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News archives for the week ending 11th June 2010

A long and unpopular war

On the day the war in Afghanistan became America’s longest, public discontent with the conflict inched to a new high in ABC News/Washington Post polling.

Considering its costs vs. its benefits, 53 percent of Americans say the war in Afghanistan has not been worth fighting – not significantly different from before, but numerically a high. Forty-four percent say the war has been worth it, matching the low since we started asking this question in 2007.

Support for the war is down from 56 percent shortly after President Obama announced his Afghanistan policy in March 2009, and down from vast approval – as high as 94 percent – at its start in fall 2001.

The public, at the same time, divides nearly evenly on whether the United States is winning or losing the war in Afghanistan, 42 percent to 39 percent.

ABC News, 7/6/10

Cameron: Afghanistan top foreign policy priority

British Prime Minister David Cameron on Thursday made his first visit to Afghanistan since taking office, saying the war there was his top foreign policy priority but that British troops should not stay "a day longer than is necessary."

Cameron's unannounced trip came a day after U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus declared that defeating the Taliban could not be accomplished without Britain's participation. Petraeus and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates were in London this week to shore up Britain's commitment to the war in the face of public opposition and the new government's vow to cut spending.

Cameron ruled out any troop increases as "not remotely on the U.K. agenda." After the U.S., the British have the largest deployment in Afghanistan, consisting of about 10,000 military personnel. But as troops continue to come home in coffins, many here are questioning Britain's involvement and demanding withdrawal as quickly as possible.

More than 290 British troops have been killed in Afghanistan since U.S.-led forces invaded in 2001 after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., according to icasualties.org, a website that tracks U.S. and NATO military deaths in Afghanistan.

Los Angeles Times, 11/6/10

Maliki says Iraq needs him as leader

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, struggling for his political future in a snarled, months-long contest to form a new government here, warned Wednesday that failure to return him to power would lead to Iraq’s descent into the violence and sectarian strife that dominated the country when he took over in 2006.

At times confident and joking, occasionally combative, Mr. Maliki said in an interview that he would resist efforts to curtail his authority if he did return. Only a strong leader, he insisted, could navigate the challenges ahead for a country bracing for an American military withdrawal and still beset by the remnants of an insurgency.

Mr. Maliki’s remarks were defiant, even stubborn, and underlined one of the seminal issues in the crisis that followed Iraq’s landmark parliamentary elections in March and in the prolonged negotiations that have ensued to form the next government: in a country with a history of dictatorship, what power will the prime minister wield?

New York Times, 9/6/10

Britain plays 'irreplaceable' role in US wars

The security relationship between the United States and Britain is closer than at any time since World War II, the head of the U.S. Central Command said Wednesday.

Gen. David Petraeus was speaking at a conference here at the Royal United Services Institute, where he said Britain has played an "irreplaceable" role in Iraq, and a similar role in Afghanistan.

"It's clear that, as was the case in Iraq, the scale of the British contribution in Afghanistan is such that the coalition cannot succeed without you," Petraeus told the British audience.

The alliance between the United States and Britain formed the "core" of the coalition in Iraq from the beginning, he said. The cooperation included the British SAS, or special forces, which were "fully integrated" into U.S. special operations teams, Petraeus said.

CNN, 9/6/10

Israel trains PKK in Iraq

The director of a Turkish think tank says Israel trains the armed men with the anti-Ankara militant group, Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in northern Iraq.

The head of the International Strategic Research Organization, Sedat Laciner, said the Israeli Spy Agency's (Mossad) operatives and the Israeli military's retirees had been sighted providing training to PKK militants in Iraq's Kurdistan, Turkey-based English-language newspaper Today's Zaman said on Sunday.

The Turkish academic held that PKK's major operations in big cities bear the hallmark of Israel and said, "These terrorist were trained by Israeli intelligence officers on how to best penetrate cities."

Laciner said Tel Aviv does not have a positive perception of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party — led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan — and thus tries to paint a radical picture of it. "The PKK is a mere contractor for Israel to serve that purpose," he explained.

Press TV, Iran, 8/06/10

UK entered war 'with eyes shut and fingers crossed'

They went into Helmand with their eyes shut and fingers crossed. That is how Major-General Andrew Mackay views Britain’s decision to send little more than 3,000 troops to southern Afghanistan four years ago.

