"Confess or be ready to die": UN Report Pummels US Ally Afghanistan on Torture

The UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) has released its October 2011 report on "Treatment of Conflict-Related Detainees in Afghanistan" (PDF). Ten years after the US invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime, and ostensibly dismantle the Al Qaeda forces linked to the 9/11 attacks, the regime in place is not only hopelessly corrupt and unable to provide security for its citizens, Afghan security forces in the National Security Directorate (NDS) have been charged by UNAMA with "systematically" torturing "detainees for the purpose of obtaining confessions and information" at a number of provincial facilities.

The report alleges that fully 46 percent of prisoners held by security forces, and approximately one-third held by Afghan national police (ANP), are tortured. Furthermore, "[n]early all detainees tortured by NDS officials reported the abuse took place during interrogations and was aimed at obtaining a confession or information." Until last month, the U.S. routinely turned prisoners over to Afghan security forces, while NATO stopped turning over prisoners to a number of different Afghan facilities last July.

Controversies over allied forces releasing prisoners to Afghan security, where they reliably knew they would be tortured, have simmered for years now. As Marcy Wheeler highlighted in an article on the UN report today, according to UNAMA, "The US has not yet put in place a monitoring programme to track detainees it hands over to Afghan authorities."

Turning prisoners over to forces or governments that are known to commit gross human rights violations, such as torture or murder of detainees, is a violation of international law, and of the US-signed Convention Against Torture treaty.

Torture of Children

Ten percent of the prisoners examined were minors. Nearly two-thirds of the children held by the NDS and ANP (62 percent) were tortured.

UNAMA's report was statistically derived from a random sampling. Issues of possible falsification of torture evidence is addressed in the report, and the evidence was found to be credible. (Actually, the Executive Summary says the allegations have not been judged on their credibility. But the Methodology section of the report states, "In a number of cases, UNAMA interviewers observed injuries, marks and scars that appeared to be consistent with torture and ill‐treatment or bandages and medical treatment for such injuries as well as instruments of torture described by detainees such as rubber hoses." The report adds that "UNAMA rigorously analysed patterns of allegations in the aggregate and at specific facilities which permitted conclusions to be drawn about abusive practices at specific facilities and suggested fabricated accounts were uncommon..."

UNAMA statisticians calculated the margin of error for the different samples they used ranged from approximately 5 to 9 percent.

Torture for Confessions

A major conclusion from the report is that much of the torture was specifically aimed at obtaining confessions from prisoners during torture. UNAMA notes, "Confessions are rarely examined at trial and rarely challenged by the judge or defence counsel as having been coerced." Hence, there's very little to constrict government prosecutors in using torture to get their confessions, and confessions are "[i]n most cases... the sole form of evidence or corroboration submitted to courts to support prosecutions." There are few procedural safeguards for defendant prisoners, and what few there are are routinely ignored.

The following is testimony from one prisoner cited specifically in the report, Detainee 371 at Kandahar, interviewed last May:

After two days [in a National Directorate of Security (NDS) facility in Kandahar] they transferred me to NDS headquarters [in Kandahar]. I spent one night on their veranda. On the following day, an official called me to their interrogation room. He asked if I knew the name of his office. I said it was “Khad” [Dari term for the former NDS]. “You should confess what you have done in the past as Taliban; even stones confess here,” he said. He kept insisting that I confess for the first two days. I did not confess. After two days he tied my hands on my back and start beating me with an electric wire. He also used his hands to beat me. He used his hands to beat me on my back and used electric wire to beat me on my legs and hands. I did not confess even though he was beating me very hard. During the night on the same day, another official came and interrogated me. He said “Confess or be ready to die. I will kill you.” I asked him to bring evidence against me instead of threatening to kill me. He again brought the electric wire and beat me hard on my hands. The interrogation and beating lasted for three to four hours in the night. The NDS officials abused me two more times. They asked me if I knew any Taliban commander in Kandahar. I said I did not know. During the last interrogation, they forced me to sign a paper. I did not know what they had written. They did not allow me to read it.

