Unfortunately, I don’t have time to examine the question posed in the title of this piece as carefully as I’d like, but even the quickly posted Wikipedia entry on Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Task Force 373 notes that there is a large discrepancy between the amount of targets on TF373’s “kill/capture” list as reported [...]
The drama surrounding Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s departure as the head of US/NATO command presents an opportunity to take a fresh look at the United States’ counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan. After a speedy crush of Taliban proxy regime in Afghanistan in October of 2001, the United States continued with its strategy of counterterrorism to annihilate [...]
In a 10-day interview with Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone, McChrystal and his senior aides poked fun or criticized almost every civilian in the highest levels of the chain of command, including the President, Vice-President, and National Security Advisor James L. Jones, former Marine Corps commandant who, an aide told the magazine, was a “clown.” Another aide told Hastings that Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) “turn up, have a meeting with [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai, criticize him at the airport press conference, then get back for the Sunday talk shows. Frankly, it’s not very helpful.”
While at the same time a few high-risk investors are sufficiently intrigued by Afghanistan’s potential to take an early look, the ISI sees a bigger stake in the market value of this mine. The ISI had been well-known for their prolific and ambiguous practices and their double standard policy in Afghanistan. The Inter-Service Intelligence which was created in1948, in order to strengthen the performance of Pakistan’s Military intelligence during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947, it was formerly in the Intelligence Bureau, which handled intelligence sharing between the different branches of the military as well as external intelligence gathering, but with a puny civilian government in Islamabad, ISI has emerged as the executive branch of Pakistan’s government.
In the first of two articles about the Obama administration’s detention policies relating to the US airbase at Bagram, Afghanistan, I examined recent revelations about a secret prison inside the base, apparently run by a shadowy branch of the Pentagon, where Bush-era “enhanced interrogations,” involving sleep deprivation and isolation, are used, as authorized in Appendix M of the US Army Field Manual.
For eight and a half years, the US prison at Bagram airbase has been the site of a disturbing number of experiments in detention and interrogation, where murders have taken place, the Geneva Conventions have been shredded and the encroachment of the US courts — unlike at Guantánamo — has been thoroughly resisted.
Hilary Anderson at BBC has been following the Bagram prison story closely. Today, she reports that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has confirmed the existence of a second prison site at Bagram. The presence of a second site has long been suspected, a prison the Afghans call Tor Prison, or the “Black” Prison.
In the documentary film “The Most Dangerous Man In America,” Daniel Ellsberg tells about a fellow Rand Corporation war planner circa 1968 who described the US commitment to the war in Vietnam this way: “We are 10 percent concerned about the Vietnamese; we are 20 percent concerned about the Chinese; and we are 70 percent concerned about saving face.” The United States has now clearly arrived at the same insidious predicament in Afghanistan.
A Washington think tank that bills itself as “independent and nonpartisan” actually “played a key role in selling the escalation of the war in Afghanistan,” “The Nation” magazine reveals. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) exemplifies a new influence game, writes Nathan Hodge in the March 29th issue. “Think tanks, once a place for intellectuals outside government to weigh in on important policy issues, are now enlisted by people within government to help sell its policies to the public, as well as to others in government,” he writes.
The U.S. is considering holding international terror suspects at its Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. If approved, the facility north of Kabul could essentially become a new Guantanamo Bay, the notorious camp in Cuba that President Obama has pledged to close. Currently the U.S. administration is struggling with the task of relocating over 180 inmates still [...]
