Replies to post #4497 on Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

Over 80 dead in fierce fighting in Afghanistan

see also:

Al Qaeda regrouping in Afghanistan

Rahim Wardak told The Associated Press he received intelligence that Osama bin Laden's terror group is regrouping and intends to bring Iraq-style bloodshed to Afghanistan.

He also warned that the country could be in for several months of intense violence ahead of key legislative elections.
http://us.rediff.com/news/2005/jun/17afghan.htm

Spain mulls more troops in Afghanistan to guard elections
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-06/22/content_3118776.htm

Britain and the Netherlands are considering sending more troops to Afghanistan
http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/5-6-22/29742.html

-Am

Over 80 dead in fierce fighting in Afghanistan

Thursday, June 23, 2005

* Five policemen and seven Afghan soldiers killed, five US troops wounded
* Two American CH-47 helicopters damaged during eleven hours of fighting

KABUL: American warplanes pounded a suspected Taliban safe haven in the mountainsides of southern Afghanistan in an assault that left up to 76 insurgents, five policemen and seven Afghan soldiers dead and five US soldiers wounded, officials said.

Two American CH-47 helicopters were damaged during 11 hours of fighting on Tuesday at a rebel “safe haven,” a US military statement said. One made an emergency landing before it was repaired, while the other managed to fly back to a nearby coalition base.

US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jerry O’Hara said about 40 rebels had been killed, but General Salim Khan, commander of about 400 Afghan policemen who also took part in the fighting, said his men had recovered the bodies of 60 suspected insurgents. Some 30 militants were captured, including eight who were wounded, he said. Khan said that in addition to the five slain Afghan police officers, three were also injured in the gun battle on the border between the southern provinces of Kandahar and Zabul. Beside the seven Afghan soldiers killed, three were wounded, he said. “There are hundreds of Taliban in camps in the mountains. My officers have been spotting them and then the information is used by the American aircraft to bomb them,” Khan said. “Many of the rebels have started to flee the area.”

The military statement said, “Coalition warplanes and attack helicopters were hammering enemy positions throughout the evening.” O’Hara said the “operation to go after enemy safe havens is ongoing.”

“We are not letting up on the enemy and will continue to pursue them until the fighting stops. Coalition and Afghan forces will continue to defeat these militants for as long as necessary to ensure the people of Afghanistan remain free of oppression and tyranny,” he said. The names of the US wounded were withheld pending notification of their families. ap


http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_23-6-2005_pg1_1

[Amaunet]

Irag: The first, not the last throes
By Pepe Escobar

Jun 25, 2005

"The insurgency in Iraq is in its last throes."
- Vice President Dick Cheney, in May

Even the Central Intelligence Agency now admits that Iraq is the new Afghanistan - breeding a new, lethal generation of jihadis. Iraq has also been the new Vietnam since the day the resistance was born, April 18, 2003, in front of the Abu Hanifa mosque in Baghdad. Iraq as the new Vietnam replays - in a new setting - the movie of a superpower being subdued by a guerrilla war. Remember former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz's famous words before the invasion: "Let the desert be our jungles."

A mini-Tet offensive happened in Baghdad on Monday. In a city allegedly under the control of American and American-trained Iraqi forces, more than 100 guerrillas mounted a devastating attack on Baya'a, the biggest police station in Baghdad - employing successive waves of mortars, explosions, rocket-launcher attacks, hand grenades, sophisticated diversionary tactics and the sinister icing on the lethal cake, car bombings. Hi al-Elam, the neighborhood around the police station, was turned into a smoldering disaster zone. The guerrillas retreated after two hours, having lost dozens of men. But just like the Tet offensive, the message was clear: the writing, scrawled in graffiti, was literally on the walls of Hi al-Elam - "We'll be back."

Three days after this mini-battle in Baghdad, the Pentagon top brass had to face the fact that the writing on the wall is now becoming increasingly visible not only to tens of millions of Americans (60%, according to the latest polls) but to the cowed, Bush administration-intimidated Congress as well. Nevertheless, during eight hours of back-to-back testimony to House and Senate committees in Washington, the Pentagon still refused to abandon the rhetoric of "steady progress" and "victory is certain".

General John Abizaid, the Centcom chief, had to admit "more foreign fighters [are] coming into Iraq than there were six months ago" - not exactly Cheney's "last throes" scenario. Senator Robert Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia, told Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld to "get off your high horse" and stop answering questions "with a sneer". Senator Ted Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, went one step further and suggested it was time for Rumsfeld to go.

Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee, "If the coalition were to leave before the Iraqi security forces are able to assume responsibility, we would one day again have to confront another Iraqi regime, perhaps even more dangerous than the last." The occupation's logic - we can't leave because they would not know how to take care of themselves - happens to be the same espoused on the record by Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, in Washington for official talks at the White House. Sunni Arabs in Iraq - as well as the Sadrists - will take note, adding even more fuel to the fire.

Help, the voters will kill us
The somewhat rash exchanges in Washington have to be put in the context of the 2006 mid-term elections in the US. The Iraq quagmire is leading senators and congressmen - especially Republican - to a degree of panic. They're starting to realize that President George W Bush's war is taking them down. Democrats for their part - including those who supported the war in the first place - are scenting blood. Crucially, no senators or congressmen suggested that the Pentagon should send more troops to Iraq - an extremely unpopular move. But at the same time, nobody suggested troops should be withdrawn immediately - which means they still, albeit grudgingly, subscribe to the Pentagon's strategy.

The disorientation was more than evident in the behavior of Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina and staunch war supporter. Graham said he was concerned by declining support for the war - which means bad news in the next elections - but he also said, ominously, "We have bought into a model that is extremely difficult, but the only answer, because you can't kill enough of these people" - implying that it is such a pity the Pentagon cannot produce a thousand Fallujahs.

