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News archives for the week ending 13th February 2009

UK woos Indonesia, but supports Israel

The United Kingdom believes Indonesia can play a major role as an intermediary between Western countries and the Middle East, State Minister for the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office Bill Rammell said in Jakarta on Tuesday.

"We believe that Indonesia can play its part-by leveraging its influence with members of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) to convince them to show the same unity in diversity, the same tolerance and willingness to seek compromise that has delivered so much for your citizens over the past decade," Rammell told the Center for Dialogue and Cooperation among Civilizations.

But Rammell later faced difficulties in convincing the wary audience of his vision of Indonesia's role in conflict resolution and was met by a flurry of tough questioning regarding Britain's policy on Gaza and how exactly Indonesian "influence" would support peace agreeable to Palestinians.

Rammell said Indonesia is rightly supporting the Palestinian people as they are doing in the United kingdom and although the British government would like to recognize Hamas it would involve steps to be taken on the part of Hamas.

He also said that while the UK didn't support the force with which Israel responded to Hamas attacks during the war in Gaza, the UK was committed to maintaining an alliance with Israel.

Jakarta Post, 12/2/09

UK deploys advanced spy plane

Britain’s Royal Air Force has announced the official deployment of what it describes as “the most advanced long-range, airborne surveillance system of its kind in the world”. The aircraft-based system is called ASTOR (Airborne Stand-Off Radar) and is installed on Raytheon’s Sentinel R1 jets.

The ASTOR radar is reportedly so advanced that it can detect target movement over “thousands of square miles, looking deep into valleys, picking out well-used enemy routes and mapping vehicle activity”, and can even perform during bad weather at night. What is more, the twin-engine aircraft can do all that while flying up to 7.5 miles above ground level, thus staying clear of any engagement by most air-defense systems, including surface-to-air missiles.

Britain’s Defense Ministry has said the per-unit cost of this new system is around £200,000. It also revealed earlier this month that the radar-equipped jets were successfully tested in Afghanistan in November and December of 2008.

intelNews.org, 11/2/09

Kyrgyzstan base was won by bribery

The recent decision by President Kurmanbek Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan to close the U.S. military base in the small Central Asian country should come as no surprise to Washington's new foreign policy team. Since its establishment in the fall of 2001, the U.S. air base at Manas has been founded upon the granting of narrow economic incentives to the host country - and not on the Kyrgyz Republic's commitment to the broader international campaign in Afghanistan.

In 2001, the U.S. established the base, located just outside of the capital Bishkek, to support coalition operations in Afghanistan. American planners initially secured Kyrgyz cooperation by agreeing to pay the Manas Airport Authority, controlled by the then-president, Askar Akayev, and his inner circle of kleptocrats, international civil aviation rates for the daily take-offs and landings of military aircraft at the airport, an unusual fee structure for a standard operation.

Most importantly, between 2001 and 2005 the United States paid hundreds of millions of dollars for base-related service and fuel contracts to companies that were controlled by Akayev's family. None of these base-related revenues were accounted for by the Kyrgyz government or reported in national budgetary statistics, though they did line the pockets of the regime. A subsequent FBI investigation revealed that money from the contracts had ended up in offshore bank accounts controlled by the Akayevs.

At a time when USAID was officially funding good governance and transparency projects in the Central Asian country, U.S. payments associated with Manas were sinking down a black hole of patronage, insider dealings and corruption.

International Herald Tribune, 10/2/09

US asked to stop detaining journalists

A media watchdog group is urging President Barack Obama to end the U.S. military's practice of detaining journalists without charges, and has asked for a full investigation into killings of journalists by U.S. military forces.

Officials with the Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday the detention of journalists without trial by U.S. authorities in such countries as Iraq has emboldened other countries to do the same.

Paul Steiger, the group's chairman, announced he sent a letter to Obama's transition team last month. The letter said 14 journalists have been held without due process for long periods in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. He also said 16 journalists have been killed by U.S. fire in Iraq since 2003.

Associated Press, 10/2/09

US must deal with Kurdish issue

Despite the recent success of peaceful elections in Iraq, before the United States withdraws its troops the new administration will need to address the Iraqi Kurdish issue if it is to prevent the country regressing into violence.

