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The state of NATO's failure in Afghanistan (Read 1313 times)

abu_rashid

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The state of NATO's failure in Afghanistan
Oct 4^th, 2011 at 7:35pm

Interesting that the Talibaan are punishing a man for carrying out an honour killing, I thought the Talibaan commit honour killings?

Interesting that the people are turning against NATO and joining the Talibaan to expel NATO and accusing NATO of all the murdering of civilians, yet NATO tells us the exact opposite... who to believe? The people on the ground whose families are being killed? Or the NATO proaganda machine... that's a tough one.

In the Afghan villages where Taliban still rule

Talib fighter 'Rahimullah', right, said he was willing to kill his soldier brother

The invasion of Afghanistan that forced the Taliban from power began 10 years ago this week but the Taliban were not completely defeated. The BBC's Paul Wood in Kabul looks at the state of the insurgency today and asks: "Could they be back?"

The wind blows in from an empty desert plain, whipping around a hunched figure kneeling, blindfolded and chained, on the ground. He is about to be executed by the Taliban.

Insurgents with rocket-propelled grenades strapped to their backs assemble an expectant crowd. Many watching have camera-phones - it is how we obtained the pictures.

Standing to one side are three young women wearing burkas. They will kill him.

The man is their uncle. He murdered their parents and two siblings in a dispute over family honour. Their mother was committing adultery, the villagers said. Their father, the condemned man's brother, refused to do anything. The uncle, shamed and enraged, opened fire at a car carrying the whole family.

The man has to pay for killing four people. Blood for blood. Taliban fighters help the girls to hold a heavy Kalashnikov. They are just inches from the man about to die.

"Pull the trigger," says one of the Talibs. "It's easy."

One by one, the women shoot him.

A large crowd has turned out for the execution. They jostle for space on the roof of the smart new community centre built by a Danish NGO. Some, no doubt, are there out of fear of the Taliban. Others enthusiastically shout "God is Great" as sentence is carried out.

"People were happy this man was shot like this," one of those present recalls.

"The Taliban control 20 to 30 villages around here. They catch thieves. People like what they do. The government doesn't punish criminals but the Taliban do."

It is 10 years since the invasion of Afghanistan but Nato still has not beaten the Taliban. So they remain in charge in remote areas like this, a village 60 miles from Herat, in the west of the country.

Where Nato has reinforced, in the south, it is pushing the Taliban back. But elsewhere, in the east for instance, the militants have gained ground”

The execution, with the three young women being pushed forward to pull the trigger, was a shocking, even a ghoulish, spectacle. It will draw the condemnation of human rights groups.

But where the Taliban have support, largely in the conservative countryside, it is because of this harsh brand of justice, not in spite of it.

Still, many - probably most - Afghans do not want to see the Taliban back.

They worry about what might have to be given up if the insurgents get even a measure of influence over the life of the nation once again. Over the past week there have been demonstrations in Kabul against doing any kind of deal with the insurgents.

That will depend on what happens on the battlefield. Where Nato has reinforced, in the south, it is pushing the Taliban back. But elsewhere, in the east for instance, the militants have gained ground.

We spoke to militants across the country about why they were fighting.

Many said they had joined the insurgency after relatives were killed by Nato bombing. Some were tired of the conflict but said they would not give up until Nato had left Afghanistan. Most said they could move openly in areas where they once hid from Nato or the Afghan forces. They seemed confident of victory.

One fighter, Mullah Mushk Alam, from Sari Pul province, is worth quoting at length, simply because he is so typical.

"I joined the Taliban about seven or eight months ago," he says.

"I am carrying out jihad against the infidels because they invaded our country. I joined the Taliban because the foreigners kill a lot of people, because they search our houses with dogs, because they search our women and our children in an improper way.

"I joined the Taliban because of this corrupt government.

Many Taliban fighters say they are angry at the actions of Nato forces in their country
"Two of my brothers and my uncle were killed by Nato bombing. When they brought the dead bodies to my house, that was the day I decided to start fighting Nato.

"It's not just me; there are many like me. Day by day the number people joining the Taliban is increasing. Where there were 10 Taliban fighters in one village, now there are 100.

"The Taliban do not pay us. We spend the money to fight from our own pockets. We are winning because Islam will always be victorious."

Most of those interviews were carried out by local cameramen because foreigners stand a good chance of being kidnapped if they travel to Taliban-controlled areas. But I did go to see one Talib fighter, in a house we chose for the interview on the outskirts of Kabul.

