s security says something like that, then we have to verify.”

India ‘lacks evidence’

India said it did not have enough evidence to reach a firm conclusion.

“The Indian government does not have any evidence pointing to any individual, entity, organisation or country being involved in Monday’s blast, so far,” a foreign ministry spokesman said.

The attack on an Israeli diplomatic car in the Indian capital left a female diplomat and three other people injured.

Police in Georgia said they had thwarted on an Israeli diplomatic vehicle on the same day.

Russia has condemned the bomb attacks and called on both countries to investigate but did not accuse Iran or any other country of involvement.

Russia “decisively condemns these attacks by extremists”, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

“We are convinced there can be no justification for terrorism in all its forms.”

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Excerpt:

By Marsha B. Cohen and Jim Lobe
MIAMI/WASHINGTON, Feb 13 2012 (IPS)

While Israel and its allies here blamed Iran for Monday’s two nearly simultaneous car bomb incidents in the capitals of India and Georgia, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama echoed local authorities in both countries who said they were not sure who the perpetrators were.

“I don’t have an assessment to give you of what the Israeli government is saying,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters in Washington.

“We have no information yet to share with you about who was behind those attacks, but we’re obviously working and discussing with the Israelis and others to ascertain exactly that,” he added.

Independent analysts in Washington also professed uncertainty about responsibility for the bombings.

Some said Iran, which had vowed last month to retaliate for the assassination, reportedly by Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran, was the most likely candidate.

Others suggested that Laskar-e Taiba (LeT), a Pakistani terrorist group which carried out the 2008 bombings in Mumbai, India, also had to be considered a major suspect for the attack in New Delhi, which sent the wife of the Israeli Embassy’s military attaché to the hospital. After surgery to remove bits of shrapnel from the bomb, she was released late Monday, according to news reports.

The Indian government has promised Israel a thorough investigation of the blast that injured the woman and several other people. According to reports, an explosive device was placed on her car by a motorcyclist while it was stopped at a red light close to the Israeli embassy.

At nearly the same time, in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, a similar device, described by some reports as a grenade, was found attached to a car owned by one of the Israeli embassy’s local drivers and dismantled before it could be detonated.

A spokesman for the Georgian Interior Ministry, Shota Khizanishvili told reporters that the incident may have been linked to the driver’s personal life, rather than his work at the embassy, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

Coming so soon after the Jan 11 killing – also by a bomb attached by a motorcyclist to a car – of the Iranian nuclear scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the two attacks appeared to many both here and in Israel that Tehran was trying to take the revenge it had promised.

Roshan was the fourth Iranian scientist to be killed in this way in the last two years. NBC News quoted senior U.S. officials last week as confirming that the assassination campaign has been organised by Israel’s Mossad working with the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, an Iraq-based Iranian group that the U.S. lists as a terrorist organisation.

“In recent months we have witnessed several attempts to attack Israeli citizens and Jews in several countries, including Azerbaijan, Thailand and others,” Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu charged Monday. “…Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, were behind all of these attempted attacks,” he said.

Tehran called Israel’s charges “sheer lies” and suggested that Israel itself may have been responsible as part of its “psychological warfare” against Iran.

Israeli officials noted that Sunday marked the fourth anniversary of the assassination, also reportedly by Mossad, of Imad Mughiniyeh, one of the founders of Hezbollah, which, with Iran’s help, began as a resistance movement against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon during the 1980s and 1990s. Mughniyah had been accused of planning and carrying out terrorist attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets at Iran’s behest throughout the Middle East and even in Argentina.

Indian officials, meanwhile, did not rule out involvement of the LeT, which has been linked to Al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s military intelligence. Among the 164 people killed in its Mumbai attack were six people at Nariman House, a Chabad religious centre that catered to Israelis and visiting Jews from Western countries. Investigators concluded that the centre was a specific target of the LeT attack.

Since the fall of 2009, Israel has issued travel warning to its citizens visiting India, a popular destination with Israelis: “The terror group that carried out the 2008 Mumbai attack can conduct a number of attacks across India, including on the concentration of Western tourists and Israelis and may also attack Chabad houses.”

Early reports on several Indian news sites said that “low grade explosive material, including sulphur and potassium chlorate with sulphuric acid,” had been used to detonate Monday’s explosion. These early reports also noted that Abdul Karim Tunda, said to be affiliated with the LeT, used this method in late 1990s and early 2000s to set off explosions in various parts of India.

As of Monday night, however, the explosives used in the attack had not been positively identified, according to Delhi Police Commissioner B. K. Gupta.

The Times of India reported early Tuesday morning that the bomb attached to the Israeli embassy vehicle by a magnet was the type that has been used in past terrorist operations in Iran, Israel, Georgia, Turkey and Armenia. The newspaper also reported that its manufacture was of a sophistication that had not been seen in India to date.

U.S. experts on Iran and South Asia Monday said they were uncertain about who was responsible.

“The Israelis have been very quick and categorical in blaming the Iranians; it’s not an unreasonable charge,” said Bruce Riedel, a former top CIA analyst on the Near East and South Asia, now at the Brookings Institution.

“Israel and Iran have been engaged in a Spy vs. Spy war for years. This war has been getting hotter and hotter, with Israel’s deep concern about Iran’s nuclear programme,” he told IPS. “What we’re seeing now is a very dangerous game, getting more and more dangerous all the time.”

“It’s not a cold war anymore,” Riedel, who has advised the Obama administration on South Asia policy, went on, noting the assassinations of the Iranian scientists, as well as other efforts to sabotage Tehran’s nuclear and missile programmes. “Iran and Hezbollah are fighting back, and want to show their ability to carry out simultaneous attacks.”

At the same time, he stressed, “There are a host of people who would like to see a war between Iran and Israel, particularly Al-Qaeda” with which LeT has been linked.

Stephen Tankel, an expert on LeT at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, agreed that the perpetrators could be Iran, Hezbollah, or LeT.

“Does Lashkar have an interest in targeting Israelis? Yes. Do Hezbollah (and Iran) have an interest in targeting Israelis? Yes and arguably more so,” he told IPS. “Do both groups have transnational networks? Yes.

Neither Hezbollah nor Lashker-e-Taiba is previously known to have operated in Georgia. Tankel said, “I’ve not heard of Lashkar folks in Georgia, but that does not mean they’re not there.”

“Gun to my head, I’d be more inclined to believe it was Hezbollah, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it turned out I picked the wrong horse,” says Tankel. “Remember, we’re talking about two state-sponsored organisations that are pretty good at covering their tracks.”

Monday’s incidents also coincided with the opening of the trial of Umar Patek in Jakarta, Indonesia. Patek, who is believed to be a member of another Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist group, Jemaah Islamiah, is accused of masterminding the explosions that killed 202 people, most of them foreigners, at a night club and bar in Bali on 2002.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Excerpt:

By - - and Correspondents
DOHA, Qatar, Feb 13 2012 (IPS)

Israeli diplomats have been targeted by car bombs in India and Georgia, leaving three injured and Israel’s foreign minister promising a response.

An Israeli embassy car exploded in New Delhi, the Indian capital, injuring an Israeli diplomat and three other people, but it was not immediately known whether the explosion was caused by a bomb, officials said.

The Indian Foreign Ministry did not identify the wounded, but officials said the driver and a diplomat’s wife were injured.

Another Israeli embassy vehicle was targeted in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, where the car’s driver found a package attached to the undercarriage and police discovered and defused a grenade.

