By John C. Hulsman and Alexis Y. Debat
The National Interest, Summer 2006.
Legitimacy comes in many faces. Westerners like to see it in the glow of freedom fighters ascending to high office in a sweeping democratic process, preferably after mass rallies in the squares of capital cities with the attendant flags and banners and rock concerts. But we are loath to grace with "legitimacy" the evil, greedy chieftain of Western imagination--the warlord--conjured in no small part by the portrayals in Indiana Jones movies. Of course, the West might work with such unsavory characters in alliances of convenience, but they are to be despised (not least in their immoral challenge to Western democratic superiority) and then quickly done away with at the first possible opportunity--to be replaced by "proper" political figures.
Our cinematic reaction to warlords has carried over into the policies of American state-builders to an uncomfortable degree. When looked at in the glare of reality, America's state-building record in the post-Cold War era is dreadful because of our reflexive antipathy for warlords and our unwillingness to co-opt them. America's failure to identify and engage warlords has contributed again and again to the most conspicuous of U.S. nation-building failures.
In Haiti we intervened to put a Robespierreist president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, back in power following a military coup. After he pathetically failed even to begin addressing Haiti's massive problems, cultivated authoritarian tendencies, and failed to draw in the country's factional power brokers, Aristide was again chased into exile, this time in Africa. Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
In Bosnia America's failure to grasp the durability of clan and ethnic allegiances undermined peacekeeping efforts. If free and fair elections were held tomorrow, two of the three primary ethnic groups (the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian Croats) would vote to secede from the country, a decade after the Dayton Accords.
In Afghanistan things are a little better. President Hamid Karzai, following successes in both the presidential and parliamentary elections, is finally more than just the mayor of Kabul. But anyone assuming that in the foreseeable future he will be able to supervise, bypass or pacify the country's powerful warlords--especially now that they are represented in Parliament--needs an Internet connection. And, of course, there is Iraq.
This dismal record is matched by an unwillingness to seriously assess the flaws in the standard Western model of state-building from afar. Debates continue to focus on the potential roles of the United States, United Nations, World Bank, European Union or International Monetary Fund in state-building, with indigenous leadership--chiefs, elders and yes, even warlords--playing either a secondary or adversarial role in the process.
As long as international admiration trumps local legitimacy in selecting who we are willing to work with in state-building, our efforts will fail. This means, in many parts of the world, we have to come to terms with so-called warlords.
But just what do we mean by "warlord"? A "warlord" is a leader whose power has been attained by non-democratic means but who exercises authority usually on the basis of an appeal to ethnic or religious identity, and who usually controls a definable territory where he has a near monopoly on the use of force. A warlord, as opposed to a gang leader or petty crook, operates within a clear and defined political framework.
To bolster our state-building efforts in the future, we should instead look towards a British subaltern who in the early 20th century hastily scribbled some notes about the importance of warlords in the wastes of the Arabian Desert.
Lessons from Lawrence
Thomas Edward Lawrence, in the flower of his youth, was one of the most famous men in the world. The conqueror of Aqaba at 29 and Damascus at thirty, he was a major leader of the wildly romantic and improbably successful Arab Revolt of Emir Feisal--a warlord--against his Turkish overlords during World War I. There is no doubting Lawrence's military achievement. During the Great War, 50,000 Turks were pinned down east of the Jordan by an Arab force of around 3,000 irregulars operating under his immediate direction. A further 150,000 Turks were spread over the rest of the region in a vain effort to crush the Arab Revolt, so little more than 50,000 were left to meet the assault by Sir Edmund Allenby--the senior British officer in theater and Lawrence's commanding general. The British historian and a friend of Lawrence's, Basil Liddell-Hart, noted that while it was unlikely that the Arab forces alone could have overcome the Turks without British assistance, it was equally true that Allenby could not have defeated the Turks without the Arabs and Lawrence.
Lawrence's approach was based on a few simple principles, encapsulated in an August 1917 memo he wrote for British officers serving with Feisal's legions, and in a September 1920 article he wrote anonymously for the British journal Round Table. What Lawrence advocated in these primary sources represents a dramatic break not only with state-building as it was then practiced, but also as it continues to be implemented today.
Local elites, Lawrence held, must be stakeholders in any successful state-building process. At root, almost all state-building problems are political and not military in nature; with political legitimacy, military problems can be solved. To work against the grain of local history is to fail. It is critical to accurately assess the unit of politics in a developing state--and in the case of the Arab Revolt, it was the tribe, and hence tribal leaders, or warlords.
To Lawrence, the seminal operational fact in dealing with the Arab Revolt was that the framework was tribal. By working within Bedouin cultural norms, rather than imposing Western institutions, the Arabs accepted the legitimacy of British objectives. As he wrote in his 1917 memo, "Wave a Sharif [local warlord] in front of you like a banner, and hide your own mind and person." Lawrence understood that the sharif, not he, had local legitimacy. The common British custom was to issue orders to the Arabs only through their chiefs, and only when agreed upon. Lawrence did not take this approach out of some romantic belief in the unspoiled ways of the Arabs. Rather, he saw it as the only practical way to achieve results. Lawrence worked with local culture, history, political practice, sociology, ethnology, economic statutes and psychology to get the job done.
Early on, Lawrence realized that in Emir Feisal he had happened upon the ideal warlord of the Arab Revolt. As son of the sharif of Mecca, Feisal was imbued with religious and political legitimacy. He led in the name of his father, who as keeper of the Holy Places had an unrivalled political position in the Hejaz (western Saudi Arabia). Lawrence worked within the tribal structure and collaborated with warlords, an approach he employed later on his way to Damascus, when he successfully constructed another alliance of Syrian tribes, including the Howeitat, Beni Sakhr, Sherrat, Rualla and Serahin.
The contrast with modern Western efforts at state-building could hardly be greater. Too often, modern-day Wilsonians assume that because a nation-state exists on paper, they can dispense with the need to forge alliances and compacts among sectarian, tribal, ethnic and religious factions and simply deal with "Iraqis" or "Somalis" or "Afghans"--disregarding or ignoring the traditional sub-national centers of authority in favor of anointing "modern" leaders.
Mistakes in Iraq
Many of the administration's problems in Iraq can be traced to two fatal mistakes. First, while obsessing about Iraq's problematic long-term democratic future, the Bush White House ignored the "spiritual warlord" Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the Kurdish leader Nechirvan Barzani, both of whom possessed the (admittedly non-democratic) legitimacy to bring the majority of the Shi'a and the Kurds toward some sort of fairly rapid Iraqi national compromise. The failure to recognize their importance, particularly that of Sistani, one of the most respected men in Iraq, led to a situation whereby the administration was playing a game of perpetual political catch-up.
Secondly, the administration simply backed the wrong horse in supporting Ahmed Chalabi, rather than Sistani. In its appreciation of the impeccably tailored and mannered Chalabi, the administration failed to question how his exile status and Western orientation, indeed the very qualities that made him a neoconservative fantasy ruler for Iraq, would impair his leadership capability. Chalabi had not set foot in Baghdad since he fled Iraq in 1958 at the age of 14. The wonder was that American policymakers presumed he could speak with confidence for any indigenous Iraqis at all. In many ways Chalabi functioned as the anti-warlord, grounding his power in the patronage he received from Washington, rather than possessing any significant local sway in Iraq.
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Citation: John C. Hulsman and Alexis Y. Debat. "In Praise of Warlords," The National Interest, Summer 2006.
Original URL: http://www.nationalinterest.org/ME2/Segments/Publications/Print.asp?Module=Publications::Article&id=C71D44FAE2CA4BF486C81789761BDA9E
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28 December 2006
Snipers stalk Marine supply route in western Iraq
By Tony Perry
Los Angeles Times, 28 December 2006
Along MSR Mobile, Outside Fallouja, Iraq — The battle for this desolate stretch of road east of Fallouja is relentless: Twenty-four hours a day, Marines lumber up and down the six-lane freeway in 23-ton amphibious assault vehicles, looking for bombs and dodging snipers.
The shadowy gunmen are a constant menace on MSR Mobile — short for Main Supply Route Mobile, so dubbed because it serves as a main link between several U.S. bases here in Al Anbar province. In the last two weeks, two Marines with Company B of the 2nd Assault Amphibian Battalion from Camp Lejeune, N.C., have fallen to snipers' bullets: Lance Cpl. Luke Yepsen, 20, of Brazos, Texas, and Cpl. Joshua Pickard, 20, of Merced, Calif.
Marines suspect the same sniper killed Yepsen and Pickard.
"I hope he shows up today — I'd like to blast his ass," Sgt. Clayton Chism, 26, of Prentiss, Miss., said at the beginning of a patrol involving 14 Marines and three vehicles from the battalion's Team Gator.
The mission on the road linking Fallouja to Baghdad could be seen as a microcosm of the Marine mission in Al Anbar: nothing likely to be made into a Hollywood war movie, just a "persistent presence" to wear down the insurgency.
But there are moments of adrenalin-pumping drama. On this day, the Marines shot an Iraqi spotted planting a roadside bomb. When Lance Cpl. William Shaw was lifting the wounded Iraqi into a vehicle to be taken to a field hospital, the Marine was shot in the back by a sniper.
