The War as We Saw It
August 27, 2007
I don’t think the following statement would have seen the light of the day, let alone be public, unless with the tacit approval of people higher in the chain of command. Although most of it is quite banal, it nevertheless has some interesting insights. More importantly, it renders superfluous Gen. Patraeus’s report on Iraq, while at the same time serving as a punishing indictment of the punditocracy and the politicos who still see signs of ’progress’ in Iraq. (Check out Khody Akhavi’s excellent report on Ken Pollack — the discredited hack from Saban Centre who was generously provided space by the New York Times to peddle his pro-war propaganda — lending support to the so called ‘surge’ in the guise of criticism).
VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)
The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.
A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.
As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.
Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.
However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.
In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.
Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.
Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux.
The Iraqi government is run by the main coalition partners of the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, with Kurds as minority members. The Shiite clerical establishment formed the alliance to make sure its people did not succumb to the same mistake as in 1920: rebelling against the occupying Western force (then the British) and losing what they believed was their inherent right to rule Iraq as the majority. The qualified and reluctant welcome we received from the Shiites since the invasion has to be seen in that historical context. They saw in us something useful for the moment.
Now that moment is passing, as the Shiites have achieved what they believe is rightfully theirs. Their next task is to figure out how best to consolidate the gains, because reconciliation without consolidation risks losing it all. Washington’s insistence that the Iraqis correct the three gravest mistakes we made — de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government — places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support.
Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.
At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.
In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.”
In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.
Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.
We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.
Buddhika Jayamaha is an Army specialist. Wesley D. Smith is a sergeant. Jeremy Roebuck is a sergeant. Omar Mora is a sergeant. Edward Sandmeier is a sergeant. Yance T. Gray is a staff sergeant. Jeremy A. Murphy is a staff sergeant.
What Do Palestinians Really Think?
August 27, 2007
Manipulation of poll figures is not a new phenomena. The only places where one has reason not to doubt their authenticity is when the outcome seems to be in conflict with the interests of the polling agency (i.e., if its affiliaitons or agenda is known). Only recently in Venezuela, the Israel Lobby connected Observatorio Hannah Arendt, and several other pro-US polling agencies were predicting a neck-to-neck battle between Hugo Chavez and Manuel Rosales. Independent polling firms at the same time were suggesting a very different outcome. In the following piece Ali Abunimah analyses the recent reports about polls allegedly finding higher support for the US-Israel proxy Salam Fayyad regime.
“Palestinian poll finds support for Fatah government over Hamas.” That headline from the International Herald Tribune, one of many similar ones last week, must have warmed the hearts of supporters of the illegal, unelected and Israeli-backed Ramallah “government” of Salam Fayyad. Last June Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and the national unity government he headed, and appointed Fayyad without the legally required endorsement of the Palestinian legislative council. This followed Hamas’ rout of the US and Israeli-backed militias of Fatah warlord Mohammed Dahlan in the Gaza Strip.
Does this poll vindicate the US and Israeli strategy of funding and arming Palestinian collaborator leaders in Ramallah, and Abbas’ strategy of embracing Israel, cracking down on the resistance, colluding in a cruel siege on his people in Gaza, and refusing all dialogue with Hamas? A closer look at the poll results as well as the context suggests the opposite.
The poll’s publisher, the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre (JMCC), trumpeted that a “majority” of Palestinians “said the performance of Fayyad’s government is better” than that of the democratically-elected government of Haniyeh who is still the de facto prime minister despite Abbas’ dismissal order.
In fact the results claim 46.5 percent preferring Fayyad’s performance (a plurality not a majority) as against 24.4 percent preferring Haniyeh’s performance since the events in June. (See JMCC poll number 62, August 2007)
Still, if true, that would be an impressive achievement for Abbas and Fayyad. The poll also states that were new legislative elections held, 38 percent would vote for Fatah, while just 24 percent would vote for Hamas — with Fatah retaining a lead in both the West Bank and Gaza.
Yet there are good reasons to believe that this poll, like all previous polls taken by JMCC and other organizations, overestimates support for Fatah and understates support for Hamas by a wide margin. (Recall that all the polls erroneously predicted a comfortable win for Fatah in the January 2006 legislative election, and the 2005 municipal elections).
According to its methodology, this poll included face-to-face interviews with 1,199 Palestinians in randomly selected households throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Let us suppose that is the case.
Abbas has effectively declared Hamas illegal and his Israeli-backed security forces are working alongside Israeli occupation troops to carry out mass arrests of its supporters. Israel continues to carry out mass kidnappings and extrajudicial executions of Hamas members and other Palestinian resistance activists, aided by an extensive network of collaborators working inside and outside Palestinian official institutions, and some non-governmental organizations. Under such circumstances it is not surprising that true support for Hamas (as measured by secret ballots in elections) has always been much higher than that to which people are willing to admit in face-to-face interviews with strangers whose affiliations they cannot easily assess.