The new administration will have to deal with the Kurdish problem, as it has the potential to cause considerable instability and violence in Iraq and beyond, as well as outside intervention, according to a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace titled "Preventing Conflict over Kurdistan."

Finding a solution to Kirkuk, establishing dialogue and cooperation between Turkey and the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq, and demobilizing the PKK should be Washington’s priorities, according to the report drafted by Dr. Henri Barkey.

The U.S. objective should be to preserve Iraq’s territorial integrity within the confines of a federal and democratic state, according to the report. "Iraqi territorial integrity is dependent on Iraq’s ability to integrate its Kurdish population into a successful federal framework. Unless a legitimate solution is formulated, Kirkuk stands ready to explode into interethnic conflict," said the report.

Hurriyet Daily News, Turkey, 11/2/09

Pakistan is key problem for US

A nearly completed U.S. military study is expected to say that nuclear-armed Pakistan, not Iraq, Afghanistan or Iran, is the most urgent foreign policy challenge facing President Barack Obama.

Pakistan - convulsed by a growing al-Qaida-backed insurgency, hamstrung by a ruinous economy and run by an unpopular government that's paralyzed by infighting and indecision - is critical to U.S. efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, thwart the spread of nuclear weapons and prevent tensions with neighboring India from escalating into a nuclear showdown.

The U.S. Central Command review is expected to recommend major changes in the U.S. approach to the volatile region, including major increases in U.S. aid to Pakistan in areas such as public education, health care and good governance, in a bid to stem the poverty and illiteracy that help fuel the country's Islamic insurgency.

Stepped up non-military aid also could ease popular anger at the government and its chief ally, the United States, which many Pakistanis accuse of stoking the insurgency by relying primarily on military offensives and missile strikes that have claimed numerous civilian lives, officials said.

Kansas City Star, 8/2/09

UK Defence Secretary calls for Afghan escalation

US President Barack Obama's envoy to Afghanistan has said that winning the conflict there will be "much tougher" than in Iraq.

Richard Holbrooke told a conference in Munich: "I have never seen anything like the mess we have inherited."

America has long been pushing its Nato allies to increase their troop numbers in Afghanistan and UK Defence Secretary John Hutton raised the need for "burden-sharing", without naming any particular nation.

"Combat forces, that is a most precious contribution right now to that campaign," he said. "We kid ourselves if we imagine that other contributions are as important."

BBC News, 8/2/09

Iraq parliament fails to elect speaker

Iraq's parliament remained deadlocked on the election of a new speaker on Sunday, just two days after US Vice President Joe Biden said Iraq needed to push ahead with political reform.

The failure is a blow to the fledgling democracy which without a speaker cannot debate or approve a new budget and oil laws deemed crucial to the reconstruction of the country.

Under Iraq's complex political rules, Sunni Arabs have the right to nominate the speaker but bitter infighting in the largest Sunnni Arab bloc, the National Concord Front, has seen them unable to agree on the best candidate.

Biden on Friday said that Washington would have to be "more aggressive" in prodding Iraq's government on forging political reform.

AFP, 8/2/09

Fraud claims in Iraq elections...

Iraqi politicians backed by the radical anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Saturday said they would lodge an official complaint about votes being excluded during last weekend's provincial elections.

Allies of Sadr said that preliminary results declared by election authorities were markedly different from estimates compiled by the party's observers during the hotly-contested vote.

Separately, another political party alleged late Friday that there had been fraud in southern provinces during special voting -- for police officers, soldiers, hospital patients and convicts -- ahead of the main poll.

"There are important violations in Maysan," Ibrahim al-Sumaidaie, secretary general of the recently established Constitutional Party told AFP. "Eighteen thousand voters cast their ballots in the special vote, but the commission destroyed six thousand ballots, half of them for the Constitutional Party," he said.

"International observers and the United Nations pulled out of the polling stations after the announcement of preliminary results of the election on Thursday, which resulted in this manipulation."

AFP, 7/2/09

...as Maliki acclaimed victor

Preliminary results from Iraq's provincial elections show big wins for the bloc headed by the prime minister, Nouri Maliki. His coalition won victories in Baghdad and Basra, and emerged as the largest group across the mainly Shia provinces of southern Iraq.

The other major city, Mosul, saw a strong result for a Sunni faction which boycotted the last elections.