According to the report, forms of torture included "routine blindfolding and hooding [i.e., sensory deprivation] and denial of access to medical care," in addition to "suspension (being hung by the wrists from chains or other devices attached to the wall, ceiling, iron bars or other fixtures for lengthy periods) and beatings, especially with rubber hoses, electric cables or wires or wooden sticks and most frequently on the soles of the feet. Electric shock, twisting and wrenching of detainees’ genitals, stress positions including forced standing, removal of toenails and threatened sexual abuse..."

Alibiing the Afghan Government

Strangely, after describing the "systematic" use of torture by Afghan security and police forces, UNAMA declares the Afghan government innocent of use of torture as government policy. The report cites the fact that the NDS cooperated with the investigation, concluding "the use of torture is not a de facto institutional policy directed or ordered by the highest levels of NDS leadership or the Government. This together with the fact that NDS cooperated with UNAMA’s detention observation programme suggests that reform is both possible and desired by elements within the NDS."

This is a surprising assertion, and of course, the international press has highlighted this supposed reassurance about the Afghan government in its coverage of the report's conclusions. The cooperation of the NDS appears to have been equivocal at best. For one thing, as the report concedes, the NDS refused to allow UNAMA to visit its national counter-terrorism facility in Kabul, or interview prisoners there. Known as Department 90, it is where "high-value" prisoners are held. Information on Department 90 prisoners was gathered from those held elsewhere who previously had been held at the NDS Kabul facility.

Twenty-six of 28 prisoners who were determined to have been held at Department 90 were tortured, leading to a near 100 percent probability of being tortured there. One prisoner told UNAMA investigators, "When they took me to [Department] 90, I did not know where I had been taken. . . After two days, I learned that I was in 90 from my cellmates. There is so much beating at 90 that people call it Hell." Five of the six children interviewed who had been held at Department 90 were tortured.

The Afghan government has long promised they would clean up their act regarding abuse of prisoners, and US agencies have covered up for them in the past. A 2006 RAND study, prepared for George Soros's Open Society Institute, that torture and extrajudicial killings were in decline by Afghan authorities, and that US assistance had "somewhat improved" human rights practices by Afghan police. (RAND has a very stringent warning about quoting its material, or even providing links, but here's the link the New York Times gave in its article on the UNAMA report.)

One can only conclude that the US government has been more than supportive of the torture policies within Afghanistan, only withdrawing funds when it was politically expedient to do so. Most of the stories on the UNAMA report have noted UNAMA's mention of the so-called "Leahy law." According to UNAMA, "legal provisions in the US Foreign Appropriations Act and Defence Appropriations Act prohibit the US from providing funding, weapons or training to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible evidence that such unit has committed gross human rights violations, unless the Secretary of State determines the concerned government is taking effective remedial measures" (emphasis added).

None of the press results and analysis thus far has noted this escape from accountability clause, wherein the Secretary of State can decide a foreign government -- say, Afghanistan -- which has committed "gross human rights violations," is sincerely doing the best it can to address the issue. Indeed, parts of the UNAMA report appear to be written to allow just such an interpretation by the Obama/Clinton-led State Department.

So while the Americans and their allies in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have as of last month, "in response to the findings in this report, "stopped transferring detainees to certain installations as a precautionary measure," the report also notes that a return to the previous transfer policy "would presumably require the US to resume transfer of detainees only when the Government of Afghanistan implements appropriate remedial measures that include bringing to justice NDS and ANP officials responsible for torture and ill‐treatment."

But this doesn't speak to the funding or arming of the Afghan security and police forces. Indeed, by indicating that portions of the government, including the NDS, are sympathetic and trying to change the abuse/torture situation, it would appear that ammunition is being provided to Secretary Clinton to conclude that a good faith effort is being made, and bypass the provisions of the Leahy Law. This would seem to be the point in concluding the torture is not "institutional," and that "reform is both possible and desired by elements within the NDS."

But anyone reading this report could hardly come to this politically convenient conclusion. In fact, senior NDS officials admitted "they have investigated only two claims of torture in recent years, neither of which led to charges being pursued against the accused NDS official." Nor would NDS officials "provide UNAMA with any information on any other disciplinary or criminal action against NDS officials for torture and abuse." This doesn't sound like desired elements for reform to me.