Iran accused

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, blamed Iran for the attacks on the Israeli embassy staff.

“(Iran) is the biggest exporter of terror in the world,” Netanyahu told members of his rightwing Likud party.

The Israeli leader said there had been a number of attempts to harm Israelis and Jews in recent months, in places such as Thailand and Azerbaijan, in a series of attacks coordinated by Tehran and Lebanon’s Shia movement, Hezbollah.

“In all these incidents, those responsible were Iran and its protege Hezbollah,” he said.

Israel would continue to act “with a firm hand” to stamp out “international terror coming from Iran”, he said.

Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister, told reporters in Jerusalem he knows “exactly who is responsible for the attack and who planned it”.

“We’re not going to take it lying down,” he said.

Al Jazeera’s Cal Perry, reporting from Jerusalem, said the attacks were “near simultaneous”.

“That is going to lend weight to those who will point the finger at a larger organisation, maybe even a country like Iran, maybe Hezbollah,” Perry said.

Iran rejected the accusations as “sheer lies”, the official IRNA news agency quoted the Islamic Republic’s ambassador to New Delhi as saying.

“Any terrorist attack is condemned (by Iran) and we strongly reject the untrue comments by an Israeli official,” Mehdi Nabizadeh was quoted as saying by IRNA.

“These accusations are untrue and sheer lies, like previous times.”

High-security area

Al Jazeera’s Prerna Suri, reporting from New Delhi, said the targeted vehicle there was parked down the street from the Israeli embassy in a high security area, about a kilometre away from the prime minister’s residence.

“Witnesses described how the car exploded in flames. One side of the car had been completely charred. The bonnet had been flung open and exploded in flames.

“Other witnesses described two people on motor bikes throwing some kind of device (at the car), and police are trying to find out what kind of device that was. Indian forensic teams as well as Israeli embassy staff are at the scene of the incident, trying to piece together what exactly has happened,” our correspondent said.

David Goldfarb, Israeli embassy spokesman, said that one of the occupants in the car was an Israeli diplomat, but declined to identify him.

A photograph on NDTV showed the Toyota station wagon engulfed in flames in the middle of the road. Later television footage showed the vehicle burnt out and the area cordoned off by police.

“There was an explosion in an Israeli diplomat’s car but we don’t know how it happened,” Goldfarb said. “We are in constant contact with the local authorities.”

Shota Uitashvili, spokesman for the Georgian Interior Ministry, said the car in Tbilisi was in a car park about 200 metres from the embassy, where the driver had parked it in the morning after coming from his home.

As Perry points out, Israeli embassies had already been on high alert for potential attacks.

“It was four years ago, almost to the day, on Feb. 12 that Imad Mughniyah, the military leader of Hezbollah, was assassinated in Damascus and Hezbollah has been warning that they will retaliate for this assassination and has always pointed the finger at Israel,” Perry said.

“All of Israel’s embassies were on high alert starting on the 12th as a normal course of security every year. But this is the first year that we have seen simultaneous attacks on foreign soil, which was also something that Hezbollah said it would do.”

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Excerpt:

An analysis by Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, which the U.S. Army has not approved for public release but has leaked to Rolling Stone magazine, provides the most authoritative refutation thus far of the official military narrative of success in the Afghanistan War since the troop surge began in early 2010.

U.S. Army Pfc. Shawn Williams is evacuated after being injured by a roadside bomb in Kandahar Province on June 17, 2011. Credit: DoD photo

In the 84-page unclassified report, Davis, who returned last fall after his second tour of duty in Afghanistan, attacks the credibility of claims by senior military leaders that the U.S.-NATO war strategy has succeeded in weakening the Taliban insurgent forces and in building Afghan security forces capable of taking primary responsibility for security in the future.

The report, which Davis had submitted to the Army in January for clearance to make it public, was posted on the website of Rolling Stone magazine by journalist Michael Hastings Friday. In a blog for the magazine, Hastings reported that “officials familiar with the situation” had said the Pentagon was “refusing” to release the report, but that it had been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House.

Hastings wrote that he had obtained it from a U.S. government official.

Contacted by IPS Friday, Davis would not comment on the publication of the report or its contents.

Writing that he is “no Wikileaks guy Part II”, Davis reveals no classified information in the report. But he has given a classified version of the report, which cites and quotes from dozens of classified documents, to several members of the House and Senate, including both Democrats and Republicans.

“If the public had access to the classified reports,” Davis writes, “they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is true behind the scenes.”

Davis is in a unique position to assess the real situation on the ground in Afghanistan. As a staff officer of the “Rapid Equipping Force”, he traveled more than 9,000 miles to every area where U.S. troop presence was significant and had conversations with more than 250 U.S. soldiers, from privates to division commanders.

The report takes aim at the March 2011 Congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus, then the top commander in Afghanistan, and the Defence Department’s April 2011 Report to Congress as either “misleading, significantly skewed or completely inaccurate”.

Davis attacks the claim in both the Petraeus testimony and the DOD report that U.S. and NATO forces had “arrested the insurgents’ momentum” and “reversed it in a number of important areas”.

That claim is belied, Davis argues, by the fact that the number of insurgent attacks, the number of IEDs found and detonated and the number of U.S. troops killed and wounded have all continued to mount since 2009, the last year before the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops and 10,000 NATO troops.

Davis notes that Petraeus and other senior officials of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the U.S.-NATO command in Afghanistan, have boasted of having killed and captured thousands of insurgent leaders and rank and file soldiers, cut insurgent supply routes and found large numbers of weapons caches as well as depriving the insurgents of their main bases of operation since spring 2010.

If these claims were accurate measures of success, Davis writes, after the Taliban had been driven out of their strongholds, “there ought to have been a reduction in violence not a continual, unbroken string of increases.”

In fact, Davis writes, Taliban attacks “continued to rise at almost the same rate it had risen since 2005 all the way through the summer of 2011” and remained “well above 2009 levels in the second half of 2011” even though it leveled off or dropped slightly in some places.

Davis notes that total attacks, total number of IEDs and total U.S. casualties in 2011 were 82 percent, 113 percent and 164 percent higher, respectively, than the figures for 2009, the last year before the surge of 30,000 troops. The annual number of U.S. dead and wounded increased from 1,764 in 2009 to 4,662 in 2011.

The veteran Army officer quotes Congressional testimony by Adm. Mike Mullen Dec. 2, 2009 as citing a lesser increase in Taliban attacks in 2009 of 60 percent over the 2008 level as a rationale for a significant increase in U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan, implying that the war was being lost.

Davis leaves no doubt about his overall assessment that the U.S. war effort has failed. “Even a cursory observation of key classified reports and metrics,” Davis concludes, “leads overwhelmingly to the conclusion that over the past two years, despite the surge of 30,000 American Soldiers, the insurgent force has gained strength….”

Davis is also scathing in his assessment of the Afghan army and police who have been described as constantly improving and on their way to taking responsibility for fighting the insurgents.

“What I saw first-hand, in virtually every circumstance,” writes Davis, “was a barely functioning organization – often cooperating with the insurgent enemy….”

Both in his longer report and in an article for Armed Forces Journal published online Feb. 5, Davis recounts his experience at an Afghan National Police station in Kunar province in January 2011. Arriving two hours after a Taliban attack on the station, Davis asked the police captain whether he had sent out patrols to find the insurgents.

