Just Foreign Policy News
April 13, 2010
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Progressive Democrats of America: No Unconditional Military Aid to Israel
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http://capwiz.com/pdamerica/issues/alert/?alertid=14926411
Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) Killings of Afghan civilians by U.S. troops have fueled President Karzai’s rage against the United States, the Washington Post reports. "We want night raids to be stopped entirely. We want house searches to be stopped. We want civilian casualties to be minimized," said deputy national security adviser Shaida Abdali.
2) Security for Afghan villagers remains precarious in the Marja district of Helmand province, according to Marine general Larry Nicholson, who led the assault on Marja six weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times reports. "No one can move about freely. There is no security," said Marja tribal elder Sultan Mohammad Shah. He and others said promised government services have been slow to materialize. "If the situation remains like this, people will leave Marja," Shah said. "Right now, it’s pretty thin," Nicholson said of the government presence in Marja. "We need to do more." [Prior to the Marja offensive, General McChrystal said, "We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in" – JFP.]
3) U.S. Special Operations Forces are playing an expanded role in Pakistan counterinsurgency campaign, Reuters reports. A Pentagon proposal would deepen that role by creating a special $10 million pool of funds SOF could spend more quickly on projects in the FATA. The $10 million would come out of State Department economic assistance funding for Pakistan. Critics say the move risked stoking concerns in Pakistan about U.S. meddling and could open the door to a further escalation down the road. U.S. officials concede that the U.S. military presence in Pakistan is a "radioactive" issue in Pakistan.
4) U.S. officials have conceded that they are largely ignorant about Afghan society, but haven’t conceded that ignorance is leading to Afghan civilian deaths as U.S. forces rely on dubious "tips" about alleged Taliban insurgents in choosing targets for night raids and airstrikes, notes Gareth Porter for Inter Press Service. U.N. Rapporteur Philip Alston wrote in a May 2009 report that "numerous government officials" had told him that "false tips" had "often" caused night raids to result in the killing of innocent civilians. He reported that one provincial governor had "stated that there were people in his province who made a business acting as intermediaries who would give false tips to the international forces in return for payment from individuals holding grudges."
5) A dramatic spike in disability claims during the last seven years has overwhelmed the VA and nearly doubled the cost of compensating wounded veterans, the Chicago Tribune reports. Veterans from the Vietnam and Persian Gulf eras accounted for roughly 84 percent of the rise in spending, which hit $34.3 billion last year. There a backlog at of least 500,000 claims – some veterans groups say it’s as high as 1 million.
6) Last year, mental illnesses accounted for 35 percent of the $22 billion spent on disability payments to veterans who served in the Vietnam, Persian Gulf and "global war on terror" eras, the Chicago Tribune reports. A survey of about 100,000 Afghanistan and Iraq veterans found that 31 percent had been diagnosed with mental health or psychosocial problems. "When you look at the epidemic of PTSD, you see the future," said Harvard University’s Linda Bilmes, co-author of the 2008 book "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."
Kyrgyzstan
7) The U.S. claimed to need the airbase in Kyrgyzstan in order to fight for democracy in Afghanistan, but to secure it, they supported an undemocratic regime in Kyrgyzstan, writes Stephen Kinzer in the Boston Globe. This contradiction, inherent in any imperial project, alienated Kyrgyz citizens who believe they too are entitled to live in freedom. The US wound up looking like the enemy of groups supporting "American ideals," while propping up a regime based on principles it professes to detest. Bakiyev’s son, widely seen as one of his most loathsome henchmen, was in Washington last week for what were supposed to be friendly talks; anger over America’s willingness to receive him helped set off last week’s explosion.
8) In 2005, the last time angry crowds toppled the government of Kyrgyzstan, the US found itself in an awkward position: among the rallying cries was an allegation that the ruling family had benefited handsomely from Pentagon contracts, the New York Times reports. Now, substantially the same thing appears to be happening again. Senior leaders in the interim government that took power last week are accusing the US of allowing family members of the ousted president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, to enrich themselves with contracts supplying jet fuel to Manas Air Base.
Afghanistan
9) U.S. Marines are paying poppy farmers in Marja to plow under their fields, the Washington Post reports. As of Sunday, 730 farmers had signed up for the program, a Marine official said.
Pakistan
10) The UN said more than 200,000 people have fled Pakistan’s latest offensive against Taliban militants in the northwest, AP reports. The recent exodus of civilians adds to the more than 1.3 million people driven from their homes by fighting in the northwest and unable to return. The U.N. warned it faces a severe shortfall in funding needed to aid those displaced, saying it has only received about $106 million, or 20 percent, of the $538 million appeal it launched in February for the next six months. The U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Pakistan said some aid groups providing water, food, health care and sanitation for the displaced were having to scale down their activities.