Second, when Palestinians are being asked to evaluate “performance” it is not clear what they are being asked to assess. Does the question take into account the fact that the democratically-elected Hamas government was barely able to function from the time it took office in March 2006 due to the kidnapping of half its cabinet by Israel, the US-EU-Israeli siege which deprived it of its rightful revenues even to pay salaries, sabotage by Dahlan’s gangs, and since June the total blockade of Gaza that has virtually shut down its economy? (The latest ploy was the apparent collusion by Israel, the European Union and Abbas advisors to cut off Gaza’s electricity on the basis of accusations, denied by a Gaza electricity company official, that Hamas was siphoning off revenues).
At the same time, Abbas and Fayyad are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from their foreign patrons. Not really a fair comparison. But given their advantages Abbas and Fayyad are doing remarkably poorly even as measured by the poll.
While 44 percent of Gaza residents polled said their own security situation has improved since Hamas took over (and 31 percent said it had gotten worse), only 17 percent of West Bank residents polled say their security situation has improved living under Abbas and Fayyad, while 36.5 percent said it had deteriorated.
More than half of those polled were “dissatisfied” with Abbas’ performance, while just a fifth were “very satisfied.”
Overall, 26 percent of Palestinians under occupation said the Fayyad government should be “canceled” and the national unity government (which had been headed by Haniyeh) restored to office (21 percent in the West Bank and 34 percent in Gaza). Only 17 percent thought the Haniyeh government should be “canceled” so that Fayyad could rule over the West Bank and Gaza (18 percent in the West Bank, 16 percent in Gaza). Read another way this suggests that just 17 percent of Palestinians under occupation view the Fayyad government as being the legitimate authority.
A majority of Palestinians wanted to see a return to dialogue and national unity — a rejection of Abbas’ intransigent refusal to talk to Hamas.
Asked which leaders they trust most, Abbas came highest with 18 percent (17 percent in the West Bank, 20 percent in Gaza). Haniyeh came a close second at 16 percent (11 percent in West Bank, 25 percent in Gaza). Salam Fayyad came in fifth at just 3.5 percent, scoring the same in both territories. Almost a third of Palestinians said they didn’t trust anyone.
Asked who they would vote for in a presidential election, those polled gave statistically equal support to both Abbas and Haniyeh (21 percent and 19 percent), while Fayyad got five percent.
If the poll shows weak support for Abbas and Fayyad (and great disaffection with all political factions), it shows outright rejection of Abbas’ capitulationist approach to peace negotiations with Israel. Canceling the right of return, allowing Israeli settlements to stay, and giving up most of Jerusalem in exchange for a Palestinian statelet on a fraction of the West Bank are reportedly at the heart of the “agreement of principles” that Abbas is negotiating with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Almost 70 percent of Palestinians under occupation, according to the poll, adhere to the right of “return of all refugees to their original land.” Another 12 percent envisage the return of only some refugees to their original lands. Just seven percent of those polled agreed with the position that no refugees should return home at all.
Eighty-two percent opposed allowing Israel to retain control of “major settlement blocs inside the West Bank in exchange for equal Israeli land,” and 94 percent rejected “keeping Israel’s authority in the area of Al-Aqsa mosque” in Jerusalem.
Peace process industry propagandists routinely claim that a two-state solution is overwhelmingly supported by the vast majority of Palestinians. This has never been true (millions of Palestinian refugees and exiles outside the country have never been included in elections, and are not regularly polled). This poll indicates that among Palestinians under occupation, support for a two-state solution is at just 51 percent (49 percent in the West Bank and 54 percent in Gaza). At the same time support for “a binational state in all of Palestine where Palestinians and Israeli [sic] enjoy equal representation and rights” is now supported by 30 percent (roughly similar in both territories).
Support for a two-state solution remains remarkably anemic, given the massive efforts invested in promoting it, while support for a one-state solution is impressively high and continues to creep upwards despite the fact that no major political faction or leader has openly endorsed it and so much effort is invested in discrediting it.
There are legitimate concerns about the methodology of the JMCC poll, the phrasing of questions and the context. At least one blogger cast doubt on it because the pollster, Ghassan Khatib, has served numerous times as a minister in the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority.
Nevertheless, whatever doubts there are, this poll merely confirms that Palestinians under occupation remain united on the fundamentals of their cause. Despite the conspiracy they face to starve and brutalize them into giving up their rights, the Palestinian people are steadfast in defending them.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
Margolis on Media Coverage of Iraq
August 27, 2007
The Real News Network interviews paleoconservative veteran journalist Eric Margolis on the coverage of the Iraq war.
War Made Easy
August 26, 2007
I just watched the new film War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, based on Normon Solomon’s book, and I think it is one of the most powerful indictments of the media’s role in selling and sustaining support for the war. Narrated by Sean Penn, the film is also compelling visually with rare archival footage that highlights the rhetorical and strategic continuity in the art of selling war (there are also some real gems with establishment hacks making asses of themselves carried away with their proximity to power — political as well as military). I urge everyone to support MEF’s superb work by buying a DVD of the film. In the meanwhile, here is an interview with Solomon on the genesis of the film.
What’s changed in the rhetoric of war since the 1960s? A new film, War Made Easy, explores how media and government spin from the Vietnam era to today has kept America at war.
