Afghanistan

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Times have changed boxy, times have changed.

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Aussie troops capture Afghan 'insider'
* From: AAP
* September 02, 2012 8:11PM

AN insider who helped a rogue Afghan soldier murder three Australian diggers has been captured.

A statement from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) says Australian and Afghan troops hunting the killer of Lance Corporal Stjepan Milosevic, 40, Sapper James Martin, 21, and Private Robert Poate, 23, have captured "a key facilitator".

"Operating shoulder to shoulder, the Afghan and coalition soldiers successfully captured a key facilitator who not only enabled the insider attack, but also was responsible for IED (improvised explosive device) emplacement, and the kidnapping and murder of Afghan civilians," the ISAF statement said.

It said the operation was planned and executed in co-ordination with Afghan officials including approval by the Oruzgan provincial governor.

The three diggers were shot dead at a patrol base in Oruzgan province on Wednesday.

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Trapped in a maze of deadly contradictions
* by: By David Penberthy
* From: The Daily Telegraph
* September 04, 2012 12:00AM

THE quality of much of the public discussion around our continuing presence in Afghanistan over the past few days has left much to be desired.

That laziest of cliches - the assertion Australians who support the war effort have "blood on their hands" - has been bandied about.

The use of this loaded term commits the gravest of sins. It suggests the five soldiers who died last week, and the others who perished before them, gave their lives in vain and need not have died at all.

From all I have read over the many years this war has gone on, the bereaved seem more likely to argue that the death of their husband or son shows why we must maintain our resolve and keep on fighting. I'd suggest if someone I loved had died I would be loathe to see an end that makes their sacrifice empty and valueless too.

As things stand, and with the greatest respect to the different views held by grieving families, now would seem to be the right time for a dispassionate assessment of whether our continuing presence in Afghanistan is worth it. Can there ever be such a discourse?

That assessment should be made without florid language. It should be made on the basis of a clinical examination of progress versus cost. The progress seems to be limited at best. The cost is proving to be immense.

The death toll from our 11-year engagement in Afghanistan now stands at 38. The murder of three Diggers by a rogue Afghan soldier last week and the chopper crash claiming another two Australian lives gave the ADF its worst day in combat since Vietnam.

And, given the conduct of Afghanistan's President Harmid Karzai over the past 36 hours, it is possible to make a strong case we should pull out of Afghanistan on the basis of ingratitude. Karzai is not loved widely in Afghanistan, some even say he is corrupt as is his government. Pointedly Karzai is in it for karzai at the very least. The question is would any others do better? The Taliban perhaps?

I have long been a strong supporter of this war and been amazed and appalled by the knee-jerk hostility - predominantly from so-called left-wingers. This war should have the same galvanising force for so-called progressives as the Spanish Civil War did for the left in the 1930s. It began in response to an act of terror by an organisation which is barbaric and medieval in its views. Of course Dave is a Left-winger.

Despite this, there are a lot of people in the West who are happier talking about capitalist decadence or the history of American foreign policy than having an honest discussion about the moral dimensions of the battle against this enemy.

In the past fortnight there's been a couple of grotesque reminders as to the true nature of fundamentalist Islam: The beheading of 17 people in Afghanistan for daring to hold a dance, and the jailing of a young woman with Down syndrome in Pakistan for defacing the Koran, under that country's strict anti-blasphemy laws.

This most screwed-up version of the faith holds that women shouldn't be educated, there is no such thing as freedom of speech, that historic monuments pertaining to other religions should be blown up and that music and television are the work of the devil.

Yet it suits many to rabbit on instead about how America and its vassal states such as Australia are the real wrongdoers, or to engage in undergraduate moral relativism about how every society has its problems and we shouldn't be too quick to judge the poor old Taliban for their love of executing adulterers. Or allowing safe haven to Terrorists and training camps for the same.

This is still far and away the best argument for staying to fight these nutjobs - to make sure they don't end up with an entire country at their disposal to run as an international franchise to murder innocent people. But the argument is being eroded by the reality of what is happening on the ground. And that is a total erosion of trust. Which is just what the terrorists and taliban want.

From afar it now looks like our troops cannot operate with even a modicum of confidence as they go about training a viable domestic security force in Afghanistan. This is because the extremists are within the very ranks of those we are training.

It is beyond appalling that Karzai would rather launch an attack on Australia with his own hotly-contested version of events over a raid on Taliban suspects than acknowledge the pain and loss caused by the murder of Australian troops in the process of training his countrymen to defend themselves. Yet he is the Leader we are propping up.

More than one-third of the deaths sustained by ADF personnel in Afghanistan have been caused by rogue soldiers. The Kiwis have now signalled an earlier withdrawal from Afghanistan as three of their soldiers were killed in a single roadside bomb incident last month. That earlier withdrawal might have been decided upon with the support of the coalition forces in Afghanistan but it also showed that the conservative New Zealand government is mindful that the public is fed up with the costs of this war. I think we all are.

So, too, it seems are many Australians, notably many in the military who can see no resolution on the horizon and are galled by the continuing loss of life at the hands of people we are trying to help. It's at this point that you wonder why you bother. I am not sure why.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/o ... 6464160239" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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and another opinion...