The round struck the back plate in the flak vest worn by the 22-year-old from Fort Bend, Texas. A few inches lower, and Shaw might have been killed or his spine severed.
The explosive ordnance detail was called to examine the bomb. It was fake.
Fake bombs are a recent wrinkle in the insurgents' game plan. The strategy, apparently, is to fire at Marines who arrive to neutralize the devices.
Navy trauma doctors who have treated wounded Marines say the snipers have also learned how to find vulnerable spots not covered by protective plates.
"We're not bionic men," said Gunnery Sgt. Justin Smith, 32, of Boston.
Several sniper shootings have taken place nearby. Marines suspect that insurgents use low-slung buildings parallel to the freeway as a staging ground and a place to make bombs.
The Marines raided the buildings recently and detained dozens of Iraqis. Some Marines had hoped to get permission to demolish the buildings, but that was denied by upper authority.
"It's like being in the U.S. and having a public park being used by drug dealers," said Capt. Eric Dominijanni, 34, of New York, commander of B Company. "Not everybody there is a drug dealer, and you can't destroy the park."
Chism's three-vehicle convoy arrived to provide additional security for the Marines. Inside one vehicle, nicknamed "Event Horizon," after a sci-fi movie, three Marines waited to respond if the searchers were attacked.
Protecting MSR Mobile is sometimes boring.
For four hours, they waited. "It was a good day: not much action," said Cpl. Dennis Bryant, 21, of Kodiak, Alaska. "Everybody came back OK."
Navy corpsman Raymond Casas, 35, of Victoria, Texas, was hit by a sniper round in the upper chest while on a mission just off the freeway. The bullet hit his M-16 and then the fabric of his protective vest, leaving Casas with a deep gouge in his Grim Reaper tattoo.
Casas said he felt a sharp sting in his chest and immediately went on the radio to report he'd been hit. "I was more mad than hurt," he said. He knows that if the bullet hadn't been deflected by his M-16, he'd be dead. "I was lucky, I guess."
Although the sniper thought to have killed Yepsen and Pickard is still at large, the Marines here have killed and captured numerous snipers and bombers.
"We take one off, there seems to be another to take his place," Smith said.
-----------------------
Citation: Tony Perry. "Snipers stalk Marine supply route in western Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 28 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-snipers28dec28,1,4223355.story?coll=la-headlines-world
-----------------------
Los Angeles Times, 28 December 2006
Along MSR Mobile, Outside Fallouja, Iraq — The battle for this desolate stretch of road east of Fallouja is relentless: Twenty-four hours a day, Marines lumber up and down the six-lane freeway in 23-ton amphibious assault vehicles, looking for bombs and dodging snipers.
The shadowy gunmen are a constant menace on MSR Mobile — short for Main Supply Route Mobile, so dubbed because it serves as a main link between several U.S. bases here in Al Anbar province. In the last two weeks, two Marines with Company B of the 2nd Assault Amphibian Battalion from Camp Lejeune, N.C., have fallen to snipers' bullets: Lance Cpl. Luke Yepsen, 20, of Brazos, Texas, and Cpl. Joshua Pickard, 20, of Merced, Calif.
Marines suspect the same sniper killed Yepsen and Pickard.
"I hope he shows up today — I'd like to blast his ass," Sgt. Clayton Chism, 26, of Prentiss, Miss., said at the beginning of a patrol involving 14 Marines and three vehicles from the battalion's Team Gator.
The mission on the road linking Fallouja to Baghdad could be seen as a microcosm of the Marine mission in Al Anbar: nothing likely to be made into a Hollywood war movie, just a "persistent presence" to wear down the insurgency.
But there are moments of adrenalin-pumping drama. On this day, the Marines shot an Iraqi spotted planting a roadside bomb. When Lance Cpl. William Shaw was lifting the wounded Iraqi into a vehicle to be taken to a field hospital, the Marine was shot in the back by a sniper.
The round struck the back plate in the flak vest worn by the 22-year-old from Fort Bend, Texas. A few inches lower, and Shaw might have been killed or his spine severed.
The explosive ordnance detail was called to examine the bomb. It was fake.
Fake bombs are a recent wrinkle in the insurgents' game plan. The strategy, apparently, is to fire at Marines who arrive to neutralize the devices.
Navy trauma doctors who have treated wounded Marines say the snipers have also learned how to find vulnerable spots not covered by protective plates.
"We're not bionic men," said Gunnery Sgt. Justin Smith, 32, of Boston.
Several sniper shootings have taken place nearby. Marines suspect that insurgents use low-slung buildings parallel to the freeway as a staging ground and a place to make bombs.
The Marines raided the buildings recently and detained dozens of Iraqis. Some Marines had hoped to get permission to demolish the buildings, but that was denied by upper authority.
"It's like being in the U.S. and having a public park being used by drug dealers," said Capt. Eric Dominijanni, 34, of New York, commander of B Company. "Not everybody there is a drug dealer, and you can't destroy the park."
Chism's three-vehicle convoy arrived to provide additional security for the Marines. Inside one vehicle, nicknamed "Event Horizon," after a sci-fi movie, three Marines waited to respond if the searchers were attacked.
Protecting MSR Mobile is sometimes boring.
For four hours, they waited. "It was a good day: not much action," said Cpl. Dennis Bryant, 21, of Kodiak, Alaska. "Everybody came back OK."
Navy corpsman Raymond Casas, 35, of Victoria, Texas, was hit by a sniper round in the upper chest while on a mission just off the freeway. The bullet hit his M-16 and then the fabric of his protective vest, leaving Casas with a deep gouge in his Grim Reaper tattoo.
Casas said he felt a sharp sting in his chest and immediately went on the radio to report he'd been hit. "I was more mad than hurt," he said. He knows that if the bullet hadn't been deflected by his M-16, he'd be dead. "I was lucky, I guess."
Although the sniper thought to have killed Yepsen and Pickard is still at large, the Marines here have killed and captured numerous snipers and bombers.
"We take one off, there seems to be another to take his place," Smith said.
-----------------------
Citation: Tony Perry. "Snipers stalk Marine supply route in western Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 28 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-snipers28dec28,1,4223355.story?coll=la-headlines-world
-----------------------
27 December 2006
Pressed in Iraq, U.S. Army turns out interrogators
By Bernd Debusmann
Reuters, 26 December 2006
FORT HUACHUCA, Arizona (Reuters) - The U.S. Army has stepped up its training of interrogators to get a clearer picture of Iraq, where attacks on American and Iraqi targets have been running at unprecedented levels -- almost 1,000 a week.
The number of soldiers going through a 93-day course to become Human Intelligence Collectors, the army term for interrogators, has quadrupled over the past three years -- from 265 in 2003 to 1,070 in 2006 -- and is projected to rise to just over 1,500 by 2009. The increase reflects an urgent need to plug gaps in intelligence.
"We needed to change, adapt and expand the training here," said Major General Barbara Fast, who commands the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. "We have significantly increased our humint (human intelligence) capability and will increase it even more."
According to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group's December report, "our ... government still does not understand very well either the insurgency in Iraq or the role of the militias." It said there had been too little investment in intelligence gathering and analysis.
The army, by far the biggest branch of the armed forces, has about 37,000 military intelligence soldiers, about a quarter of whom are in human intelligence. That is a larger share than in the past, when the U.S. intelligence community focused on satellite imagery and monitoring communications.
"But especially since September 11," Fast said in an interview, "we know how important it is to understand that which cannot be seen or monitored."
The training at Fort Huachuca is designed to mimic Iraq as closely as possible -- complete with Arabic-speaking Americans playing the role of the Iraqis dressed in robes and keffiyehs, the checkered headdresses widely worn in the Arab world.
During an exercise toward the end of a course in December, a tall man in flowing robes argued heatedly in Arabic with soldiers at a sandbagged roadblock at the entrance to a cluster of houses and huts resembling a military base in Iraq.
In interrogation booths, soldiers tried to extract information on car bombs and mortar attacks from reluctant "detainees," their questions and answers relayed through interpreters.
The training is based on rules of interrogation laid down in a field manual on "Human Intelligence Collector Operations," a 336-page document issued in September, the first new manual since 1992.
The manual applies to all four branches of the armed forces and bans harsh interrogation techniques, including the use of dogs, placing hoods over a detainee's head and forcing detainees to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner.
ABU GHRAIB
In April 2004, pictures that showed American soldiers using such techniques at
Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad shocked the world, damaged America's image and prompted contentious debates over the definition of torture.
Fast, one of the few army women to make major general, was the highest-ranking U.S. intelligence officer in Iraq at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal. An army investigation cleared her of wrongdoing and she was promoted to command the Intelligence Center in March 2005.
"There is no way you can rule out misbehavior entirely," Fast said, "but there are measures in place now, checks and balances, which make it very difficult."
The Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners and the protection of civilians are part of the curriculum at Fort Huachuca. The field manual expressly bans eight interrogation techniques that had been used at Abu Ghraib and the U.S. detention and interrogation camp at Guantanamo Bay.
During their Arizona training, future interrogators practice 19 "approaches" to detainees. Explained in detail in the field manual, these techniques range from the "emotional love approach" and the "incentive approach" to the "emotional fear-up approach."
