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The Afganistan Withdrawal Hornswoggle

For years now, we the public have been told that 2011 will be our last year of involvement in Afganistan.  As most are likely aware, this is no longer the case - Harper has announced that we'll be keeping 400 Canadian soldiers there to operate in a training capacity, and the Liberals countered his announcement with the suggestion that we should increase that number to an even thousand because...  well, because they're Liberals and the Liberal party is pretty shit right now.

Of course, this move surprises no one who's been paying attention.  Pogge pointed out, way back at the beginning of October, that the official line from both U.S. and Canadian governments weren't really meshing well with their own message:  namely that our planned withdrawal was putting the mission at jeopardy, that "it will be impossible to replace Canada's more than 1,000 combat troops without diminishing forces elsewhere in the country."  The reason this objection didn't make much sense is that our withdrawal was meant to occur at the same time as the planned drawdown of American troops in Afghanistan - which suggests that, in truth, the U.S. Government has little intention of actually reducing their forces.

The number of troops we're going to be keeping there during this farce of nation-building is yet to be determined - don't think for a second that the four hundred number Harper gave is in any way accurate, not with the Liberals giving him ample opportunity and excuse to boost that upwards considerably, nor with the concerted campaign to convince us that we really actually don't want to pull out anyway.  Our withdrawal may not even end up as a drawdown, at this rate.

Omar Khadr set to Plead

Omar Khadr, a young man who was taken prisoner in Afghanistan while fighting NATO forces alongside the Taliban in 2002. He was 15 at the time; he captured while wounded, probably tortured, interrogated at length, intimidated and threatened with many things including rape and murder, and held for years without access to a lawyer. He was eventually given not a trial, but a tribunal, and is currently in the midst of his second military tribunal to determine his guilt or innocence.

He's also a Canadian citizen, albeit one whose plight has been largely ignored by Canada's reigning governments.

Indeed, successive Canadian governments have refused to seek extradition or repatriation despite the fact that groups like Amnesty International urged doing so. In fact, not only did Canada fail him - as established by the Canadian Cabinet, the Federal Court of Canada, and then the Supreme Court of Canada, resptively - we've spent $1.3 million making sure that he stays in Guantanamo... Rather than fighting for his Charter Rights.

According to the buzz in the media, he's about to plead to a lesser charge. As a result, he'll serve eight years, and will likely be made to withhold any formal accusations of torture - much like what happened with John Walker Lindh's own plea bargain.

I'm not going to talk about this, though, because I'm sure there are plenty of news sites, and plenty of other blogs, where you can hear all about this stuff. Instead, I'm going to focus on a narrative I fear is about to grow through certain media sources - one which I find incredibly ugly, particularly given everything this young man has already been forced to endure.

There are certain groups who are doing their level best to make sure Khadr's repatriation won't happen. This includes one purported "expert on evil" by the name of Dr. Michael Welner:

In an exclusive interview, Dr. Michael Welner says Khadr is known to have expressed peace-loving intentions only to "those advancing his public image" from behind the razor wire at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Welner also discounts much-cited comments by some U.S. guards at Guantanamo that the Toronto native is a "good kid" and "salvageable" - calling them "shallow in their prognostic significance."

"When one leaps to the conclusion about Omar Khadr's future because he is friendly, one might recall that Osama bin Laden has always been described as gentle, likable and charming," New York-based Welner told Postmedia News.

"There is no record of (Khadr's) publicly repudiating al-Qaida, as civilized Muslims should, not even a letter composed for him by Dennis Edney," he added in a reference to one of Khadr's two Canadian lawyers. There is "no call . . . to radical Islamists to mature beyond their elemental intolerance."

Welner, 46, spoke as the Canadian government faces the prospect of soon receiving a call for Khadr to be transferred to a Canadian jail in the event he is convicted of war crimes charges he faces in a Guantanamo military commission.

This Doctor, and I use the term loosely, has created what he calls "the Depravity Scale," purportedly a "achieve a scientific-legal standardization of evil." I expect this Doctor, again a term I'm using loosely, will get a lot of face-time from certain news sources.

Let's be clear, though: The man's a quack. There's no such thing as a scientific measure of evil. The whole idea doesn't even make any sense.

Looking through the sources Welner used to build his scale reveals all of a single reference to an actual, academic journal (Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law). His scale never went through any sort of peer-review process, either - it was an editorial. This is exactly as scientific as measuring someone's skull to determine whether they're likely to commit murder. Or, to use a more modern example, diluting medicine to make it more effective.

And yet Dr. Welner is trying to use this system he invented whole-cloth from his imagination to make Khadr's situation even more miserable.

This poor man has spent a third of his life in prison, terribly mistreated, denied a fair and open trial, and now is likely to spend yet another eight years behind bars. But this still isn't enough Dr. Welner.