After the question had been conveyed by the interpreter, Davis recalls, “The captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he laughed.”

“No! We don’t go after them,” he quotes the captain as saying. “That would be dangerous!”

According to Davis, U.S. troops who work with Afghan policemen in that province say they “rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints”, allowing the Taliban to “literally run free”.

Describing the overall situation, Davis writes, “(I)n a number of high profile mission opportunities over the past 11 months the ANA (Afghan National Army) and ANP (Afghan National Police) have numerous times run from the battle, run from rumors, or made secret deals with the Taliban.”

The draft posted online notes after that statement that the classified version of the paper has been “redacted”, indicating that Davis provides further details about those “secret deals” in the classified version.

The Army dissenter calls on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees to “conduct a bi-partisan investigation into the various charges of deception or dishonesty in this report….” He urges that such a hearing include testimony not only from senior military officials but from mid- and senior-level intelligence analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies.

Both Senate and House Armed Services Committees have exhibited little or no interest in probing behind the official claims of success in Afghanistan. That passive role reflects what many political observers, including some members of Congress, see as cozy relationships among most committee members,military leaders, Pentagon officials and major military contractors.

It remains to be seen whether Davis’s success in raising the issue of misleading claims of success in a front-page New York Times story Feb. 6 and in subsequent television appearances will bring pressure on those committees from other members to hold hearings on whether senior military officials are telling the truth about the situation in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military leadership in Afghanistan is brushing off Davis’s critique as having no importance. During a briefing in which he claimed continued steady progress in Afghanistan, Army Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, deputy commander of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, dismissed the Davis report as “one person’s view of this”.

The threat of terrorism carried out by Muslim Americans appears to have been exaggerated by U.S. officials in recent years, according to a new study on domestic terrorism released Wednesday.

The study, the third in an annual series by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security in North Carolina, found that both the number of plots by and indictments against radicalised Muslim Americans fell sharply last year from a high in 2009, defying predictions by law enforcement and other officials.

Only one of the 20 Muslim Americans who were indicted in 2011 for plotting terrorist activities succeeded in carrying out an actual attack; in that case, the assailant fired shots at military buildings outside Washington without injuring anyone.

“Threats remain: violent plots have not dwindled to zero, and revolutionary Islamist organizations overseas continue to call for Muslim-Americans to engage in violence,” according to the report’s principal author, Charles Kurzman, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina.

“However, the number of Muslim-Americans who have responded to these calls continues to be tiny, when compared with the population of more than 2 million Muslims in the United States and when compared with the total level of violence in the United States, which was on track to register 14,000 murders in 2011,” wrote Kurzman who last year published a book titled “The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists.”

Coincidentally, the new report was released as a senior Pentagon official suggested that Washington may also have exaggerated the threat posed by Al-Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11.

“Al-Qaeda wasn’t as good as we thought they were on 9/11,” Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defence for special operations and low intensity conflict, told a conference here Tuesday.

“Quite frankly, we … were asleep at the switch, the U.S. government, prior to 9/11. So an organisation that wasn’t that good looked really great on 9/11. Everyone looked to the skies every day after 9/11 and said, ‘When is the next attack?’ And it didn’t come, partly because Al-Qaeda wasn’t that capable,” he was reported as saying by the Army Times.

“They didn’t have other units here in the U.S. …Really, they didn’t have the capability to conduct a second attack,” he added.

Critics of the administration of former President George W. Bush and his “global war on terror” have long charged that it exaggerated the threat posed by both Al-Qaeda and by its sympathisers in the United States.

The latest report Triangle Center report, however, focuses primarily on the period since Barack Obama became president in January 2009.

Indeed, 2009 saw a major spike in the number of indictments – 47 – of Muslim Americans for their alleged involvement in terrorist plots or actual attacks. That was substantially more than the annual average of 20 indictments since 9/11.

Moreover, the actual attacks themselves killed more people on U.S. soil than in any other single year since 9/11, heightening concern. On Nov. 5, 2009, an army psychiatrist, Nidal Hasan, opened fire at Ford Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Three months before, Abdulhakim Muhammad shot two soldiers outside a military recruitment centre in Little Rock, Arkansas, killing one of them.

Adding to concern by the end of that year was the attempted bombing by a Nigerian Muslim, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, of a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam as it was preparing to land in Detroit.

The number of indictments of Muslim Americans for alleged terrorism- related activities subsequently fell in 2010 to 26, but the attempted car bombing in New York City’s Times Square on May 1 that year by Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-born naturalised U.S. citizen who had been trained in explosives by an extremist group in Waziristan, bolstered fears that Muslim Americans were becoming radicalised.

By the first part of 2011, U.S. officials, such as Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, were warning that the terrorist threat faced by the authorities had reached its greatest height since 9/11.

At the same time, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Rep. Peter King, held a series of four controversial hearings on “the extent of Muslim-American radicalization by al-Qaeda in their communities”.

“These and similar warnings have braced Americans for a possible upsurge in Muslim-American terrorism, which has not occurred,” according to the Triangle Center study which concluded that “…a byproduct of these alerts is a sense of heightened tension that is out of proportion to the actual number of terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11.”

Indeed, public opinion surveys of Muslim Americans have consistently shown a very low degree of radicalisation and a higher level of satisfaction with their lives, their local communities, and the direction of the country than the general public as a whole.

While 55 percent of some 1,000 Muslim American respondents told a Pew Research Center poll released last summer their lives had become more difficult since 9/11, eight in 10 said they were satisfied with their personal lives, and 56 percent said they felt satisfied with the way things were going in the country, compared to only a 23-percent satisfaction rate among the general public.

A Gallup poll also released last summer found that U.S. Muslims express greater tolerance for members of other faiths and are more likely to oppose violent attacks against civilians than any other major U.S. religious group.

The Triangle Center study found that almost 200 Muslim Americans have been involved in violent terrorist plots over the past decade, and more than 400 Muslim Americans have been indicted or convicted for supporting terrorism, which includes providing funding for terrorist groups overseas.

In 2011, however, the numbers dropped in both categories, and the severity of the cases also appeared to decline: not only were there no fatalities resulting from terrorist plots during the year, but the four indictments issued for terrorist financing involved relatively small amounts of money, the report found.

The nearly 200 Muslims who have been involved in violent terrorist plots since 9/11 were roughly equally divided between those who were born in the U.S. and those who immigrated here.

According to the Pew poll, 37 percent of Muslim Americans were born in the U.S., and 63 percent were born elsewhere.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta’s surprise announcement Wednesday that U.S. troops will phase out their combat role in Afghanistan by mid-2013 is drawing mixed reactions, as well as a fair bit of confusion, from both critics and supporters of the 11-year-old war here.

U.S. Marine Corps Pfc. Garrett Reed watches over a bridge during a security patrol in Garmser district, Helmand province. Credit: DOD photo

The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, called the decision “misguided” and “naïve”. Neo- conservatives and other hawks charged that it was politically motivated and would result in the return of the Taliban to Kabul little more than a decade after a U.S-coordinated military campaign chased their leadership into Pakistan.

“Only in some alternative universe is this a winning strategy,” complained Max Boot, a neo-conservative military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “In the world we actually inhabit it is a recipe for a slow-motion – or maybe not so slow – catastrophe.”

But the war’s critics, many of whom were deeply disappointed by President Barack Obama’s decision shortly after taking office in 2009 to send substantially more troops to Afghanistan, cheered Panetta’s announcement.