To avoid incidents that could backfire on the interrogator -- or America's image -- the instructions carry warnings. For example: "The HUMINT collector must be extremely careful that he does not threaten or coerce a source. Conveying a threat may be a violation of the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice)."
The manual lists three interrogation techniques that require specific approval from a senior officer.
These are: "Mutt and Jeff," a version of the good cop-bad cop routine used by police; "false flag," a technique to trick a detainee into believing his questioners are from a country other than the United States; and "separation" to keep detainees apart from each other. That approach requires approval from a four-star general.
In the arduous debates that led to the new manual, according to officials involved in the process, a sizable body of opinion held that making details of interrogation techniques public handed an advantage to Iraqi insurgents and other anti-U.S. forces because they would know what to expect.
But that view did not prevail and the army posted the manual on its Web site in September.
-------------------------------
Citation: Bernd Debusmann. "Pressed in Iraq, U.S. Army turns out interrogators," Reuters, 26 December 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061226/us_nm/bc_iraq_usa_interrogators_dc_1
-------------------------------
Reuters, 26 December 2006
FORT HUACHUCA, Arizona (Reuters) - The U.S. Army has stepped up its training of interrogators to get a clearer picture of Iraq, where attacks on American and Iraqi targets have been running at unprecedented levels -- almost 1,000 a week.
The number of soldiers going through a 93-day course to become Human Intelligence Collectors, the army term for interrogators, has quadrupled over the past three years -- from 265 in 2003 to 1,070 in 2006 -- and is projected to rise to just over 1,500 by 2009. The increase reflects an urgent need to plug gaps in intelligence.
"We needed to change, adapt and expand the training here," said Major General Barbara Fast, who commands the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. "We have significantly increased our humint (human intelligence) capability and will increase it even more."
According to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group's December report, "our ... government still does not understand very well either the insurgency in Iraq or the role of the militias." It said there had been too little investment in intelligence gathering and analysis.
The army, by far the biggest branch of the armed forces, has about 37,000 military intelligence soldiers, about a quarter of whom are in human intelligence. That is a larger share than in the past, when the U.S. intelligence community focused on satellite imagery and monitoring communications.
"But especially since September 11," Fast said in an interview, "we know how important it is to understand that which cannot be seen or monitored."
The training at Fort Huachuca is designed to mimic Iraq as closely as possible -- complete with Arabic-speaking Americans playing the role of the Iraqis dressed in robes and keffiyehs, the checkered headdresses widely worn in the Arab world.
During an exercise toward the end of a course in December, a tall man in flowing robes argued heatedly in Arabic with soldiers at a sandbagged roadblock at the entrance to a cluster of houses and huts resembling a military base in Iraq.
In interrogation booths, soldiers tried to extract information on car bombs and mortar attacks from reluctant "detainees," their questions and answers relayed through interpreters.
The training is based on rules of interrogation laid down in a field manual on "Human Intelligence Collector Operations," a 336-page document issued in September, the first new manual since 1992.
The manual applies to all four branches of the armed forces and bans harsh interrogation techniques, including the use of dogs, placing hoods over a detainee's head and forcing detainees to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner.
ABU GHRAIB
In April 2004, pictures that showed American soldiers using such techniques at
Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad shocked the world, damaged America's image and prompted contentious debates over the definition of torture.
Fast, one of the few army women to make major general, was the highest-ranking U.S. intelligence officer in Iraq at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal. An army investigation cleared her of wrongdoing and she was promoted to command the Intelligence Center in March 2005.
"There is no way you can rule out misbehavior entirely," Fast said, "but there are measures in place now, checks and balances, which make it very difficult."
The Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners and the protection of civilians are part of the curriculum at Fort Huachuca. The field manual expressly bans eight interrogation techniques that had been used at Abu Ghraib and the U.S. detention and interrogation camp at Guantanamo Bay.
During their Arizona training, future interrogators practice 19 "approaches" to detainees. Explained in detail in the field manual, these techniques range from the "emotional love approach" and the "incentive approach" to the "emotional fear-up approach."
To avoid incidents that could backfire on the interrogator -- or America's image -- the instructions carry warnings. For example: "The HUMINT collector must be extremely careful that he does not threaten or coerce a source. Conveying a threat may be a violation of the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice)."
The manual lists three interrogation techniques that require specific approval from a senior officer.
These are: "Mutt and Jeff," a version of the good cop-bad cop routine used by police; "false flag," a technique to trick a detainee into believing his questioners are from a country other than the United States; and "separation" to keep detainees apart from each other. That approach requires approval from a four-star general.
In the arduous debates that led to the new manual, according to officials involved in the process, a sizable body of opinion held that making details of interrogation techniques public handed an advantage to Iraqi insurgents and other anti-U.S. forces because they would know what to expect.
But that view did not prevail and the army posted the manual on its Web site in September.
-------------------------------
Citation: Bernd Debusmann. "Pressed in Iraq, U.S. Army turns out interrogators," Reuters, 26 December 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061226/us_nm/bc_iraq_usa_interrogators_dc_1
-------------------------------
Afghan heroin's surge poses danger in U.S.
The world's purest form can kill more addicts, as seen in L.A. County.
By Garrett Therolf
Los Angeles Times, 26 December 2006
Supplies of highly potent Afghan heroin in the United States are growing so fast that the pure white powder is rapidly overtaking lower-quality Mexican heroin, prompting fears of increased addiction and overdoses.
Heroin-related deaths in Los Angeles County soared from 137 in 2002 to 239 in 2005, a jump of nearly 75% in three years, a period when other factors contributing to overdose deaths remained unchanged, experts said. The jump in deaths was especially prevalent among users older than 40, who lack the resilience to recover from an overdose of unexpectedly strong heroin, according to a study by the county's Office of Health Assessment and Epidemiology.
"The rise of heroin from Afghanistan is our biggest rising threat in the fight against narcotics," said Orange County sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino. "We are seeing more seizures and more overdoses."
According to a Drug Enforcement Administration report obtained by The Times, Afghanistan's poppy fields have become the fastest-growing source of heroin in the United States. Its share of the U.S. market doubled from 7% in 2001, the year U.S. forces overthrew the Taliban, to 14% in 2004, the latest year studied. Another DEA report, released in October, said the 14% actually could be significantly higher.
Poppy production in Afghanistan jumped significantly after the 2001 U.S. invasion destabilized an already shaky economy, leading farmers to turn to the opium market to survive.
Not only is more heroin being produced from Afghan poppies coming into the United States, it is also the purest in the world, according to the DEA's National Drug Intelligence Center.
Despite the agency's own reports, a DEA spokesman denied that more heroin was reaching the United States from Afghanistan. "We are NOT seeing a nationwide spike in Afghanistan-based heroin," Garrison K. Courtney wrote in an e-mail to The Times.
He said in an interview that the report that showed the growth of Afghanistan's U.S. market share was one of many sources the agency used to evaluate drug trends. He refused to provide a copy of DEA reports that could provide an explanation.
The agency declined to give The Times the report on the doubling of Afghan heroin into the U.S. A copy was provided by the office of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control.
This potent heroin, which the DEA says sells for about $90 a gram in Southern California, has prompted warnings from some officials who deal with addicts that they reduce the amount of the drug they use. Many addicts seeking the most euphoric high employ a dangerous calculation to gauge how much of the drug they can consume without overdosing. An unexpectedly powerful bundle of heroin, therefore, can be deadly.
"I tell people, 'If you're using it, only use half or three-quarters of what you used to,' because of the higher potency," said Orlando Ward, director of public affairs at the Midnight Mission on Los Angeles' skid row.
Health workers in boutique rehab centers as well as health clinics for the homeless say increasing numbers of clients are addicted to more powerful heroin.
"My patients say it's more available and cheaper," said Michael H. Lowenstein, a doctor at the Waismann Method detoxification center in Beverly Hills.
Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, warned world health authorities in October of the increase in Afghan heroin.
"This, in turn, is likely to prompt a substantial increase in the number of deaths by overdose, as addicts are not used to injecting doses containing such high concentrations of the drug," he said.
From 1980 through 1985, Afghan heroin dominated the U.S. market, with a 47% to 54% share, according to the DEA.
AFGHANISTAN'S share dwindled to 6% for much of the 1990s, as competition from Southeast Asia and Colombia grew. Meanwhile, the Taliban was cracking down as it gained territory, virtually eliminating poppy production after taking over the country.
Once the fundamentalist Islamic government was overthrown in 2001, Afghans turned once again to the poppy trade to survive in one of the poorest countries in the world.
A report released Nov. 28 by the World Bank said U.S. and European efforts to end Afghanistan's $2.3-billion opium business were failing.
The production of opium used to produce heroin reached its highest level ever in Afghanistan this year. It accounted for more than one-third of Afghanistan's gross domestic product and 90% of the world's supply of illicit opium, mainly going to Asia and Europe, according to the report.
The poppy crop now drives the economy in some regions of the embattled nation, helping to fund a Taliban resurgence.
In the United States, Afghan and Mexican poppies tied for second place among sources of heroin in 2004, according to the DEA's Heroin Signature Program. South America, led by top supplier Colombia, held 69% of the market.
That figure had dropped 19 percentage points from the 2003 level as U.S. and Colombian efforts to eradicate the trade enjoyed success and as Afghanistan's share increased, according to the DEA.
