Mr Obama's War: Taliban at the Gates

CNN has a dramatic headline this morning: "Taliban Poised at the Gates of Kabul". The story is based on interviews with two very different sources, a Taliban leader and a Kabul police commander.

It's an atmosphere piece rather than a consideration of latest developments, but the conclusion is still significant in its focus on the local rather than on plans for the US military:

Coalition forces have no choice by to keep rooting for Kabul's cops. By the end of the year, NATO will hand over much of the responsibility for securing the capital to the city's police force. And that will be a crucial test to see if this city and this country can stand on its own, even with the Taliban standing at the gate.

Comments

[Gary]

Lurid headlines appeared in some papers yesterday ( http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5888427.ece ) regurgitating a story that was placed in the media by US intelligence agencies. The story claimed that an ex-prisoner of the the Guantanamo torture camp in Cuba is now a leading Taliban commander in Afghanistan, responsible for the change in tactics that has seen their effectiveness increase markedly against occupying troops - especially British troops in the south of the country.

I find the timing of this story too good to be true on the part of the UK government, coinciding as it does with the revelations about UK collusion in torture at Guantanamo, Morocco and Pakistan by recently released detainee, Binyam Mohamed.

Conveniently for the authorities it is impossible to cross reference any sources to verify the veracity of their claims.

The man, who has been named as Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, was released into the custody of the Afghan government in December 2007 and subsequently released.

According to US intelligence the man has since changed his name - which naturally makes me even more suspicious about the story - to Abdullah Zakir.

Rasoul was originally apprehended by US forces in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and because he had a gun and more than one watch was assumed to be a supporter of the Taliban. But most men in Afghanistan have a gun or access to one given the country has been in a state of near-perpetual war for thirty years, so this apprehension was in fact the typical random kidnapping of anyone US forces came across that they designated as being on the 'battlefield'.

Does this now pose a problem for Obama in keeping his promise of shutting down Guantanamo, or should it be seen as a good excuse for not following through on that particular election promise? I would suggest the latter.

All this comes at a time when the UK and other NATO member states have been complaining that US forces in Afghanistan are not been sharing intelligence information with their 'partners'. The Guardian said that the secret report:

"Based on scores of interviews with British, US, Canadian and Dutch military, intelligence and diplomatic officials - and marked for "official use only" - the book-length report is damning of a US military often unwilling to share intelligence among its military allies"

In addition a US general admitted this week ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/4960902/US-general-admits-coalition-not-winning-in-large-areas-of-Afghanistan-including-British-run-south.html ) that the coalition is losing the war, particularly in the south, which seems like an implicit criticism of the British effort that has seen soldiers' lives being lost every week and won't go down very well at the British Ministry of Defence.

http://gazasolidarity.blogspot.com/2009/03/afghan-lies-from-discredited-us.html