Watching the Warmakers is based in Brighton, England.
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which confront those struggling for peace and justice.

News archives for the week ending 1st May 2009

US interest in African gas

"But our interests and concern in Africa reach far beyond ethnicity and national origin and are based on our fundamental interests in promoting peace and stability, democratic rule and good governance and sustained economic growth across the continent – the absence of which invariably impacts the United States.

We also see Africa as a major trading partner, especially in the area of hydrocarbons. Fifteen percent of America's oil comes from Africa and the continent supplies the majority of the liquefied natural gas consumed by the eastern United States. Africa's economic potential is vast and its importance as a trading partner will continue to grow."

Ambassador Johnnie Carson, nominee for United States Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, in front of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 29, 2009

Attacks on rise in both Afghanistan and Pakistan...

Terrorist attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan have risen sharply as extremists have consolidated and expanded operations, according to the government and independent analysts.

On Thursday, the State Department's annual assessment of worldwide terrorism is expected to show that terrorist attacks in Pakistan alone more than quadrupled between 2006 and 2008, according to a U.S. official briefed on its findings. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because Congress is still being notified of the findings.

Last year's "Country Reports on Terrorism" from the State Department found that attacks in Pakistan had more than doubled from 375 to 887 between 2006 and 2007, and the number of fatalities jumped by almost 300 percent from 335 to 1,335.

Terror attacks also were up in Afghanistan, according to the new report. Last year's State terrorism report found the number of attacks rose 16 percent in Afghanistan, to 1,127 incidents in 2007, killing 1,966 people, 56 percent more than the 1,257 who died in 2006.

Associated Press, 30/4/09

...and Afghan surge may push problem into Pakistan

Pakistan has voiced concern that US reinforcements in Afghanistan's south could push Taliban insurgents and refugees over its porous border, a US general said on Wednesday.

The commandant of the US Marine Corps, General James Conway, said Pakistan's military chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, conveyed his worry about a planned push by the US military in southern Afghanistan in a recent meeting.

"He expressed concern that our forces going into the south could cause a refugee problem that Pakistan is ill-equipped to handle right now, based on their fiscal scenario, and the possibility that we could be forcing Taliban out of the south and onto supply lines that the Pakistani forces are currently trying to protect for us," Conway told reporters.

AFP, 29/4/09

'Exciting investment opportunity' in Iraq...

War-torn Iraq represents the most exciting investment opportunity since the Asian tiger economies in the 1970s, according to an adviser to the Iraqi Government, who warned that British companies and investors were in danger of missing out.

Sir Claude Hankes said that Iraq would turn out to be “the economic dynamo for the entire Gulf region” because of its large and growing population, educated middle class and industrious trading culture.

Sir Claude is advising the state-owned Trade Bank of Iraq, which he said was attempting to raise a $250 million (£170 million) fund to invest in local Iraqi businesses. TBI, which was set up soon after American tanks rolled into Iraq in 2003, reported a 41 per cent increase in net profits to $359 million on Wednesday with total assets up 64 per cent to $10 billion.

“You think it's all chaos,” Sir Claude said. “But the fact is that if you go to Baghdad, which I have done many times, life goes on quite normally.”

The Times, 30/4/09

...despite chaos in the streets of Baghdad

April was the bloodiest month Baghdad has seen in more than a year, but President Barack Obama said that while recent bombings are "a legitimate cause for concern, civilian deaths ... remain very low compared to what was going on last year."

The worst of Wednesday's explosions took place in Sadr City, a sprawling Shiite Muslim slum in east Baghdad. Three bombs hidden in parked cars detonated in quick succession along a busy commercial street around 5 p.m., an official with Iraq's interior ministry said.At least 43 people were killed and 68 injured. Authorities said they expect the death toll to rise.

"It was chaos in the streets," said one witness, Wissam Hassan.

Kansas City Star, 29/4/09

Britain to expand special forces...

Britain's special forces are to be boosted to prepare the country for long wars of insurgency under plans being drawn up in a "major rebalancing" of the military for operations abroad.

The Defence Secretary, John Hutton, will today outline the new strategy which is being drawn up with the Americans to prepare for years of commitment in Afghanistan and the expectation of other similar conflicts.

SAS units are already being moved from Iraq to join the SBS in Afghanistan as part of a US led surge. This followed a specific request from the Americans who have been working closely with UK special forces in the two conflicts.