Ten years after US and foreign forces invaded Afghanistan and installed a puppet regime, all the while jockeying for alliances among various warlord forces, has not improved the human rights situation in Afghanistan. Surely the Taliban and the various warlords cannot be counted upon to provide such improvement either. But there is one big difference. The Taliban are not foreign invaders. While such foreign invaders occupy the country, killing civilians and giving political and military support to a torture regime, no progress from within Afghanistan can take place.

Originally posted at FDL's The Dissenter

Land of Perpetual War: US Troop Levels in Afghanistan to Double from Last Year

According to a report by Paul Tait of Reuters, published at Truthout.org, U.S. forces in Afghanistan have expanded to near double the level of last year, with plans to expand to 68,000 troops or more by December, up from 32,000 at the end of 2008. Currently, with both U.S. and other allied troops, there are over 100,000 soldiers facing what is reported to be a more "aggressive" and "brazen" Taliban force.

Forty-one U.S. troops died in Afghanistan in the past month; 71 allied troops overall. The article gave no figures for Afghan deaths.

Commander of U.S. forces, U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal -- formerly head of Special Forces for the Pentagon, during a time when Special Operations units were implicated in torture in Iraq -- "said the resurgent Taliban have forced a change of tactics on foreign forces and warned that record casualty figures would remain high for some months" (emphasis added). No one asks why the Taliban should be stronger now, almost eight years after 9/11 -- well, no one in the mainstream U.S. press.

The war in Afghanistan continues to escalate, even as no one is really sure what the war is about anymore, or what endgame is envisioned. But things are getting clearer and clearer to Afghans themselves. Here's some testimony from Malalai Joya, from Afghanistan, published in the Guardian UK (H/T Chris Floyd):

In 2005, I was the youngest person elected to the new Afghan parliament. Women like me, running for office, were held up as an example of how the war in Afghanistan had liberated women. But this democracy was a facade, and the so-called liberation a big lie....

Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.

You must understand that the government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban. Many of these men committed terrible crimes against the Afghan people during the civil war of the 1990s.

For expressing my views I have been expelled from my seat in parliament, and I have survived numerous assassination attempts. The fact that I was kicked out of office while brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their crimes should tell you all you need to know about the "democracy" backed by Nato troops....

So far, Obama has pursued the same policy as Bush in Afghanistan. Sending more troops and expanding the war into Pakistan will only add fuel to the fire.... Today the situation of women is as bad as ever. Victims of abuse and rape find no justice because the judiciary is dominated by fundamentalists....

This week, US vice-president Joe Biden asserted that "more loss of life [is] inevitable" in Afghanistan, and that the ongoing occupation is in the "national interests" of both the US and the UK.

I have a different message to the people of Britain. I don't believe it is in your interests to see more young people sent off to war, and to have more of your taxpayers' money going to fund an occupation that keeps a gang of corrupt warlords and drug lords in power in Kabul.

Author Tariq Ali reports in the London Review of Books (again, H/T Chris Floyd):

This is now Obama’s war. He campaigned to send more troops into Afghanistan and to extend the war, if necessary, into Pakistan. These pledges are now being fulfilled. On the day he publicly expressed his sadness at the death of a young Iranian woman caught up in the repression in Tehran, US drones killed 60 people in Pakistan. The dead included women and children, whom even the BBC would find it difficult to describe as ‘militants’. Their names mean nothing to the world; their images will not be seen on TV networks. Their deaths are in a ‘good cause’....

In May this year, Graham Fuller, a former CIA station chief in Kabul, published an assessment of the crisis in the region in the Huffington Post. Ignored by the White House.... not only did Fuller say that Obama was ‘pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush’ and that military force would not win the day, he also explained... that the Taliban are all ethnic Pashtuns, that the Pashtuns ‘are among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalised and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader’ and ‘in the end probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist’. ‘It is a fantasy,’ he said, ‘to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.’ And I don’t imagine he is the only retired CIA man to refer back to the days when Cambodia was invaded ‘to save Vietnam’....