11) Survivors said at at least 68 villagers were killed in Pakistani airstrikes, sharply contradicting initial army accounts that the dead were Islamist militants, AP reports. Elsewhere in the northwest, a village elder claimed 13 civilians were killed in the latest U.S. missile strike there, contesting accounts by Pakistani security officials that four militants died in the attack.
Colombia
12) A Colombian NGO is disputing claims by presidential candidate [until he stepped down to run, Defense Minister – JFP] Juan Manuel Santos that the "false positives" scandal, over the army’s murder of civilians, who were then reported as guerrillas killed in action, has been over for more than a year, writes Colombia Reports. CINEP/PP said there were nine known cases of false positives between October 2008 and December 31 2009, seven of which were extraducial killings, while two involved arbitrary arrests. The report did state that there had been a decrease in false positives cases since October 2008, and measures taken by the Ministry of Defense had contributed to the decline.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Shooting By U.S. Soldiers In Afghanistan Fuels Karzai’s Anger
Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, Tuesday, April 13, 2010; A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/12/AR2010041200761.html
Kabul – Twelve days before President Hamid Karzai denounced the behavior of Western countries in Afghanistan, he met a 4-year-old boy at the Tarin Kowt civilian hospital in the south.
The boy had lost his legs in a February airstrike by U.S. Special Operations forces helicopters that killed more than 20 civilians. Karzai scooped him up from his mattress and walked out to the hospital courtyard, according to three witnesses. "Who injured you?" the president asked as helicopters passed overhead. The boy, crying alongside his relatives, pointed at the sky.
The tears and rage Karzai encountered in that hospital in Uruzgan province lingered with him, according to several aides. It was one provocation amid a string of recent political disappointments that they said has helped fuel the president’s emotional outpouring against the West and prompted a brief crisis in his relations with the United States. It was also a reminder that civilian casualties in Afghanistan have political reverberations far beyond the sites of the killings.
Before dawn Monday, American soldiers strafed a passenger bus that approached their convoy outside Kandahar City, killing at least four Afghans, including a woman, and wounding 18 others in another incident that Afghan officials warn could hurt the U.S. military effort. The city, which spawned the Taliban movement, has become the focal point of American military efforts for the next few months. Of the 30,000 additional U.S. troops President Obama ordered to Afghanistan, 13,000 have arrived, and thousands more are headed to Kandahar in preparation for a summer offensive intended to roll back the insurgency.
But Karzai told a gathering in Kandahar last week that he would not permit an American offensive there unless the people supported it. After Monday’s shooting, residents blocked a road, denounced the American presence and demanded justice.
"This is a savage action. They have committed a great crime," said Bismillah Afghanmal, a member of Kandahar’s provincial council. "They knew that this was the public transportation way. . . . Buses always use that road." Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar, condemned the shooting and called it "very irresponsible."
Under Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, NATO forces have made reducing civilian casualties a top priority. McChrystal has restricted night raids, home searches and the close air support that troops often request during firefights, all in an effort to mitigate collateral damage to Afghan civilians. The U.S.-led NATO force issued a statement Monday saying it "deeply regrets the tragic loss of life" in Kandahar.
But high-profile civilian killings continue to attract wide attention in Afghanistan. A Feb. 12 nighttime raid by U.S. Special Operations forces near Gardez, in the southeast, that killed five people, including two pregnant women, is being investigated after Afghan officials alleged that U.S. troops tampered with evidence at the scene.
After the Feb. 22 Uruzgan airstrike – on a bus mistakenly thought to be carrying insurgents – killed more than 20 people, Canadian and American forces patrolling far from the scene in Kandahar City reported a sudden deterioration in residents’ attitudes toward them. In some cases, residents threw rocks and spit at troops, according to U.S. military officials. "We have to calm people. You have to give them some satisfaction as to whether this will continue or not," Shaida M. Abdali, the deputy national security adviser, said in an interview last week.
Abdali praised McChrystal’s efforts to reduce civilian casualties and said the commander "has always been quick to apologize," but he said the Afghan government thinks more needs to change.
"We want night raids to be stopped entirely. We want house searches to be stopped. We want civilian casualties to be minimized," he said.