The Department of Homeland Security also has found evidence of increasing Afghan heroin in this country. The agency reported skyrocketing numbers of seizures of heroin arriving at U.S. airports and seaports from India, not a significant heroin-producing country but a major transshipment point for Afghan drugs.
The seizure of heroin packages from India increased from zero in 2003 to 433 in 2005 — more than 80% of total mail seizures of heroin arriving in the U.S. that year.
In the meantime, although they may not recognize the product as coming from Afghanistan, addicts across the country are increasingly coming into contact with more powerful heroin.
"There is a different kind of heroin now," said Eric Wade, a 32-year-old recovering addict in Portland, Ore. "It is very, very strong, and it is cheaper than the other stuff. Not everybody has access to it, but I've seen more people overdose … on that stuff."
In Ballwin, Mo., an affluent suburb of St. Louis, two sisters were arrested in the spring, accused of selling "China white" heroin between classes at their high school.
Capt. Tom Jackson, who leads the St. Louis County Police Department's bureau of drug enforcement, said investigators thought the heroin traveled to the campus from Afghanistan with the help of Nigerian traffickers, a Chicago gang and a downtown St. Louis drug dealer.
"This China white is so pure that they can snort it or smoke it," Jackson said. "So, no needles or track marks."
---------------------------
Citation: Garrett Therolf. "Afghan heroin's surge poses danger in U.S.," Los Angeles Times, 26 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-heroin26dec26,0,7339972.story?coll=la-home-headlines
---------------------------
By Garrett Therolf
Los Angeles Times, 26 December 2006
Supplies of highly potent Afghan heroin in the United States are growing so fast that the pure white powder is rapidly overtaking lower-quality Mexican heroin, prompting fears of increased addiction and overdoses.
Heroin-related deaths in Los Angeles County soared from 137 in 2002 to 239 in 2005, a jump of nearly 75% in three years, a period when other factors contributing to overdose deaths remained unchanged, experts said. The jump in deaths was especially prevalent among users older than 40, who lack the resilience to recover from an overdose of unexpectedly strong heroin, according to a study by the county's Office of Health Assessment and Epidemiology.
"The rise of heroin from Afghanistan is our biggest rising threat in the fight against narcotics," said Orange County sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino. "We are seeing more seizures and more overdoses."
According to a Drug Enforcement Administration report obtained by The Times, Afghanistan's poppy fields have become the fastest-growing source of heroin in the United States. Its share of the U.S. market doubled from 7% in 2001, the year U.S. forces overthrew the Taliban, to 14% in 2004, the latest year studied. Another DEA report, released in October, said the 14% actually could be significantly higher.
Poppy production in Afghanistan jumped significantly after the 2001 U.S. invasion destabilized an already shaky economy, leading farmers to turn to the opium market to survive.
Not only is more heroin being produced from Afghan poppies coming into the United States, it is also the purest in the world, according to the DEA's National Drug Intelligence Center.
Despite the agency's own reports, a DEA spokesman denied that more heroin was reaching the United States from Afghanistan. "We are NOT seeing a nationwide spike in Afghanistan-based heroin," Garrison K. Courtney wrote in an e-mail to The Times.
He said in an interview that the report that showed the growth of Afghanistan's U.S. market share was one of many sources the agency used to evaluate drug trends. He refused to provide a copy of DEA reports that could provide an explanation.
The agency declined to give The Times the report on the doubling of Afghan heroin into the U.S. A copy was provided by the office of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control.
This potent heroin, which the DEA says sells for about $90 a gram in Southern California, has prompted warnings from some officials who deal with addicts that they reduce the amount of the drug they use. Many addicts seeking the most euphoric high employ a dangerous calculation to gauge how much of the drug they can consume without overdosing. An unexpectedly powerful bundle of heroin, therefore, can be deadly.
"I tell people, 'If you're using it, only use half or three-quarters of what you used to,' because of the higher potency," said Orlando Ward, director of public affairs at the Midnight Mission on Los Angeles' skid row.
Health workers in boutique rehab centers as well as health clinics for the homeless say increasing numbers of clients are addicted to more powerful heroin.
"My patients say it's more available and cheaper," said Michael H. Lowenstein, a doctor at the Waismann Method detoxification center in Beverly Hills.
Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, warned world health authorities in October of the increase in Afghan heroin.
"This, in turn, is likely to prompt a substantial increase in the number of deaths by overdose, as addicts are not used to injecting doses containing such high concentrations of the drug," he said.
From 1980 through 1985, Afghan heroin dominated the U.S. market, with a 47% to 54% share, according to the DEA.
AFGHANISTAN'S share dwindled to 6% for much of the 1990s, as competition from Southeast Asia and Colombia grew. Meanwhile, the Taliban was cracking down as it gained territory, virtually eliminating poppy production after taking over the country.
Once the fundamentalist Islamic government was overthrown in 2001, Afghans turned once again to the poppy trade to survive in one of the poorest countries in the world.
A report released Nov. 28 by the World Bank said U.S. and European efforts to end Afghanistan's $2.3-billion opium business were failing.
The production of opium used to produce heroin reached its highest level ever in Afghanistan this year. It accounted for more than one-third of Afghanistan's gross domestic product and 90% of the world's supply of illicit opium, mainly going to Asia and Europe, according to the report.
The poppy crop now drives the economy in some regions of the embattled nation, helping to fund a Taliban resurgence.
In the United States, Afghan and Mexican poppies tied for second place among sources of heroin in 2004, according to the DEA's Heroin Signature Program. South America, led by top supplier Colombia, held 69% of the market.
That figure had dropped 19 percentage points from the 2003 level as U.S. and Colombian efforts to eradicate the trade enjoyed success and as Afghanistan's share increased, according to the DEA.
The Department of Homeland Security also has found evidence of increasing Afghan heroin in this country. The agency reported skyrocketing numbers of seizures of heroin arriving at U.S. airports and seaports from India, not a significant heroin-producing country but a major transshipment point for Afghan drugs.
The seizure of heroin packages from India increased from zero in 2003 to 433 in 2005 — more than 80% of total mail seizures of heroin arriving in the U.S. that year.
In the meantime, although they may not recognize the product as coming from Afghanistan, addicts across the country are increasingly coming into contact with more powerful heroin.
"There is a different kind of heroin now," said Eric Wade, a 32-year-old recovering addict in Portland, Ore. "It is very, very strong, and it is cheaper than the other stuff. Not everybody has access to it, but I've seen more people overdose … on that stuff."
In Ballwin, Mo., an affluent suburb of St. Louis, two sisters were arrested in the spring, accused of selling "China white" heroin between classes at their high school.
Capt. Tom Jackson, who leads the St. Louis County Police Department's bureau of drug enforcement, said investigators thought the heroin traveled to the campus from Afghanistan with the help of Nigerian traffickers, a Chicago gang and a downtown St. Louis drug dealer.
"This China white is so pure that they can snort it or smoke it," Jackson said. "So, no needles or track marks."
---------------------------
Citation: Garrett Therolf. "Afghan heroin's surge poses danger in U.S.," Los Angeles Times, 26 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-heroin26dec26,0,7339972.story?coll=la-home-headlines
---------------------------
21 December 2006
Enlarging military poses challenge
By Anne Plummer Flaherty
The Associated Press, 20 December 2006
WASHINGTON — President Bush's plan to enlarge the Army and Marine Corps responds to pleas from the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, but finding more recruits will be expensive and challenging and have little immediate impact on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a news conference Wednesday, the president said he has asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates to look into adding more troops to the nearly 1.4 million uniformed personnel on active duty — a force which has been strained by the two wars.
Bush also said he remains undecided on whether to send more troops to Iraq and expects to announce that decision early next year.
Bush's desire to expand the services — an abrupt turnaround — was cheered Wednesday by lawmakers and military analysts. They agreed, though, that boosting troop levels is costly and time-consuming and will do little to help in Iraq anytime soon.
"To get to the kind of levels both services want will be five to 10 years," said Anthony Cordesman, a national security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "And by then the Iraq war on one level or the other will be over."
According to service officials, the Army wants to expand its force of 507,000 soldiers by 20,000 to 30,000, while the Marine Corps would like to add 5,000 to its nearly 180,000 troops.
The unpopular war in Iraq — where more than 2,950 American troops have already died — complicates the task of finding more recruits and retaining current troops.
To find new troops, the military will have to hire more recruiters and offer incentives like increased bonuses and higher salaries. In recent years, it has accepted more recruits with minor criminal records and with lower scores on aptitude tests.
Once the recruits are found, the military must train and equip them, which takes months. Other expenses will come from additional health care and support programs for families.
"It takes a long time to train trigger-pullers. And that's what we need — more trigger-pullers," said retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, former assistant vice chief of staff for the Army.
According to the nonpartisan
Congressional Budget Office, increasing the Army by 40,000 troops would cost $2.6 billion the first year and more than $4 billion annually to maintain.
The estimate is similar to one provided by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker, who says the service budget jumps $1.2 billion for every additional 10,000 soldiers. Schoomaker says the Army can add up to 7,000 troops per year.