You don't have to be a genius to see the Democrats, led by Barack Obama, sauntering down the same path as Jack Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson -- or Richard Nixon, for that matter -- and blundering into Asian war, led by the nose by the war profiteers, by the military brass and intelligence agencies that stand to get tons of money and promotions fighting the wars of their generation, oblivious that this grasping after money and glory could have some social cost. Just ask the generals of the former Red Army, or the Wehrmacht, for that matter, about the price of such empire-building, going all the way back to Ipsus and Marathon.

What's worst is the paralysis of much of the liberal left, who cannot bring themselves to call up the old antiwar chants hauled out previously in the early Bush years. Over time, the antiwar movement became subordinated to electing Democrats, and forgot how to do anything else. Now the Democrats are in power and they are pushing the war, and what's a good antiwar progressive to do but grit his or her teeth and hope things will change.

Well, that's bullshit, and if those who call themselves progressive can't bestir themselves to see they must oppose this militarist, imperialist aggression, whose legacy is only death, hatred, and more cycles of violence and war, then they deserve their ignominious fate, which is irrelevancy and a slow descent into reactionary politics, or exit from politics altogether.

Update:
The following information adds corroboration to what I am saying in the diary, and comments not only on the war cost issue, but puts into perspective the military strategy pursued by the U.S. in this new, more deadly phase of fighting in Afghanistan. Jim Maceda, who has reported from Afghanistan since 2001, had this to say, reporting from NBC news (emphasis added, H/T chrississippi in Daily Kos comments):

But [McChrystal's] plan to put troops into heavily populated areas isn't a new strategy. Thousands of Canadian forces have been doing just that for several years in Kandahar, trying to "separate the enemy from the people," with little success.

What is new (that word again) is the commitment of large numbers of U.S. forces to reinforce those Canadian units in the South.

U.S. military experts, quoted in Sunday's Washington Post, said that these security and political commitments will last at least a decade and potentially cost the U.S. more than the war in Iraq.

Mir agreed with the time line. "It could take another decade," he said, "to convince the Taliban that fighting is useless."

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PHR: US Silent About Destruction of Mass Graves in Afghanistan

From a 12/11/08 story by Tom Lasseter at McClatchy Newspapers on the destruction of evidence of war crimes by a major U.S. ally in Afghanistan:

DASHT-E LEILI, Afghanistan — Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who'd surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime.

When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum's headquarters, they were filled with corpses. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum's militiamen had fired into the metal containers.

Dostum's men dumped around 2000 corpses into mass graves. Someone came by with bulldozers earlier this year and moved many of these corpses to some other site unknown, leaving "gaping pits in the sands of the Dasht-e-Leili desert" where once mass graves had been. Lasseter continues:

NATO — which has command authority over a team of troops less than three miles from the grave site — the United Nations and the United States have been silent about the destruction of evidence of Dostum's alleged war crimes.

Why the silence? Lasseter says there is speculation that Dostum, an ally of the U.S., who worked with Special Forces and the CIA during the time of the prisoner killings, is getting a "free pass" from Washington. U.S. government sources plead ignorance, while some at the UN admit they've turned to look the other way. A UN spokesperson explained:

"It's a judgment call we constantly strive to get right, and this is not the only instance where the choices we have to make can be extraordinarily tough ones."

Physicians for Human Rights' International Forensic examined the site for the UN in 2002. No one has directly implicated U.S. forces in the original deaths, but Special Forces units were certainly operating in the area. From the 2002 Newsweek article, "The Death Convoy of Afghanistan":