Monday’s shooting occurred as the bus was passing through the Zhari district of Kandahar province. The NATO statement said the incident began when a large vehicle approached a slow-moving NATO convoy from behind at "a high rate of speed." The convoy, sweeping the road for bombs, could not get out of the way of the oncoming vehicle because of a steep embankment, the statement said.
NATO said the troops in the convoy followed procedure, using a flashlight, three flares and hand signals to warn the vehicle to stop. When none of that worked, they opened fire. "Once engaged, the vehicle then stopped," the statement said. "Upon inspection, ISAF forces discovered the vehicle to be a passenger bus."
But Abdul Ghani, an Afghan man who told The Washington Post in a telephone interview that he was the driver of the bus, said the soldiers "didn’t give me any kind of signal. . . . They just opened fire. No signal at all."
Ghani’s account could not be independently confirmed, and other news organizations quoted a different person who said he was the driver. But Ghani, 35, related to The Post specific details about the bus and the incident that suggest he knew what had occurred.
He said the green and white 1984 German vehicle left a Kandahar city bus depot at 4:30 a.m., bound for Nimruz province, seven hours away. Half an hour into the trip, the bus drove up behind the U.S. convoy. The gunfire erupted when the bus was 80 to 100 meters behind the convoy, he said.
[…]
2) Afghan District Not Secure Despite Offensive
In Afghanistan’s Marja district, U.S. Marines and Afghan security forces remain two months after the massive military assault began. But insurgents continue to plant bombs and intimidate civilians.
Tony Perry and Laura King, Los Angeles Times, 5:26 PM PDT, April 12, 2010
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/asia/la-fg-afghan-marja13-2010apr13,0,425417.story
Kabul, Afghanistan, and San Diego – Security for Afghan villagers remains precarious in the Marja district of Helmand province, where U.S. Marines and Afghan soldiers mounted a massive assault in February to oust the Taliban from control, according to the Marine general who led the assault.
Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson said late Sunday that while there are hopeful signs in Marja, with Afghan police patrolling and farmers signing up to grow crops other than opium poppy, the mission’s success or failure may not be known for months. "It’s still a fragile security situation," Nicholson said in a telephone interview from Camp Leatherneck just hours before relinquishing command Monday after a year of being in charge of all Marines in Afghanistan. "I think we’re off to a good start."
Two Marine battalions, about 2,000 troops, remain in Marja along with Afghan security forces. But insurgents continue to plant roadside bombs in hopes of killing Marines. At night, Taliban fighters intimidate civilians by visiting their homes.
[…] Villagers interviewed separately told of feeling hemmed in by insurgents and their homemade bombs, six weeks after the main fighting of the offensive ended. "No one can move about freely. There is no security," said Marja tribal elder Sultan Mohammad Shah, 64. "The Taliban are killing and beating people, and no one knows what is going on the next block over because they cannot go anywhere."
He and others said promised government services have been slow to materialize. "If the situation remains like this, people will leave Marja," Shah said. The head of the district’s education department, Ewar Khan, said teachers and students alike were under threat.
For the battle of Marja to influence the overall struggle for control of Afghanistan, the U.S. and Afghan governments will have to move quickly to improve the lot of its citizens, officials have long acknowledged. "Right now, it’s pretty thin," Nicholson said of the government presence in Marja. "We need to do more."
3) U.S. Military Playing Expanded Role In Pakistan
Adam Entous, Reuters, Monday, April 12, 2010; 6:04 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/12/AR2010041203498.html
Washington – U.S. Special Operations Forces on a training mission in Pakistan are playing an expanded but largely unseen role in the country’s counterinsurgency campaign, working with paramilitary units to "hold and build" tribal areas as militants are cleared out.
U.S. defense and administration officials say the elite trainers, who currently number more than 100, have not and are not authorized to take part in Pakistani military offensives in the semi-autonomous tribal regions, known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, along the Afghan border. Pakistan has balked at U.S. offers of joint military operations there, officials said on condition of anonymity.
But Special Ops trainers play a bigger role than has been widely disclosed in helping Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps, such as surveying and coordinating projects aimed at winning "hearts and minds" and preventing Taliban fighters from returning to areas once they have been pushed out.
A Pentagon proposal would deepen that role by creating a special $10 million pool of funds the trainers could spend more quickly on civil affairs and humanitarian projects in the FATA in coordination with their Pakistani counterparts.
U.S. defense and administration officials spoke about the training program and the new proposal on condition of anonymity because, as one said, the relatively small American military presence is such a "radioactive" issue in Pakistan.
U.S. and Pakistani officials worry that detailed disclosures about the role of Special Ops could compromise operational security, spark a backlash among Pakistanis against their government and fuel already high anti-American sentiment.