There are about 6,700 recruiters trying to sign up 80,000 new active duty soldiers for the 2007 budget year, which began last October. Roughly 1,800 recruiters are working to sign up 35,000 for the Army Reserves for the same period, officials said.
To accomplish additional growth, the service will need to sweeten incentives. The Army failed to meet its recruiting goal in the 2005 budget year for the first time since 1999, but met its goal in 2006 after adding recruiters and incentives for new enlistees.
The Pentagon also will have to budget for the additional troops at a time of rising health care costs and an overall budget crunch caused in part by Iraq and Afghanistan, which cost $120 billion last year and are likely to get more expensive.
"If the president doesn't put forward a plan to pay for this in his annual budget request then this announcement is meaningless," said Sen. Jack Reed (news, bio, voting record), D-R.I., a member of the Armed Services Committee and longtime advocate of a bigger force.
So far, Congress has provided about $450 billion for the Pentagon for 2007. That includes $70 billion for the wars, but it excludes another $100 billion the military wants to request for additional war costs.
Last week, Schoomaker said the Army will break without more soldiers, but he had previously opposed congressional mandates to add more troops. He had argued the cost would overburden the Army's budget. But retired Pentagon officials say it doesn't have be an either-or situation if there is the political will to do it.
"You can certainly do it, but it takes time and it takes resources," said Les Brownlee, former acting Army secretary.
One reason adding several thousand troops would make a difference in the massive military is the types of jobs they do.
Only a fraction of the Army and Marines available are the kind needed in Iraq — combat infantry troops that can conduct security patrols and staff checkpoints. Of the 140,000 now in Iraq, just over one-third are combat forces.
As a result, many people serve repeated tours there and heavily used units must scramble to replace or fix battle-damaged equipment.
Gates' predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, staunchly opposed increasing the size of the force because of the cost. Instead, Rumsfeld advocated reorganizing the Army into small, more flexible units that would rely less on manpower and more on technology.
Bush sided with Rumsfeld until his departure last week.
"It's so frustrating to me we have to be four years into a war with the Marine Corps and Army on the verge of breaking that we decide we need more Army and Marines," said retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, former commandant of the Army War College.
___
Associated Press writers Pauline Jelinek and Andrew Taylor contributed to this report.
---------------------------
Citation: Anne Plummer Flaherty. "Enlarging military poses challenge," The Associated Press, 20 December 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061220/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/growing_the_military
---------------------------
The Associated Press, 20 December 2006
WASHINGTON — President Bush's plan to enlarge the Army and Marine Corps responds to pleas from the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, but finding more recruits will be expensive and challenging and have little immediate impact on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a news conference Wednesday, the president said he has asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates to look into adding more troops to the nearly 1.4 million uniformed personnel on active duty — a force which has been strained by the two wars.
Bush also said he remains undecided on whether to send more troops to Iraq and expects to announce that decision early next year.
Bush's desire to expand the services — an abrupt turnaround — was cheered Wednesday by lawmakers and military analysts. They agreed, though, that boosting troop levels is costly and time-consuming and will do little to help in Iraq anytime soon.
"To get to the kind of levels both services want will be five to 10 years," said Anthony Cordesman, a national security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "And by then the Iraq war on one level or the other will be over."
According to service officials, the Army wants to expand its force of 507,000 soldiers by 20,000 to 30,000, while the Marine Corps would like to add 5,000 to its nearly 180,000 troops.
The unpopular war in Iraq — where more than 2,950 American troops have already died — complicates the task of finding more recruits and retaining current troops.
To find new troops, the military will have to hire more recruiters and offer incentives like increased bonuses and higher salaries. In recent years, it has accepted more recruits with minor criminal records and with lower scores on aptitude tests.
Once the recruits are found, the military must train and equip them, which takes months. Other expenses will come from additional health care and support programs for families.
"It takes a long time to train trigger-pullers. And that's what we need — more trigger-pullers," said retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, former assistant vice chief of staff for the Army.
According to the nonpartisan
Congressional Budget Office, increasing the Army by 40,000 troops would cost $2.6 billion the first year and more than $4 billion annually to maintain.
The estimate is similar to one provided by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker, who says the service budget jumps $1.2 billion for every additional 10,000 soldiers. Schoomaker says the Army can add up to 7,000 troops per year.
There are about 6,700 recruiters trying to sign up 80,000 new active duty soldiers for the 2007 budget year, which began last October. Roughly 1,800 recruiters are working to sign up 35,000 for the Army Reserves for the same period, officials said.
To accomplish additional growth, the service will need to sweeten incentives. The Army failed to meet its recruiting goal in the 2005 budget year for the first time since 1999, but met its goal in 2006 after adding recruiters and incentives for new enlistees.
The Pentagon also will have to budget for the additional troops at a time of rising health care costs and an overall budget crunch caused in part by Iraq and Afghanistan, which cost $120 billion last year and are likely to get more expensive.
"If the president doesn't put forward a plan to pay for this in his annual budget request then this announcement is meaningless," said Sen. Jack Reed (news, bio, voting record), D-R.I., a member of the Armed Services Committee and longtime advocate of a bigger force.
So far, Congress has provided about $450 billion for the Pentagon for 2007. That includes $70 billion for the wars, but it excludes another $100 billion the military wants to request for additional war costs.
Last week, Schoomaker said the Army will break without more soldiers, but he had previously opposed congressional mandates to add more troops. He had argued the cost would overburden the Army's budget. But retired Pentagon officials say it doesn't have be an either-or situation if there is the political will to do it.
"You can certainly do it, but it takes time and it takes resources," said Les Brownlee, former acting Army secretary.
One reason adding several thousand troops would make a difference in the massive military is the types of jobs they do.
Only a fraction of the Army and Marines available are the kind needed in Iraq — combat infantry troops that can conduct security patrols and staff checkpoints. Of the 140,000 now in Iraq, just over one-third are combat forces.
As a result, many people serve repeated tours there and heavily used units must scramble to replace or fix battle-damaged equipment.
Gates' predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, staunchly opposed increasing the size of the force because of the cost. Instead, Rumsfeld advocated reorganizing the Army into small, more flexible units that would rely less on manpower and more on technology.
Bush sided with Rumsfeld until his departure last week.
"It's so frustrating to me we have to be four years into a war with the Marine Corps and Army on the verge of breaking that we decide we need more Army and Marines," said retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, former commandant of the Army War College.
___
Associated Press writers Pauline Jelinek and Andrew Taylor contributed to this report.
---------------------------
Citation: Anne Plummer Flaherty. "Enlarging military poses challenge," The Associated Press, 20 December 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061220/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/growing_the_military
---------------------------
20 December 2006
Iraq's Diyala province -- center of sectarian conflict
By Patrick Fort
Agence France-Presse, 19 December 2006
One night last month in Iraq's eastern province of Diyala, Sunni militants surrounded a remote farmstead housing Shiite families, dragged out the 27 men and shot them dead in a nearby field.
Meanwhile, in the market towns of the restive region, the overwhelmingly Shiite police force routinely tortures Sunni suspects, according to a civilian US lawyer who recently visited local prisons and courts.
"I was told about a guy nicknamed 'Cable Ali' because he tortured and hit guys with a cable," the lawyer told AFP on condition of anonymity.
"So I asked the police, 'Does this guy exist?' and they said 'Yes he does, but he only tortures the guilty ones,'" he said.
Earlier this month a high-level US panel of foreign policy experts, the Iraq Study Group, warned of the "grave and deteriorating" situation in Iraq, a country wracked by sectarian violence by rival Sunni and Shiite death squads.
Outside Baghdad, the epicentre of the violence, the starkest evidence of the murderous rage engulfing the country is in Diyala province.
"We were very close once, but times have unfortunately changed," said Sheikh Fadhel al-Nedawi, a Sunni tribal chief, as he gave condolences to his Shiite counterpart Ahmed Abdullah al-Shamari after the murder of the 27 villagers.
Diyala has been called "little Iraq" and if this province with almost equal proportions of Sunnis and Shiites and a smattering of Kurds can't work, then the forecast for a united Iraq is grave.
On one hand, the Shiite villagers of the fertile province are victims of a vicious campaign of sectarian cleansing carried out by Sunni extremists with links to Al-Qaeda.
In return, armed Shiite groups carry out murders of their own, while police, according to several US officials, turn a blind eye.
"Squads kill with the acquiescence or even knowledge of the police," said the lawyer, adding that the police are "completely infiltrated" by sectarian Shiite militias.
Until the government's own reconciliation efforts bear fruit, US forces in the troubled province are struggling to bring about some form of detente.
"There are constant exchanges between US military and political leaders, the sheikhs, religious leaders and high-ranking security officials," said Captain Adam Jacobs of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, based in Baquba.
Last week, some 40 tribal leaders met with the mayor and the local Iraqi and US army commanders to talk about ending the violence in the province.
"The sheikhs are a valuable asset within society," said Colonel David Sutherland of the 3rd Brigade. "They have the ability to influence peace and stability within the province."
US commanders are also hoping to persuade local leaders to sign the "Mecca Pledge", a little heeded effort by Iraqi Sunni and Shiite religious leaders to reconcile the warring communities declared in October.
They are also recommending new provincial elections be organized that would include the Sunnis, who boycotted them last time.