Over the three days that the first convoys of dead were arriving at Sheberghan, Special Forces troops were in the area. There was also a separate, four-man U.S. intelligence team, in combat gear, at the prison doing first selections of Qaeda suspects for further questioning. According to Pelton, a swashbuckling freelancer who specializes in writing about dangerous places, Special Forces soldiers were mainly concerned about security at the prison. At the same time the containers of dead were arriving, many truckloads of living prisoners were also streaming in: On the evening of Dec. 1, for instance, a container arrived bearing the 86 survivors from Qala Jangi. One of them was John Walker Lindh. It was the 595 team's medic, Bill, who first treated Lindh. Pelton believed at the time, and still does, that the dead from container trucks numbered "40-some odd" and were mostly people who died of wounds suffered in the siege of Konduz. "When I was with 595, we went over this time and again," says Pelton. "What happened is that these people basically died because they were wounded." A senior Defense Department official, speaking to NEWSWEEK on background, said the Pentagon asked the commander of the Fifth Special Forces Group to look into the reports of container deaths. That commander, Col. John Mulholland, reported back that the A-team knew that numbers, perhaps even large numbers, of Taliban prisoners had died on the journey to Sheberghan. But the Special Forces believed that these deaths had occurred from wounds or disease.

PHR is asking NATO to use their forces to help Afghan forces in protecting the mass grave site, so that no more evidence is destroyed, and to assist U.S., UN, and Afghan investigators. They have a web page dedicated to the the Dasht-e-Leili War Crimes Investigation.

While I can't believe that NATO or U.S. forces will work strenuously to investigate war atrocities, especially as atrocities continue in the U.S.-backed military occupation of the country, and put zero faith in either NATO or the U.S.'s ability to conduct such an impartial investigation. One wonders if the silence of the actors who knew about these crimes, and of their cover-up, are not guilty as a result of war crimes themselves, i.e., covering up a war crime is a war crime.

While critical of PHR on this point, I can totally solidarize with their CEO Frank Donaghue's statement on the situation last Monday:

As PHR knows from our work in Bosnia, Rwanda, Central America and elsewhere, communities that have lost loved ones in mass killings — especially the mothers, siblings, and children of victims — have a right to the truth and to justice, including identification and return of remains. The demands of mothers and families demonstrating in the streets of Kabul over the last few days show that the Afghan people are demanding that those who have committed mass atrocities be held accountable. Peace and stability require truth and justice; it never pays to ignore mass graves and the atrocities associated with them.

An international investigatory commission, independent of any government, and staffed by human rights representatives and other trusted citizens, including what representatives from the victims' families, in all the countries involved, perhaps sponsored by the UN or the ICC, should be formed to prosecute these kinds of cases, as the governments involved are too compromised. In the meantime, the work of PHR's forensic department, and the organization as a whole, deserves your support.

Fox News & Oliver North Involved with U.S. Afghanistan Massacre Cover-up

The UK TimesOnline has posted a video of the aftermath of the killings of dozens of villagers in the Afghan village of Nawabad (called Azizabad in other stories). The U.S. has maintained that seven civilians and three dozen Taliban militants were killed in the combined U.S. Special Forces/Afghan Army/U.S. air operation last August 21. The United Nations and local villagers insist that 92 civilians were killed, over half of them children. According to the article:

In the video scores of bodies are seen laid out in a building that villagers say is used as a mosque; the people were killed apparently during a combined operation by US special forces and Afghan army commandos in western Afghanistan. The film was shot on a mobile phone by an Afghan doctor who arrived the next morning.

Local people say that US forces bombed preparations for a memorial ceremony for a tribal leader. Residential compounds were levelled by US attack helicopters, armed drones and a cannon-armed C130 Spectre gunship.

Besides the UN, the villagers' account is backed up by investigations from an Afghanistan government delegation and what the Times calls Afghanistan's "leading human rights organisation."

Now, NATO command is backing off the official story, noting that there is a "discrepancy" in death toll figures, and expressing the usual "heartfelt sorrow." But , as the Times reports, a new report by Human Rights Watch says that under reporting of civilian deaths in Afghanistan is out of control. (The report criticizes both U.S./NATO and Taliban forces.)

Taking what it says are the most conservative figures available, Human Rights Watch has calculated that civilian deaths as a result of Western airstrikes tripled between 2006 and 2007 to 321. In the first seven months of this year the figure was 119. In the same period, 367 civilian deaths were attributed to Taleban attacks. It accuses US officials of routinely denying reports of civilian deaths.