TBC...

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abu_rashid

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Re: The state of NATO's failure in Afghanistan
Reply #1 - Oct 4^th, 2011 at 7:36pm

I wanted to meet him because his brother is a serving officer in the Afghan army. That seemed extraordinary - though further research revealed that such divided families are not as unusual as you might think.

Sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor, "Rahimullah" told me he was aged 20 and had been in the Taliban since he was 16. I asked him if he was prepared to kill his brother, the army officer, if necessary. The answer, calmly delivered, was chilling: "Whoever joins the infidels, we will fight them.

"Even if it is my brother, even if it is my father. Our religion requires this."

That seemed both tragic and evidence of the kind of ruthless campaign the Taliban are accused of waging. Did he support, for instance, the use of child suicide bombers by the insurgency?

"We don't force people to do suicide attacks," he said. "They want to sacrifice themselves for their religion."

His older brother, "Abdul Rashid", was not at all ideological. He told me he was in the army just to collect a salary. He did not support either side but, when pressed, said he thought Nato were "infidels", and he feared the insurgents.

"The Taliban control my village," he said. "Elsewhere in the province they have checkpoints on the roads at night everywhere. Without my brother in the Taliban I could be stopped and taken away."

A lieutenant, he was second-in-command of 80 men. Would he help the Taliban if they asked him? An officer in uniform could be a valuable asset to the insurgents.

High-profile attacks
"If the Taliban put pressure on me, I will have to do it for them," he replied miserably.

That was just one family, in one province, Wardak. But the contrast between the reluctant army officer and his committed Talib brother is not good for Nato. The whole strategy to get out of Afghanistan relies on handing over to the local forces, which Nato hopes will fight the Taliban vigorously.

Nato believes that, overall, things are going its way. According to its figures, violence is down nationwide 7% over the year, falling 27% in one of the most difficult provinces, Helmand.

But behind the statistics are high-profile attacks like those in Kabul recently, which have massive strategic impact. The Taliban are not winning but they are not exactly losing, either.

Following the assassination of former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Afghan government has suspended efforts to reach out to the insurgents.

But few doubt that, eventually, they will have to talk to the people behind the attacks in Kabul and executions in the countryside.

Source: BBC

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freediver Gold Member Offline www.ozpolitic.com Posts: 49133 At my desk.	Re: The state of NATO's failure in Afghanistan Reply #2 - Oct 4^th, 2011 at 9:20pm You could always try democracy to figure out what the Afghan people really want. What do you think of that idea Abu?
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falah

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Re: The state of NATO's failure in Afghanistan
Reply #3 - Oct 4^th, 2011 at 11:42pm

freediver wrote on Oct 4^th, 2011 at 9:20pm:

You could always try democracy to figure out what the Afghan people really want.

What do you think of that idea Abu?

They tried that, but the Americans forgot not to get let their corrupt friends run the election:

Corrupt election campaign unfolds in US-occupied Afghanistan
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14211

The United Nations' shameful complicity in this year's corrupt Afghan elections.

A ridiculous, banana-republic style shenanigan produced, in its first round, an outcome that did not survive even the most cursory scrutiny. On the very first inspection of the polling stations and the ballots, it was laughably easy to discover polling stations that never opened but that recorded vast turnouts and ballots that had gone straight from the printing press into the pockets of President Hamid Karzai and his associates—one of whom, Azizullah Lodin, doubles as the chairman of the absurdly named Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan.

That would be bad enough, were it not for the craven complicity of the U.N. mission in Kabul. Perhaps as much as $200 million of the international community's money was allotted to ensure that the Afghan people could vote, but when vast numbers of them did not or could not, and while many others of them managed to do so, in effect, five or six times, there was no alarm call from the responsible U.N. officers in Kabul. Or perhaps I should rephrase that: One officer did complain that there had been a) widespread fraud, and b) government collusion in same, and c) U.N. indifference that amounted to complicity. This was Peter Galbraith, a senior American diplomat who was then the deputy special representative of the U.N. secretary-general, that scintillating figure known in song and story as Ban Ki-moon. Galbraith complained that Kai Eide, the Norwegian head of the U.N. mission, had been indifferent to the flagrant bias shown by the local Afghan officials who were in effect spending the United Nations' money to buy votes for their political boss. Eide in turn complained to Ban, who immediately obliged by firing Galbraith. Thus we cannot quite say that nobody involved in this fiasco and fiesta of corruption has yet lost his job—it would be almost true except that the main whistle-blower was fired as the first order of business.