Baquba's Sunni mayor, Khalid al-Sanjari, recognizes the scope of the problem and the sectarian cleansing taking place in the province.
"The Shiites have been kicked out of Baquba," he said, describing a combination of threats and economic decline that has depopulated many areas.
"The Shiites have every right to be angry," he acknowledged.
"But the Sunnis do too," he added. "The police and army do not protect the Sunnis, and when there is a problem: they just don't come."
Sanjari explained there could never be reconciliation in the tortured province until there is some effort to make security forces half Sunni and half Shiite, instead of their current make-up as 85 percent Shiite.
Brigadier Ali, the deputy commander of Diyala's police force and a Kurd, insisted there is no sectarianism in the province's police force but, when pressed, admitted that there was political pressure from the factions.
"I was fired twice -- once for arresting a Shiite, once for arresting a Sunni," he said. "It's all politics and politicians."
---------------------------
Citation: Patrick Fort. "Iraq's Diyala province -- center of sectarian conflict," Agence France-Presse, 19 December 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061219/wl_mideast_afp/iraqusunrestdiyala
---------------------------
Agence France-Presse, 19 December 2006
One night last month in Iraq's eastern province of Diyala, Sunni militants surrounded a remote farmstead housing Shiite families, dragged out the 27 men and shot them dead in a nearby field.
Meanwhile, in the market towns of the restive region, the overwhelmingly Shiite police force routinely tortures Sunni suspects, according to a civilian US lawyer who recently visited local prisons and courts.
"I was told about a guy nicknamed 'Cable Ali' because he tortured and hit guys with a cable," the lawyer told AFP on condition of anonymity.
"So I asked the police, 'Does this guy exist?' and they said 'Yes he does, but he only tortures the guilty ones,'" he said.
Earlier this month a high-level US panel of foreign policy experts, the Iraq Study Group, warned of the "grave and deteriorating" situation in Iraq, a country wracked by sectarian violence by rival Sunni and Shiite death squads.
Outside Baghdad, the epicentre of the violence, the starkest evidence of the murderous rage engulfing the country is in Diyala province.
"We were very close once, but times have unfortunately changed," said Sheikh Fadhel al-Nedawi, a Sunni tribal chief, as he gave condolences to his Shiite counterpart Ahmed Abdullah al-Shamari after the murder of the 27 villagers.
Diyala has been called "little Iraq" and if this province with almost equal proportions of Sunnis and Shiites and a smattering of Kurds can't work, then the forecast for a united Iraq is grave.
On one hand, the Shiite villagers of the fertile province are victims of a vicious campaign of sectarian cleansing carried out by Sunni extremists with links to Al-Qaeda.
In return, armed Shiite groups carry out murders of their own, while police, according to several US officials, turn a blind eye.
"Squads kill with the acquiescence or even knowledge of the police," said the lawyer, adding that the police are "completely infiltrated" by sectarian Shiite militias.
Until the government's own reconciliation efforts bear fruit, US forces in the troubled province are struggling to bring about some form of detente.
"There are constant exchanges between US military and political leaders, the sheikhs, religious leaders and high-ranking security officials," said Captain Adam Jacobs of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, based in Baquba.
Last week, some 40 tribal leaders met with the mayor and the local Iraqi and US army commanders to talk about ending the violence in the province.
"The sheikhs are a valuable asset within society," said Colonel David Sutherland of the 3rd Brigade. "They have the ability to influence peace and stability within the province."
US commanders are also hoping to persuade local leaders to sign the "Mecca Pledge", a little heeded effort by Iraqi Sunni and Shiite religious leaders to reconcile the warring communities declared in October.
They are also recommending new provincial elections be organized that would include the Sunnis, who boycotted them last time.
Baquba's Sunni mayor, Khalid al-Sanjari, recognizes the scope of the problem and the sectarian cleansing taking place in the province.
"The Shiites have been kicked out of Baquba," he said, describing a combination of threats and economic decline that has depopulated many areas.
"The Shiites have every right to be angry," he acknowledged.
"But the Sunnis do too," he added. "The police and army do not protect the Sunnis, and when there is a problem: they just don't come."
Sanjari explained there could never be reconciliation in the tortured province until there is some effort to make security forces half Sunni and half Shiite, instead of their current make-up as 85 percent Shiite.
Brigadier Ali, the deputy commander of Diyala's police force and a Kurd, insisted there is no sectarianism in the province's police force but, when pressed, admitted that there was political pressure from the factions.
"I was fired twice -- once for arresting a Shiite, once for arresting a Sunni," he said. "It's all politics and politicians."
---------------------------
Citation: Patrick Fort. "Iraq's Diyala province -- center of sectarian conflict," Agence France-Presse, 19 December 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061219/wl_mideast_afp/iraqusunrestdiyala
---------------------------
In Iraq, the Marines' arsenal includes money
Troops hope compensating Iraqis for damage will pay off in the fight against insurgents.
By Tony Perry
Los Angeles Times, 20 December 2006
SAQLAWIYA, IRAQ — An imam complained about a hole in the roof of a mosque punched by a Marine mortar round that malfunctioned.
A teacher who raises poultry requested compensation for 500 chickens apparently scared to death by mortar fire. And a woman accused Marines of stealing jewelry and watches during a search of her home.
Half a dozen Marine officers, including a lawyer, battalion and company commanders and an Arabic-speaking battalion executive officer, listened to the requests and several more.
If it's Tuesday at the Iraqi police station in this farming community near Fallouja, it's claims day, when Iraqis can make complaints against Marines and seek payment.
Marines have long given out such cash payments to Iraqis, an effort that dates to just after the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.
But amid the continuing insurgency in Al Anbar province, the payments have taken on a purpose beyond compensation for losses: They are also aimed at winning over Iraqis in hopes they will provide information about insurgents.
It is a slow process that requires hours of listening to possibly divine a nugget of information.
The insurgents have targeted the police headquarters on claims days in an apparent effort to scare away residents. On this day, two mortar rounds landed nearby as the session was about to begin.
Many of the claims are for farm animals run over by Marine vehicles or caught in crossfire between Marines and insurgents.
Maj. Joel Garrett, a lawyer with the 2nd Battalion of the 8th Marine Regiment, has authority to settle claims of up to $15,000. He has distributed about $120,000 in the last five-plus months, and has learned that a dead cow is an expensive thing.
In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2005, the U.S. paid out more than $20 million to settle claims with Iraqis, with more than half distributed in Al Anbar. No figure has been released for the latest fiscal year.
The Americans told the woman who made an allegation of theft that the Marines who searched her home were later searched themselves. Her house drew attention, she was told, because it was believed that insurgents lived next door and a gun position was located on her roof.
The Marines said the surprise search of the troops found nothing. She was adamant.
"You guys took it from my house," she said through an interpreter hired by the Marines. "Why did you people come to my house? Only children live there, no men."
Asked about the allegation that insurgents were living next door, she denied any knowledge of them. She appeared glum as she left.
The imam received a more cordial reception.
He is one of the few authority figures left in the area. The tribal sheik fled to Jordan after insurgents struck his home with mortar rounds. The police chief left; other police officers have been killed.
The imam received the equivalent of about $2,500 in Iraqi dinars to have the roof patched. Smiling, he left, but only after Marines appealed to him for help in finding insurgents who were killing troops and Saqlawiya residents.
"You've had one mortar round hit your house; I have had many [roadside] bombs hit my Marines, and many mortar rounds hit my home," said Capt. Mark Broekhuizen, commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion's Golf Company.
The company has lost five Marines and an interpreter to the violence.
The imam said there were no insurgents among the more than 1,000 men who attended his mosque, although Marines thought otherwise.
Marines have claim cards to give Iraqis whenever the troops realize they have caused damage. Forgeries are common.
Several claims were referred for further investigation, including the request for $2,000 for the chickens. Broekhuizen promised to visit the chicken farm.
Most of those seeking claims asked that their pictures not be taken and their names not be published, lest they be targeted by insurgents. Each was given a short lecture by the Marines noting that the Al Qaeda terrorist network did not pay claims when it destroyed property.
"That's the difference between them and us," Broekhuizen told the chicken rancher.
------------------------------
Citation: Tony Perry. "In Iraq, the Marines' arsenal includes money," Los Angeles Times, 20 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-payments20dec20,1,6701125.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
------------------------------
By Tony Perry
Los Angeles Times, 20 December 2006
SAQLAWIYA, IRAQ — An imam complained about a hole in the roof of a mosque punched by a Marine mortar round that malfunctioned.
A teacher who raises poultry requested compensation for 500 chickens apparently scared to death by mortar fire. And a woman accused Marines of stealing jewelry and watches during a search of her home.
Half a dozen Marine officers, including a lawyer, battalion and company commanders and an Arabic-speaking battalion executive officer, listened to the requests and several more.
If it's Tuesday at the Iraqi police station in this farming community near Fallouja, it's claims day, when Iraqis can make complaints against Marines and seek payment.
Marines have long given out such cash payments to Iraqis, an effort that dates to just after the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.
But amid the continuing insurgency in Al Anbar province, the payments have taken on a purpose beyond compensation for losses: They are also aimed at winning over Iraqis in hopes they will provide information about insurgents.