The film has been adapted from the critically acclaimed book by Norman Solomon, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” which was published in 2005.
Norman Solomon is a nationally syndicated columnist on media and politics. He has been writing the weekly “Media Beat” column since 1992. AlterNet spoke with him about the film.
Q: How exactly did this project get off the ground?
A: I’m a writer who’s done a lot of radio and occasionally TV, but I’m not a filmmaker. The experience of writing this book was a pretty mind-blowing process for me, and when it was published, I thought about the dimension of archival footage and the media onslaught in favor of war, both past, present and future, for that matter. I’d really admired the Media Education Foundation for a long time. For instance, their film — Hijacking Catastrophe — I thought was superb on the neocons’ global agenda. So when I talked with people at MEF, they decided to make a film based on the War Made Easy book, and I was thrilled. Eighteen months later, the film is launching this summer, and I’m just really excited about how the analytical, the informational, and the emotional are accessed in this documentary.
Q: How has the response been to the film so far?
A: My hopes have been largely fulfilled during the several screenings I’ve been to on both the East and West coasts. People are leaving the movie with grief and anger but also motivation to stop the war in Iraq and to prevent the wars that are gleams in the eyes of top officials in Washington.
Q: Why do you think there’s so much resistance amongst the media to draw parallels between Iraq and Vietnam?
A: Any geographer will tell you Iraq isn’t Vietnam. But the United States is still the United States. The overwhelming issue is how our country continues to drag itself and so much of the world into one horrific conflagration after another.
The pundits and reporters who have the highest profile in this country tend to be eager to see every discredited war as an aberration, and they did the same thing during the Vietnam War. When it became incontrovertible that the war was based on a series of mendacious maneuvers, the response was, “Well, yeah, but that’s not what we’re like. This is an anomaly.” And we’re still getting that. It’s because “Bush is weird, and Cheney’s weird.” You even get that from some liberal pundits.
Q: President Bush has said that history will ultimately judge whether of not the Iraq War was a success or failure. Do you believe we’ll one day hear people saying this war was a success (as some have with Vietnam) or will people universally deem this a failure?
A: Well, both. It is one of the most horrific war choices ever made out of Washington. There will always be people in Washington and in the media who try to justify the war, or they will say if it had been done differently it would’ve been potentially a good use of U.S. military power. One of the key points of the film is that the whole argument against a quagmire is a very narrow one, because it begs the question of whether a war based on imperial assumptions and presumptions of empire can be justified? And how can you competently execute an immoral war? How can you do a better job of managing a war that should never have been launched in the first place?
Those kind of questions are not popular amongst the elite media. Quite frankly, if this war had resulted in a military triumph in the middle of 2003, you wouldn’t have the July 8 editorial in the New York Times saying it’s time to pull the troops out. They would be celebrating this war along with the rest of the media. I think War Made Easy really draws a thread across the last 50 years of U.S. foreign policy and the American warfare state, to find the patterns that have inflicted so much suffering. It’s what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism,” and it hasn’t stopped yet.
Q: How has the way the mainstream press covered war changed or not changed since the Vietnam war?
A: The style has changed but not the substance. There’s still a reliance on official sources, an echoing of the White House’s rationale for war, a reluctance to challenge the prerogatives of empire. These have been virtual constants.
In terms of content, beyond style and technology, the changes have been implemented more in response to grassroots pressure. In other words, the anti-war protesting that people have done from 2002 until today has had a cumulative effect on our society, and while the news media are slow to react to grassroots pressure against the war, they are still within shouting distance. There is a huge disconnect between anti-[war sentiment in the grassroots and what we get from the likes of not only Fox, but CNN, NPR and PBS.
Q: What do you make of the analysis of President Bush’s state of mind with regards to war? It is widely believe that LBJ was at least privately tortured about his leadership and the war’s toll.
A: For people in Vietnam or for people in Iraq, or for U.S. soldiers who are sent to those countries to kill and be killed, it really didn’t matter whether LBJ or George W. Bush felt remorseful or gleeful as the war went on. It’s really about policies that affect peoples’ lives. The media spin has been refined and of course adapted to changes like the advent of cable television. But one of the really stunning things about the archival footage that’s been unearthed and put together for the War Made Easy film is the continuity of the propaganda messages to justify the morally and logically unjustifiable.
From the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 to WMD in 2002 — the rhetoric that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon used against withdrawing troops from Vietnam is often word for word the same catch phrases and code words that George W. Bush has been using. “You can’t cut and run,” “You must stay the course.” These are ways of vilifying the opponents of the war in no uncertain terms.
Q: Why is it that so many Americans can fall for the same rhetoric that gets us involved in imperial wars, when it is often so transparent?
A: George Orwell said it well, “Those who control the past, control the future. Those who control the present, control the past.” The arguments over Vietnam have not only been about a war in the past, it’s been an argument over a war in the present and prospectively future wars as well.