There are 200 U.S. military personnel in Pakistan, including troops who guard the sprawling American Embassy compound in Islamabad. The number of Special Operations trainers fluctuates from as little as 60 to about 120.
A February bombing that killed three Special Operations "civil affairs" specialists in northwest Pakistan partly exposed how small U.S. teams sometimes venture out beyond the confines of heavily guarded military bases.
Washington is in talks to increase the number of Special Ops trainers and authorize sending them to sectors deeper in the tribal regions, but details have yet to be worked out.
[…] The $10 million in funds, which has yet to be approved by the Pentagon leadership, would be modeled after the Commanders’ Emergency Response Program, or CERP, which has become a linchpin of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and has been credited with helping turn the tide in Iraq.
CERP-funded projects are intended to gain the confidence of local residents and leaders and discourage them from cooperating with insurgents. The program has been authorized for war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq – not Pakistan.
[…] Under the proposal, the $10 million would come out of State Department economic assistance funding for Pakistan, officials briefed on the matter said. Critics say the move risked stoking concerns in Pakistan about U.S. meddling and could open the door to a further escalation down the road.
[…]
4) US Ignorance of Afghan Society Led to Botched Raids
Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service, 12 Apr
http://ipsnorthamerica.net/news.php?idnews=2987
Washington – A Special Operations Forces raid on Feb. 12 on what was supposed to be the compound of a Taliban leader but that killed three women and two Afghan government officials demonstrated a fatal weakness of the U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan: after eight years of operating there, the U.S. military still has no understanding of the personal, tribal and other local socio-political conflicts.
In targeting the suspected Taliban in such raids, therefore, the U.S. military command has been forced to rely on informants of unknown reliability – and motives.
As a provincial council member from Gardez, near the scene of the botched raid, declared bitterly last week, U.S. Special Forces "don’t know who is the enemy and who isn’t". When the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, Adm. William McRaven, went to the site of the raid to apologise, the head of the extended family which lost five people to the SOF unit, Hajji Sharibuddin, demanded that the U.S. military turn over "the spy who gave the false information to the Americans".
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and his chief of intelligence, Gen. Michael Flynn, have admitted the profound ignorance of the U.S. military about Afghan society, while avoiding the implications of that ignorance for the issue of false intelligence on the Taliban.
[…] Flynn avoided any suggestion that this profound ignorance of the society in which U.S. troops are operating could affect targeting of suspected Taliban. He asserted that the intelligence problem is not about the Taliban but about the lack of knowledge about governance and development issues.
But a foreign military force that is so fundamentally ignorant of the socio-political forces at play inevitably allows local sources which have access to it to act in their own self-interest.
More often than not, the U.S. and NATO have depended heavily on ties with Afghan tribal leaders and warlords. That has proven disastrous over and over again.
Col. David Lamm, who was chief of staff for Gen. David Barno, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, has said that it became clear to top officials in the command that it should not make alliances with tribes to obtain information on the Taliban. It often turned out that a group which a tribal leader said was the Taliban was actually a competing tribe, Lamm recalled in a September 2008 interview with IPS.
Barno also ordered his commanders to shun local police as intelligence sources on the Taliban. "Local police were too close to the local elite," said Lamm.
Despite such warnings, however, CIA and military intelligence operatives have continued to rely on tribal patriarchs and local warlords as intelligence sources on the Taliban. As recently as December 2008, U.S. intelligence officials were telling Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick that their operatives had been using gifts of Viagra, among other inducements, to get warlords and tribal leaders to provide such intelligence.
[…] In the most widely known instance of mass civilian casualties from a U.S. attack, an airstrike on the village of Azizabad in Heart province in August 2008, Afghan officials expressed certainty that U.S. commanders had been misled by a rival of clan leader Timor Shah, who had died some months before.
An investigation of the incident by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) revealed that a former business partner of Timor’s who still had personal enmity toward the family – and who had been involved in various criminal activities – had passed false information to Coalition Forces that there would be a big gathering of Taliban fighters in Azizabad.
The U.S. command carried out a devastating bombing of what turned out to have been a memorial ceremony for Timor Shah. As many as 90 civilians, including 60 children, were killed by the bombing.
U.N. Rapporteur Philip Alston wrote in a May 2009 report that "numerous government officials" had told him that "false tips" had "often" caused night raids to result in the killing of innocent civilians. He reported that one provincial governor had "stated that there were people in his province who made a business acting as intermediaries who would give false tips to the international forces in return for payment from individuals holding grudges."