“This is good news,” said Matthew Hoh, a former Marine officer and State Department adviser in Afghanistan who until recently directed the Afghanistan Study Group here. “What we’ve needed to do for some time is to transition from a belligerent in the conflict to a mediator focused on facilitating an inclusive political settlement. This appears intended to do that.”

Whether that was indeed the intention remained unclear Thursday, however, as the senior officials here insisted that Panetta’s announcement did not signal a major shift in U.S. or NATO strategy which had set the deadline for all security tasks to be transferred to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.

“This was an assessment of what could happen within the context of the stated policy of NATO, which is to transfer the security lead to the Afghan security forces by 2014, and, within that …timeline, the transition will take place,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

Similarly, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, Gen. (ret.) David Petraeus, the architect of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, insisted that Panetta’s remarks were consistent with previous planning.

“This is exactly in line with the policy that we started back in the summer of 2011, transitioning leadership of combat operations from ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force) to Afghan forces and then progressively complete it by the end of 2014,” he told congressmen on Capitol Hill.

Panetta’s remarks, which clearly also took the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. allies by surprise, were made to reporters while he was en route to a NATO conference in Brussels.

Not only did he say that Washington hoped to end the U.S. combat role by mid-2013 – 18 months before the end-of-2014 deadline – but he also indicated that NATO will likely cancel plans to expand the size of Afghanistan’s security forces from the current 310,000 to 350,000 soldiers and police.

His remarks came at a critical moment on a number of fronts.

With Washington’s and Pakistan’s apparent backing, the Taliban has established an office in Qatar where they have been engaged in talks with U.S. officials over confidence-building measures, such as the return of Taliban detainees imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that could lead to broader peace talks.

At the same time, Karzai, who only reluctantly endorsed the Doha talks, has reportedly been pushing to open a separate negotiating channel to begin negotiations under the auspices of Saudi Arabia.

While cooperating with U.S. efforts to engage the Taliban, Islamabad has continued to reject U.S. appeals to reopen NATO supply routes through Pakistani territory that were closed in late November to protest the accidental killing by U.S. warplanes of 24 Pakistani troops at a border post.

As a result, Washington has been made to rely almost exclusively on the Northern Supply Network through Central Asia, making logistical support for the troops far more expensive. The U.S. has already budgeted more than 90 billion dollars for the war this year.

In the wake of the killing of four French Legionnaires by an Afghan soldier – the latest in a lengthy series of such incidents against NATO troops – French President Nicolas Sarkozy last week announced that he will withdraw all 3,600 French combat troops by the end 2013, a year earlier than previously scheduled.

Amidst all these developments, the leak this week of a sensitive NATO report based on the interrogation of some 4,000 Taliban detainees in Afghanistan shed new and very discouraging light on both the degree to which Pakistan’s military intelligence agency (ISI) has backed – even controlled – the Taliban and the confidence of Taliban militants themselves that they are winning the war.

The report also noted that the Taliban was receiving support from Afghan government officials, including Army units in areas from which NATO forces had withdrawn. The government “continues to declare its willingness to fight, yet many of its personnel have secretly reached out to insurgents, seeking long-term options in the event of a possible Taliban victory,” according to the report.

The thrust of the report – that NATO forces have failed to stop, let alone reverse, the Taliban’s momentum – strongly contradicted the more-optimistic assessments by U.S. and NATO field commanders and is certain to fuel growing public sentiment in the West, including the U.S., that the war has not been worth the expense in blood and treasure.

In the last major nationwide poll conducted on Afghanistan in mid- January, 56 percent of respondents said U.S. troops should be withdrawn “as soon as possible”.

Washington currently has some 90,000 troops in Afghanistan, down from a high of just over 100,000 last summer. It plans to withdraw another 22,000 by the end of this summer. In his remarks Wednesday, Panetta stressed that no decision had been made regarding the pace of the withdrawal of the remaining 68,000 troops.

According to Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, however, Panetta’s remarks suggest that the administration has adopted a strategy to end “America’s major military footprint in Afghanistan well before the previous December 2014 deadline,” but that won’t be clear until after the presidential elections here in November.

Writing for the Daily Beast website, Gelb claimed that Panetta, Vice President Joe Biden, and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon had become convinced late last year that, with the death last May of Osama bin Laden and the successful disruption of his Al-Qaeda, U.S. interests in Afghanistan “were no longer vital, and that more American deaths and billions (of dollars) in costs were no longer worthwhile.”

As a result, even while continuing efforts to target senior and mid- ranking Taliban commanders, Washington is now focusing its efforts on a negotiated settlement.

But whether that will be possible, particularly given the apparent confidence of the Taliban, remains very much in doubt.

“The Taliban are a much larger organisation than they were a couple of years ago, and we’ve ruined our relationship with Pakistan,” according to Hoh, who blames Petraeus’ aggressive “surge” strategy for these setbacks.

“The policy has clearly failed, and now we’re to put some kind of settlement together before we leave, and there’s a real possibility that will fail.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Bangladesh’s army has won paludits as leading United Nations peacekeepers, but the January coup attempt against Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government has exposed lurking religious extremism within its ranks.

Coffins of the 57 army officers killed in an armed forces mutiny in 2009. Credit: Shafiqul Alam Kiron/IPS

At a rare press conference in the Dhaka cantonment, Brig. Gen. Masud Razzaque, flanked by senior officers, said: “Specific evidence has been unearthed that a group of retired and serving officers have been involved in the conspiracy to topple the democratic government through use of the armed forces.”

Razzaque said two of the alleged conspirators had admitted to having connections with the outlawed political party, Hizbut-Tahrir (HuT), suggesting that religious extremists continue to maintain links within the country’s armed forces.

The HuT website openly urges army officers to “Remove Hasina, the killer of your brothers and establish the Khilafah to save yourselves and the Ummah from subjugation to U.S.-India.”

“Initial investigations suggest that links with non-resident Bangladeshis could not be ruled out,” Razzaque said, hinting that forces inimical to Bangladesh’s 1971 liberation from Pakistani rule were at work and may also have had a hand in the coup conspiracy.

The HuT is known to have strong links with Bangladeshi expatriates in Britain along with other Islamist groups such as the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) opposed to the professed secularism of the AL and to the 1971 liberation.

This was the first time that the defence establishment has admitted to extremists in its midst, though the country has seen a series of coups, starting with the one in which Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the founder of Bangladesh and father of Sheikh Hasina was killed.

Indeed the army is known for the deep divide that exists between officers who fought for Bangladesh’s liberation and those who did not and this has fomented no less than 19 coup attempts.

Significantly, the January coup attempt follows the execution of a number of officers convicted for the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur, 40 years ago.

Hasina has also put on trial several religious political leaders, including the former chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), Golam Azam, for alleged collaboration in the genocide committed by the Pakistani military in trying to bludgeon Bangladesh’s struggle for independence.

The JeI is one of the key allies of the four-party main opposition led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of former prime minister Khaleda Zia.

The path for the trials was cleared on Mar. 25, 2010 when the government set up a special tribunal to try the religious leaders for their alleged crimes against humanity committed during the country’s liberation war four decades ago.

Five of the JeI’s top leaders, including its party chief, Prof. Motiur Rahman Nizami and secretary general, Ali Ahsan Mojaheed, both former ministers in BNP government, are currently being held in prison.

Soon after taking office for the second time in January 2009, the Hasina government banned 12 religion-based organisations suspected to have strong militant bases across the country.