The so-called Vietnam syndrome is something we talk at length about in the film because it’s a catchphrase that’s used in a negative way by media and war advocates in Washington to try to justify continuing an insane war that’s so destructive. It’s basically a way to say, if you’re against the war, you’re a wimp and you don’t have fortitude. As one TV pundit said, “You’re a weenie.” The epithet of the Vietnam syndrome is based on a series of myths that we unpack in the film.
Q: What makes your film unique and worth seeing?
A: You’ll see a panorama of techniques from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush, from Walter Cronkite to Bill O’Reilly, that show how we’re being scammed in the same ways from one war to another, from one decade to another. I think it’s the scope of the film, which uses unarguable TV footage and historical film segments to show just how pernicious and how deep these patterns are.
It’s really, for a lot of people, mind-blowing when it’s laid end to end from 1964 to 2007. The film, I think, in its unique way conveys not by talking at people but by showing people that we have been subjected to a colossal scam. The results have been so terrible that we better get wise to it and find ways to resist, or the future that we want for the future generations is gravely imperiled.
Adam Howard is the editor of PEEK.
Israel: An Important Marker Has Been Passed
August 26, 2007
There are already enough reasons why no one should susbscribe to the New Statesman, but the publication has just added another. With its current issue it is offering to subscribers a copy of zionut Melanie Phillips’s favorite book, The Islamist, by extremist Muslim-turned-extremist Neocon Ed Husain (next issue will offer Jordan’s biography I presume). The idea no doubt comes from the little turd Martin Bright, its political editor, whose disdain for Muslims is only matched by his admiration for neoconservatives (his anti-Muslim screed was published by Michael Gove’s hardline Policy Exchange). John Pilger, Mark Thomas and Ziauddin Sardar (and a few occasional others) are the New Labour rag’s only saving graces, but fortunately you can access all their articles online.
Here Pilger, a true hero for our times, returns to question of Palestine, and draws attention to civil society’s response to the inaction and complicity of governments: boycott, divestment, sanctions.
In a column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes his first encounter with a Palestinian refugee camp and what Neldon Mandela has called “the greatest moral issue of our age” - justice for the Palestinians. ‘Something has changed’, he writes, referring to the world view of sanctions and a boycott against Israel.From a limestone hill rising above Qalandia refugee camp you can see Jerusalem. I watched a lone figure standing there in the rain, his son holding the tail of his long tattered coat. He extended his hand and did not let go. “I am Ahmed Hamzeh, street entertainer,” he said in measured English. “Over there, I played many musical instruments; I sang in Arabic, English and Hebrew, and because I was rather poor, my very small son would chew gum while the monkey did its tricks. When we lost our country, we lost respect. One day a rich Kuwaiti stopped his car in front of us. He shouted at my son, “Show me how a Palestinian picks up his food rations!” So I made the monkey appear to scavenge on the ground, in the gutter. And my son scavenged with him. The Kuwaiti threw coins and my son crawled on his knees to pick them up. This was not right; I was an artist, not a beggar . . . I am not even a peasant now.”
“How do you feel about all that?” I asked him.
“Do you expect me to feel hatred? What is that to a Palestinian? I never hated the Jews and their Israel . . . yes, I suppose I hate them now, or maybe I pity them for their stupidity. They can’t win. Because we Palestinians are the Jews now and, like the Jews, we will never allow them or the Arabs or you to forget. The youth will guarantee us that, and the youth after them . . .”.
That was 40 years ago. On my last trip back to the West Bank, I recognised little of Qalandia, now announced by a vast Israeli checkpoint, a zigzag of sandbags, oil drums and breeze blocks, with conga lines of people, waiting, swatting flies with precious papers. Inside the camp, the tents had been replaced by sturdy hovels, although the queues at single taps were as long, I was assured, and the dust still ran to caramel in the rain. At the United Nations office I asked about Ahmed Hamzeh, the street entertainer. Records were consulted, heads shaken. Someone thought he had been “taken away . . . very ill”. No one knew about his son, whose trachoma was surely blindness now. Outside, another generation kicked a punctured football in the dust.
And yet, what Nelson Mandela has called “the greatest moral issue of the age” refuses to be buried in the dust. For every BBC voice that strains to equate occupier with occupied, thief with victim, for every swarm of emails from the fanatics of Zion to those who invert the lies and describe the Israeli state’s commitment to the destruction of Palestine, the truth is more powerful now than ever. Documentation of the violent expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 is voluminous. Re-examination of the historical record has put paid to the fable of heroic David in the Six Day War, when Ahmed Hamzeh and his family were driven from their home. The alleged threat of Arab leaders to “throw the Jews into the sea”, used to justify the 1967 Israeli onslaught and since repeated relentlessly, is highly questionable.
