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News archives for the week ending 29th August 2008

US wants to stay in Iraq until 2015

The United States asked Iraq for permission to keep troops there to 2015 but compromised with Iraqi negotiators on 2011, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said. The bilateral security pact negotiations underscore the Iraqi government's increasing assertiveness in seeking to define the future of the U.S. presence as violence drops sharply across the country.

"It was a U.S. proposal for the date which is 2015, and an Iraqi one which is 2010, then we agreed to make it 2011," Talabani said. "Iraq has the right, if necessary, to extend the presence of these troops."

U.S. officials said that the negotiations, although close to conclusion, continue, and declined comment on the specifics of Talabani's statements.

Reuters, 28/8/08

UN confirms civilian deaths

The United Nations yesterday confirmed Afghan government claims that 90 civilians were killed by US-led coalition air strikes in the west of the country last week.

Kai Eide, the UN special representative in Afghanistan, said investigators had interviewed locals in the Azizabad area of Shindand district in Herat and found "convincing evidence" that about 90 civilians were killed, including 60 children.

The incident - which, if true, has claimed one of the worst civilian casualties since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 - had prompted President Hamid Karzai on Monday to order a full review of the presence of foreign troops. The death of civilians is political poison for Mr Karzai's embattled government. His apparent inability to rein in Nato and US forces undermines his credibility as he prepares for next year's re-election campaign.

Financial Times, 27/8/08

US backs off Georgia confrontation

A U.S. Embassy spokesman says plans have been canceled to try to dock a military ship carrying humanitarian aid in the Georgian port of Poti. Russian forces are posted on the outskirts of the city.

The ship, the Coast Guard cutter Dallas, was to have come to the Black Sea port on Wednesday morning. But embassy spokesman Stephen Guice said the vessel instead will dock in Batumi, a port well south of the zone of fighting in this month's war between Russia and Georgia.

Guice said he did not have information on why the plan was changed. Poti's port reportedly suffered heavy damage from the Russian military. Russian troops have established checkpoints on the northern approach to the city and a US ship docking there could have been seen as a direct challenge.

Associated Press, 27/8/08

Maliki turning on Sons of Sudan

There is a gathering storm on Iraq's horizon. Over the last several weeks, its central government has embarked on what appears to be an effort to arrest, drive away or otherwise intimidate tens of thousands of Sunni security volunteers -- the so-called Sons of Iraq -- whose contributions have been crucial to recent security gains.

There are now about 100,000 armed Sons of Iraq, each paid $300 a month by U.S. forces to provide security in local neighborhoods throughout the country. In recognition of the key role the Awakening played in security improvements, President Bush met with several Sunni tribal leaders during his trip to Anbar last September, and Petraeus, who cites the program as a critical factor explaining the decline in violence, has promised to "not walk away from them."

But Iraq's predominantly Shiite central government seems intent on doing precisely that. Maliki and his advisors never really accepted the Sunni Awakening, and they remain convinced that the movement is simply a way for Sunni insurgents to buy time to restart a campaign of violence or to infiltrate the state's security apparatus. In 2007, with Iraq's government weak and its military not yet ready to take the lead in operations, the Maliki government acquiesced to the U.S.-led initiative and grudgingly agreed to integrate 20% of the Sons of Iraq into the Iraqi security forces.

Now, a newly confident Maliki government is edging away from this commitment. Recent government successes in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul seem to have convinced Maliki's inner circle that Iraq's army does not need American help as much as it used to. A newly emboldened prime minister is now moving out aggressively against his adversaries, including the Sons of Iraq.

Over the last several weeks, Iraqi army units and special operations forces (which report directly to Maliki) have arrested Sons of Iraq leaders, dismantled checkpoints and otherwise harassed local security volunteers in Diyala province and greater Baghdad. There are reportedly plans to detain hundreds of Sons of Iraq members in the coming weeks.

"These people are like cancer, and we must remove them," an Iraqi army general in Abu Ghraib, a Baghdad suburb, told a reporter last week. Another Iraqi commander in Baghdad confided, "We cannot stand them, and we detained many of them recently," before telling that reporter of plans to instigate a major crackdown as early as November.

Los Angeles Times, 26/8/08

Russia will not block NATO supplies to Afghanistan

Moscow does not plan to suspend NATO's use of Russian land routes to transit non-military supplies and equipment to the alliance's troops in Afghanistan, Russia's NATO envoy said Tuesday.

"As far as overland transport to Afghanistan is concerned... we do not plan to touch this," Dmitry Rogozin told journalists in Moscow. Rogozin listed a number of areas of cooperation with NATO that will be frozen as a result of its support of Georgia in an ongoing stand-off with Russia. But he said an agreement signed in April on the land transit of non-military freight destined for Afghanistan would not be affected.