He is not alone. A succession of military and civilian officials, interviewed by The Times, indicated that warnings about under-resourcing and over-ambition were made lower down the chain of command during the planning process, but were not considered sufficient for a significant rethink by the top brass.

The charge sheet includes institutional arrogance and an overkeeness to deploy to Helmand to compensate for a troubled campaign in Iraq. In addition, there is evidence of another British intelligence failure, this time an underestimation of the threat rather than the overestimation that was made on weapons of mass destruction before the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

The Times, 9/6/10

UK to deport child asylum seekers to Afghanistan

The UK Border Agency is to set up a £4m "reintegration centre" in Afghanistan so that it can start deporting unaccompanied child asylum seekers to Kabul from Britain.

The terms of the official tender for the centre show that immigration officials initially hope to forcibly return 12 boys a month aged under 18 to Afghanistan and provide "reintegration assistance" for 120 adults a month.

Home Office figures show there are more than 4,200 unaccompanied child asylum seekers in Britain, with most being supported in local authority social services homes. Those from Afghanistan are the largest group. Of the 400 minors claiming asylum in the first three months of this year, almost half were Afghans.

A decision to start deporting Afghan child asylum seekers who arrive in Britain alone would amount to a major shift in policy. Up until now, child protection issues and an undertaking that failed child asylum seekers would be returned only if adequate reception and care arrangements were in place for them on arrival have blocked returns.

The Refugee Council said ministers should urgently review the plans to start removing unaccompanied minors to countries that are not safe. Its chief executive, Donna Covey, said: "There has been little said about how these children would be kept safe … if they have no family to whom they can be returned safely, should they be returned at all?"

Guardian 8/6/10

NATO's worst day for seven months

Insurgents killed 12 NATO soldiers on Monday, 7 of them Americans, military officials said. It was the worst single day for the foreign forces operating in Afghanistan in over seven months.

The deaths came in six separate attacks in the south and east of the country, according to statements from the International Security Assistance Force, as the NATO force in Afghanistan is known.

In addition, a civilian American security guard was killed Monday, along with another guard whose nationality was not immediately clear, in a suicide attack on the police training center in the southern city of Kandahar.

New York Times, 7/6/10

Gates confident of UK's Afghan role

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday that Washington would not be asking Britain to pledge more troops for Afghanistan and voiced confidence the new government in London was committed to the war.

Last month, Gates' British counterpart Liam Fox told the Times of London newspaper that the Prime Minister David Cameron's government, which took power last month, hoped to speed up the process of withdrawal from Afghanistan. He was quoted in the paper saying Britain was "not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country."

But Gates told reporters traveling on his plane en route to Britain that he believed, based on conversations with Fox, that Cameron's government was "quite resolute with respect to Afghanistan."

Reuters, 7/6/10

America's longest war

After 104 months of combat, Afghanistan has now passed Vietnam as America’s longest war.

Fox News, 7/6/10

Turkey's growing independence worries US

The image Turkey has long had in the West is as a secular friend of Israel and the United States. But in recent days, public anger has flared over Israel's bloody seizure of a Turkish-flagged aid ship headed to the Gaza Strip, which is under an Israeli blockade. The incident occurred as Turkey has been strengthening ties with Muslim governments in the region -- becoming more vocally pro-Palestinian and trying to head off new U.N. sanctions on Iran.

That has prompted worried speculation at home and abroad: Is Turkey turning away from the West? Turkey's Islamic-oriented government says no. And some analysts say the question is too simplistic. With a growing economy and self-assured leaders, this NATO member is emerging as a regional power with a more independent foreign policy, they say.

"They want to be the big kid on the block," said Henri Barkey, a Turkey expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "They have essentially a very inflated sense of their own importance."

Washington Post, 7/6/10

American missiles used in Yemen raid

American missiles were used in a raid against al-Qaeda militants in Yemen in which women and children died in December, rights group Amnesty International says.

Amnesty has released images taken after the raid that it says show remnants of a US-made Tomahawk cruise missile. Cluster bombs were also apparently used in the attack, which Amnesty described as "grossly irresponsible".

The US has said its troops gave support for the raid, in Abyan province. But Yemeni officials have denied any US involvement.

