Category: Afghanistan

Buried at Sea…

May 6, 2011: rosencrantz

After the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraqi Aluminum Tubes, Nigerian Yellowcake, The Escape of Jessica Lynch, The Death of Pat Tillman, and many other war justifying and glorifying fictions, it is unreasonable not to look askance at U.S. Government announcements regarding Imperial Threats and Milestones — especially when elements of these announcements are demonstrated at once to be false, or at least embarrassingly incoherent.

Curiously, several false claims regarding the Assassination of bin Laden had to be publicly corrected by the Government itself, even after establishment media had dutifully parroted them: No, actually bin Laden wasn’t armed. No, he did not use his wife as a human shield. No, there was no 40 minute gun battle, only one armed man in a guest house. (But maybe not even that.)  And no, this wasn’t a “capture or kill mission” but a “kill mission”.

But enough questions about the killing!

Other claims fell to minimal scrutiny.  The claim that bin Laden was buried at sea “in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition” could be easily debunked by anyone who bothered to look up what the Qu’ran actually says.  And why, in any case, would the U.S. go out of its way to respect bin Laden’s religious sentiments, especially after putting two holes in his head?

Another absurdity: That the U.S. won’t release documentary photos of bin Laden’s body, so as not to incite violence –  “because that’s not who we are” — as if the world (outside of the U.S.) is not regularly exposed to photographic evidence of civilians slaughtered as a result of U.S. military operations.

But perhaps the most insidious lie was uttered by the President himself, who asserted that assassinating an old man in his pajamas “is a testament to the greatness of our country” — despite the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the decade of misdirected, proliferating war leading up to this glorious event.

Other notes:

Reuters did manage to acquire some photos of the bodies left behind by the kill team in the hours following the assassination:

Remember when Bush rejected a Taliban offer to surrender bin Laden way back at the beginning of the Terror War?

Do the Gitmo Files show that the U.S. knew where Osama was since 2005?

And, for good measure, some embarrassing morons:

U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

8th Anniversary of Supreme International Crime

March 21, 2011: rosencrantz

Nothing symbolizes more acutely the dark matrix of corporate hegemony, war, lies, unaccountability, torture and secrecy than the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq 8 years ago.

This weekend, as the U.S. Executive Branch (without Congressional approval) began bombarding yet another oil rich predominantly Muslim country, Los Angeles joined other cities in protest to mark the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a “supreme international crime” according to principles laid out by the International Tribunal at Nuremberg after World War II.

As I did last year, I documented the event in video.  This year the most compelling speaker was Mike Prysner, an Iraq War Vet and co-founder of March Forward!, a anti-war veterans group.  Here is a recording I made of his speech at the rally, edited with time lapse video of the protest march:

The AP reported that “hundreds” of people marched, but the time lapse sequences seem to indicate more. Looks like at least a few thousand to me.

Meanwhile, in D.C., Daniel Ellsberg and about 100 others were arrested in protests outside the White House.

This We’ll Defend

March 7, 2011: rosencrantz

It can be rough for people living under the U.S. occupying forces in Afghanistan, many of whom have been liberated from existence by NATO gunships in at least 3 air strikes in the past couple of weeks – scores of women and children here, 9 boys here — thus continuing the dark trend that saw 2010 as the worst year yet for civilian deaths of the Afghanistan war.

General Petraeus, current commander of the the ISAF, had to apologize about the slaughter of the 9 boys, but reportedly tried to dodge responsibility for civilian deaths resulting from a separate operation by suggesting  that “residents had invented stories, or even injured their children, to pin the blame on U.S. forces.”

“Killing 60 people, and then blaming the killing on those same people, rather than apologizing for any deaths? This is inhuman,” one Afghan official said. “This is a really terrible situation.”

Johnathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution suggests that this is how one inflicts “horrible burns on a bunch of kids and yet sleep soundly at night” and points to an historical precedent to such behavior — Nixon allowed himself to wonder whether the famous picture of wailing children running from a U.S. napalm strike was “a fix”.

Meanwhile, speaking on the situation in Libya, Obama said he wants to make sure that the U.S. “has the full capacity to act” in case “defenseless civilians” find themselves “trapped and in great danger.”

But, in Afghanistan, it is often precisely the exercise of U.S. capacities that puts “defenseless civilians” — such as the 9 wood-gathering boys ripped to shreds by NATO helicopters — not only in “great danger” but in caskets.

Those boys now join the 2,500 other people killed by the 101st Airborne Division since they arrived in eastern Afghanistan last June.

(The images of the wounded Afghan children in the above collage come from the website of The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who don’t shy away from illustrating their updates with images that reflect the violence of the U.S. occupation of their country.)

Enough about Assange: What WikiLeaks has Revealed

December 29, 2010: rosencrantz

By focusing on the personalities or philosophy behind Wikileaks, in addition to the Imperial and Corporate reactions to its successes thus far, it is easy to lose focus on the actual substance of the leaks themselves. So here is an incomplete list of significant revelations emerging from Wikileaks in 2010, summarized from a list of headlines compiled by G. Greewald:

UPDATE: Here is another round-up of what Wikileaks revelations, compiled by CBS news.