Alston was told by a village elder in Nuristan that a district government had fed false information to "international forces" that led to a raid targeting his local opponents. He also said a similar incident in Nangarhar’s Ghani Khel district was reported to him.
Alston reported that a "senior official" who responded to his critical report did not deny that "feuds" drive much of the identification of local Taliban officials. Instead the official suggested that such "feuds" were simply "part and parcel of the conflict between the Taliban and the Government".
Instead of admitting that U.S. intelligence was fatally flawed, the U.S. military command had simply adopted a justification that did not require any real understanding of the society. McChrystal, on the other hand, has lamented that ignorance but continues to authorise raids that are based on the faulty intelligence it generates.
5) VA laboring under surge of wounded veterans
Tribune finds increase in claims, outdated compensation system threatening well-being of those who fought for their country
Jason Grotto and Tim Jones, Chicago Tribune, April 11, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-met-disabled-veterans-cost-20100409,0,5841974.story
In a sobering reminder of the long-term costs of war, a dramatic spike in disability claims during the last seven years has overwhelmed the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and nearly doubled the cost of compensating wounded veterans, according to an unprecedented Tribune analysis.
The bulk of the increases didn’t come from veterans of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but from those who served years or even decades before. Veterans from the Vietnam and Persian Gulf eras accounted for roughly 84 percent of the rise in spending, which hit $34.3 billion last year.
The surge from past eras comes even as more soldiers than expected are returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan in need of care. With hundreds of thousands of troops still deployed, the VA already provides disability payments to nearly 200,000 veterans from the current conflicts, a number that is expected to balloon during the next 30 years.
The unanticipated crush of claims is exacerbated by the VA’s antiquated compensation system, which hasn’t been overhauled since 1945. Cumbersome and heavily bureaucratic, the system requires a mountain of paperwork, is based on diagnoses that lag far behind medical advances and runs on a computer system that is so outdated it can’t accurately verify whether veterans were deployed.
The problems have led to a backlog at of least 500,000 claims – some veterans groups say it’s as high as 1 million – that threatens the well-being of veterans with ailments ranging from brain injuries and back problems to cancers and mental disorders.
[…] Among the findings from the Tribune’s analysis of more than 3 million disability claims approved by the VA:
– By the end of 2009, more than 3 million veterans were receiving compensation, a 24 percent increase since 2003. The total costs, meanwhile, grew from $19.5 billion to more than $34 billion, a 76 percent increase.
– The psychological toll of war now accounts for more than a third of the $24 billion spent last year compensating veterans from the Vietnam, Persian Gulf and "global war on terror" eras, more than any other category. Yet studies have shown that the current system is ill-equipped to handle claims related to post-traumatic stress disorder and other conditions, adding to delays and forcing veterans into the even lengthier appeals process.
– The unpredictability of war has led to devastating illnesses that cost U.S. taxpayers billions every year. By the end of last year, more than 300,000 Vietnam-era veterans were receiving nearly $2 billion in disability payments for illnesses associated with Agent Orange and other dioxin-laden herbicides used to defoliate jungles and destroy enemy crops during the war. Those costs are expected to increase by billions of dollars as the VA expands the list of illnesses associated with the chemicals.
The result is that some who have "borne the battle" die before their claims are processed while others are shortchanged by a system that wasn’t built to deal with wounds veterans face today.
[…]
6) Costs soar for compensating veterans with mental disorders
PTSD and other psychological disorders are becoming a costly consequence of wartime service
Tim Jones and Jason Grotto, Chicago Tribune, 7:33 PM CDT, April 12, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-met-veterans-mental-illness-20100412,0,2457126.story
Corey Gibson’s right leg bounces when he sits. At 29 he sleeps fitfully, with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle mounted above his bed. "That’s my sense of security," he says.
Laurie Emmer, a 47-year-old mother of four, shuns crowds and strangers. She always sits facing the restaurant door when she goes out to eat and, before sitting down, makes sure to identify the quickest route out.
And Eric Johnson, 62, who revisits Vietnam nearly every night in his head, escapes the demons who rob him of sleep by patrolling the streets of his South Side neighborhood with his yellow Labrador retriever, Che.
The veterans come from different generations and different wars, yet they share a common and increasingly costly wartime affliction – post-traumatic stress disorder and other forms of psychological damage. Last year, mental illnesses accounted for 35 percent of the $22 billion spent on disability payments to veterans who served in the Vietnam, Persian Gulf and "global war on terror" eras, according to a Tribune analysis.