Perhaps the most amazing political news surrounding the Nawabad massacre is that the Pentagon says it relied for its account, in part, on corroborative evidence by the embedded journalist on the scene: Fox News "reporter" Oliver North! The Times portrays North as coming "to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair."

Actually, North was convicted for three felonies in regards to his activities during the Iran-Contra scandal. He only escaped a suspended prison sentence and $150,000 in fines because, as his Wikipedia bio describes it, an "appeals court found that witnesses in his trial might have been impermissibly affected by his immunized congressional testimony." North had been deputy director for political-military affairs for the National Security Council under Reagan, until the scandal brought his career to a halt.

North came into the public spotlight due to his participation in the Iran-Contra Affair, in which he was the chief coordinator of the sale of weapons via intermediaries to Iran, with the profits being channeled to the Contras in Nicaragua. He was responsible for the establishment of a covert network used for the purposes of aiding the Contras. U.S. funding of the Contras by appropriated funds spent by intelligence agencies had been prohibited by the Boland Amendment.

North's testimony in front of a congressional committee during the Iran-Contra hearings marked him as an unabashed apologist for covert operations and the projection of American power abroad, irregardless of the will of those in the countries subjected to U.S. intervention. Lying to Congress was justified, in his opinion, because he supported the anti-Sandinista "Contras", whom he labeled "freedom fighters." Since then, and after an unsuccessful foray into politics, he has made his living as a right-wing ideologue, writing books, and establishing himself as a right-wing television commentator.

It looks like North's service to his military masters has never ended. Looking at the video from the Times, which shows rows of dead bodies, including many children, we can only conclude that North has once again lied for the government. It's his specialty, and one shouldn't be surprised. However, North's participation in this U.S. military cover-up vividly calls into question the role of embedded "reporters" among the armed services.

The cover story on Nawabad/Azizabad included U.S. asssurances that the villagers were lying about the casualties. This from Chris Floyd's coverage:

What's more, the Pentagon then claimed that the reports of a wider slaughter were being faked by the villagers, at the behest of the Taliban. The American brass even accused the survivors of the attack of creating fake graves to fool the good-hearted U.S. military inspectors who, it was claimed, quickly visited the scene to ascertain the truth.

But Carlotta Gall is reporting at the New York Times:

Cellphone images seen by this reporter show at least 11 dead children, some apparently with blast and concussion injuries, among some 30 to 40 bodies laid out in the village mosque. Ten days after the airstrikes, villagers dug up the last victim from the rubble, a baby just a few months old. Their shock and grief is still palpable....

A visitor to the village and to three graveyards within its limits on Aug. 31 counted 42 freshly dug graves. Thirteen of the graves were so small they could hold only children; another 13 were marked with stones in the way that Afghans identify women’s graves.

If it takes this concerted of an international outcry to get the truth out of the U.S. government (and they're not admitting to anything on Nawabad yet), how many other instances of U.S. military action can even be believed? Is there anything this government even says or does that has credibility? I know that sounds severe, but that's the price power pays for mendacity and cover-up.

Hat-tip to Grand Moff Texan at Daily Kos for the TimesOnline article

New Report Warns "Afghanistan on the Brink"

Reuters has just posted a story that should make Americans stand up and take notice -- assuming they can bestir their self-interested torpor -- as the Senlis Council, a well-respected international think-tank, has released a report, "Stumbling into Chaos: Afghanistan on the Brink", which argues the situation in Afghanistan has reached "crisis proportions". This follows the revelations last month from a top British politician and former UN representative in the Balkans that the war in Afghanistan is "lost".

Canadian Television summed up the conclusions in the Senlis report this way (all emphases in quotes throughout are mine):

*** The Taliban are winning hearts and minds in southern Afghanistan; the international community is not. NATO-ISAF troops are forced to fight in an increasingly hostile environment because of the international community’s blunt political errors.
*** The absence of comprehensive development aid plans has given a strategic advantage to the Taliban.
*** Time for a well-planned village by village hearts and minds campaign to re-engage the Afghan population and make NATO’s mission a successful one.