Swedish Documentary about Wikileaks

December 15, 2010: rosencrantz

Here is an informative Swedish documentary on Wikileaks:

Tanks Giving

November 25, 2010: rosencrantz

The U.S. and its NATO allies are introducing the Abrams tanks to Afghanistan this holiday season, despite the rise in civilian casualties — such as Asan and Slima, pictured above — brought on by the recent intensification of air strikes, in which more than 1000 bombs and missiles were fired in October.

Up until now, NATO has avoided using tanks in Afghanistan for fear of reminding the Afghans of the tank heavy Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

According to the AP, Colonel Dave Lapan explained to reporters in Washington that “American tanks would have a much different role than the Soviet tanks, which he said had been used to ‘oppress’ the Afghans.”

U.S. tanks don’t oppress Afghans, you see – they “protect” them from “insurgents”.

Meanwhile, a recent poll taken by the International Council on Security and Development finds that 92% of young men in Kandahar and Helmand provinces know nothing about 9-11, the putative reason the U.S. has been occupying their country for almost a decade.

In any case, many Afghans themselves refuse to give thanks to the occupiers of their country, choosing instead to lodge complaints with U.S. and Afghan officials about the destruction of their trees, crops, homes and loved ones.

Nevertheless, in the eyes of Imperial Functionaries, such destruction can be seen as a good thing:

Although military officials are apologetic in public, they maintain privately that the tactic has a benefit beyond the elimination of insurgent bombs. By making people travel to the district governor’s office to submit a claim for damaged property, “in effect, you’re connecting the government to the people,” the senior officer said.

Success!

Animated IED Incident Map 2004 – 2009

July 30, 2010: rosencrantz

Based on info from the leaked Afghanistan war logs:

I think the end tag – “Stop all illegal wars” – is a bit fuzzy, conceptually speaking, but the animation is good, and is a great example of the kind of things that can be done with the massive amount of leaked info.

Also, it is interesting to compare the trajectory explicit in the video with what the BBC published today:

The Leader of the Free World

July 27, 2010: rosencrantz

Julian Assange is a superhero genius who looks like a Batman villain, and this press conference is world historical:

Wikileaks, holding it down.

July 25, 2010: rosencrantz

Wikileaks released “The Afghan War Diaries” Today:

The Afghan War Diaries an extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority of lethal military actions involving the United States military. They include the number of persons internally stated to be killed, wounded, or detained during each action, together with the precise geographical location of each event, and the military units involved and major weapon systems used.

The Afghan War Diaries is the most significant archive about the reality of war to have ever been released during the course of a war. The deaths of tens of thousands is normally only a statistic but this archive reveals locations and key events behind each of these individual deaths. We hope the impact will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and modern warfare in general.

Three newspapers were given early access on the condition the they would not publish about them until today.  Lots to read:

The Guardian (U.K.)

Spiegel (Germany)

New York Times (U.S.):

Another Revolution in Kyrgystan

April 27, 2010: rosencrantz

WGP_Kyrgystan_2WGP_Kyrgystan

In Kyrgystan this month, a U.S.-backed dictator fell to popular opposition forces supported by Russia. Here is some back story:

The predominantly Muslim former Soviet state gained independence in the early ’90s under the relatively democratic leadership of Askar Akayev, who nevertheless eventually slid into authoritarianism  and cronyism amid economic challenges and political divisions between Kyrgystan’s Russified north and its more Islamic south.

After 9/11, the Akayev government agreed to host Bush Jr.’s coalition forces at Manas Air Force Base – a place from which they could more conveniently bomb people in Afghanistan.  (See for example here, here and here.)

WGP_Manas_Air_Base

(The base, by the way, has since been euphemistically renamed “Transit Center at Manas“,  although it still functions as a launching point of operations in the U.S.-led terror war.)

In 2005, after years of popular protests, Akayev was ousted as a result of the Tulip Revolution, which put Kurmanbek Bakiyev in power.  Bakiyev then followed in the tradition of his predecessor and descended into gangsterism, resulting in a sharp rise in murders of political opponents and journalists, but was nevertheless supported by the U.S. in the face of popular opposition due to the empire’s interest in maintaining its Air Base Transit Center at Manas.

Meanwhile, the cozy relations between U.S. and the Bakiyev drove a wedge between Bakiyev and Russia, who supported opposition forces which culminated in this month’s revolution.

A more detailed history can be found in this excellent piece by Eugine Huskey, who concludes:

The full story of Russian involvement in the April Revolution in Kyrgyzstan is still to be told, but it appears that while the Kremlin backed the forces of change in Kyrgyzstan, Washington stood behind the forces of repression. In the wake of the revolution, Putin congratulated the new leadership; Obama remained silent.

Allowing basing rights to marginalize all other dimensions of American foreign policy in former Soviet Central Asia has seriously undermined the moral authority and political influence of the United States in the region. The triumph of wartime tactics over a broad and consistent strategy of engagement with governments and societies in Central Asia has disillusioned a generation of local reformers and left the United States ill-positioned to compete with the region’s rising hegemons, Russia and China.

Whether through design or neglect, the Obama administration has continued the cynical and short-sighted policies of the Bush years in Central Asia. The next time I meet Rahm Emanuel, I’ll ask him to remind his boss that in the long run, Faustian bargains carry a heavy price.