Compensating veterans with psychological scars has helped fuel a 76 percent surge in service-related disability costs since 2003, the Tribune found, burdening an already overwhelmed system and underscoring the reality that the biggest costs of war are not often immediate or visible.
Studies suggest costs will continue to soar. The percentage of military evacuations from Iraq and Afghanistan that were attributed to mental disorders has increased sharply in the last four years, a recent Defense Department study shows. Another survey of about 100,000 Afghanistan and Iraq veterans found that 31 percent had been diagnosed with mental health or psychosocial problems.
"When you look at the epidemic of PTSD, you see the future," said Harvard University’s Linda Bilmes, co-author of the 2008 book "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."
The Tribune’s analysis of claim records from the Department of Veterans Affairs found that vets’ psychological wounds are by far the most expensive type of disability. Compensating wartime veterans since Vietnam for PTSD and other mental conditions is four to five times costlier than the average for all disability categories, the Tribune found. Victims of PTSD also are more likely to suffer other serious and costly health problems than other disabled veterans. In short, they are sicker.
[…]
Kyrgyzstan
7) Off Base
The US use of Kyrgyzstan as a military staging ground has caused it to turn a blind eye to conflict
Stephen Kinzer, Boston Globe, April 13, 2010
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/04/13/off_base
Despite its rugged Alpine splendor, or perhaps because of it, Kyrgyzstan is one of the world’s least-known countries. So there has been much puzzlement over the recent explosion of violent pro-democracy protest there, which forced President Kurmanbek Bakiyev to flee the capital and has apparently ended his rule.
Yet this outburst was eminently predictable. Kyrgyzstan has a better chance of moving toward democracy than any other country in Central Asia, but it is caught up in big-power rivalries and remains in the grip of authoritarian traditions of the Soviet era. Not coincidentally, it is also a reluctant host to an air base that the United States uses to supply its troops in Afghanistan.
How did Kyrgyzstan fall into the abyss of instability? Part of the answer lies in the American policy of arming, training, and financing Islamic radicals in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet insurgency of the 1980s. Veterans of that insurgency fanned out into nearby countries, including Kyrgyzstan, determined to impose fundamentalist rule like the kind the Taliban brought to Afghanistan. Kyrgyz authorities responded with brutal tactics that stigmatized all practicing Muslims as potential enemies. This repression, combined with the collapse of social services that people enjoyed during the Soviet era, pushed some Kygyz toward radicalism.
Kyrgyzstan, though, almost escaped the cycle of autocracy that has crippled Central Asia. After unexpectedly becoming independent following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it cast about for a national leader who could give this new nation an identity. The sentimental favorite was the novelist Chingiz Aitmatov, Central Asia’s pre-eminent intellectual and one of the few people who seemed to have a coherent idea of what Kyrgyzstan was or could be. He declined the honor, and recommended a little-known scientist and mathematician, Askar Akayev, who was duly elected and served two terms as president.
I met President Akayev in 1999 as his second term, the last allowed to him by law, was ending. My main question was whether he would step down voluntarily – something that would make him unique in Central Asian history – or adjust laws to keep himself in power. He didn’t answer directly, but told me that the 2000 elections would be "fair and transparent." Soon afterward, he decided to rewrite the constitution and run for another term. His control of the electoral machinery assured his victory, and his government became more corrupt and repressive. It was overthrown in the "Tulip Revolution" of 2005, which brought Bakiyev to power. Bakiyev, however, proved no more responsive to public will than his predecessor. Now he has apparently paid for his misrule.
Because the United States was focused on its need for an airbase in Kyrgyzstan, it turned a blind eye to Bakiyev’s sins. Americans claimed to need the base in order to fight for democracy in Afghanistan, but to secure it, they had to support an undemocratic regime in Kyrgyzstan. This contradiction, which is inherent in any imperial project, naturally alienated Kyrgyz citizens who believe they too are entitled to live in freedom. The United States wound up looking like the enemy of groups supporting "American ideals," while propping up a regime based on principles it professes to detest. Bakiyev’s son, widely seen as one of his most loathsome henchmen, was in Washington last week for what were supposed to be friendly talks; anger over America’s willingness to receive him helped set off last week’s explosion.
The United States has seen Kyrgyzstan as a military staging ground, but it is something more: a nation struggling toward freedom. Democracy has a better chance in Kyrgyzstan than anywhere else in Central Asia. If the new regime manages to consolidate itself in the coming days, the United States should approach it with humility rather than more demands. If it does, Kyrgyzstan – not Afghanistan or Pakistan – might emerge as the region’s democratic leader. That would be the kind of victory for freedom that American leaders say they want to win in this deeply troubled region.