It is a slow process that requires hours of listening to possibly divine a nugget of information.
The insurgents have targeted the police headquarters on claims days in an apparent effort to scare away residents. On this day, two mortar rounds landed nearby as the session was about to begin.
Many of the claims are for farm animals run over by Marine vehicles or caught in crossfire between Marines and insurgents.
Maj. Joel Garrett, a lawyer with the 2nd Battalion of the 8th Marine Regiment, has authority to settle claims of up to $15,000. He has distributed about $120,000 in the last five-plus months, and has learned that a dead cow is an expensive thing.
In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2005, the U.S. paid out more than $20 million to settle claims with Iraqis, with more than half distributed in Al Anbar. No figure has been released for the latest fiscal year.
The Americans told the woman who made an allegation of theft that the Marines who searched her home were later searched themselves. Her house drew attention, she was told, because it was believed that insurgents lived next door and a gun position was located on her roof.
The Marines said the surprise search of the troops found nothing. She was adamant.
"You guys took it from my house," she said through an interpreter hired by the Marines. "Why did you people come to my house? Only children live there, no men."
Asked about the allegation that insurgents were living next door, she denied any knowledge of them. She appeared glum as she left.
The imam received a more cordial reception.
He is one of the few authority figures left in the area. The tribal sheik fled to Jordan after insurgents struck his home with mortar rounds. The police chief left; other police officers have been killed.
The imam received the equivalent of about $2,500 in Iraqi dinars to have the roof patched. Smiling, he left, but only after Marines appealed to him for help in finding insurgents who were killing troops and Saqlawiya residents.
"You've had one mortar round hit your house; I have had many [roadside] bombs hit my Marines, and many mortar rounds hit my home," said Capt. Mark Broekhuizen, commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion's Golf Company.
The company has lost five Marines and an interpreter to the violence.
The imam said there were no insurgents among the more than 1,000 men who attended his mosque, although Marines thought otherwise.
Marines have claim cards to give Iraqis whenever the troops realize they have caused damage. Forgeries are common.
Several claims were referred for further investigation, including the request for $2,000 for the chickens. Broekhuizen promised to visit the chicken farm.
Most of those seeking claims asked that their pictures not be taken and their names not be published, lest they be targeted by insurgents. Each was given a short lecture by the Marines noting that the Al Qaeda terrorist network did not pay claims when it destroyed property.
"That's the difference between them and us," Broekhuizen told the chicken rancher.
------------------------------
Citation: Tony Perry. "In Iraq, the Marines' arsenal includes money," Los Angeles Times, 20 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-payments20dec20,1,6701125.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
------------------------------
19 December 2006
Sadr Army is called top threat in Iraq
A Pentagon report cites the danger of the Shiite cleric's militia.
By Julian E. Barnes
Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2006
WASHINGTON — Armed militiamen affiliated with radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr pose the gravest danger to the security and stability of Iraq, surpassing Sunni Arab insurgents and Al Qaeda terrorists, a new Defense Department report to Congress says.
The finding represents the military's strongest characterization of the danger posed by Sadr and is among the conclusions of a quarterly report to Congress that chronicles the instability in Iraq and record level of sectarian violence.
In the last three months, the number of attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops and Iraqi civilians rose 22%, and the number of U.S. casualties grew 32%, the Pentagon assessment says.
As attacks have risen, the confidence of the Iraqi people has fallen, with fewer saying in surveys that they thought their government could protect them and more agreeing that civil war was likely.
The conclusion that Sadr-related militiamen posed the chief threat to the country's security came after the U.S. military had complained for months that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite, had been unable to address armed Shiite groups and had obstructed American efforts to confront Sadr.
It also cast new light on a deteriorating situation that President Bush continued to blame in large part on Al Qaeda.
The dour Pentagon report came hours after Robert M. Gates was sworn in as the 22nd secretary of Defense with a pledge to extract frank assessments from military leaders and deliver plain advice to the president.
"You have asked for my candor and my honest counsel at this critical moment in our nation's history, and you will get both," Gates said.
An introduction to the Pentagon's quarterly Iraq report to Congress praises the Iraqi government for taking greater responsibility for the country. But the assessment also reflects frustration over the inability of the government to improve the economic situation or reconcile sectarian factions.
"The failure of the government to implement concrete actions in these areas has contributed to a situation in which, as of October 2006, there were more Iraqis who expressed a lack of confidence in their government's ability to improve the situation than there were in July 2006," the report says.
The report says the government has nearly reached its original goal of training 325,000 security personnel but that 45,000 police and army troops have been killed or wounded or have quit.
It also notes that a third of the active force is on approved leave at any time. More disturbing, the desertion rate of Iraqi soldiers increases to more than 50% when Iraqi units are deployed outside their areas of operation.
The Iraqi government has been unable to fulfill its promise to move extra battalions to Baghdad, and American commanders in the capital have cited the lack of forces as one reason death squads from warring sects have operated unchecked.
The failure of a growing number of Iraqi security personnel to contain the violence suggests that, in the short term, the U.S. strategy of replacing American troops with Iraqi security forces has not worked.
U.S. commanders say Iraqi security forces have improved — particularly in their leadership — but that the violence they are trying to combat has grown much worse.
"The violence has escalated at an unbelievably rapid pace," said Marine Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We have to get ahead of the violence cycle and break that continuous chain of sectarian violence. That is the premier challenge facing us."
From August until November, there were an average of 959 overall attacks on troops and civilians each week — including an average of 648 against U.S. and coalition forces — up from 784 attacks from May to August.
"We know what we have to do," Peter Rodman, assistant secretary of Defense for international security, said in a briefing with reporters. "We and the Iraqi government have to contain sectarian violence and bolster the institutions of national unity."
At the ceremony for Gates, Bush spoke about the danger of extremists and radicals in Iraq, although he did not mention Al Qaeda specifically, as he had in recent meetings with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Maliki. But the Pentagon report makes it plain that sectarian violence is the greatest challenge to American forces and the Iraqi government.
Although there are many armed groups, the report says the most powerful is the Al Mahdi army, a militia nominally loyal to Sadr.
The group that had "the greatest negative affect on the security situation in Iraq is [Al Mahdi], which has replaced Al Qaeda as the most dangerous accelerant of potentially self-sustaining sectarian violence in Iraq," the report says.
Rodman said that assessment was an acknowledgment that Al Qaeda in Iraq's bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra in February had touched off a cycle of sectarian fighting that threatened the stability of the Iraqi government.
"It is a way of saying the sectarian violence is more significant than the insurgency," Rodman said.
"The sectarian violence shakes the structure of a government whose unity is a crucial factor."
The report stops short of calling the sectarian conflict a civil war.
The Al Mahdi army has not been officially declared a "hostile" organization by the United States and Iraq, a designation that would allow American forces to confront the militia on sight.
U.S. troops battled Sadr's forces in 2004, and an Iraqi judge issued an arrest warrant for the cleric, who eventually was persuaded to support the political process.
Sattler suggested that the effort to improve security in Baghdad had failed in part because the military was unable to move into the Sadr City neighborhood in Baghdad and confront the militia.
"As the forces moved forward, they were not able to go in and neutralize Sadr City," Sattler said.
Military officials are wrestling with whether they need to mount a combat offensive against militias loyal to Sadr.
Sattler and Rodman avoided discussing an offensive against the militias but said the policy was under review.
Gates is expected to take charge of the review. Although he has offered no hint of his policy preference, he said failure in Iraq would be a "calamity."
"All of us want to find a way to bring America's sons and daughters home again," Gates said. "But as the president has made clear, we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come."
The Iraqi government has assumed responsibility for the security of two provinces, one of the report's findings highlighted by Rodman and Sattler.
Three more provinces, in the Kurdish north, may be turned over by the end of the year, the report says.
Army Lt. Col. Chris Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad, said Najaf in the south would be turned over Wednesday. Rodman said several more provinces were ready to be turned over to Iraqi control next year.
In October, Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, said his goal was to turn over "six or seven provinces" by year-end.
A military officer in Baghdad said that goal would probably be missed, but not by much.
"I would be surprised if six provinces had been handed over by Dec. 31," said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. "But I would not be surprised if eight or nine [provinces] had been transferred by Jan. 30."
*
julian.barnes@latimes.com
*
(INFOBOX BELOW)
On the rise
Average weekly attacks on U.S. coalition and Iraqi forces and Iraqi civilians during selected periods:
Pre-sovereignty
Apr. 1-June 28, '04: 408
Interim government
June 29-Nov. 26, '04: 536
National Assembly election
Nov. 27, '04-Feb. 11, '05: 521
Constitution drafting
Feb. 12-Aug. 28, '05: 463
Constitution campaign
Aug. 29. '05-Feb. 10, '06: 543
Samarra bombing aftermath
Feb. 11-May 19, '06: 646
Maliki government
May 20-Aug. 11, '06: 784
Maliki government
Aug.-Nov. 10, '06: 959
*
Source: Department of Defense
-------------------------
Citation: Julian E. Barnes. "Sadr Army is called top threat in Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-usiraq19dec19,1,3420868.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
-------------------------
By Julian E. Barnes
Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2006
WASHINGTON — Armed militiamen affiliated with radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr pose the gravest danger to the security and stability of Iraq, surpassing Sunni Arab insurgents and Al Qaeda terrorists, a new Defense Department report to Congress says.