In 2005, the spectacle of wailing Old Testament zealots leaving Gaza was a fraud. The building of their “settlements” has accelerated on the West Bank, along with the illegal Berlin-style wall dividing farmers from their crops, children from their schools, families from each other. We now know that Israel’s destruction of much of Lebanon last year was pre-planned. As the former CIA analyst Kathleen Christison has written, the recent “civil war” in Gaza was actually a coup against the elected Hamas-led government, engineered by Elliott Abrams, the Zionist who runs US policy on Israel and a convicted felon from the Iran-Contra era.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is as much America’s crusade as Israel’s. On 16 August, the Bush administration announced an unprecedented $30bn military “aid package” for Israel, the world’s fourth biggest military power, an air power greater than Britain, a nuclear power greater than France. No other country on earth enjoys such immunity, allowing it to act without sanction, as Israel. No other country has such a record of lawlessness: not one of the world’s tyrannies comes close. International treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by Iran, are ignored by Israel. There is nothing like it in UN history.
But something is changing. Perhaps last summer’s panoramic horror beamed from Lebanon on to the world’s TV screens provided the catalyst. Or perhaps cynicism of Bush and Blair and the incessant use of the inanity, “terror”, together with the day-by-day dissemination of a fabricated insecurity in all our lives, has finally brought the attention of the international community outside the rogue states, Britain and the US, back to one of its principal sources, Israel.
I got a sense of this recently in the United States. A full-page advertisement in the New York Times had the distinct odour of panic. There have been many “friends of Israel” advertisements in the Times, demanding the usual favours, rationalising the usual outrages. This one was different. “Boycott a cure for cancer?” was its main headline, followed by “Stop drip irrigation in Africa? Prevent scientific co-operation between nations?” Who would want to do such things? “Some British academics want to boycott Israelis,” was the self-serving answer. It referred to the University and College Union’s (UCU) inaugural conference motion in May, calling for discussion within its branches for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. As John Chalcraft of the London School of Economics pointed out, “the Israeli academy has long provided intellectual, linguistic, logistical, technical, scientific and human support for an occupation in direct violation of international law [against which] no Israeli academic institution has ever taken a public stand”.The swell of a boycott is growing inexorably, as if an important marker has been passed, reminiscent of the boycotts that led to sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Both Mandela and Desmond Tutu have drawn this parallel; so has South African cabinet minister Ronnie Kasrils and other illustrious Jewish members of the liberation struggle. In Britain, an often Jewish-led academic campaign against Israel’s “methodical destruction of [the Palestinian] education system” can be translated by those of us who have reported from the occupied territories into the arbitrary closure of Palestinian universities, the harassment and humiliation of students at checkpoints and the shooting and killing of Palestinian children on their way to school.
These initiatives have been backed by a British group, Independent Jewish Voices, whose 528 signatories include Stephen Fry, Harold Pinter, Mike Leigh and Eric Hobsbawm. The country’s biggest union, Unison, has called for an “economic, cultural, academic and sporting boycott” and the right of return for Palestinian families expelled in 1948. Remarkably, the Commons’ international development committee has made a similar stand. In April, the membership of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) voted for a boycott only to see it hastily overturned by the national executive council. In the Republic of Ireland, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has called for divestment from Israeli companies: a campaign aimed at the European Union, which accounts for two-thirds of Israel’s exports under an EU-Israel Association Agreement. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, has said that human rights conditions in the agreement should be invoked and Israel’s trading preferences suspended.
This is unusual, for these were once distant voices. And that such grave discussion of a boycott has “gone global” was unforeseen in official Israel, long comforted by its seemingly untouchable myths and great power sponsorship, and confident that the mere threat of anti-Semitism would ensure silence. When the British lecturers’ decision was announced, the US Congress passed an absurd resolution describing the UCU as “anti-Semitic”. (Eighty congressmen have gone on junkets to Israel this summer.)
This intimidation has worked in the past. The smearing of American academics has denied them promotion, even tenure. The late Edward Said kept an emergency button in his New York apartment connected to the local police station; his offices at Columbia University were once burned down. Following my 2002 film, Palestine is Still the Issue, I received death threats and slanderous abuse, most of it coming from the US where the film was never shown. When the BBC’s Independent Panel recently examined the corporation’s coverage of the Middle East, it was inundated with emails, “many from abroad, mostly from North America”, said its report. Some individuals “sent multiple missives, some were duplicates and there was clear evidence of pressure group mobilisation”. The panel’s conclusion was that BBC reporting of the Palestinian struggle was not “full and fair” and “in important respects, presents an incomplete and in that sense misleading picture”. This was neutralised in BBC press releases.
The courageous Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, believes a single democratic state, to which the Palestinian refugees are given the right of return, is the only feasible and just solution, and that a sanctions and boycott campaign is critical in achieving this. Would the Israeli population be moved by a worldwide boycott? Although they would rarely admit it, South Africa’s whites were moved enough to support an historic change. A boycott of Israeli institutions, goods and services, says Pappé, “will not change the [Israeli] position in a day, but it will send a clear message that [the premises of Zionism] are racist and unacceptable in the 21st century . . . They would have to choose.”
And so would the rest of us.
El Libertador
August 26, 2007
What is King Abdullah of Jordan doing? (h/t Roads to Iraq)
Gathering his generals around him in a serious discussion, is he discussing a plan to liberate Al-Quds [Jerusalem] from Israel? Or retake the West-bank?