The preliminary results, which are subject to appeal and review, confirmed what many anecdotal and unofficial accounts had already claimed, that the State of Law Coalition, headed by the prime minister, has come out very strongly in Shia and mixed areas.

BBC News, 5/2/09

France and Germany skirt Afghanistan question

NATO's top official chastised Germany and France for refusing to commit more troops to Afghanistan, but the two European powers skirted the issue Saturday even while agreeing that Washington should not be left to fight international conflicts alone.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel supported the general concept of more European military backing of the U.S. through NATO, but did not address U.S. calls for additional European deployments in Afghanistan.

Germany has argued that its military is already too stretched to send troops beyond the 4,500 maximum it has committed to the relatively calm north of Afghanistan. About 3,500 are now there. Instead, it says the focus should be on civil reconstruction in conjunction with military security.

The French parliament voted in September to keep 3,300 French troops in the Afghan theater, but has no current plans to increase the French contingent. French President Nicholas Sarkozy argued for a Europe more ready to defend itself instead of relying on others, but also managed not to touch on the Afghan troops issue.

But NATO's exasperated secretary general, Jaap De Hoop Scheffer, said if Europe wants a greater voice, it needs to do more.

"The Obama administration has already done a lot of what Europeans have asked for including announcing the closure of Guantanamo and a serious focus on climate change," he said. "Europe should also listen; When the United States asks for a serious partner, it does not just want advice, it wants and deserves someone to share the heavy lifting."

Associated Press, 7/2/09

900 civilians dead after US planned raid in Uganda

The American military helped plan and pay for a recent attack on a notorious Ugandan rebel group, but the offensive went awry, scattering fighters who carried out a wave of massacres as they fled, killing as many as 900 civilians.

The operation was led by Uganda and aimed to crush the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group that had been hiding out in a Congolese national park, rebuffing efforts to sign a peace treaty. But the rebel leaders escaped, breaking their fighters into small groups that continue to ransack town after town in northeastern Congo, hacking, burning, shooting and clubbing to death anyone in their way.

The United States has been training Ugandan troops in counterterrorism for several years, but its role in the operation has not been widely known. It is the first time the United States has helped plan such a specific military offensive with Uganda, according to senior American military officials.

No American forces ever got involved in the ground fighting in this isolated, rugged corner of Congo, but human rights advocates and villagers here complain that the Ugandans and the Congolese troops who carried out the operation did little or nothing to protect nearby villages, despite a history of rebel reprisals against civilians.

American officials conceded that the operation did not go as well as intended, and that villagers had been left exposed.

New York Times, 6/2/09

Record suicides among US troops

As many as 24 U.S. soldiers may have taken their own lives in January, the Army announced Thursday, more than were killed in combat last month.

Military officials said that seven suicides had been confirmed and another 17 possible suicides were under investigation, CNN reported. A total of 16 soldiers died in combat during the month in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

"This is terrifying," one official said. "We do not know what is going on."

Last week, the Army reported that the suicide rate in 2008 was the highest since it has been keeping records, 20.2 confirmed suicides among every 100,000 active-duty soldiers and activated National Guard members. There were 128 confirmed suicides and 15 suspected.

UPI, 5/2/09

Pentagon boosts spending on propaganda...

As it fights two wars, the Pentagon is steadily and dramatically increasing the money it spends to win what it calls "the human terrain" of world public opinion. In the process, it is raising concerns of spreading propaganda at home in violation of federal law.

An Associated Press investigation found that over the past five years, the money the military spends on winning hearts and minds at home and abroad has grown by 63 percent, to at least $4.7 billion this year, according to Department of Defense budgets and other documents. That's almost as much as it spent on body armor for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2004 and 2006. This year, the Pentagon will employ 27,000 people just for recruitment, advertising and public relations.

"We have such a massive apparatus selling the military to us, it has become hard to ask questions about whether this is too much money or if it's bloated," says Sheldon Rampton, research director for the Committee on Media and Democracy, which tracks the military's media operations. "As the war has become less popular, they have felt they need to respond to that more."

Associated Press, 6/2/09

...as videos show US 'kicking butt in Iraq'

The black-and-white video starts with a mini-van locked in the crosshairs and the sound of a missile launching. A ball of fire suddenly consumes the van and a palm grove somewhere in Iraq. "Good shot," says a voice squawking over what sounds like a military radio. Before the one-minute video clip is over, two more SUVs are destroyed by Apache helicopters.