"The position of the leadership of the country is that Afghanistan is a shared problem," he said. "The Taliban has recently has demonstrated maximum activity."

AFP, 26/8/08

Canada hires US terrorism experts

The federal government is hiring U.S. terrorism experts to deepen Canadian soldiers' understanding of how their Taliban enemies think - saying it needs to prepare troops better as they wage a counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan.

The move was announced yesterday, after weeks of mounting attacks by the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, including Kandahar province, where Canadian soldiers are fighting, and the security situation has markedly worsened.

"Traditionally, cultural awareness training was a brief introduction to the language, culture, customs and food. This training, while providing basic instruction in these areas, did not provide the operational relevance required to conduct [counterinsurgency warfare]," a Canadian government contract notice posted yesterday says.

Globe and Mail, Canada, 26/8/08

West should negotiate in Afghanistan

Spectacular Taliban successes in Afghanistan and Pakistan are forcing Western leaders to rethink their anti-terrorist strategy in both countries. In recent days, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown have paid separate flying visits to Kabul to assess the situation. They, and other Western heads of government, are facing the painful possibility that NATO is losing the war in Afghanistan -- a war which has also destabilized neighboring Pakistan.

The Afghan war has expanded into an unwinnable conflict against a formidable coalition of Pashtun tribesmen on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border. The war has drawn in Islamic militants from the Arab world, from Kashmir, and even from Central Asia.

Al-Qaida may be no more than a small element in this coalition. The tribes are fighting to protect themselves from what they see as a foreign threat to their religion and traditions, to their tribal way of life, and to the sanctity of their families. Civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes inflame opinion and play into the hands of the Taliban.

What should NATO and the West do? The United States has endorsed a $17 billion plan to build up the Afghan army to 122,000 over the next five years. Britain's premier thinks this is still too small to defeat the Taliban. Some experts believe, however, that there is no military solution to the conflict, indeed that the war is already lost.

A more promising approach would be to negotiate a ceasefire with both the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban movements, within the context of a regional strategy, which would include India and Iran, as well as the governments in Kabul and Islamabad.

Middle East Times, 26/8/08

Iraq and US disagree over withdrawal timetable

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Monday that all U.S. troops must be out of Iraq by 2011 and there would be no security agreement between the United States and Iraq without an unconditional timetable for withdrawal. This was a direct challenge to the Bush administration, which insists the timing for troop departure would be based on conditions on the ground.

Maliki's comments appeared to be an attempt to extract further concessions from U.S. officials, less than a week after both sides said they had agreed to remove all U.S. combat troops by the end of 2011, if the security situation remained relatively stable, but leave other U.S. forces in place. The U.S. plan is to leave as many as 40,000 troops to continue to assist Iraq in training, logistics and intelligence for an undefined period.

"There is an agreement actually reached, reached between the two parties on a fixed date, which is the end of 2011, to end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil," Maliki said. But the White House disputed Maliki's statement and made clear the two countries are still at odds over the terms of a U.S. withdrawal

."Any decisions on troops will be based on conditions on the ground in Iraq," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said in Crawford, Texas, where President Bush is vacationing. "That has always been our position. It continues to be our position."

Fratto denied Maliki's assertion that an agreement has been reached mandating that all foreign forces be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. "An agreement has not been signed," he said. "There is no agreement until there's an agreement signed. There are discussions that continue in Baghdad."

Seattle Times, 25/8/08

Afghan government wants new rules of engagement

Afghanistan is demanding a renegotiation of the rules for international troops in the country after 90 people were killed in US-led attacks on Friday. The Afghan Cabinet wants to review the "limits of authority and responsibilities" of international troops after 90 people, including 50 children, were killed in the air strikes in Herat.

A Government statement says air strikes on civilian targets, unilateral searches of homes, and illegal detentions of Afghan civilians must be stopped.

About 70,000 foreign troops from 40 countries, including Australia, are in Afghanistan.The country's Government wants them to be accountable under rules consistent with Afghan and international law.

ABC News, Australia, 26/8/08

Surge was not the cause of drop in violence

The three developments that were most effective in driving down the fatality rate in Iraq had little to do with the deployment of thousands of extra US troops.

First was the security impact of forced population movements. The good news about declining civilian deaths, particularly in Baghdad, was due in part to the bad news about ''ethnic cleansing''. Sectarian violence continued to drive people from their homes in the Iraqi capital throughout the surge build-up in the first half of 2007. Areas controlled by the Shi'ites expanded in the north of the city, while the Sunnis, who were mostly on the losing side, consolidated in the south. The sharply redrawn sectarian boundaries that were the result of ethnic cleansing created more defensible space for both communities, while far fewer vulnerable, mixed neighbourhoods meant that there was less territory to fight about.