To read the story behind this image and to see the whole image click on:
No he is opening a biscuits factory, as the story reported on Al-Ghad Jordanian newspaper front page taunting the King.
But in case you thought the man is just a buffoon with a penchant for wearing fancy uniforms, you must remember that he has played dignified roles in far more significant enterprises. (h/t Angry Arab)
Ladies and Gentlemen — His Royal Highness, the King of Jordan!
Fisk on September 11
August 25, 2007
One of the consequences of the more loony conspiracy theories about September 11 has been that it has made is easier for true believers to discredit or dismiss even the legitimate questions. I agree with them to the extent that the official story remains the most improbable, however what they offer in its stead is so full of speculation that it makes the official story appear credible by comparison. Here Fisk is compelled follow the necessary distantiation ritual before admitting that he also has his doubts about aspects of the official story. Personally I think there is a strong case to be made for the fact that the carnage was avoidable — some, like those who sold stocks the night before, were clearly in the know. So ‘let it happen’ has more traction than ‘made it happen’.
Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience – just one – whom I call the “raver”. Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions – often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist – and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the “raver” is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a “raver”.
His – or her – question goes like this. Why, if you believe you’re a free journalist, don’t you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don’t you tell the truth – that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don’t you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows – that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what “all the world knows” (that usually is the phrase) – who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the “raver” is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then – the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd – left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.
Usually, I have tried to tell the “truth”; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically – it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?
Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim – as the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa’ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. “We disrupted al-Qa’ida, causing them to run,” Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named “Operation Lightning Hammer” in Iraq’s Diyala province. “Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them.” And more of the same, all of it untrue.
Within hours, al-Qa’ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas – which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush’s more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.
But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It’s not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93’s debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I’m not talking about the crazed “research” of David Icke’s Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.
I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the “raver” bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be “fraudulent or deceptive”.
Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard “explosions” in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let’s claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA’s list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.
But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose “Islamic” advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the “Fajr” prayer to be included in Atta’s letter.
Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious “war on terror” which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush’s happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that “we’re an empire now – we create our own reality”. True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.
White Discussions
August 25, 2007
White Discussions — by Live
I talk of freedom
you talk of the flag
I talk of revolution
you’d much rather brag
and as the decibels of this disenchanting discourse
continue to dampen the day
the coin flips again and again, and again, and again
as our sanity walks awayall this discussion though politically correct
is dead beyond destruction
though it leaves me quite erect
and as the final sunset rolls behind the earth
and the clock is finally dead
I’ll look at you, you’ll look at me
and we’ll cry a lot
but this will be what we said
this will be what we saidLook where all this talking got us, baby.
The Propaganda Machine
August 24, 2007
Jonathan Cook is an excellent journalist with phenomenal analytical skills. It is hardly a surprise then that that Israel’s cyber army should feel threatened by his reports. In the following preface to his latest article he describes his motivations behind writing for Guardians Comment is Free section. What is ironic — not to say amusing — is how the GIYUS crowd responded to his latest article just the way he described they do to anything critical of Israel. (Thanks Ann)
I published an article entitled “Kosher in Tehran” on the Guardian’s popular blogsite Comment is Free on 7 August 2007 (the same piece is archived on my own site as “Israel’s Jewish problem in Tehran”). Like most articles criticising Israel on Comment is Free, it — or rather I — was greeted with much abuse from the Israeli apologists who frequent the site. Which is one reason, I suppose, why it is worth publishing there. If the “hasbara” crowd are so determined to shout invective every time criticism of Israel appears on Comment is Free, then it is a sign either that the site is influential or, at the very least, that they think it is influential.
All of which encouraged me to air on the same site some simple observations about the purpose of hasbara and its effects on the freedom of journalists, particularly in the US, to publish news and views critical of Israel. That involved mentioning my own experiences at the hands of the Israel lobby and pointing out how a well-respected newspaper, the International Herald Tribune, caved in to such pressure. I do not believe my experience is unique, or special; in fact, I know it is not.
The results, again particularly in the US, are clear: the media is profoundly fearful of allowing articles seriously critical of Israel to be published, and any journalist who dares or manages to sneak such a piece past the editors is in for a career-damaging bashing afterwards. Obviously this is an assault of the highest order on freedom of speech in the West about our support for one country, Israel, and its involvement in regional confrontations that are increasingly having global consequences. It ensures that a whole realm of US-assisted foreign policy, conducted by Israel, is entirely off-limits to debate in the mainstream American media, even more so than US foreign policy itself.
(On a related side note: the original article mentioned here, “Kosher in Tehran”, was offered by the Institute of Middle East Understanding as an op-ed to all the main newspapers in the US. Every one of them rejected it. Interestingly, an obscure web page on the Camera site that published attacks on me over two articles I published in the Tribune in 2003 and 2004 shot up the Google ranking on a search of my name. Does that mean US newspaper editors, unsure of who I was, checked first to see if the Israel lobby had had a problem with me in the past? We will never know, of course.)
Unfortunately, and with no little irony, the editors at Comment is Free excised the last part of my article, in which I discussed my own experiences, even if briefly given the length restrictions on articles. Exceptionally, therefore, I am archiving the submitted article rather than the published one. Anyone who wants to read the version on Comment is Free can do so here.