Among them was Jamaat-ul Mujahideen, Bangladesh (JMB), the second largest Islamist organisation and one that is believed to have links to the banned Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).

After the JMB carried out 500 synchronized bombing attacks in almost all the 64 districts of the country on August 17, 2005, police have arrested over 200 of its members.

Many of its leaders have been executed, including its founder – Shaikh Abdur Rahman and the man known to be second in command, Siddiqul Islam, popularly known as ‘ Bangla Bhai’.

But, the arrest of about 100 JMB activists since October 2008 and the unearthing of huge caches of firearms, explosives and ammunition demonstrated the JMB’s ability to regroup, recruit and reorganise.

The Hasina government faces increasing challenges in restoring a secular outlook for the country’s polity originally promoted by her father and the Awami League (AL) party as opposed to the more Islamist face of the opposition.

Significantly, Khaleda Zia alleged at a rally held in Chittagong on Jan. 9 that the government had kidnapped certain army officers and was torturing them. While Khaleda’s statement was refuted by the army, it admitted to trying officers for ‘dereliction of duty’.

Over the years Hasina’s pro-liberation, secular AL party has faced violent challenges from the so-called Islamic nationalist and anti-liberation forces which apparently also do not believe in democratic principles.

Hasina’s government has also been extending friendly gestures to India which helped Bangladesh in its struggle for freedom from the military junta then ruling Pakistan.

After being swept back into office in January 2009 with a two-thirds majority in parliament, Hasina’s 14-party grand alliance restored the four fundamental secular principles of the constitution enacted by her father.

That step angered many religion-based political parties. In February 2009, the national border guards, then known as the Bangladesh Rifles mutinied killing some 70 people including 57 army officers.

The revolt was believed to have been orchestrated by anti-liberation forces and the names of the religious extremist groups were not far down the list of suspects.

It is unlikely that the Bangladesh army would venture to take over power from a democratically elected government – that would jeopardise its prized role as top international peacekeeper – but it will certainly have to deal with extremism within its ranks, as the January events show.

Excerpt:

By - - and Correspondents
DOHA, Qatar, Feb 1 2012 (IPS)

Pakistan has rejected as “frivolous” a leaked NATO report which claims that the country’s security services are helping the Taliban, and suggesting that the group believes it is poised to regain power.

The leaking of the report comes as Hina Rabbani Khar, the Pakistan foreign minister, visits Kabul for talks aimed at improving strained relations between the neighbours.

Speaking after talks on Wednesday with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, Khar said: “We can disregard this (report) as a potentially strategic leak … this is old wine in an even older bottle.”

The report, titled “State of the Taliban: Detainee Perspectives”, is derived from thousands of interrogations and alleges that Pakistan knows the locations of senior Taliban leaders.

It claims that Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency is “intimately involved” in the Taliban’s campaign against Afghan forces and its international allies, and that the Taliban assumed their victory would be inevitable once U.S. and multinational forces left the country in 2014.

Khar, whose one-day diplomatic visit was dubbed a “new co-operation phase” by Afghan officials, said: “We have no hidden agenda in Afghanistan. These claims have been made many, many times. Pakistan stands behind any initiative that the Afghan government takes for peace.”

Contrasting views

While allegations that Pakistan’s security services are helping the Taliban have been repeatedly made, the timing of the report’s leak, initially reported by the BBC and the UK’s Times newspaper, appeared to place fresh strain on already fractured diplomatic ties.

A Pakistani foreign ministry spokesman denied the allegations and played down the report’s significance.

“This is frivolous, to put it mildly. We are committed to non- interference in Afghanistan and expect all other states to strictly adhere to this principle,” Abdul Basit, the spokesman, said

However, Daoud Sultanzoy, a former Afghan legislator, said the “ugly truth” about Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban does not come as news to Afghans.

Speaking to Al Jazeera from Kabul, he said: “From president to peasant, we have been talking about this for a very long time. The people of Afghanistan have been grappling with this debilitating problem for many many years.”

“The Taliban is not commanding its troops from Mars, they’re sitting somewhere. And no matter where they sit in Pakistan, it would be a joke to say that Pakistani intelligence doesn’t know about them.”

Tentative moves

Besides Karzai, Khar met her Afghan counterpart, Zalmai Rasoul, on Wednesday amid tentative moves towards negotiations in Qatar involving the U.S. and the Taliban, which was removed from power by a 2001 U.S.-led invasion.

Karzai has given a lukewarm welcome to the Taliban opening a political office in the Gulf state, but is wary of being sidelined and has insisted that his government should have a central role in any peace talks.

The Pakistan foreign minister’s visit to Afghanistan comes despite a freeze in bilateral and trilateral meetings (including the U.S.) since the assassination last September of Afghanistan’s chief peace negotiator, Burhanuddin Rabbani, which one Afghan minister blamed on Pakistani spies.

Pakistan boycotted a major conference in Germany in December on the future of Afghanistan to protest against a cross-border U.S. air raid that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on Nov. 26. It also closed down the crucial supply routes that NATO forces uses.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Excerpt:

The war against terrorism has left many Pakistanis disabled. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan 28 2012 (IPS)

The prolonged United States-led war against terrorism has left a large number of people disabled in Pakistan, compelling the government to institute a rehabilitation plan that will include imparting vocational skills.

The plan, to be put into action in March this year, will start with the compilation of data on people injured in the war in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, says Mahboob ur Rehman, head of the physiotherapy department at the Hayatabad Medical Complex (HMC)in Peshawar.

“We plan to enhance the physical rehabilitation services for the victims of terrorism to save them from permanent disability,” he told IPS.

The decade-long armed conflict has resulted in injuries to thousands of people from blasts, shelling and drone attacks, with the majority of the victims needing prosthetic and orthotic management to help regain the ability to walk, he said.

Citing statistics gleaned from government-owned hospitals, Rehman said that some 35,000 people have died in the war while another 60,000 have received serious injuries. An estimated 10,000 persons will need rehabilitation services, he said.

Mohammad Haris, an orthopaedic surgeon at the Lady Reading Hospital, Peshawar, says the war-injured include women, children and elderly people who have lost limbs and are immobile.

“They require wheelchairs, crutches and other support. The majority are poor and cannot afford the costly rehabilitation services offered by private institutes,” Haris said adding that many of the disabled were unaware of treatment facilities available at government hospitals and orthotic workshops.

Irfanullah, 22, who lost both his legs in a mortar shell attack in North Waziristan Agency in October last year, eagerly awaits the new programme.

“I need artificial limbs so I can walk and cope with running a fruit shop,” Irfanulah said. “My father, who received critical injuries only a month ago and had his left leg amputated also needs an artificial limb,” he said.

Shagufta Bibi, 38, from Swat says she would have been bedridden had it not been for the artificial leg provided to her. “I was sitting on the lawn of my house when the Taliban threw a hand grenade that seriously injured my right leg,” the mother of three children told IPS.

The Taliban fled over the border into Pakistan’s tribal areas after its government in Afghanistan was toppled by U.S.- led NATO forces in 2001. But once they had settled down they began attacking Pakistani forces, market places and government buildings in a bid to enforce their fundamentalist ideology.

The new plan, worth 1.2 million dollars, will cover the cost of artificial limbs, wheel chairs, and sewing machines. Accessories worth two million dollars have been pledged by the Japanese government to be provided free to the beneficiaries.