For shame, Dr. Welner. For shame.

Collateral Murder revisited

You might remember the whole Wikileaks release of the Apache killings of several reporters and unarmed Iraqi civilians back in April.

Well, Evan McCord was one of the soldiers on the ground who was on the scene, and a while ago he gave a speech about the events of that day.  You can watch it here.  It's...  uncomfortable to watch and listen to, almost as much as watching the original footage...  But he has important things to say, so I recommend giving it a watch when you have the time.

At the very least, his courage in speaking out should be commended.

Killing Civilians for Sport

I had a hard time deciding the topic for today's post... Part of me really wanted to talk about the Conservatives' muzzling of federal scientists, since that's a Canadian thing and fairly recent. But I'm still pretty damn angry about the news out of Afghanistan, even if it's almost a week since the story broke, and I think it's important enough to override more local stuff. Not the least of which is because a certain perspective becomes apparent as you read the various reports on the events and the order in which they happened, one that I haven't seen much comment on.

From the Guardian article on the event:

Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.

Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.

So, more war crimes in Afghanistan, this time of as blatant a nature as you can get. I mean, this is the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a bad movie - one that would get a public outcry in the U.S. for unfairly depicting U.S. Soldiers. But here it is, and it happened in the really real world.

Of course, if you've even glanced at the story, you probably know all this. What you might not realize is something that reveals itself only by really thinking about the implications of some of the reported events:

The killings came to light in May after the army began investigating a brutal assault on a soldier who told superiors that members of his unit were smoking hashish. The Army Times reported that members of the unit regularly smoked the drug on duty and sometimes stole it from civilians.

The soldier, who was straight out of basic training and has not been named, said he witnessed the smoking of hashish and drinking of smuggled alcohol but initially did not report it out of loyalty to his comrades. But when he returned from an assignment at an army headquarters and discovered soldiers using the shipping container in which he was billeted to smoke hashish he reported it.

Basically, what happened was the self-described "kill squad" decided to smoke hashish in the wrong place - a recruit who was otherwise willing to look the other way if they smoked anywhere else wasn't willing to put his own ass on the line because they were using the container he was responsible for as their smoke house. So, he told on them, they found out, and then they beat him up.

Then, as revenge, he told his superiors about their war crimes.

This suggests two things: 1. He knew about the war crimes already, much like he knew about the drug use before they got him involved in it. 2. He considered their drug use in his container worse than murdering civilians, since otherwise he would have reported them in a different order, and much sooner than he did.

Think about that for a second. Of course, this should come as no surprise; according to a survey of U.S. troops in Iraq, almost half of all army soldiers (and more than half of Marines) have said they would cover up war crimes for their fellow soldiers. Moreover, if the statistics in that survey hold up for Afghanistan (and I see no reason they wouldn't), then going by the numbers there are almost ten thousand war criminals stationed there, as one in ten have admitted to committing abuses against civilians.

I'd be very interested to see how coalition forces rate against these statistics. I suspect it would be very revealing, but I've yet to see a proper survey performed.

Ultimately, all this adds up to the mission in Afghanistan being a failure - and it's likely the door for success has long passed. No "surge" strategy will work here (for that matter, the surge strategy didn't really work in Iraq, but that's a whole 'nother topic). If the coalition is even still trying to win hearts and minds, they're failing miserably - and it's because of events like this. There's even a good chance that the Army was warned after the first murder and chose to ignore the warning, though I don't know if we'll ever know for sure whether that's true.

Can anyone state the official goal of the war in Afghanistan, quoted from an official in a position of responsibility, stated for public consumption? The last thing I remember hearing is about how it's for the well-being of Afghans - particularly Afghan women - because if the coalition in general departs, and the U.S. in specific, then blood will run in the streets.

That these claims can be made when the Afghans don't want us there, when actual Afghan women's organizations want us all out because we're making things worse, not better... That these claims can be made while our side sends out murder squads both official (Task Force 373) and unofficial (this Stryker brigade)... Well. Hypocrisy ain't just for the Greeks, you know. Sooner or later, we're going to have to face the possibility that, as much as any conflict can have good guys and bad guys, we may just be on the side of the bad.

Ironically, once upon a time, I was a supporter of the war in Afghanistan. I'm not sure exactly when I changed my mind on the subject, but I'm sure it was related to something like this.

