Afghanistan: US Military Holds On to Detainees

Gareth Porter writes for Inter Press Service:

An initiative to revise the procedures for reviewing the cases of detainees in order to free marginal insurgents and innocent Afghans has run afoul of the interests of officers of the powerful Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in defending their role in earlier detention decisions.

A study of U.S. detention policy in Afghanistan by Maj. Gen. Douglas
Stone in early 2009 had concluded that holding hundreds of detainees
without charge in both U.S. and Afghan detention facilities was helping the hardcore Taliban radicalise the vast majority of the detainees.

Stone was reported by The Guardian Oct. 14 to believe that two-thirds of the prisoners held in Bagram were innocent and should be released.

But the new procedures for detainee review put in place late last year
have led to relatively few releases, and the conditions attached to
those releases have rubbed more salt on old Afghan wounds.


Of the 576 detainees whose cases had been reviewed under the new rules by late January, only 66 had been released, Brig. Gen. Mark S.
Martins, deputy commander of "Joint Task Force 435", which has
responsibility for detainee operations in Afghanistan, told IPS in a
recent interview.

In addition, the release procedure requires the detainees and the
village elders vouching for them to sign a paper saying the detainees
had been held on the basis of intelligence linking them to the
insurgency. At a meeting for the handover of some released detainees
in Kabul reported by The New York Times Saturday, village elders from Paktia province refused to sign the paper until the offending language was changed.

The commander of Task Force 435, Navy Vice Admiral Robert S. Harward Jr., defended the intelligence conclusions at the Kabul meeting, but ultimately agreed to allow the elders to sign a paper that rejected
that conclusion. In the future, the document will say that the
detainees were considered insurgents in the eyes of the U.S.,
according to the Times report.

Harward's role at the meeting highlights an apparent conflict of interest that hampers the achievement of the original aim of the Task Force.

Harward had been assistant commander of "Task Force 714", a covert
special operations group that conducted hundreds of targeted raids in
Afghanistan under JSOC, from 2006 to 2008. Those raids filled the U.S.
detention facility at Bagram Air Base with suspected insurgents.

Harward and other present and past JSOC officials, including Gen.
Stanley A. McChrystal, who was then overall commander of JSOC, have an obvious interest in ensuring that the results of case reviews do not
reflect negatively on JSOC's detention decisions.

Putting an officer with such an obvious conflict of interest in charge
of the Task Force - and assigning Martins, a lawyer who is clearly
more sympathetic to detainee rights, as his deputy - has all the
earmarks of a Pentagon compromise.

Read rest of article....

Afghanistan: Getting the Real Point Of The Marja "Offensive"

Gareth Porter has an excellent piece up on Inter Press Service, "Fiction of Marja as City Was U.S. Information War," in which he breaks down the media disinformation campaign on the size of Marja:

Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.

"It's not urban at all," an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marja a "rural community".

"It's a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds," said the official, adding that the homes are reasonably prosperous by Afghan standards.

Porter is right on, and you should read the whole thing for an idea on exactly how these disinformation campaigns are spread, but I'm afraid in the case of Marja, we might be missing the point. We're complaining that Marja is only an excuse for a propaganda victory while at the same time complaining that the victory won't be worth anything because it's not a city.

As Woody Allen said on a much different topic, "This food is terrible, and such small portions!"



This shouldn't be news to anyone, but Afghans live in rural communities. We're supposedly there to protect Afghans from the Taliban after all. Rajiv Chandrasekaran described the strategy last year in the Washington Post:

The U.S. strategy here is predicated on the belief that a majority of people in Helmand do not favor the Taliban, which enforces a strict brand of Islam that includes an-eye-for-an-eye justice and strict limits on personal behavior. Instead, U.S. officials believe, residents would rather have the Afghan government in control, but they have been cowed into supporting the Taliban because there was nobody to protect them.

Great, so if the plan is to protect Afghans from the Taliban, then you'll want to go where Afghans actually live, right? That would be in "a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds," just like the anonymous ISAF official told IPS.

Big cities like Kabul and Herat don't speak for the entirety of all Afghans, so focusing all of our attention on the major urban centers doesn't do anything to extend the legitimacy and credibility of the government, much less provide security from the Taliban. President Karzai's derisive nickname as the "Mayor of Kabul" was one small indicator of just how well the strategy of focusing on city centers, at the cost of conceding rural territory to the Taliban, was working. That is, not working at all. We also can't discount the effect concentrating on cities had on the Taliban propaganda narrative of western-occupied Kabul (or Islamabad) oppressing the mostly-rural Pashtuns.

In this case, Marja being a small farming community might actually be a positive step. So, ISAF finally went to the population, but are they protecting them? From Military.com:

At least 35 civilians have been killed in the operation, according to the Afghan human rights commission. Spokesman Nader Nadery said insurgent bombs killed more than 10 people, while NATO rocket fire killed at least 14.

Not only are we failing to protect the civilians from the Taliban, but we seem to have killed more Afghans than the militants themselves. Perhaps the Afghans will show their legendary patience, and accept that the government had to massacre 14 of their friends and relatives with rockets in order to have a more peaceful, prosperous Afghanistan. Will they side with Karzai? From the same article above:

"Are you against me or with me?" Karzai asked the elders. "Are you going to support me?"

The men all raised their hands and shouted: "We are with you. We support you."

But...

[Tribal Elders] complained - sometimes shouting - about corruption among former Afghan government officials. They lamented how schools in Marjah were turned into military posts by international forces. They said shops were looted during the offensive, and alleged that innocent civilians were detained by international forces.

But they still said they said they support Karzai, right?

Mohammad Naeem Khan, in his early 30s, said his loyalty is to whoever will provide for him.

"If the Taliban tap me on the shoulder, I will be with them, and if the government taps me on my shoulder I will be with them," Khan said.

So we wind up with the exact same bloody stalemate we've had since about 2002. They'll side with the government, except for when they side with the Taliban. That's not a victory, propaganda or otherwise.

The problem is not the size of Marja, it could be a teeming industrial metropolis of millions, it still wouldn't matter as long as we continue using military force and propping up a corrupt, illegitimate government. Until we have a strategy that doesn't involve violently imposing our pet gangsters' will on the Afghan people, we'll have a hard time even distinguishing ourselves from the Taliban, much less convincing the citizens to take our side against them.

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Josh Mull is the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. You can read his work on The Seminal or at Rethink Afghanistan.