BBC News, 7/6/10

New Japanese PM affirms US alliance

Japan's new prime minister, Naoto Kan, told President Barack Obama that the alliance with the U.S. will remain the linchpin of Tokyo's foreign policy in a call Sunday that took place while the premier was shaping his cabinet.

Two days after Yukio Hatoyama stepped down as leader following his botched effort to relocate a controversial U.S. base in Okinawa, Mr. Kan pledged to solve the issue in accordance with a recent bilateral agreement that led to his predecessor's departure.

In a call the U.S. requested, Messrs. Kan and Obama reaffirmed the importance of the security alliance between their nations and agreed to work in lockstep to solve issues facing both, such as the tensions in Iran and North Korea, the Japanese foreign ministry said. The White House said the two leaders "agreed to work very closely together."

Wall Street Journal, 7/6/10

North Korean attack a fake?

On 20 May, South Korea announced it had "overwhelming evidence" that a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine sank one of its warships, the Cheonan, in March with the loss of 46 sailors.

The US keeps 28,000 troops in South Korea, where the public has long supported détente with Pyongyang. On 26 May, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, flew to Seoul and demanded that the "international community must respond" to "North Korea's outrage".

The "overwhelming evidence" is a propeller that "had been corroding at least for several months", reported the Korea Times. In April, the director of South Korea's national intelligence, Won Se-hoon, told a parliamentary committee that there was no evidence linking the sinking of the Cheonan to North Korea. The defence minister agreed. And the head of South Korea's military marine operations said, "No North Korean warships have been detected [in] the waters where the accident took place." The reference to an "accident" suggests the warship struck a reef and broke in two.

To the American media, North Korea's guilt is beyond doubt, just as North Vietnam's guilt was beyond doubt, just as Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, just as Israel can terrorise with impunity.

John Pilger, New Statesman, 3/6/10

Warlords building strength in Afghanistan with US cash

The most powerful man in this arid stretch of southern Afghanistan is not the provincial governor, nor the police chief, nor even the commander of the Afghan Army. It is Matiullah Khan, the head of a private army that earns millions of dollars guarding NATO supply convoys and fights Taliban insurgents alongside American Special Forces.

In little more than two years, Mr. Matiullah, an illiterate former highway patrol commander, has grown stronger than the government of Oruzgan Province, not only supplanting its role in providing security but usurping its other functions, his rivals say, like appointing public employees and doling out government largess. His fighters run missions with American Special Forces officers, and when Afghan officials have confronted him, he has either rebuffed them or had them removed.

Mr. Matiullah is one of several semiofficial warlords who have emerged across Afghanistan in recent months, as American and NATO officers try to bolster — and sometimes even supplant — ineffective regular Afghan forces in their battle against the Taliban insurgency.

In some cases, these strongmen have restored order, though at the price of undermining the very institutions Americans are seeking to build: government structures like police forces and provincial administrations that one day are supposed to be strong enough to allow the Americans and other troops to leave.

New York Times, 5/6/10

British troops have to stay in Afghanistan

British troops have to stay in Afghanistan to prevent it from becoming a failed state and breeding ground for terrorism, newly appointed Defence Secretary Liam Fox said Saturday.

"In the first week that I was appointed defence secretary, my first visits were to the injured troops who have come back from Afghanistan, and the question that I asked myself was, looking at the human cost of conflict, should we be there? And my answer was, unequivocally, still yes," he said.

"We could not afford to allow Afghanistan once again to become a failed state, a security vacuum into which might be drawn the forces of transnational terrorism which were unleashed on us in the past," he added.

A total of 290 British troops have been killed since operations in Afghanistan began in October 2001. Of these, at least 255 were killed as a result of hostile action.

AFP, 5/6/10

Obama secretly deploys US special forces to 75 countries across world

President Obama has secretly sanctioned a huge increase in the number of US special forces carrying out search-and-destroy missions against al-Qaeda around the world, with American troops now operating in 75 countries.

The dramatic expansion in the use of special forces, which in their global span go far beyond the covert missions authorised by George Bush, reflects how aggressively the President is pursuing al-Qaeda behind his public rhetoric of global engagement and diplomacy.