The Importance of Wikileaks

There's a book titled "Claim of Privilege" by Barry Siegel. Not too hard to find. Here's the Publishers Weekly write-up, as quoted on the Amazon dot com:

In 1948, three civilian engineers died in the crash of an air force B-29 bomber that was testing a missile guidance system; in their widows' lawsuit, the Supreme Court upheld the air force's refusal to divulge accident reports that it claimed held military secrets. But when the declassified reports surfaced decades later, the only sensitive information in them involved the chronic tendency of B-29 engines to catch fire, egregious lapses in maintenance and safety procedures, and gross pilot error. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Siegel (Shades of Gray) ably recounts the case, a scandal and cover-up with grave constitutional implications. The 1953 Supreme Court decision gave the executive branch sweeping authority to conceal information under national security claims without judicial review, a precedent confirmed when the Court refused to reopen the case in 2003. (The author notes the influence of Cold War anxieties and the 9/11 attacks in these rulings.) Siegel insists on decorating the story with often extraneous human-interest profiles of everyone involved. But his is an engrossing exposition of the facts and legal issues in the case, which produced a disturbing legacy of government secrecy and misconduct still very much alive. (June)

This is just one example of gross mismanagement of justice in the name of "national security." There are many others, both before and since, and it wouldn't take very long to drudge up a few. Governments want the people over which they rule to trust and support them; whether they're a democracy or a totalitarian regime, this remains true. This is why it's so important for societies to do exactly the opposite - question at every turn, demand transparency and accountability, and make sure the things they do in your name are things with which you agree.

The media (or at least those portions of the media which are stuck suckling at the U.S. Government's tit, which is most of them) would have you believe that the latest batch of documents released by Wikileaks - which, I'd agree, was released in a careless manner - did nothing but put people in danger. "There is nothing new to be found in these documents," goes the refrain, "anyone who's been paying attention already knew all this stuff."

There's some truth to this statement, though it makes one wonder why most of this was classified in the first place.

It's certainly true that it's been a poorly-kept secret at best that Coalition forces have been utilizing teams of assassins to target high-profile insurgent leaders; this is something that's been reported on before, though usually with a certain level of deniability on the part of Government spokespersons. But there are certain details that have emerged as a result of the leak that are rather eye-opening. As Prattap Chatterjee reports:

"Find, fix, finish, and follow-up" is the way the Pentagon describes the mission of secret military teams in Afghanistan which have been given a mandate to pursue alleged members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda wherever they may be found. Some call these “manhunting” operations and the units assigned to them “capture/kill” teams.

Whatever terminology you choose, the details of dozens of their specific operations -- and how they regularly went badly wrong -- have been revealed for the first time in the mass of secret U.S. military and intelligence documents published by the website Wikileaksin July to a storm of news coverage and official protest. Representing a form of U.S. covert warfare now on the rise, these teams regularly make more enemies than friends and undermine any goodwill created by U.S. reconstruction projects.

...

In more than 100 incident reports in the Wikileaks files, Task Force 373 is described as leading numerous “capture/kill” efforts, notably in Khost, Paktika, and Nangarhar provinces, all bordering the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northern Pakistan. Some reportedly resulted in successful captures, while others led to the death of local police officers or even small children, causing angry villagers to protest and attack U.S.-led military forces.

The core information used here is from the diarydig website that catalogues and analyzes the Wikileaks documents. Very interesting/disturbing is the way that local leaders of reconstruction projects are forced to apologize to communities for the actions of these sorts of teams - the aid workers we put there are distrusted by the populace because they're seen as part of the same group. And really, why wouldn't they be? If my country was being occupied and my countrymen being killed on such a regular basis, I split hairs like that, either.

In fact, it gets worse than this. If you look through the data, there's only a single case where Task Force 373 successfully assassinated their target; every other incident involves friendly fire, killing afgan police, or a civilian massacre. That's one successful mission out of a hundred for a task force that's illegal by international law in the first place.

This isn't helping.

"We have an important job to do there," various Coalition governments assure us - my own government included. We do? What is it? We're not saving any lives, our very presence in Afganistan is causing far more harm than we could possible prevent... We're not fighting for equal rights for women, despite our claims to the contrary and terrible articles found in Time magazine; our presence there is actively making things worse because we tend to prop up and protect the very people who do these terrible things (despite our claims to the contrary). Initially, the coalition went in to dismantle the Taliban and get bin Laden. Well, okay. The first part's done, the second part can't be done anymore, at least not in Afganistan.

Now, what?

Supposedly, we're still there in an effort to rebuild Afganistan after the tremendous damage we've inflicted there.

So, what is it? Revenge? How many lives must end, how much blood must be spilt, before the West in general, and the U.S. in specific, has had its revenge on that part of the world for 9/11? It was nine years and over a million deaths ago.

Just how many Afgan and Iraq lives is a single U.S. life worth? Or, to put it more selfishly, how many Coalition soldiers' lives have to be wasted before we can admit that we're not helping, there's little point to staying, and we should just leave? Any chance we likely had to complete the mission (assuming the mission statements ever given in Afganistan actually had anything to do with truth) is probably gone.