What's that? A "hearts and minds" campaign to "re-engage" the population against the native opposition? Where have I heard that kind of language before?

Meanwhile, the Reuters article elaborates:

If NATO, the lead force operating in Afghanistan, is to have any impact against the insurgency, troop numbers will have to be doubled to at least 80,000, the report said.

Despite the alarms and the suggestions, the Taliban is likely to retake Kabul next year.

Senlis said its research had established that the Taliban, driven out of Afghanistan by the U.S. invasion in late 2001, had rebuilt a permanent presence in 54 percent of the country and was finding it easy to recruit new followers.

It was also increasingly using Iraq-style tactics, such as roadside and suicide bombs, to powerful effect, and had built a stable network of financial support, funding its operations with the proceeds from Afghanistan's booming opium trade.

"It is a sad indictment of the current state of Afghanistan that the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when," the report said.

Putting it all together, we can see that like its neighbor to the east, Pakistan, Afghanistan is headed for greater turbulence and a higher amount of Western intervention -- although perhaps we should drop the polite language and call "intervention" by its real name: invasion.

The "hearts and minds" language, when combined with the call to double troop presence, points to plans for a large-scale military counterinsurgency campaign, as in Vietnam... or in Iraq. Such a campaign cannot really win popular support in the target country, as a prominent international humanitarian representative explains:

David Curtis, head of mission for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Somalia, explains: “When military and humanitarian groups are doing similar work it is hard for people… to differentiate between them. Yet the objectives of the two are utterly dissimilar; humanitarian agencies aid the population without taking sides and based on need, while the US military serve their own political and military objectives alone. The two are incompatible.”

Why U.S./NATO Troops Must Withdraw from Afghanistan

The U.S. "war on terror" has always been a cover for imperialist maneuvering between Western nations, the drive to secure capital markets and natural resources, like gas and oil, and to beat out your opponents while doing it. For instance, despite their putative "alliance," the U.S., France, Germany, and the U.K. all have strong reasons to see the other nations of the group as competitors, particularly the U.S. and Germany.

The one thing that keeps them together is a lingering fear of Russia, and the political decision that the time has not yet come to split the alliance (as France almost did five years ago over Iraq). Well, I suppose there's also the profits, as a Daily Kos diarist noted the other day:

More than $20 billion in U.S. Government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan has gone to "... foreign companies whose identities – at least so far – are impossible to determine, according to a new study from the Center for Public Integrity.

The sufferings of the Afghan people has been immense. The Taliban are a truly awful political organization, one which will enslave much of the population in barbaric medieval religious laws and institutions. But the U.S. and its allies are incapable of "liberating" this country, as the predatory Iraq War has made clear to all Muslims in the region.

Only the complete defeat of the political leadership in the U.S. and Europe, and the institution of a new one, dedicated to punishing the militarists, politicians and businessmen, particularly those responsible for the illegal intervention into Iraq and the use of torture throughout the region, will begin the massive repair job needed to truly win the "hearts and minds" of impoverished and oppressed people around the globe. Such an overturn in leadership and political policy will not be without its reflection within the countries undergoing such change, and there will be both pain and sacrifice, and a feeling of liberation and a future free of fear.

For now, 2008 looks to be a year of further defeats on the battlefield for Bush and the neo-cons, followed by strained attempts to ratchet up the military machinery in the most explosive corner of the world. It is not too late to throw out this rancid bunch, but I fear the current political opposition is too subservient, too inured to a sterile electoralist platform, and too afraid, frankly, of necessary change, because too indebted to the large corporations that feed off the military machine, to lead as it should.

The conclusion will be messy, but as always in history, unforgiving, especially for those candidates and politicians that cannot embrace impeachment and immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan -- Withdrawal from Afghanistan?? you cry. Yes. NATO cannot save the anti-fundamentalist opposition in Afghanistan. They are ensuring a Taliban victory. They are irrevocably tainted by war crimes and torture. If a truly domestic opposition is to form and beat the Taliban and the warlords -- and I strongly oppose both Taliban and the vicious warlords and obscurantist mullahs -- then the U.S. and its allies must pull out.