The video is one of dozens brought to viewers around the world by Maj. Alayne Conway, the top public affairs officer for the 3rd Infantry Division. When her unit was in Iraq, her office sent out four to six videos a day to media outlets around the world, as well as posting them on YouTube.

"You want to make sure you edit it in the right way," Conway said. "You have to go through the steps. ... Is this something that is going to make Joe Six-Pack look up from his TV dinner or his fast-food meal and look up at the TV and say, `Wow, the American troops are kicking butt in Iraq?'"

Associated Press, 5/2/09

Iraq: Obama requests longer withdrawal options

Responding to a request by President Barack Obama, top military and diplomatic advisers on Iraq have submitted a report to the White House that spells out the risks of drawing down U.S. forces in Iraq over periods as long as 23 months, two defense officials told McClatchy.

The multiple options are the first indication that the Obama administration may be willing to abandon a campaign promise of a 16-month withdrawal.

Kansas City Star, 5/2/09

US searches for alternative routes to Afghanistan

The Obama administration scrambled Wednesday to come up with an alternative to a crucial United States air base in Central Asia, used to supply the growing military operation in Afghanistan, after the president of Kyrgyzstan ordered the American base in his country closed.

The Kyrgyz Parliament planned to vote Friday on a measure that would close the base at Manas, a major air hub for troops and cargo. Loss of the base would present a significant problem for the Obama administration as it deploys as many as 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan over the next two years. Taliban attacks have made another prime supply route to Afghanistan — an overland pass through Pakistan — highly unreliable.

A senior State Department official said that negotiations with Kyrgyzstan over the base had been halted and that the alternatives under consideration included bases in Europe and the Persian Gulf, as well as a possible expansion of existing bases in Afghanistan.

New York Times, 4/2/09

US warns of violence as Iraq results due

The US military warned on Wednesday that election results in Iraq could trigger a fresh outbreak of violence, as allegations of fraud swirled ahead of the winners being announced.

Electoral officials are on Thursday expected to declare the preliminary results of the elections held in 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces on Saturday, but claims of cheating have thrown the apparent success of the country's first vote since 2005 into doubt.

There have been allegations of electoral irregularities across the country, but the complaints in Anbar, a Sunni Arab-majority province west of Baghdad that was long a bastion of the anti-US insurgency, have seen tribesmen threaten to take up arms.

"We demand a recount of the votes and to bring to justice the people who committed fraud," said Deputy Prime Minister Rafaa Illawi, who is himself a Sunni Arab, after meeting tribal leaders in the province.

AFP, 4/2/09

US has no 'end game' in Afghanistan

The Pentagon is prepared to announce the deployment of 17,000 additional soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan as early as this week even as President Barack Obama is searching for his own strategy for the war.

According to military officials during last week's meeting with Defense Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon's "tank," the president specifically asked, "What is the end game?" in the U.S. military's strategy for Afghanistan. When asked what the answer was, one military official told NBC News, "Frankly, we don't have one." But they're working on it.

Senior military officials confirm to NBC News that a secret report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to President Obama recommends a shift in the military mission in Afghanistan to concentrate solely on combatting the Taliban and al-Qaida and leave the "hearts and minds" aspect of the war to other U.S. agencies and NATO.

According to the officials, the Taliban "has definitely gained the upper hand" in some areas of Afghanistan, particularly the South, because there's just too much territory and too few American forces to "clear and hold" an area. "The Taliban is no match" for U.S. forces, but once the Americans drive the Taliban from a region, then leave, the Taliban immediately filter back in and regain control. "In many remote areas, the Taliban have established 'shadow governments' and in some cases gained the confidence and support of the locals."

NBC News, 4/2/09

Iraq militants in Afghan switch

Foreign militants are flowing into Afghanistan because of the success of the "troop surge" in Iraq, the Afghan defence minister has said. Abdul Rahim Wardak said in some encounters last year 60% of the Taleban fighters were foreign.

"Afghanistan is definitely the front line in the war against the global terror now," Mr Wardak said. He was speaking after meeting Nato's supreme allied commander for Europe, US Gen John Craddock.

BBC News, 4/2/09