“We have decided to appoint physiotherapists and orthotic specialists at the district hospitals in KP and in the FATA. The rehabilitation process starts right from surgical intervention, medical and physical rehabilitation to providing vocational skills and support for self-employment,” an official said.

Public-sector hospitals already have physiotherapy facilities but physical rehabilitation and paraplegic and hemiplegic management are possible only with the support of private-sector organisations that specialise in helping disabled people.

The government will allocate funds for wheelchairs, walking aids and the manufacture of support devices. Departments dealing with health, social welfare and women’s department as well as religious charities are expected to pitch in.

Officials said that the need for a programme to help the disabled was first felt after the 2005 earthquake which left thousands of people with serious disabilities. The plan is to have physiotherapists attached to surgical, orthopaedic, neurosurgery and other wards at tertiary care hospitals.

A 20-bed rehabilitation facility is to be set up at the HMC to take care of victims of paralysis. At the moment there is no indoor rehabilitation unit at any public-sector health unit, although there is a limited paraplegic centre.

Officials said that the privately run, 15-bed Habib Physiotherapy Complex, which has facilities for stroke management, was likely to sign an agreement with the government for coordination among public and private organisations.

Thousands of polio-affected children could also benefit from the programme once it is launched, officials said.

The Pakistani military leadership’s response to the U.S. report on its helicopter attack on two Pakistani border posts Nov. 26 assailed the credibility of the investigation by Air Force Brig. Gen. Steven Clark and expressed doubt that the attack could have been “accidental”.

Slain Pakistani soldier Najibullah Khan's younger brother keeps vigil at his grave. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

The long-expected rejoinder, made public Monday, charged that 28 of its soldiers at two border bases were killed one by one long after the U.S. military had been told about the attack on a Pakistani base.

The Pakistani critique questions the claims that the U.S. did not know about the Pakistani border posts, that the combined U.S.-Afghan Special Forces unit believed it was under attack from insurgents when it called in air strikes against the two border posts, and that a series of miscommunications prevented higher echelons from stopping the attacks on the border posts.

Revelations in the Clark report – as well as what it omits – support the Pakistani contention that the U.S. investigation covered up what actually occurred before and during the attack. Information in the report suggests that the planners of the Special Forces operation the night of Nov. 25-26 may have known about the two Pakistani border posts that were attacked while feigning ignorance to the commander who had to approve the operation.

It also portrays a military organisation that was not really interested in stopping the attack on the border posts even after it had been told that Pakistani military positions were under fire.

The Pakistani analysis does not repeat the assertion made by Gen. Ashfaq Nadeem, the director general for operations, in the aftermath of the attack that the coordinates of the two Pakistani border posts had been given to the U.S. military well before the incident of Nov. 25-26.

The analysis leaves no doubt, however, that the Pakistani military believed the United States was well aware of the two posts. It said each of the posts had five or six bunkers built above ground on the top of a ridge and clearly visible from Maya village about 1.5 kilometres away.

The Pakistani critique asserts that two or three U.S. aircraft had been operating in the area daily, and that U.S. intelligence had questioned Pakistani officials in the past even about changes in weaponry in its border posts.

The Pakistani military document highlights the revelation in the Clark report that Maj. Gen. James Laster, the commander of the “battlespace” in which Operation SAYAQA was to take place, had demanded that the planners of the operation “confirm the location of Pakistan’s border checkpoints”.

The most recent map of Pakistani border positions available at the time, according to the Clark report, was dated February 2011. The obvious intent of the demand by Gen. Laster was that the planners find out if there were any new border checkpoints that needed to be added to update the map.

The Clark report reveals that “pre-mission intelligence analysis” had indicated “possible border posts North and South of the Operation SAYAQA target areas….”

That intelligence was obviously relevant to Gen. Laster’s order, but those border posts did not show up on the map produced Nov. 23. The planners had decided not to check on those “possible border posts” by asking a Pakistani border liaison officer or investigating unilaterally.

The Clark report tiptoes carefully around the implications of that fact, saying the operation’s planners “did not identify any known border posts in the area of Operational SAYAQA”.

The point of requiring confirmation of a new map would presumably have been to go beyond border posts that were on the available map.

Air crews planning for the operation also knew about the “possible border posts”, according to the report, but didn’t include them in their “pre-mission planning packages”, because “they were data points outside the Operation SAYAQA area.”

U.S. investigators showed no apparent curiosity about what appears to have been the deliberate exclusion of the two new border posts from the map given to Gen. Laster.

The Pakistani critique charges that it is “not possible” that the failure to check on the Pakistani posts was “an innocent omission”.

A second point made by the Pakistani military is that the U.S. attack on its “Volcano” base by U.S. helicopter gunships continued for “as long as one hour and 24 minutes” after the U.S. side had been informed of the attack on its post.

Despite the fact that U.S. and ISAF officials had already been informed about the assault on the Pakistani bases “at multiple levels by the Pakistan side”, the Pakistani analysis charges, “every soldier in and around the posts…was individually targeted.”

The Clark report’s account of U.S. responses to being informed by Pakistani officials that their bases were under attack does nothing to allay Pakistani suspicions about the claim that the attack was unintentional.

It confirms the earlier Pakistani claim that its border liaison officer at the ISAF Regional Command East (RC-E) had informed the U.S. officers in charge of “deconfliction” with Pakistani positions on the border minutes after the attack had begun at 23:40 hours that Pakistani Frontier Force soldiers were being “engaged” by U.S.- coalition forces coming from Afghanistan.

The exchange over the news from the Pakistani officer was testy. Gen. Clark recalled in his press briefing on the report Dec. 22 that the Pakistani liaison officer had been asked where the border posts were located, and had not given the coordinates, but had responded, “Well, you know where it is because you’re shooting at them.”

Clark suggested that there was “confusion” about where the attack was taking place, but there was only one place where U.S. forces were firing at positions inside Pakistan that night, and RC-E’s border confliction cell could have easily identified that place quickly enough with one or two calls.

Neither the text of the report nor the detailed timeline in an annex show any effort to contact the Special Forces Task Force or Task Force BRONCO, which had approved the operation, about the report that they were attacking Pakistani border posts. The report offers no explanation for the absence of any action on that report, saying only that it “could not be immediately confirmed”.

Twenty minutes before the information had arrived, according to the Clark report, Task Force BRONCO told the Special Operations Task Force in the region it was still waiting to get confirmation from the Border Coordination Center for the area that there were no Pakistani troops near the operation. It added that RC-E was not tracking any PAKMIL border posts on its computerised map of the area.

The Special Operations Task Force then then sent out a message system saying, “PAKMIL has been notified and confirmed no positions in area.”

In yet another suspicious episode, instead of asking the Pakistani liaison to the border coordination commission whether Pakistan had any posts or troops in the area of Operation SAYAQA, RC-E give him a general location that was 14 kilometres away from that area and asked if Pakistan had troops nearby.

The misdirection of the Pakistani liaison officer, which ensured the response that there were no Pakistani troops in the area, is explained in the Clark report as having been caused by a “misconfigured electronic map overlay”.

Asked in his press briefing why the RC-E had refused to provide precise grid coordinates under circumstances in which it was supposed to be determining whether U.S. forces were firing at Pakistani forces, Clark cited “the overarching lack of trust”.

Nearly 40 minutes after the attack on border post “Volcano” began, according to a timeline in the report, the U.S. Liaison officer to Pakistan’s 11th Corps reported to the Special Operations Task Force that U.S. helicopters and a drone had been firing on a Pakistani military post.