Independent, 27/4/09

...and spend $20 billion on Trident

Britain must not abandon its independent nuclear deterrent in the face of the current financial and economic crisis, Defence Secretary John Hutton warned yesterday.

Ministers have faced calls to scrap the £20 billion update of the Trident nuclear deterrent after Chancellor Alistair Darling revealed the dire state of the public finances in the Budget. But in a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research, Mr Hutton, the MP for Barrow where nuclear submarines are built, said the deterrent was likely to be "vital" to national security for decades, and it would be "reckless" to get rid of it now.

The Scotsman, 28/4/09

Arms trade shows sharp rise

THE arms trade has expanded by more than 20 per cent worldwide in the past five years, and the Middle East and Asian countries account for most of the increase, according to figures published yesterday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

The US was by far the largest arms supplier, accounting for 31 per cent of weapons exports over the past five years, with more than a third going to the Middle East. The US also supplied 40 per cent of Pakistan's conventional weapons systems.

The five biggest suppliers of conventional arms were the US, Russia, Germany, France and Britain. Britain's biggest markets for its arms were the US and India, which is receiving 66 Hawk-100 trainer aircraft and 20 Jaguar-S fighter aircraft. Delivery of 72 Eurofighter Typhoon combat aircraft to Saudi Arabia is due to begin this year.

According to British Government figures, in the last quarter of last year £1.4 million ($2.8 million) worth of arms exports to Sri Lanka, mainly components for communications equipment, were approved. This compared with less than £1 million for the whole of 2007.

Sydney Morning Herald, 28/4/09

Pakistan attack threatens peace deal

Pakistan’s military operation which killed 70 militants in the last three days has weakened a peace accord in the northwest, a spokesman for a pro-Taliban group said.

“The peace accord has weakened and is shaky,” Rizwanullah Farooq, a spokesman for Tehrik-e-Nifaaz Shariat Muhammadi, said by telephone from Swat Valley today. “If it breaks, there will be a storm in the whole country,” The group suspended peace talks with the government yesterday to protest an assault by troops that forced local residents to flee the area.

President Barack Obama, who has made tackling extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan the central focus of U.S. foreign policy, is pressing the government in Islamabad to crack down on militants. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week accused nuclear-armed Pakistan of “abdicating” to the Taliban and said the deterioration of security in the country poses a “mortal threat” to the safety of the U.S. and the world.

Bloomberg, 28/4/09

Marines fight 'information war' in Afghanistan

Britain’s Royal Marines won the information war in Afghanistan during their recent deployment, by employing a new methodology. This was carried out by a combination combat and intelligence outfit, the Information Exploitation (IE) Group.

Instead of concentrating on just human intelligence or electronic information gathering, the IE Group gathered, processed, and acted on information gathered through any available means in order to trick and defeat Taliban fighters.

The formation combined unmanned UAVs, reconnaissance patrols, local security forces, and electronic warfare specialists to collect and develop a large picture of enemy dispositions in the province.

The British realize that combat is only half the battle in Afghanistan. The other half is information, without which the enemy cannot be found or fixed. By establishing a compact unit that can gather intelligence, process intelligence, work with the local security forces, jam the Taliban’s communications, and engage in proactive and continuing offensives, the brigade's effectiveness is enhanced.

Strategy Page, 27/4/09

EU welcomes narrow victory for Tadic in Serbia

While opposing Kosovan independence, Mr Tadic does not want bitterness about losing the province to get in the way of boosting Serbian prosperity from within the EU fold. The man he defeated by a mere 100,000 votes, the ultranationalist Tomislav Nikolic, was in favour of turning to Russia and away from the EU in protest at its planned recognition of Kosovo.

"We will continue working with Serbia and we'd like Serbia to get as close as possible as rapidly as possible toward the European road," said Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, after Mr Tadic's victory.

Analysts in Kosovo agree that Mr Tadic's re-election is good news, because of the much-needed stability in the region ahead of the expected proclamation of independence. The province has been run by the United Nations and patrolled by Nato since 1999 in response to ethnic cleansing.

Yesterday the EU formally agreed to send a joint action force of 1,800 police and justice officials to Kosovo, without setting a date for deployment. Although parts of the EU force are in place in Pristina, full deployment will take several weeks.

Independent, 27/4/09

US raid was breach of Iraq security pact...

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Sunday that a US raid in which a policeman and a woman were shot dead was a "breach" of a landmark security pact signed with Washington in November.