The second factor was the unilateral ceasefire put into effect in August 2007 by the leader of the powerful, but deeply factionalised Mahdi Army, Moqtada al-Sadr. In mid-November last year the US military reported that the ceasefire had been a significant factor behind the drop in attacks in Baghdad. The ceasefire had nothing to do with the surge.

Finally, there was the surprising alliance formed between the US military and its former Sunni insurgent enemies against the terrorist group al-Qaeda In Iraq. This too had little to do with the surge.

From 2005 into 2006, the Sunni militants of al-Qaeda in Iraq had been pursuing a nationwide terror campaign against Iraq's Shi'ite community. The suicide bombings of Shi'ite mosques and other civilian targets were intended to provoke revenge attacks against Sunni communities that would precipitate a Sunni-Shi'ite civil war. The resulting violent anarchy would, the Iraqi al-Qaeda leaders believed, lead to the withdrawal of the US and its allies.

The strategy backfired. The indiscriminate anti-Shi'ite violence from al-Qaeda in Iraq, plus the militants' efforts to impose their extremist ideology on the local Sunni populace in al-Anbar province and elsewhere, had generated growing Sunni anger throughout Iraq.

Canberra Times, 25/8/08

Biden 'one of Congress's most prominent liberal hawks'...

Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has established himself as one of Congress's most prominent liberal hawks. He took a leading role in pushing the Clinton administration to get involved, twice, to confront Serbian aggression in the Balkans - first in Bosnia, than in Kosovo.

Biden traveled last week to Georgia, a trip he said was made at the invitation of the country's president, Mikheil Saakashvili. "I left the country convinced that Russia's invasion of Georgia may be one of the most significant events to occur in Europe since the end of communism," Biden said in a statement upon his return, in which he called for Congress to establish a $1 billion fund to aid Georgia's reconstruction.

Boston Globe, 24/8/08

...and deeply distrusted in Iraq

Senator Joe Biden may be one of the only U.S. politicians that can get Iraq's feuding Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish politicians to agree. But not in a good way.

Across racial and religious boundaries, Iraqi politicians on Saturday bemoaned Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama's choice of running mate, known in Iraq as the author of a 2006 plan to divide the country into ethnic and sectarian enclaves.

"This choice of Biden is disappointing, because he is the creator of the idea of dividing Iraq," Salih al-Mutlaq, head of National Dialogue, one of the main Sunni Arab blocs in parliament, told Reuters.

"We rejected his proposal when he announced it, and we still reject it. Dividing the communities and land in such a way would only lead to new fighting between people over resources and borders. Iraq cannot survive unless it is unified, and dividing it would keep the problems alive for a long time."

Reuters, 23/8/08

Locals protest US killing of civilians

Villagers in Afghanistan have protested against the death of civilians caught up in the conflict between militants and foreign troops. The Afghan Interior Ministry says 76 civilians were killed in coalition air strikes near the village of Azizabad in the western province of Herat on Friday. The U-S led coalition disputes the figure saying 30 militants were killed.

The police chief for western Afghanistan, General Akram Yawar said about 250 villagers held a protest on Saturday throwing stones at Afghan troops. A correspondent from the AFP news agency said the protesters had burnt a police car and blocked the main road to Heart city for several hours.

ABC News, Australia, 24/8/08

US kills civilians in Afghanistan

A US-led coalition military operation in western Afghanistan on Friday killed 76 civilians, including 50 children and 19 women, the Afghan interior ministry said. The coalition confirmed it carried out an operation that included air strikes in the western province of Herat but said 30 Taliban rebels were killed only and said it knew of no civilian deaths.

"Seventy-six people, all civilians and most of them women and children, were martyred during the operation by coalition forces in Shindand district of Herat province," the ministry said in a statement. The dead were "19 women, seven men and the rest children all under 15 years of age," it said.

The police chief for western Afghanistan, Akramuddin Yawer, had also said 76 people were killed in the incident and 15 houses were destroyed in strikes. If the death toll is confirmed it would be one of the highest for civilians in the battle to fight the extremist Taliban, who were ousted during a US-led invasion in 2001.

AP, 22/8/08

Majority of French want to leave Afghanistan

A majority of French people want their troops pulled out of Afghanistan, a poll suggested on Friday, days after an ambush there killed 10 French soldiers.

A survey in Le Parisien daily showed 55 percent of respondents think France should leave the NATO mission fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, compared to 36 percent who say they should remain following Monday's bloody attack. Despite the mounting criticism, Sarkozy has stressed his commitment to keeping French troops in Afghanistan.

The Hindu, India, 23/8/08