8) Jet Fuel Sales To U.S. Base Are An Issue In Kyrgyzstan
Andrew E. Kramer, New York Times, April 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/world/asia/12manas.html
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan – Back in 2005, the last time angry crowds toppled the government of Kyrgyzstan, the United States found itself in an awkward position: among the rallying cries was an allegation that the ruling family had benefited handsomely from Pentagon contracts. Now, substantially the same thing appears to be happening again.
Senior leaders in the interim government that took power last week are accusing the United States of allowing family members of the ousted president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, to enrich themselves with contracts supplying jet fuel to Manas Air Base outside Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital.
Companies controlled by the president’s 32-year-old son, Maksim, who became a loathed figure during the uprising, skimmed as much as $8 million a month from fuel sales to the base, according to senior leaders in the new government, relying on a monopoly and favorable taxes.
That such accusations became a factor in last week’s uprising speaks to the entrenched cronyism of former Soviet states, where power often blends seamlessly with wealth.
[…] While establishing offices and mulling what to do with the president, who is in the south of the country, officials have already begun releasing details of an elaborate payment system for up to a quarter million gallons of jet fuel used at the base each day.
They accuse the United States of having used that system to curry favor with the ousted president in order to hold onto the air base, the only remaining Amerian military refueling site in Central Asia after Uzbekistan closed a base in a dispute with the United States over human rights.
"Whatever the Pentagon’s policy of buying warlords in Afghanistan, the state of Kyrgyzstan demands more respect," Edil Baisalov, chief of staff of the interim leader, Roza Otunbayeva, said in an interview. "The government of Kyrgyzstan will not be bought and sold. We are above that."
Officials with the military agency that buys fuel, the Defense Energy Supply Corporation, have said no United States laws would be violated if contracts were awarded to companies owned by relatives of a foreign heads of state.
[…] In the haste of the buildup for the war in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, companies controlled by Aidar Akayev, son of Askar Akayev, who was then the president, had wound up with lucrative contracts to sell fuel to Manas, according to Kyrgyz officials. A lawyer for Mr. Akayev’s son has also said the contracts were not illegal.
Nonetheless, when President Akayev was deposed in 2005, the prosecutor’s office under the new leader, Mr. Bakiyev, opened a criminal investigation, asked for F.B.I. cooperation and hired an independent corporate investigations company to untangle the arrangement.
According to a report prepared by that investigator, who asked not to be identified, as he was not authorized to disclose the report, the primary source of aviation grade kerosene used at the base is an oil refinery in the Siberian city of Omsk, owned by the oil division of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant.
Red Star, a company with offices in London and Bishkek, contracted with Defense Energy Supply to buy the fuel and move it across several Central Asian countries to Manas. Chuck Squires, a former American Army lieutenant colonel, was hired to handle the contract.
The outside investigator met with Mr. Bakiyev to present the initial findings, and characterized his responses as: "Thank you very much for your job. Your services are no longer needed." The investigator said he suspected the new president was in fact taking over the same business model.
"They changed the names of the companies but the scheme remained the same," he said.
[…] Alikbek Jekshenkulov, who was serving as Mr. Bakiyev’s foreign minister at the time, said the ruling family consolidated its control of the trade in 2006, after Mr. Bakiyev issued the first of several public threats to expel the base. The threat, he said, was used to compel the transfer of the remaining fuel contracts to the Bakiyev-family-controlled firms.
[…]
Afghanistan
9) Marines Try Unorthodox Tactics To Disrupt Afghan Opium Harvest
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post, Tuesday, April 13, 2010; A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/12/AR2010041204176.html
Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan – U.S. Marines are mounting an intensive effort to disrupt the opium harvest in the former Taliban enclave of Marja by confiscating tools from migrant workers, compensating poppy farmers who plow under their fields and collaborating with Drug Enforcement Administration personnel to raid collection sites.
The steps amount to one of the most novel U.S. attempts to crack down on a key part of Afghanistan’s drug trade while seeking to minimize the impact on individual farmers, many of them poor sharecroppers who face economic peril if they cannot harvest or sell their crops.
The plan to pay farmers, who will receive $120 for each acre of tilled fields, prompted a tense debate among Marine officials and civilian reconstruction personnel, some of whom argued that it provides preferential treatment to those in Marja who planted an illegal crop.
But the Marines’ program eventually won the approval of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. In a March 30 cable to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, she called the effort "the best decision in the face of an array of less-than-perfect options."
