Pajhwok News Agency reports that on Tuesday, the Afghanistan senate deplored the foreign airstrikes that killed 21 innocent civilians in the province of Daikundi on Sunday, and demanded that NATO avoid any repetition of this sort of error.
But some senators went farther, demanding that NATO or US military men responsible for the deaths be executed. Senator Hamidullah Tokhi of Uruzgan complained to Pajhwok that the foreign forces had killed civilians in such incidents time and again, and kept apologizing but then repeating the fatal mistake: “Anyone killing an ordinary Afghan should be executed in public.”
Lawmaker Fatima Aziz of Qunduz concurred, observing, “We saw foreign troops time and again that they killed innocent people, something unbearable for the already war-weary Afghans.”
The head of US Central Command, General David Petraeus, appeared on NBC Television’s Meet the Press, first to walk viewers through the US interventions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq and then to take a tour around other issues from Iran to Guantanamo Bay to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays and lesbians in the military.
In contrast to previous appearances, when Petraeus was fighting his own President to get his version of US foreign and military policy, this was a stay-the-course interview behind agreed approaches. The message on Afghanistan was long-haul effort to win. On Pakistan, it was supporting Pakistani forces to vanquish the Taliban. He spoke in generalities about maintaining pressure on Iran, and beyond his main agenda, on the tricky issues like Guantanamo Bay and “enhanced interrogation” (torture), he evaded any definitive statements.
MR. DAVID GREGORY: General David Petraeus joins us live from U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida.
General, welcome to MEET THE PRESS.
GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS: Thanks, David. Good to be with you.
One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town’s bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost’s dust-doused streets for days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaar-goers for ransom.
But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat, handwritten note on Red Cross stationary to the family. In it, Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American prison more than 200 miles away. U.S. forces had picked him up while he was on his way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and he didn’t know when he would be freed.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s very cautiously-worded support for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban leadership, in an interview published Monday, is only the first public signal of a policy decision by the Barack Obama administration to support a political settlement between the Hamid Karzai regime and the Taliban, an official of McChrystal’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) command has revealed in an interview with IPS.
Speaking to the Financial Times, McChrystal couched his position on negotiations in terms of an abstract support for negotiated settlements of wars, saying, “I believe that a political solution to all conflicts is the inevitable outcome.” The ISAF commander avoided a direct answer to the question of whether the Taliban could play a role in a future Afghan government.
When pressed by the interviewer on the issue, McChrystal would only say that “any Afghan can play a role if they focus on the future and not the past”.
The ISAF official, who spoke with IPS on condition that he would not be named, was much more candid about the centrality of peace negotiations with the Taliban leadership in the Obama administration’s strategy in Afghanistan and about the understanding of the ISAF command that the Taliban leadership is independent of al Qaeda and is already positioning itself for a political settlement.
UPDATE 0800 GMT: Iran News Now has a spirited investigation of Time’s poll and the dropping of “Iran’s Protesters” from the final list for Person of the Year.
It may not rank with the alleged theft of June’s Presidential election, but Time magazine just put itself in the role of vote-stealing villain for many supporters of Iran’s Green Wave.
The seven finalists [for Time's Person of the Year] include Apple [Computers] CEO Steve Jobs, US Federal Reserve Charman [sic] Ben Bernanke, US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Jamaican Sprinter and Olympic Gold Medalist Usain Bolt, Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal and US President Barack Obama.
Also making the lists is “the Chinese worker,” a group of people whom TIME says “are an increasingly influential group in one of the world’s most powerful economies”.
All credible candidates for the honour of the figure or group who has made a significant impact on the world in 2009 – except maybe the one whose claim is that he runs really, really fast. But the news is who didn’t make the final cut from 10 nominees. Apparently “the Iranian People” didn’t match up to an American Congresswoman, the man leading the US Long War in Central Asia, or the iPhone guy, let alone an assembly-line machinist in Beijing.
Still, even that rejection might have fluttered into cyber-space had it not been for Time’s perverse tribute to democracy. Read the rest of this entry »
Tom Englehardt, writing at TomDispatch, goes beyond the headline “30,000 extra troops” of President Obama’s recent announcement to detail the extent of the US escalation and long-term commitment — despite Obama’s initial declaration of a “beginning to the end” of the military presence in July 2011 — to the intervention in Afghanistan (N.B.: All links in original article):
In his Afghan “surge” speech at West Point last week, President Obama offered Americans some specifics to back up his new “way forward in Afghanistan.” He spoke of the “additional 30,000 U.S. troops” he was sending into that country over the next six months. He brought up the “roughly $30 billion” it would cost us to get them there and support them for a year. And finally, he spoke of beginning to bring them home by July 2011. Those were striking enough numbers, even if larger and, in terms of time, longer than many in the Democratic Party would have cared for. Nonetheless, they don’t faintly cover just how fully the president has committed us to an expanding war and just how wide it is likely to become.
Despite the seeming specificity of the speech, it gave little sense of just how big and how expensive this surge will be. In fact, what is being portrayed in the media as the surge of November 2009 is but a modest part of an ongoing expansion of the U.S. war effort in many areas. Looked at another way, the media’s focus on the president’s speech as the crucial moment of decision, and on those 30,000 new troops as the crucial piece of information, has distorted what’s actually underway. Read the rest of this entry »
Get beyond the headline of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ admission, “I think it has been years” since the US had good intelligence on Osama bin Laden’s, and here are the important points from this interview:
1. The Obama approach on Afghanistan, no matter how many times Gates says “transition strategy”, is to “kick the can down the road”, putting off the deadline for another significant decision to mid-2011.
2. The Obama Administration still has no confidence that it can rely on a political center in Kabul. Look at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s far-from-ringing endorsement of Afghan President Hamid Karzai: “The proof is in the pudding. We’re going to have to wait to see how it unfolds.”
3. There is not a hint of an approach in Pakistan other than the Pakistani military being told to go and beat up the “Taliban”.
4. The Obama Administration has no real idea how to deal with the economic strain of this increased commitment, other than to hope that it goes away sooner rather than later.
5. So how to proceed, given all these obstacles? Repeat: Al Qa’eda, Al Qa’eda, Al Qa’eda.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, HOST: And we begin with the cornerstones of President Obama’s national security cabinet, the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton; secretary of defense, Robert Gates. Welcome to you both.
This is the first time you’re here together on “This Week”. Thanks for doing it.
HILLARY CLINTON, SECRETARY OF STATE: The first time we’ve been called cornerstones.
THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. To the United States Corps of Cadets, to the men and women of our Armed Services, and to my fellow Americans: I want to speak to you tonight about our effort in Afghanistan — the nature of our commitment there, the scope of our interests, and the strategy that my administration will pursue to bring this war to a successful conclusion. It’s an extraordinary honor for me to do so here at West Point — where so many men and women have prepared to stand up for our security, and to represent what is finest about our country. Read the rest of this entry »
Juan Cole offers a full round-up of developments:
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UPDATE 0925 GMT: US National Public Radio is conducting 
Tom Englehardt, 
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