It wouldn't now matter whether there was a runoff or not, or a "contested" election—there can't be any sentient Afghan who believes that the process is anything much more than a cynical fix. It is not as bad as the recent trampling on the voting rights of the people of neighboring Iran, but we are supposed to have a slightly more elevated standard than that (and the mere comparison, of course, goes to show how high the stakes are).

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2009/11/first_silence_the_whistleblower.html

Nothing is worthy of worship except God Almighty - our Creator!

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abu_rashid Gold Member Offline Aussie Muslim Posts: 8353	Re: The state of NATO's failure in Afghanistan Reply #4 - Oct 5^th, 2011 at 6:31am We had several threads on the corrupt elections at the time it all unfolded falah, freediver has a very short memory.
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Yadda

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Re: The state of NATO's failure in Afghanistan
Reply #5 - Oct 5^th, 2011 at 10:56am

freediver wrote on Oct 4^th, 2011 at 9:20pm:

You could always try democracy to figure out what the Afghan people really want.

What do you think of that idea Abu?

FD,

You clearly missed my post here....

Top Afghan peace negotiator killed in bomb attack

http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1316561016/4#4

Wink

And regards the corrupt election process in Afghanistan....

Q.
Yes, the elections there were sponsored and supervised by Westerners no doubt, but who were the people who ACTUALLY ran and conducted the election ???

A.
A group, a society of people who for years have been indoctrinated [within ISLAM] in how to conduct themselves honestly in life ?

The truth is that, imo, ISLAM does not indoctrinate a people with good, virtuous, life values.

ISLAM is a corrupt philosophy, and it has a corrupting influence upon men.

What is that very old computer idiom ???

'Garbage in, garbage out.'

i.e.
Putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank [and expecting there to be blood on hand], is foolish.

"....And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead."
Luke 16:31

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freediver

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At my desk.

Re: The state of NATO's failure in Afghanistan
Reply #6 - Oct 5^th, 2011 at 1:00pm

abu_rashid wrote on Oct 5^th, 2011 at 6:31am:

We had several threads on the corrupt elections at the time it all unfolded falah, freediver has a very short memory.

They all started the same way, with Abu giving three or four examples of an Afghan deciding he supports the Taliban after all (often at gunpoint) and pretending that is a reflection of the will of the people. Then I point out how silly it is to claim that on behalf of those people when they demonstrate what they want at the polls. Then I think they start to differ, with Abu giving a different reason each time for why it is actually a dictatorship.

Looks like Falah stepped in for him this time, with a UN led conspiracy to trick the world into thinking they had an election. It just goes to show that no matter what crap you come up with, you can find someone on the internet who you can copy and paste. That way you don't sound as stupid as if you had said it yourself.

People who can't distinguish between etymology and entomology bug me in ways I cannot put into words.

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salad in Gold Member Offline Australian Politics Posts: 5941	Re: The state of NATO's failure in Afghanistan Reply #7 - Oct 5^th, 2011 at 6:54pm Quote: Talib fighter 'Rahimullah', right, said he was willing to kill his soldier brother Islam is the religion of peace and Talib is a shining example of that cherished ideal. Verily it is so.
Back to top	The ALP, the progressive party, the party of ideas, the workers' friend, is the only Australian political party to roast four young Australians in roof cavities. SHAME! SHAME! SHAME! IP Logged

abu_rashid Gold Member Offline Aussie Muslim Posts: 8353	Re: The state of NATO's failure in Afghanistan Reply #8 - Oct 5^th, 2011 at 7:18pm Quote: Looks like Falah stepped in for him this time, with a UN led conspiracy.. I posted that info at the time, as it was common knowledge and in all the world's media. Your lack of comprehension skills is no excuse fd.
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falah

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Re: The state of NATO's failure in Afghanistan
Reply #9 - Oct 6^th, 2011 at 7:24am

Yadda wrote on Oct 5^th, 2011 at 10:56am:

A.
A group, a society of people who for years have been indoctrinated [within ISLAM] in how to conduct themselves honestly in life ?

Speak to Afghans, and they will tell you that the Taliban were famous for not being corrupt.

Bring back Taliban to end police corruption, say Afghan truckers

Abad Khan has spent much of his life on Afghanistan's roads, driving a truck through some of the most beautiful and hostile terrain in the world.

The work is hard but it gives the 30-year-old and his colleagues a view of this country rarely seen or heard about, and it is a view they are increasingly finding they do not like. Deteriorating security across Afghanistan means the country's roads are now rife with bandits, illegal checkpoints and corrupt officials.