For his part, Carl Levin, Democrat from Michigan and the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, came up with the wacky suggestion that "the United States needs to tell the Iraqis and the world that if that deadline [for approving a new constitution] is not met, we will review our position with all options open, including but not limited to, setting a timetable for withdrawal". Levin shifts the blame for all the mess from the occupation to Iraq's politicians. He should beware of what he wants: Iraqis may enthusiastically welcome his proposition, as throwing the occupiers out is their No 1 priority.

And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for
The Pentagon strategy is not working, and it won't work for two main reasons. The neo-conservative American project for Iraq was based on ethnic, confessional sectarianism for a start. The current pre-civil-war atmosphere is just a consequence of privileging Kurds out of proportion and marginalizing Sunni Arabs - not to mention the blowback (from Washington's point of view) of a weak Shi'ite-dominated, Islamic-leaning, Iran-friendly government having to fight not only the Sunni Arab guerrillas, but a Sunni-Sadrist political opposition. Moreover, the development of the so-called Iraqi defense forces may take at least five years. The current militia inferno - tolerated or even encouraged by the Americans - is bound to derail the country for at least a generation.

Just like in Vietnam, the Americans have no meaningful intelligence on the resistance. It's a massive, American strategic, cultural and linguistic failure. That's why American "counterinsurgency" in Iraq these days is reduced to supporting militias nested in the Interior Ministry - "Rumsfeld's boys", as they are known - as well as operations conducted by El Salvador-style death squads. There's no way this will win Sunni Arab hearts and minds. For most Sunni Arabs, from the simply alienated to the terrified, most of them impoverished to sub-Saharan conditions, the American presence - in the form of awesome firepower - only means death and destruction.

The hearings this Thursday in Washington may have been just the tip of the iceberg. The real facts on the ground are, in Iraq, a horrific quagmire; and in the US, the unstoppable rising of anti-war sentiment. This is not a "last throes" scenario - rather the first throes of a national American rejection of the Iraqi imperial adventure. Just like in Vietnam.


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF25Ak04.html

[Amaunet]

Afghanistan, Iraq-style
By Golnaz Esfandiari

Jul 13, 2005

The Taliban and their allies have markedly increased attacks in the southern and eastern regions of Afghanistan, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people.

The fatalities include 16 US soldiers killed when their Chinook helicopter was shot down on June 28 - one of the heaviest US casualties since the 2001 ouster of the Taliban - and 21 people killed in a suicide bomb attack in Kandahar, also in June, at the funeral of a senior cleric assassinated days earlier.

Adding to the US's woes, on Monday four al-Qaeda prisoners escaped from a detention center at Bagram air base north of Kabul. Hundreds of US and Afghan troops supported by helicopters hunted on Tuesday for the four Arab men - the first ever to escape from from the heavily guarded center at the main US base in Afghanistan.

The detention center has housed hundreds of militant suspects since US-led forces overthrew the Taliban in late 2001 for refusing to give up al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. They have included senior al-Qaeda suspects arrested in neighboring Pakistan and elsewhere. A US military spokeswoman said about 450 militant suspects were currently held at the base.

The intensification of violence in Afghan appears to bear out comments from the Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak earlier this this month that he had received intelligence that al-Qaeda was regrouping and intended to bring Iraqi-style bloodshed to Afghanistan.

And he said on Monday that foreign fighters from Arab and neighboring countries were carrying out attacks with the Taliban. "Following the melting of the snow [in March], there has been a significant increase in terrorist attacks, more than we expected," Wardak said.

His comments came as authorities in southern Afghanistan confirmed the death of 10 Afghan police officers. Six of them were beheaded and their bodies and heads were dumped near the border with Pakistan. Beheading has been rare in the conflict in Afghanistan.

Afghan Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali said on Monday that the police officers had been abducted on July 8 following an ambush in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province. "In Helmand, in the Deshu district, a patrolling group of Afghan border forces came under attack by a large number of terrorists while it was traveling from Barancha region to Rubatak," Jalali said. "As a result of the fighting, unfortunately, they took with them 10 members of the border force, they martyred four of them in one place, the other six men were killed just 200 kilometers away from the Pakistani border. Then the kidnappers escaped to the Gerdi Jangal border."

Jalali condemned the killings as un-Islamic and inhuman. "Those people who commit such crimes are not Muslims and they are not human beings because this is against Islam and humanity," Jalali said.

Afghan officials have said that the Taliban and their allies are stepping up their attacks in an effort to disrupt upcoming parliamentary and local elections. The scheduled September 18 elections are considered another key step in the Afghanistan's path towards recovery.

Afghan election officials say that three Afghans working in support of the elections have been killed in recent months.

Vahid Mozhdeh, an Afghan writer and security expert based in Kabul, believes that the attacks are aimed at creating fear among government forces to force them to quit. "One reason that can explain the stepping up of [attacks] is the wish of al-Qaeda for the Americans to be blighted in Afghanistan as they are in Iraq and to suffer more casualties," Mozhdeh said.

Mozhdeh told RFE/RL that Taliban forces and their allies were becoming more organized. He said they were changing their tactics and using more effective explosives.

"Fewer fighters are involved, they come and attack using motorbikes and quickly escape," Mozhdeh said. "The Taliban want to put people and the coalition forces against each other. They conduct operations somewhere and then leave and then coalition forces carry an attack against them there but mostly civilians get hurt. We've been witnessing a series of suicide attacks, which in the past had not been common in Afghanistan. Therefore, we see that the experience of violence is spreading from Iraq to Afghanistan."

Copyright (c) 2005, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20036