Anyone interested to learn more about my run-in with the Israel lobby can find Camera’s letter of complaint to the Tribune in 2003 and my response here.
Unfortunately, as far I can see, Abraham Foxman’s pro forma letter on the Anti-Defamation League’s website is no longer available in its archives.
My letter responding to the “largest mailbag in the Tribune’s history”, as the comment editor told me at the time, over the 2004 story can be found here.
Now for Cook’s description of The Propaganda Machine.
It is an honour of a kind, I suppose, to briefly have the most active thread on the Comment is free site. But not much of one when 95% of the posts rarely rose above the level of vitriolic name-calling. The posters probably know that by now I am immune to playground taunts of “scum” and “Nazi”, but the abuse, I suspect, is meant more as a warning to others who might criticise Israel. Keep quite – or else.Volcanic outbursts of hatred on Cif greet anyone who objects to Israel’s policies: in my case, I sinned by pointing out that its leaders have turned the small community of Jews in Tehran into pawns in a struggle to persuade the world that Iran is a genocidal threat to world Jewry. My point was that Israel’s concern is entirely hollow. It simply wants to mobilise support for an attack on Iran, either by itself or the US.Some posters to this site seem to be aware of the organised nature of these critic-bashing campaigns. They note that sites like giyus.org rally the faithful to the cause. But most posters are probably not aware that giyus and its ilk are only the tip of a much larger effort called “hasbara” by Israel and its supporters. Usually the word is translated as “advocacy for Israel”. I call it by its proper name: propaganda.
The main goal of hasbara is constantly to disseminate good news about Israel, largely independent of whether the news is true or not, in the hope that over time a benevolent image of Israel will be reinforced. Here’s an example: in 2000 it was reported that an Israeli court ruling had ended the country’s system of land apartheid, a legally enforced territorial separation that keeps Jewish and Arab citizens apart in most of country. To this day apologists cite this ruling as proof of equality in Israel, even though the decision only applied to one Arab family, has yet to be enforced, and the Israeli parliament is currently passing legislation to make sure it never is.
But the charm offensive is only the upside of their work. The downside is, as Cif posters know well, a relentless campaign to target, discredit and silence critics of Israel. It can take many forms, not only name-calling. I was intrigued to see several posters thought I had no right to criticise Israel because my wife is an Israeli citizen, though – and this is presumably her and my offence – she also happens to be a Palestinian. They would have a field day – but fail to see their own double standards – were I to suggest that only non-Jews be allowed to apologise for Israel.
A few posters made what appeared to be a substantive point: why had I failed to note that, while today 25,000 Jews live in Tehran, another 80,000 have fled? But look closer and the case crumbles. The overwhelming majority of those 80,000 Jews left in the wake of the country’s Islamic revolution in 1979 – that is, nearly 30 years ago. They are irrelevant to Israel’s current claims that the Iranian leadership is preparing to commit a genocide against the Jews. In any case, most of those fleeing Jews left because they were middle class and secular and saw no future in an Islamic state, despite reassurances from Ayatollah Khomeini that they would left in peace. In other words, they left – like many other Iranians – for economic reasons, not political or religious ones.
Other posters simply lied, in the great tradition of hasbara. Several suggested I had written that Rafik Hariri was killed by Israel. I hadn’t, and you can check my website to be sure. I had also apparently written that the two Israeli soldiers killed in a Hizbullah operation last year were caught on Lebanese soil. Again a search failed to find the story. No matter. Truth is not what hasbara is about.
And if all this fails to discredit a critic of Israel, simply label him an anti-semite, and the argument can be closed. Game, set and match.
I am not sure if any other country or cause encourages this kind of mainly voluntary propaganda work, but I am sure that no other country or cause has the human resources that Israel can rely on to carry it out. There are thousands of people sitting at their computers ready to pounce. (I know because I have received abusive emails from them, unless it’s just a handful with thousands of different email addresses.) They do not need orders or much guidance. They do it because they love Israel and see it as part of their life’s work to protect Israel’s image.
Doubtless, they believe what they write too. If you have been raised to live in constant fear of anti-semitism, and to see an anti-semitic impulse lurking in the recessses of every non-Jewish mind (an observation that is often publicly made in the Israeli and American media but less often here), then what other motive could someone like me have but anti-semitism for writing what I do? The logic is satisfyingly circular.
But Cif posters may be less aware of how the rest of the Israel lobby works. Giyus is, in fact, the most amateurish part of its operation. These are the “shock troops” on the front line. They overwhelm by force of numbers only. Far more effective are the lobby’s “snipers”. They pick off anyone the shock troops have failed to frighten off and whose voice might be heard in places where it matters: particularly in the American media and on US campuses. Tony Judt has recently felt their ire, as have Professors Walt and Mearsheimer.