His remarks, delivered on state-run TV, came after the ministry of defence detained two Iraqi army commanders and accused them of allowing the raid to go ahead on Shiite militants in southern Iraq without the government's knowledge.

Maliki condemned the killing of the two people and demanded that the US military hand over those responsible to be tried in court.

IC Publications, 26/4/09

...as US suggests there could be a delay in some withdrawals...

The United States and Iraq will begin negotiating possible exceptions to the June 30 deadline for withdrawing American combat troops from Iraqi cities, focusing on the troubled northern city of Mosul, according to military officials. Some parts of Baghdad also will still have combat troops

“Mosul is the one area where you may see U.S. combat forces operating in the city” after June 30, the United States military’s top spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. David Perkins, said in an interview.

In Baghdad, however, there are no plans to close the Camp Victory base complex, consisting of five bases housing more than 20,000 soldiers, many of them combat troops. Although Victory is only a 15 minute drive from the center of Baghdad and sprawls over both sides of the city’s boundary, Iraqi officials say they have agreed to consider it outside the city.

In addition, Forward Operating Base Falcon, which can hold 5,000 combat troops, will also remain after June 30. It is just within Baghdad’s southern city limits. Again, Iraqi officials have classified it as effectively outside Baghdad, so no exception to the agreement needs to be granted, in their view.

New York Times, 26/4/09

...and Iraq disagrees

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has said the recent wave of attacks in the country were isolated incidents which did not threaten overall security improvement, and would not delay the withdrawal of American forces.

Mr Maliki said the upsurge in violence had had no effect on the timetable for the withdrawal of US forces.

"No, no, it hasn't changed it at all," he said. "As we agreed at the beginning when we signed the withdrawal agreement, these deadlines are final and absolute and not open to postponement."

BBC News, 27/4/09

US looks to advance the power of military in Pakistan

Events in Pakistan and Afghanistan are already overtaking the Obama administration's month-old strategy for the two countries, and it needs to be modified even before it's been implemented, U.S. officials and experts said this week.

As Islamic militants continue their advance in Pakistan and press their attacks on overstretched U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, many U.S. officials fear that the administration is running out of time to defeat what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week called a "mortal threat" to the world. Failure in either place, these officials argue, would guarantee failure in the other.

"We need a fundamental change of approach," David Kilcullen, who advised the administration on its Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, told the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee Thursday.

Some officials favor reaching out to Zardari's main opponent, Nawaz Sharif, but others have little faith in him, either. Mullen and some other top officers argue that working with the Pakistani chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, is America's best option.

"There are no other useful alternatives here," said one defense official.

Miami Herald, 24/4/09

Killings aim to inflame Sunni - Shiite tensions in Iraq

A deadly outburst of violence appears to be overwhelming Iraq’s police and military forces as American troops hand over greater control of cities across the country to them. On Friday, twin suicide bombings killed at least 60 people outside Baghdad’s most revered Shiite shrine, pushing the death toll in one 24-hour period to nearly 150.

The latest bombings — there have been at least 18 major attacks so far this month — so far have not prompted retaliatory attacks, but they have strained what remains a fragile society deeply divided between Sunnis and Shiites.

Nearly half of those killed were Iranians making a pilgrimage to the shrine, a golden-domed landmark in the predominantly Shiite Kadhimiya neighborhood of Baghdad that is devoted to 2 of the 12 imams of Shiite Islam. At least 125 people were wounded, many of them also Iranians.

A loose coalition of Sunni militant forces, the Islamic State of Iraq, has claimed responsibility for carrying out many of the recent attacks.

New York Times, 24/4/09

Iraq bombings threaten Afghan escalation

A raft of sensational attacks in Iraq is raising new questions about President Obama's plans to draw down troops in Iraq so he can send more to Afghanistan. On Friday, two female suicide bombers blew themselves up near the gates of a Shiite Muslim shrine in Baghdad, killing 60 people. The attack followed two suicide bombs Thursday that killed more than 80 people.

Gen. David Petraeus, formerly the top US commander in Iraq and who now oversees both the wars there and in Afghanistan, warned lawmakers Friday that despite "substantial progress" in Iraq there remain lingering concerns. Al Qaeda in Iraq, as well as other groups, continue to pose a threat, he said.

"Numerous challenges still confront its leaders and its people," General Petraeus told a House panel. He said an Al Qaeda network that provides foreign fighters from Tunisia through Syria to Iraq has been "reactivated." Four of the most recent suicides were carried out by Tunisians, he said.