When Mr Obama took office US special forces were operating in fewer than 60 countries. In the past 18 months he has ordered a big expansion in Yemen and the Horn of Africa — known areas of strong al-Qaeda activity — and elsewhere in the Middle East, central Asia and Africa.

According to The Washington Post, Mr Obama has also approved pre-emptive special forces strikes to disrupt terror plots, and has given the units powers and authority that was not granted by Mr Bush when he occupied the White House.

It also emerged yesterday that Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, has ordered the Pentagon to find savings of more than $100 billion (£68 billion) over the next five years to redistribute more funds for combat forces — including special operations units. The effort to provide more money for combat forces in Afghanistan and Iraq — including special operations units — is likely to lead to a clash with Congress, and also with the defence industry if favoured equipment programmes are scrapped.

The aggressive secret war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups has coincided with a surge in the number of US drone attacks in the lawless border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, an al-Qaeda and Taleban haven, since Mr Obama took office. Just weeks after he entered the White House, the number of missile strikes from the CIA-operated unmanned drones significantly increased, and the pattern has remained. In Iraq, US forces have killed 34 out of the top 42 al-Qaeda operatives in the past 90 days alone.

Mr Obama has asked for a 5.7 per cent increase in the Special Operations budget for the 2011 fiscal year — a total of $6.3 billion — on top of an additional $3.5 billion he requested this year.

Of about 13,000 US special forces deployed overseas, about 9,000 are evenly divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A report last week revealed that the top US commander in the Middle East had signed an order last September authorising a big expansion of clandestine military missions in the region, and also in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Somalia.

The order also allowed for US special forces to enter Iran to gather intelligence for a possible future military strike if tensions over its alleged nuclear weapons programme escalate dramatically.

The seven-page document states that the surge is designed to build networks that could “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” al-Qaeda and other militant groups, and to “prepare the environment” for future military strikes by US and local forces.

Times, 5/6/10

Pakistan to increase defense spending by 17 percent

Pakistan will increase defense spending by 17 percent in the 2010/11 fiscal year as the U.S. ally intensifies its battle against Taliban insurgents operating from their enclaves on the border with Afghanistan.

Defense spending is set to rise to 442.2 billion rupees ($5.17 billion) for the 2010/11 fiscal year beginning on July 1, compared with 378.13 billion rupees allocated in 2009/10.

Pakistani forces have mounted a series of offensives in the volatile northwest over the past year, killing hundreds of militants and capturing many of their bases. However, militants have retaliated with a wave of bomb and suicide attacks throughout the country, including its heartland, Punjab, killing hundreds of people.

Pakistan raises its defense spending every year because of its historically uneasy relations with India. Relations between the nuclear-armed rivals, which have fought three full-scale wars since 1947, went into a freeze after Pakistan-based militants attacked the Indian city of Mumbai in 2008. However, security analysts say much of the increase in the defense budget would be spent on the fight against Islamist militants.

Pakistan, a vital ally for the United States as it struggles to stabilize Afghanistan and end the global threat posed by al Qaeda and its allies, has been heavily burdened by the cost of battling Taliban insurgents along its Afghan border.

The United States has given Pakistan more than $15 billion in direct and military reimbursements since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. About two-thirds of it is security related.

Reuters, 5/6/10

Politician killed in Iraq

Attackers dressed in military uniforms on Saturday gunned down a politician aligned with the secular coalition that won the most seats in Iraq’s elections in March.

He was the second candidate from the bloc to be killed in northern Iraq since the vote. The politician, Faris Jassim al-Jabbouri, belonged to Iraqiya, the electoral list led by Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite politician, that won an exceedingly narrow victory over a coalition loyal to the country’s prime minister.

Though Mr. Jabbouri, a retired colonel and pilot, ran unsuccessfully, his allies in Iraqiya still described the killing as a politically motivated crime, involving as many as 20 gunmen hunting for Mr. Jabbouri in his hometown, about 15 miles from Mosul.

Last month, Bashar Mohammed Hamid, a 35-year-old Sunni mill owner who had won a seat, was assassinated while holding a meeting at his office in Mosul.

Political killings have become almost common, especially in the troubled region around Mosul in northern Iraq. Some politicians, though, worry that the long deadlock over a new government that has followed the election may worsen the strife, tempting some groups to deploy violence as another means of leverage in stalled negotiations.

New York Times, 5/6/10