But the Task Force waited for at least 10 more minutes, according to the timeline, before informing the Special Forces Unit.

Meanwhile Pakistani troops were being hunted down one by one.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

The U.S. State Department Tuesday “strongly” condemned recent lethal attacks carried out by the Islamist group Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, but also warned against an excessive reaction by the government’s security forces.

The attacks against government and other facilities in Kano, the north’s economic capital, and Bauchi state killed at least 185 people and renewed fears here that Africa’s biggest oil exporter and most populous nation is becoming dangerously unstable.

They followed nationwide strikes and demonstrations that forced President Goodluck Johnson to partially restore fuel subsidies that had been abruptly cut by the government earlier this month.

The latest attacks by Boko Haram were the deadliest in a campaign of violence that, since it began in July 2009, has taken a total of at least 935 lives, according to a briefing paper also released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch (HRW), which denounced the group’s attacks as “indefensible”.

Nigeria, the dominant power in West Africa and the oil- and gas-rich Gulf of Guinea, provides the United States with about eight percent of its total oil imports, making it Washington’s biggest trading partner on the African continent.

It is also one of only three sub-Saharan African countries – along with South Africa and Angola, another major oil exporter – with which the administration of President Barack Obama has established high- level bi-national commissions.

While security in the oil-producing Niger Delta region has long dominated U.S. concerns about Nigeria’s stability, the emergence of Boko Haram, whose name has been translated as “Western education is sacrilege”, in the predominantly Muslim northern part of the country has sparked growing concern, particularly in the Pentagon and its four-year-old Africa Command, or AFRICOM.

In his first visit to Nigeria as AFRICOM commander last August, Gen. Cater Ham charged that Boko Haram had made contacts with Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) and that it was conceivable that those two groups could form a “loose” partnership with al-Shabab in Somalia.

“What is most worrying at present, at least in my view,” he told journalists in Lagos in mid-August, “is a clearly stated intent by Boko Haram and by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to coordinate and synchronise their efforts,” he said. “I’m not so sure they’re able to do that just yet, but it’s clear to me they have the desire and intent to do that.”

When, just 10 days later, the group carried out a suicide attack on the U.N. compound in the capital Abuja, killing at least 23 people, it appeared that Ham’s suggestion that Boko Haram’s ambitions – or those of at least one faction within the group – were no longer confined strictly to Nigeria. It was the first known attack by the group on a foreign target.

Since then, the Nigerian government, backed by some Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, have called for putting Boko Haram on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organisations and for the administration to substantially increase its counter-terrorism assistance – which amounted to only 1.5 million dollars over the last two years – to Abuja.

In a presentation to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) here in October, Ham also appeared to endorse such an approach, reiterating his fears about the “stated intent” of Al- Shabaab, AQIM, and Boko Haram “to link and synchronise their efforts”, which he described as a “very, very dangerous outcome for us”.

“Very clearly, Boko Haram has altered the relationship somewhat, …so we’re looking for ways in which we can help …in developing their counter-terrorist capabilities, things such as non-lethal training and non-lethal equipment, to be more precise in the application of force…”

Earlier this month, Jonathan’s national security adviser, Owoye Andrew Azazi, called explicitly for such steps in an op-ed published in the Washington Times.

“We can destroy Boko Haram in its early stages, before it goes truly international,” he wrote. “We don’t want or need American troops. But we would benefit greatly from American know-how and other forms of support as we develop our new counterterrorism strategy.”

The Obama administration, however, has until now resisted such exhortations, instead suggesting that dealing with Boko Haram required a considerably more subtle approach than the one that has been pursued by Jonathan’s government.

“The Jonathan administration has chosen to view Boko Haram as essentially a security issue: throw more police at it, throw more soldiers at it, get more international help by labelling the whole thing as a counter-terrorist effort,” said John Campbell, a Nigeria expert at the influential Council on Foreign Relations.

“Boko Haram is not an organisation; it’s a movement with multiple strains and causes,” among them, the sense among northern political leaders that they have been marginalised, he told IPS.

“My argument is that Boko Haram is fundamentally a political issue, that it comes out of uniquely Nigerian circumstances; that it has little to do with international terrorism (although it certainly uses terrorist methods); and there is little or no role for the United States.”

“It could acquire a jihadist character, and the way it could is if the United States is seen as supportive of Nigerian security approaches to Boko Haram,” said Campbell, who, as a veteran diplomat, served two tours in Nigeria.

U.S. restraint appeared to be reflected in Tuesday’s State Department statement issued by its spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, who said the U.S. “strongly condemns the terrorist attacks in the city of Kano and Bauchi state… and call(s) for those responsible to be held accountable.”

“The United States remains strongly committed to working with Nigerian officials to find a way to bring peace to the north through both security and political responses and to work with the Nigerian government and others in the international community to promote greater economic development and long-term growth throughout northern Nigeria,” she said.

“We reiterate the importance of protecting innocent civilians in any law enforcement response to such attacks,” the statement added.

Carl Levan, a Nigeria specialist who teaches African politics at American University, suggested that was a very important message.

Among Nigeria specialists, he said, there has been “overwhelming sentiment that militarising the response (to Boko Haram) will only radicalise it, as it has for the last few years, and undermine support (for the government) from the local population.

“It’s not clear to me that Gen. Ham understands this, and that’s why it’s important that the U.S. speak with one voice,” he added, noting that the working group on security cooperation of the U.S.-Nigerian Binational Commission, which is coincidentally meeting in Abuja this week, has just decided to make insecurity in northeastern Nigeria a priority issue.

“Offers of security assistance are on the table, but it’s really important for the U.S. government to make sure the diplomatic and development alternatives get the resources they need,” he said, adding that Washington should also push for talks between the government and Boko Haram for which he said there is strong popular and elite support in the north.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Following a surprise meeting between President Porfirio Lobo and U.S. government officials, Honduran lawmakers voted to amend the constitution to allow extradition of its nationals.

With no prior announcement, on Wednesday Lobo met with White House representatives in Miami, and only 24 hours later the Honduran national congress had passed an amendment that authorises the signing of treaties with foreign governments to extradite Honduran citizens charged with drug trafficking, terrorism and organised crime.

The decision was adopted in a closed session and under tight security measures. Of the 128 members of congress, only the representatives of the left-wing Unificación Democrática (Democratic Unification) party expressed any misgivings about authorising terrorism-related extraditions, but they still voted in favour.

To secure approval of the measure, government officials engaged in intense negotiations with the country’s political parties and powerful economic groups throughout Thursday.

The amendment modifies article 102 of the constitution, which prohibited the extradition of Honduran nationals to a foreign country. Starting Feb. 1, the Central American country will be able to sign extradition treaties with other countries.

In a very brief press release, issued Thursday night, legislators said the decision was made for reasons of national security.

Several sectors attribute the government’s quick move to pass the amendment to Washington’s concern over Honduras’ sluggishness in addressing security issues, a concern that was apparently voiced at the Miami meeting with Lobo.

One of these issues is a recent scandal implicating police officers in murders, kidnappings, weapon thefts, extortions and other crimes.

The U.S. is also concerned over other unresolved cases such as the murder two years ago of the head of the country’s anti-drug operations, Arístides González, and more recently the death of former security adviser and anti-drug expert Alfredo Landaverde over a month ago. Both González and Landaverde had close ties to the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa.