[…] The Marines expect to spend about $12 million on the initiative, which will be paid for with funds from the Defense Department’s Commander’s Emergency Response Program. As of Sunday, 730 farmers had signed up, a Marine official said. Payments will be made only after U.S. or Afghan security forces verify that the land has been plowed.
[…]
Pakistan
10) U.N. Says 200,000 People Have Fled Northwest
Sebastian Abbot, Associated Press, Monday, April 12, 2010; 8:06 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/12/AR2010041200889.html
Islamabad – More than 200,000 people have fled Pakistan’s latest offensive against Taliban militants in the northwest, the United Nations said Monday, as fresh clashes in the remote region killed 41 insurgents and six soldiers.
Elsewhere in the northwest, a suspected U.S. missile killed five alleged militants in a house in North Waziristan, the latest in a series of strikes in the region, Pakistani officials said. North Waziristan is home to al-Qaida and Taliban commanders, many of whom play a role in the insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan.
The military has pounded the Orakzai tribal region with airstrikes and artillery in an attempt to rout insurgents from the rugged, mountainous area near the Afghan border. Many Taliban fighters fled to Orakzai last year to escape a separate army offensive in their tribal stronghold of South Waziristan.
The exodus of civilians from Orakzai adds to the more than 1.3 million people driven from their homes by fighting in the northwest and unable to return.
The U.N. warned Monday it faces a severe shortfall in funding needed to aid those displaced, saying it has only received about $106 million, or 20 percent, of the $538 million appeal it launched in February for the next six months. Last year, the U.N. had received 40 percent of its appeal by this time, it said.
Martin Mogwanja, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Pakistan, said some aid groups providing water, food, health care and sanitation for the displaced were having to scale down their activities.
[…] Pakistan received significant international attention last spring when more than 1 million people fled a military offensive in the Swat valley. Most of those people have returned home, but the number of displaced in the country has remained high as the military has targeted other areas.
Almost 210,000 people have fled Orakzai since the fighting first started at the end of last year, including nearly 50,000 people who left in the last month as the military has intensified its offensive in the area, said the U.N.
[…]
11) Pakistani airstrike kills many civilians: official
Riaz Khan and Chris Brummitt, Associated Press, Tuesday, April 13, 2010; 1:31 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/13/AR2010041300757.html
Peshawar, Pakistan – Dilla Baz Khan was pulling a woman from the rubble of an air raid when Pakistani jets screamed back into the valley for a second bombing run, killing scores of people in a village locals say had been supportive of army offensives against militants along the Afghan border.
Khan and other survivors said Tuesday at least 68 villagers were killed in the weekend airstrikes, sharply contradicting initial army accounts that the dead were Islamist militants. A local administration official said $125,000 had been paid in compensation to victims.
The official declined to say how many of the dead were civilians but said Shafiullah Khan, the top official in Khyber, apologized to local tribesman and admitted the victims were "mostly" innocent villagers.
The accounts point to one of the most serious incidents of civilian casualties inflicted by Pakistan’s military in the border region in recent years. The carnage is likely to hurt efforts to get the backing of local tribesman for offensives against insurgents behind bloody bombings in Pakistan, as well as attacks on international troops in neighboring Afghanistan.
Elsewhere in the northwest, a village elder claimed 13 civilians were killed in the latest U.S. missile strike there, contesting accounts by Pakistani security officials that four militants died in the attack in North Waziristan on Monday night.
[…]
Colombia
12) Research group disputes Santos ‘false positives’ claim
Cameron Sumpter, Colombia Reports, Friday, 09 April 2010 16:01
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/9081-research-group-disputes-santos-false-positive-claim.html
The Research Center for Popular Education and the Program for Peace (CINEP/PP) is disputing claims by presidential candidate Juan Manuel Santos that the "false positives" scandal, over the army’s murder of civilians, who were then reported as guerrillas killed in action, has been over for more than a year, according to Colectivo de Abogados.
Santos told media in March that the "issue of false positives was gone," and that "there has not been a single false positive case since October 2008."
CINEP/PP said in a report that there were in fact nine known cases of false positives between October 2008 and December 31 2009, seven of which were extraducial killings, while two involved arbitrary arrests.
The report did state, however, that there had certainly been a decrease in false positives cases since October 2008, and that the measures taken by the Ministry of Defense had contributed to the decline.
[…]
–
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
Just Foreign Policy is a membership organization devoted to reforming US foreign policy so it reflects the values and interests of the majority of Americans.