"We pay all our bribes to criminals and they are criminals who wear police uniforms," Mr Khan said...

Truck drivers are an important barometer of the security situation in Afghanistan, as their work means they experience life across the country.

When the Taliban first rose to power in the mid-1990s, it was in part a response to the rampant lawlessness on Afghanistan's roads, which had been dominated by the illegal checkpoints of warlords. Travelling anywhere was a gamble, and leading figures in the transport industry supported Mullah Mohammed Omar's fundamentalists because they longed for security. According to today's truck drivers, history is in danger of repeating itself.

"The difference between when the Taliban were in government and now is the same as the difference between land and sky," 61-year-old Haji Mohammed Amin said. "Now we are sick of life and if we are sick of life, how can we enjoy it? What is the meaning of life for us? At that time it had meaning, now it is nothing."

Violence has increased across the country this spring, and colleagues of Mr Khan and Mr Amin have been among the victims.

This Monday, a trucker was injured in Kandahar by an improvised explosive device. During March there were a series of deadly attacks on Afghans transporting goods for foreign troops. In one incident, the decapitated body of a trucker was found dumped in the southern province of Zabul. But, most notoriously of all, at least three drivers had their noses and ears cut off this month in the eastern province of Nuristan.

While officials say attacks such as these are the work of the Taliban, the truckers often refuse to believe the insurgents are responsible. Even when they do blame them, they still insist the police are a bigger threat. Truckers say bribes are usually between 50p and £30 and that policemen brutalise the drivers and vandalise their vehicles or simply syphon off their fuel.

Mr Khan and Mr Amin were sitting with some colleagues waiting to eat lunch by Jalalabad Road in Kabul, the scene of a number of suicide bombings. The men gathered there hated and feared the police. One, called Rahullah, described how he paid bribes to three different policemen on a single night. "It's my dream that ultimately the government will be run by the Taliban
, but we will still get financial support from the Americans," the-father-of-five said.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bring-back-taliban-to-end-police-corruption-say-afghan-truckers-448174.html

Interview with CIA Veteran Michael Scheuer
'Only the Taliban Are Not Corrupt'

...Scheuer: We're really not in a position to push these people. Who's going to replace them? There isn't anyone less corrupt.

Probably the only incorrupt people in Afghanistan are the Taliban. If you want no corruption, give the government back to the Taliban.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,714936,00.html

The Westerners brought their corruption to Afghanistan:

Australian admits Afghan contract bribe

An Australian man has pleaded guilty in a US federal court to accepting bribes for steering US-funded contracts in Afghanistan.

Queensland man Neil Campbell, 61, was accused of accepting a $US10,000 ($10,500) bribe while working for the International Organisation for Migration.

Campbell worked in Afghanistan in 2009-10 as an agent for the IOM, a group that has received more than $US260 million in funds since 2002 to build hospitals, schools and other facilities.

He admitted "that in July 2010, while in Afghanistan, he solicited a one-time cash payment of $190,000 from a subcontractor... as a reward for funnelling more than $US15 million in reconstruction projects to that subcontractor", a US justice department statement read.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-05/australian-pleads-guilty-to-us-bribes/3300024

Nothing is worthy of worship except God Almighty - our Creator!

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Lestat Gold Member Offline Australian Politics Posts: 1403	Re: The state of NATO's failure in Afghanistan Reply #10 - Oct 6^th, 2011 at 8:17am lol @ freediver. Sticking his head in the sand once again. I've never seen one revel in his own ignorance so much.
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falah

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Re: The state of NATO's failure in Afghanistan
Reply #11 - Oct 6^th, 2011 at 11:37pm

Afghans hold anti-US demo in Kabul

Hundreds of Afghans have held a demonstration in the capital Kabul against the US-led occupation of their country, Press TV reports.

The protesters assembled in the streets of the capital during the early hours of Thursday on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Press TV's Kabul correspondent reported.

Demonstrators condemned the US forces for killing innocent civilians and called for the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.

The angry protesters also censured US support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, chanting anti-US and anti-Taliban slogans.

Afghans have expressed their determination to continue with the protest rallies.

Meanwhile, a US-led air strike killed five civilians in eastern Ghazni province on Wednesday.

Hundreds of civilians have lost their lives in US-led airstrikes and ground operations in various parts of Afghanistan over the past few months, with Afghans becoming more and more outraged over the seemingly endless progression of deadly assaults.

Source

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