Former Attorney General Edmundo Orellana told IPS that “it’s obvious that there was pressure from the United States. How else can you explain that within a day of the Miami meeting congress was able to pass a constitutional amendment that was more than a decade-long demand?”

“I commend the legislators for this brave decision and understand the need to not make the session public or reveal the names of those who voted in favour, as many have received threats from the drug cartels,” Orellana said.

At the Miami meeting, right-wing President Lobo was accompanied by Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla, Congress Chair Juan Orlando Hernández and two other high government officials.

According to Honduran diplomatic sources, the Washington delegation was headed by Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson and U.S. Ambassador in Tegucigalpa Lisa Kubiske, and included narcotics officers and U.S. Security Council officials.

At the meeting, U.S. officials are believed to have pressed for purges in the Honduran police to address the high level of corruption and influence from organised crime, after announcing that the U.S. would be sending two special security advisers to Honduras, who will work directly with President Lobo and Minister Bonilla as of February.

Lobo refused to give any details of the Miami meeting and merely repeated in general terms the press release issued by Washington announcing the two countries’ decision to cooperate in security matters, highlighting the legal action taken by Honduras to combat crime, and suggesting that greater “efforts” to purge police forces are needed.

Hernández was more forthcoming in his statements after the meeting in Miami. “We set out general strategic lines to address security issues and we can’t go back on our actions. We are going to move forward to implement the security reforms that are still needed,” he said.

He also said that forming a new police force is a possibility that cannot be ruled out and that there will be many legislative discussions that for reasons of national security “will not be open to the press, so we ask for the media’s understanding.”

Hernández’ comment regarding a new police force came as a complete shock to Coralia Rivera, security vice minister and former police commissioner, who at a public appearance said “we were not expecting this, especially not in the manner (Hernández) announced it, so out of the blue.”

Rivera is mentioned in confidential reports from the attorney general’s office, where she is accused of being involved in police and government corruption and in particular in drug-related crimes. But she denies the charges and claims she is working to “clean up” the police’s image.

The chancellor of the National Autonomous University of Honduras, Julieta Castellanos, told IPS that the decision to authorise the extradition of Honduran citizens “is a positive sign that (the government) is willing to take action, it’ll have a deterrent effect that will enhance the possibilities of effectively cracking down on organised crime networks.”

She also said that this amendment sends out an indirect message to “corrupt police officers”, in reference to the police involvement in recent criminal actions, such as the murder of her own son and his friend on Oct. 22, 2011. Five police officers have been imprisoned for that crime, but another three suspects are still on the run.

Rigoberto Espinal, a legal expert and adviser to the state attorney, told IPS that this measure “is a significant step in the battle against impunity. It was what we were hoping for because it gives us more legal elements to combat these crimes.”

Pressure from Washington to pass this amendment intensified two months ago when it pushed for Colombia’s criminal prosecutor, Germán Zamudio, to be invited to a forum in Honduras, despite strong resistance from important circles.

Several congresspersons and executive and judicial officers called for a low-profile visit and refused to let the government host his stay, which in the end was paid for by a private company.

With the amendment, Honduras joins its neighbours El Salvador and Guatemala in authorising extraditions. The three countries form Central America’s “northern triangle”, considered one of the most violent regions in the world due to the presence of drug cartels that have been displaced from Colombia and Mexico by the war on drugs.

In their efforts to kill and injure more people as part of a terror campaign in northern Pakistan, the Taliban militia have resorted to lacing bombs with toxic chemicals that leave survivors with complicated wounds.

Taliban bombs are now laced with chemicals. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

“The new techniques devised by the militants are designed to inflict complicated injuries on the survivors of the bombings and suicide attacks. They develop contractures and physical deformities,” said Muhammad Tahzeebullah a surgeon at the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar.

The Taliban have bomb experts who manufacture explosives that cause grievous injuries, he said. “In the last two years, we have noticed that the victims end up developing more complications and disabilities.”

Khalid Khan, an official of the bomb disposal squad, said the Taliban have created special manuals for bomb making which are used in their schools in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). One manual lists the equipment needed to build a bomb factory.

“Camps which impart training to the suicide bombers and others to plant explosives in designated places have developed manuals of bomb-making scripted in Pashto, Urdu, Persian and Arabic which explain how to get ingredients and make explosives,” he said.

Khan said that the easy availability of incendiary materials like magnesium, potassium and sodium have made the Taliban’s work easier, and they now have expertise in mixing chemicals into bombs to cause serious injuries.

Only 10 percent of those injured in Taliban attacks survive, usually with crippling deformities and injuries, he said.

Pakistan has lost 35,000 people, including 5,000 soldiers, in bombings and suicide attacks unleashed by Taliban militants after they fled to the FATA from neighbouring Afghanistan, when that country was invaded by United States-led forces in late 2001.

By mid-2005, the Taliban had taken to attacking government forces and targeting marketplaces, CD and music shops and Internet cafes. Of late, they have begun attacking mosques and funeral ceremonies to kill as many people as possible.

Last year, the U.S. froze 700 million dollars in aid to Pakistan, seeking the latter’s cooperation in stopping the spread of homemade bombs, or improvised explosive devices (IEDs) – the militants’ most effective weapons against U.S.-led coalition troops in Afghanistan.

Mixing potassium, nitrogen, sugar, urea and glycerine in explosives causes complex and compound injuries, said Prof. Nasir Shah at the Bannu Medical College. The insurgents have gained expertise in making the explosives deadlier than before, he said.

Omar Ali, 15, who was injured in a suicide attack in August last year, is one of those who may die a lingering death from complex injuries. “His wounds looked normal but the chemicals mixed into the explosives have caused septicemia and he is likely to die,” Dr. Jamil Anwar at the surgical ward of Hayatabad Medical Complex (HMC) said.

“The only way to minimise the chances of deep infection is to rush the blast victims to the hospitals as soon as possible and ensure that the wounds are thoroughly cleaned,” the surgeon told IPS.

However, most victims are transported to hospitals late, allowing the toxic chemicals to penetrate deep and cause severe damage or infections, Anwar said. Injuries from firearms and road accidents, even severe ones, are easier to treat than those caused by Taliban bombings, he said.

Tariq Khan, a plastic surgeon at the Khyber Teaching Hospital in Peshawar says phosphorous-based explosives are the worst, especially when used in homemade bombs.

“Burn wounds of normal nature respond to antibiotics, but injuries caused by homemade nitrogen and potassium-based explosives are incurable and the victims often die even if they have only 10 percent injuries on their bodies,” he says.

Dr. Sirajuddin Syed at the Accident and Emergency Department at Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar said bombs produce carbon monoxide that retards the oxygen-binding capacity of blood. “The smoke from these explosives penetrates the body and retard the oxygen-carrying process, due to which the patients go into a coma and die.

“Since 2005, we have admitted 1,319 people wounded by terrorist bombings and 50 percent of them died,” Syed said. “In our experience wounds caused by gunpowder and shrapnel are curable, but not the ones caused by the Taliban’s bombs.”

In response to the insurgents’ strategy, a state-of-the-art trauma centre is now being built at the HMC at a cost of 11.5 million dollars to treat victims of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The 120-bed Benazir Bhutto Shaheed Burn, Trauma and Reconstructive Ward, named after the former prime minister, killed in a bombing attack in December 2007, will solely treat Afghans and Pakistanis who suffer burns and injuries in bombings and suicide attacks.