While the Iraq withdrawal and the Afghanistan surge won't necessarily occur simultaneously, much of the deployment to Afghanistan is predicated on the draw down plan for Iraq. If Al Qaeda were to reemerge and pose a substantive challenge to Iraqi and US forces, Mr. Obama might have to reassess his thinking.

Christian Science Monitor, 24/4/09

Government's 'underhand and despicable' treatment of Gurkas

They had, for generations, shown courage and sacrifice, fighting for Britain in countless wars. But yesterday the Gurkhas said they had been repaid by the Government with contempt and betrayal.

There had been an expectation among the warriors from Nepal and their many supporters that, after a landmark ruling by the High Court last year, those previously barred from settling in Britain because they had left the Army before 1997 would now be able to do so.

Instead, new laws unfurled by the Immigration minister Phil Woolas yesterday mean that, according to government estimates, only about 4,300 more Gurkhas out of 36,000 will be allowed to move to the UK, while campaigners argue that the rules may in reality benefit only 100 men.

The severe restriction in the numbers, said critics, flew in the face of the court judgment. Furthermore, it was achieved, they alleged, by "underhand and despicable" means. The Gurkhas were being asked to reach criteria for residency qualification which it was simply impossible for them to meet.

Independent, 25/4/09

Iraq bombs kill more than 80

Two large suicide bombings Thursday renewed fears among Iraqis that Sunni insurgents are regaining strength and lethality as the U.S. military has started disassembling its massive wartime architecture.

The blasts, which killed more than 80 people in the bloodiest day here this year, came after Sunni insurgent groups warned that they would step up attacks against U.S. troops and Iraq's Shiite-led government, which is backed by the United States.

Washington Post, 24/4/09

Pakistan military stays on the sidelines

As the Taliban tightened their hold over newly won territory, Pakistani politicians and American officials on Thursday sharply questioned the government’s willingness to deal with the insurgents and the Pakistani military’s decision to remain on the sidelines.

Some 400 to 500 insurgents consolidated control of their new prize, a strategic district called Buner, just 70 miles from the capital, Islamabad, setting up checkpoints and negotiating a truce similar to the one that allowed the Taliban to impose Islamic law in the neighboring Swat Valley.

Yet Pakistani authorities deployed just several hundred poorly paid and equipped constabulary forces to Buner, who were repelled in a clash with the insurgents, leaving one police officer dead.

The limited response set off fresh scrutiny of Pakistan’s military, a force with 500,000 soldiers and a similar number of reservists. The army receives $1 billion in American military aid each year but has repeatedly declined to confront the Taliban-led insurgency, even as it has bled out of Pakistan’s self-governed tribal areas into Pakistan proper in recent months.

The military remains fixated on training and deploying its soldiers to fight the country’s archenemy, India. It remains ill equipped for counterinsurgency, analysts say, and top officers are deeply reluctant to be pressed into action against insurgents who enjoy family, ethnic and religious ties with many Pakistanis.

New York Times, 23/4/09

Soldiers to fill civilian posts in Afghanistan

The Obama administration is having trouble finding the hundreds of civilians it wants to bolster its troop buildup in Afghanistan, so military reservists might be asked to do many of the jobs.

In announcing its new strategy for the war last month, the administration said it would send several hundred civilians — such as agronomists, economists and legal experts — to work on reconstruction and development issues as part of the military's counterinsurgency campaign.

But there's a lack of quickly available workers with the right skills, and Defense Department press secretary Geoff Morrell said Thursday that the military is trying to find ways to fill the gap.

Associated Press, 23/4/09

More than 100,000 dead in Iraq since invasion

Iraq's government has recorded 87,215 of its citizens killed since 2005 in violence ranging from catastrophic bombings to execution-style slayings, according to government statistics obtained by The Associated Press that break open one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war.

Combined with tallies based on hospital sources and media reports since the beginning of the war and an in-depth review of available evidence by The Associated Press, the figures show that more than 110,600 Iraqis have died in violence since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

The number is a minimum count of violent deaths. The official who provided the data to the AP, on condition of anonymity because of its sensitivity, estimated the actual number of deaths at 10 to 20 percent higher because of thousands who are still missing and civilians who were buried in the chaos of war without official records.

The data obtained by the AP measure only violent deaths — people killed in attacks such as the shootings, bombings, mortar attacks and beheadings that have ravaged Iraq. It excluded indirect factors such as damage to infrastructure, health care and stress that caused thousands more to die.

Associated Press, 23/4/09