So, why are we still there?

It's a damn good question, in my mind. And it's the sort of question that makes Wikileaks so important in this day and age, because as the media becomes more profit-driven, as cutbacks limit the media's ability to get at the unvarnished truth (if they were ever able to do so), the importance of finding an alternative for the public grows.

Blood, Lies, and Wikileaks

Unless you've been actively avoiding the topic, most Westerners should be aware of the existence of Wikileaks by now; this is the internet media organization that's been responsible for some really astonishing leaks of government and corporate documents and news (much of which related to government and corporate malfeasance). Some of it's been so impressive that they won the Amnesty International 2009 Media Award. Anyway, some time ago Wikileaks released 77,000 classified U.S. Military documents they'd managed to get ahold of. They had 92,000, but withheld 15,000 of them which they felt would put people at undue risk based on the contents and/or classifications attached to those documents.

The end result is a pretty bleak picture of what's going on over there.

Of course, shortly after the leak went live - which was done partnered with Der Spiegel, the New York Times, and the Guardian - the media narrative has become all about how Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, now has blood on his hands because the documents released included non-redacted names of informants.

I'll admit, this is regrettable. Wikileaks, to their credit, used the NYT as a go-between with the Department of Defence to get help in redacting sensitive names found in the documents, but the Department of Defence refused. Wikileaks is an organization with all of five employees - they didn't have the manpower to do it themselves. This meant they had a choice: go forward and get the information out there, or sit on it.

Some organizations would have sat on it, denying the public its right to know the sort of things being done in their name. That's not really how Wikileaks rolls, though, so they released the documents. Go to the Wikileaks.org website if you want to take a peek.

But that's all background - this is all old news. So, why am I talking about this now, rather than when it was all fresh?

Because this article at Newsweek, about a surge in death threats and violence in the wake of the Afganistan documents leak, is pissing me off. Allow me to explain why.

This narrative much of the media is running with is based on what is basically fabrication. That newsweek article? It's based entirely on a twisted version of this news feed, which points out that the tribal elder who was killed received no death threats, no one has claimed responsibility for his killing, and was never named in the Wikileaks documents anyway. In fact, to date no one has been able to point to a single death or act of violence directly attributable to the leak. It's all hypothetical, though you can bet that if it weren't there'd be somebody at the White House crowing about it as loud as they could.

If a surge in violence is occurring in Afganistan in the wake of the Wikileaks thing - which, based on the contents of the documents, is a very suspect idea since those documents suggest that the surge of violence has been growing for years - then it's simply based on the fact that the media reported that some people in Afganistan have been working with coalition forces as informants. Which means that it doesn't matter one whit if you redact the names - people are going to be targeted for being "suspected informants" anyway. (But then that's what's been happening all along, isn't it?) So this admonishment of Wikileaks and Julian Assange, when you wipe away all the crap, becomes less "You should have redacted the names" and more "You shouldn't let the public know about things!"



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These accusations sound stunningly familiar, in fact. It's the same sort of shpiel that's been thrown out since this whole War on (Some) Terror started. Stop me if you've heard these before:

Are you an anti-war protester? Then you're hurting the troops! You must love terrorists!

Are you questioning the bombing of Baghdad? Saddam gassed his own people! How can you support that monster!

You want torturers and people who imprison others without trial brought to task and made to answer for their actions? You must hate freedom!

You're shedding light on the failure of U.S./Coalition military policy, and the frequency with which civilians are murdered collateral damaged? You've got blood on your hands!

Classification of information is abused by governments as a matter of course, and really much of the modern media just sort of rolls over and plays dead for the powers-that-be. I'm honestly not sure if this wasn't always the case - I'd like to think there was once a time when official news outlets were on a noble quest for the truth, and certainly there seems to have been a time when they were more powerful than they are now, but I suspect that in truth this golden age of news agencies never truly existed. Still, the internet and the global society that it's helping facilitate, baby step by baby step, is a pretty powerful potential source for information, as Wikileaks is fast proving.

In order for the democratic process to work, the public needs to be able to inform itself of what's being done in its name. This goes not just for the U.S., but for every citizen of every coalition nation - a group that includes me. It's tremendously regrettable if anyone gets hurt as a result of this leak - and I'm glad that no one has yet. But civilians are being slaughtered like it's going out of style in Afganistan, and my government owns a part of the responsibility for those actions by virtue of taking an active role in this bout of military adventurism. This is all being done in my name.

That means I have a right to know what's really going on there. I have a need to know, so I can act as a responsible citizen. Wikileaks is not perfect, but it helps fulfil that need, and any accusations by Coalition government bodies of its founder having "blood on his hands" is, at best, disingenuous. It's classic beam vs. mote territory, really.