A separate lobby system, particularly Aipac, is dedicated to intimidating elected American representatives. This obsession with preserving Israel’s image in the US is not surprising: the country’s fate as an occupying, military power in the Middle East will, after all, be decided in Washington. In the main, the professional Israel lobby cares little about what is said in the European media, although as British newspaper websites like the Guardian start to penetrate the other side of the Atlantic that is changing. There may yet come a day when we will miss the abusive giyus crowd.
The professional Israel lobby have respectable names like Camera (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle Reporting in America), Honest Reporting and the Anti-Defamation League.
Camera has a section dedicated to “naming and shaming” some of the most influential journalists writing about the Middle East. You’ll find a page dedicated to the Guardian’s former Jerusalem correspondent, Chris McGreal, after he made the ultimate faux pas of comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa, a country he knows intimately. There are many who share the honour: the Independent’s Donald MacIntyre, Tim McGirk of Time magazine, Molly Moore of the Washington Post, Jim Muir and Kylie Morris of the BBC, Greg Myre and Neil MacFarquhar of the New York Times. And that’s just a fraction of those whose surname begins with M.
Before, the giyus crowd get to work, let me also point out that once I too was on the Camera list, during a period when I contributed op-eds to the International Herald Tribune. On a couple of occasions the Tribune received the largest mailbags in its history in response to my commentaries. Another small honour, I suppose. There was no doubt the letter-writing was organised: the Anti-Defamation League’s head, Abraham Foxman, kindly provided less imaginative writers with a pro forma letter on the front page of its website denouncing me.
When I stood my ground, the Tribune decided I was too hot to handle. Many writers presumably just buckle under. A couple of entries on Camera is enough to make most US journalists extremely wary of a third “exposure”.
So how will this post be received? What strategy will be used to discredit me?
The professional hasbarists – the snipers — will probably ignore my post. Why stir over this single piece in a chaotic blog on the peripheries of American discourse. Better not to give me and my writing the oxygen of publicity.
What about the amateur hasbarists? Will they bite their lip? I doubt it. Anyone who tries to expose the workings of the Israel lobby is immediately accused of claiming that the Jews are an all-powerful cabal. (For the record, I’m not: I just believe people who have power tend to abuse it, be it the Israel lobby, the National Rifle Association or the US medical lobby.)
Nonetheless, the hasbarists will be itching to claim that my piece is another Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forged document that suggested the Jews were behind a worldwide conspiracy. Doubtless they will find other ways to discredit me too, ways I cannot even begin to imagine. Let them commence…
With Friends Like These…
August 24, 2007
Why, ‘friendly’ fire was necessary to bring about the ‘good effects’ which have hitherto benefited only Afghans. However, there must be some relief at the MoD that the nintendo bombers did not ‘press home their advantage’ a la Helmand.
Three British soldiers have been killed in an apparent friendly fire incident involving US aircraft in southern Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence said today.
Two other soldiers were injured in the incident, which occurred yesterday at 6.30pm local time (3pm BST).
The MoD said the soldiers, from 1st Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment, were taking part in a patrol to disrupt Taliban activity in north-west Kajaki, in Helmand province.
The patrol was attacked by Taliban insurgents and air support was summoned in the form of two US F15 aircraft. One bomb was dropped, apparently killing the three soldiers. They were declared dead at the scene.
The two injured soldiers were evacuated by helicopter to a medical facility at Camp Bastion for treatment.
The defence secretary, Des Browne, promised a thorough investigation and defended the use of air support for British troops.
“I do know air support is brought in regularly and … hundreds of lives have been saved by this sort of support,” Mr Browne told Sky News. “Sometimes there are small margins of error, but events like this are very rare compared to the number of these deployments … US air support has saved lives on many occasions.”
The US embassy in London said in a statement: “The United States expresses its deep condolences to the families and loved ones of the soldiers who died, and we wish those who were injured a speedy recovery.”
The soldiers’ next of kin have requested a 24-hour period before further details are released.
The casualties brought to 73 the total number of deaths of British forces in Afghanistan since operations began in November 2001.
Of these, 50 were killed in action. The other 23 died from illness, accidents or injuries not from combat.
The Royal Anglian Regiment had lost six of its members in the past four months before the latest incident. The last person to die from the Royal Anglians, Captain David Hicks, was killed on August 11 during an attack by the Taliban on his patrol base north-east of Sangin, in Helmand.
Earlier this year Mr Browne said 12 British soldiers had died in friendly fire incidents involving US forces since 1990, but that no such incidents had taken place in Afghanistan.
Britain has about 7,000 troops in Afghanistan, mostly around Helmand province in the south of the country, where fighting has been particularly heavy.
Violence in Afghanistan is running at its highest level since US forces invaded the country in 2001. Taliban and other militants, some with links to al-Qaida, carry out near-daily suicide attacks, roadside bombings and ambushes – especially in the east and south of the country as they attempt to destabilise the western-backed government in Kabul.
In other developments, US-led troops shot dead a suspected militant and detained 11 others in a raid in eastern Afghanistan.
The man was killed while “attempting to engage coalition and Afghan forces” during a raid in Nangarhar province, the statement said. The detained eleven will be questioned “as to their involvement in militant activities”, it said.