Pulling out even more intolerable than Karzai
September 4, 2012
Peter Hartcher
Sydney Morning Herald political and international editor

Hamid Karzai's criticism of Australian troops on the weekend was an intolerable attack from an intolerable leader.

First, it appears that the President of Afghanistan was wrong on the facts. About 60 Australian troops and 80 Afghan National Army soldiers jointly conducted a night raid on the village of Sola in the Tarin Kowt district of Oruzgan Province on Friday night, according to Australian officials.

They were searching for the Afghan soldier who had betrayed his army and colleagues by turning his gun on the Australian troops who had been training his unit.

The turncoat, a sergeant named Hekmatullah, killed three Australians from 3RAR and wounded two others.

It was the latest in an escalating series of attacks from within. The military parlance for them is ''green on blue''; green represents Afghan forces and blue international forces.

In the course of the raid, the Australians detained about a dozen Afghans, shot and killed two - a village elder and his son - held one other and released the rest.

Karzai ''condemned'' the Australian pursuit mission as ''not authorised'', according to a statement issued by his office. He announced a ''full and all-out probe'' into the ''violation''.

The Karzai statement said that the two villagers killed by the Australians were not insurgents - they ''had no relationship with the government or militants''.

So was the operation ''not authorised''? The International Security Assistance Force, the formal name for the NATO-led coalition, said in a statement that ''the operation was planned and executed in co-ordination with Afghan officials, including approval by the Oruzgan provincial governor''. An ISAF spokesman, Adam Wojak, said the local police chief, Matiullah Khan, had also been informed.

So it seems Karzai was misinformed. The Australian Defence Minister, Stephen Smith, said yesterday that it was a misunderstanding.

If we accept that, we still have to wonder why Karzai would so vociferously condemn the raid and announce an inquiry that was plainly prejudged. On the face of it, Karzai was not acting in good faith.

And then there is the identity of the village man taken prisoner and the two shot dead. ISAF says Khan positively identified the dead men as insurgents. And ISAF said that the man kept in detention ''is confirmed to be an IED [improvised explosive device] emplacer and was previously involved in kidnapping, murder and attacks on [the] Afghan National Security Forces. At the time of his capture, he was attempting to support and move the insider threat shooter who killed three Australian soldiers and wounded two on [August] 29''.

There can be legitimate disagreement over the definition of an insurgent. And the killed Afghans were members of the Popalzai tribe, the tribe to which Karzai belongs, so perhaps that was a factor in his reaction. Tribalism in Afghanistan is one of its (and our) biggest problems.

But overall, we're left with the distinct impression that Karzai is more interested in political posturing than in seeking the facts or in pursuing the Afghan turncoat. A point which I have previously made.

This is the same man who stole the 2009 presidential election. His challenger withdrew in protest. The international coalition accepted the result with a straight face. But one US diplomat working in the United Nations at the time, Peter Galbraith, spoke out in disgust, saying that the election had been a ''train wreck'', that as many as 30 per cent of Karzai's votes were fraudulent and that the UN had helped cover up the stolen election to protect Karzai. The UN sacked Galbraith in response.

And this is the same Karzai who presides over one of the most outrageously corrupt regimes on the planet. The declared value of cash being carried out of Afghanistan through airports last year was $US4.6 billion ($4.45 billion) last year. The amount that went undeclared is anyone's guess. And this is in a country with a national government budget of $4.8 billion a year. As I have previously stated.

''Afghan officials believe many of the brick-sized stacks of $100 bills stuffed into boxes, bags and suitcases by Dubai-bound passengers belong to drug lords or criminal cartels,'' reported the Financial Times.

Or top officials. A former Karzai vice-president, Ahmad Zia Masood, was once stopped at Dubai Airport carrying $US52 million out of Afghanistan in cash, according to a cable published by WikiLeaks. He was allowed to go without questioning. Foreign governments and aid agencies take the money in to help Afghanistan; Afghan leaders take it out again to enrich themselves.

The New York Times reports matter-of-factly that ''the extensive web of Karzai family members have leveraged the President's position to put them at the centre of a new oligarchy of powerful Afghan families''.

All of this, plus much more, makes Karzai an intolerable figure. He adds insult to the injury suffered by the men and women from around the world who fight and die in a 50-nation effort to turn this benighted country from ungoverned terrorist training camp to governed territory.

So should Australia quit this intolerable government and its intolerable President in this intolerable shooting zone called Afghanistan?

The tactic of the Afghan turncoat troops, the green-on-blue attacks, is like the terrorism the Afghan mission was conceived to address. A point I have previously made.

It's tempting to say that Australian forces should leave now. It would certainly save the lives of some Diggers. But to pull out now, after 11 years, and two years before the declared Australian and international timeline, would be a serious blow to Australia's national credibility, as the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Bob Carr, has pointed out.

It would mean Australia was a country that could not keep its international commitments, a country that could be panicked by a handful of terrorists, a country that shrugs its shoulders after a decade of considered policy and the deaths of 38 of its soldiers and says it was all just a waste of time. A point I have previously made.

To stay on and fight in Karzai's Afghanistan is intolerable. To make a panicked exit now is even more so.

Peter Hartcher is the international editor.

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