The finding represents the military's strongest characterization of the danger posed by Sadr and is among the conclusions of a quarterly report to Congress that chronicles the instability in Iraq and record level of sectarian violence.
In the last three months, the number of attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops and Iraqi civilians rose 22%, and the number of U.S. casualties grew 32%, the Pentagon assessment says.
As attacks have risen, the confidence of the Iraqi people has fallen, with fewer saying in surveys that they thought their government could protect them and more agreeing that civil war was likely.
The conclusion that Sadr-related militiamen posed the chief threat to the country's security came after the U.S. military had complained for months that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite, had been unable to address armed Shiite groups and had obstructed American efforts to confront Sadr.
It also cast new light on a deteriorating situation that President Bush continued to blame in large part on Al Qaeda.
The dour Pentagon report came hours after Robert M. Gates was sworn in as the 22nd secretary of Defense with a pledge to extract frank assessments from military leaders and deliver plain advice to the president.
"You have asked for my candor and my honest counsel at this critical moment in our nation's history, and you will get both," Gates said.
An introduction to the Pentagon's quarterly Iraq report to Congress praises the Iraqi government for taking greater responsibility for the country. But the assessment also reflects frustration over the inability of the government to improve the economic situation or reconcile sectarian factions.
"The failure of the government to implement concrete actions in these areas has contributed to a situation in which, as of October 2006, there were more Iraqis who expressed a lack of confidence in their government's ability to improve the situation than there were in July 2006," the report says.
The report says the government has nearly reached its original goal of training 325,000 security personnel but that 45,000 police and army troops have been killed or wounded or have quit.
It also notes that a third of the active force is on approved leave at any time. More disturbing, the desertion rate of Iraqi soldiers increases to more than 50% when Iraqi units are deployed outside their areas of operation.
The Iraqi government has been unable to fulfill its promise to move extra battalions to Baghdad, and American commanders in the capital have cited the lack of forces as one reason death squads from warring sects have operated unchecked.
The failure of a growing number of Iraqi security personnel to contain the violence suggests that, in the short term, the U.S. strategy of replacing American troops with Iraqi security forces has not worked.
U.S. commanders say Iraqi security forces have improved — particularly in their leadership — but that the violence they are trying to combat has grown much worse.
"The violence has escalated at an unbelievably rapid pace," said Marine Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We have to get ahead of the violence cycle and break that continuous chain of sectarian violence. That is the premier challenge facing us."
From August until November, there were an average of 959 overall attacks on troops and civilians each week — including an average of 648 against U.S. and coalition forces — up from 784 attacks from May to August.
"We know what we have to do," Peter Rodman, assistant secretary of Defense for international security, said in a briefing with reporters. "We and the Iraqi government have to contain sectarian violence and bolster the institutions of national unity."
At the ceremony for Gates, Bush spoke about the danger of extremists and radicals in Iraq, although he did not mention Al Qaeda specifically, as he had in recent meetings with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Maliki. But the Pentagon report makes it plain that sectarian violence is the greatest challenge to American forces and the Iraqi government.
Although there are many armed groups, the report says the most powerful is the Al Mahdi army, a militia nominally loyal to Sadr.
The group that had "the greatest negative affect on the security situation in Iraq is [Al Mahdi], which has replaced Al Qaeda as the most dangerous accelerant of potentially self-sustaining sectarian violence in Iraq," the report says.
Rodman said that assessment was an acknowledgment that Al Qaeda in Iraq's bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra in February had touched off a cycle of sectarian fighting that threatened the stability of the Iraqi government.
"It is a way of saying the sectarian violence is more significant than the insurgency," Rodman said.
"The sectarian violence shakes the structure of a government whose unity is a crucial factor."
The report stops short of calling the sectarian conflict a civil war.
The Al Mahdi army has not been officially declared a "hostile" organization by the United States and Iraq, a designation that would allow American forces to confront the militia on sight.
U.S. troops battled Sadr's forces in 2004, and an Iraqi judge issued an arrest warrant for the cleric, who eventually was persuaded to support the political process.
Sattler suggested that the effort to improve security in Baghdad had failed in part because the military was unable to move into the Sadr City neighborhood in Baghdad and confront the militia.
"As the forces moved forward, they were not able to go in and neutralize Sadr City," Sattler said.
Military officials are wrestling with whether they need to mount a combat offensive against militias loyal to Sadr.
Sattler and Rodman avoided discussing an offensive against the militias but said the policy was under review.
Gates is expected to take charge of the review. Although he has offered no hint of his policy preference, he said failure in Iraq would be a "calamity."
"All of us want to find a way to bring America's sons and daughters home again," Gates said. "But as the president has made clear, we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come."
The Iraqi government has assumed responsibility for the security of two provinces, one of the report's findings highlighted by Rodman and Sattler.
Three more provinces, in the Kurdish north, may be turned over by the end of the year, the report says.
Army Lt. Col. Chris Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad, said Najaf in the south would be turned over Wednesday. Rodman said several more provinces were ready to be turned over to Iraqi control next year.
In October, Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, said his goal was to turn over "six or seven provinces" by year-end.
A military officer in Baghdad said that goal would probably be missed, but not by much.
"I would be surprised if six provinces had been handed over by Dec. 31," said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. "But I would not be surprised if eight or nine [provinces] had been transferred by Jan. 30."
*
julian.barnes@latimes.com
*
(INFOBOX BELOW)
On the rise
Average weekly attacks on U.S. coalition and Iraqi forces and Iraqi civilians during selected periods:
Pre-sovereignty
Apr. 1-June 28, '04: 408
Interim government
June 29-Nov. 26, '04: 536
National Assembly election
Nov. 27, '04-Feb. 11, '05: 521
Constitution drafting
Feb. 12-Aug. 28, '05: 463
Constitution campaign
Aug. 29. '05-Feb. 10, '06: 543
Samarra bombing aftermath
Feb. 11-May 19, '06: 646
Maliki government
May 20-Aug. 11, '06: 784
Maliki government
Aug.-Nov. 10, '06: 959
*
Source: Department of Defense
-------------------------
Citation: Julian E. Barnes. "Sadr Army is called top threat in Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-usiraq19dec19,1,3420868.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
-------------------------
Does Iraq need more debate?
We've had plenty of shouting matches on the war; what we need are better leaders and more capable media.
By Martin Kaplan
Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2006
EVERYONE SAYS WE need a national debate on Iraq. Left, right, politicos, pundits, editorial writers, academics. If ever there was a universally held position, it's the belief that holding a national debate on Iraq is just the thing for what ails us in the Middle East.
Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), who coined the term "freedom fries," has called for it. So has Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), repeatedly. Conservative columnist William Rusher believes "the stage is set for a national debate." Liberal evangelical Jim Wallis thinks that what we really need is a "new national debate on Iraq." The only one not joining the parade seems to be President Bush, but that may just be because his Iraq "listening tour" has caused a scheduling conflict.
It's not just Iraq. From healthcare to education, immigration to entitlements, there's hardly an issue on the national radar screen that hasn't been nominated for a cleansing and clarifying national debate.
But what would a national debate on anything really look like? How would it be any different from what we're already doing now? Imagine the elements of a national debate on Iraq, and then ask whether what's going on today fits the bill.
Analysts offering opposing views on television shows? Check. Dueling Op-Ed pieces? Check. Senators and representatives making floor speeches? Check. Presidential candidates staking out positions, and critics taking them on? Check. Magazines and journals offering thoughtful, conflicting takes? Check. A take-no-prisoners brawl in the blogosphere? Check. Public opinion polls? You can't go to the restroom without tripping over a new one. Thousands of people in the streets? Well, it's not like the Vietnam era — without a draft, it won't ever be — but plenty of cities have seen plenty of passionate marchers.
So why, despite all appearances of actually having a national debate right now, do people keep insisting that we mount one?
Perhaps it's because the mainstream media are too timid to declare the difference between right and wrong. Imagine if journalism consisted of more than a collage of conflicting talking points. Imagine the difference it would make if more brand-name reporters broke from the bizarre straitjacket of "balance," which equates fairness with putting all disputants on equal epistemological footing, no matter how deceitful or moronic they may be.
There's a market for news that weighs counterclaims and assesses truth value. It just hasn't kept up with demand. No wonder Jon Stewart has such a loyal audience: He has a point of view, and it's rooted in the reality-based — not the ideology-based — world.
Anyone who's watched a presidential debate knows how useless they are for deciding our country's direction. The coming presidential primary season, which will stretch for more than a year, will be the scene of multi-candidate cattle calls in which entrants will moo canned messages, spring scripted attacks, ignore interlocutors' questions and declare inevitable victories.
The debates are also useless for finding common ground. There are no points to be scored with nuance. We're a nation of 300 million, which means there's one political party for every 150 million points of view. Politicians behave the way they do for a reason: Wedge issues work. Bipartisan consensus is a mug's game. The base is what counts. Swing votes win elections. Food fights win ratings.
Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has been calling for a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates across the nation. I'd like that. I'd also like a pony, an end to racism, a cure for cancer and a date with Scarlett Johansson. The actual Lincoln-Douglas debates drew huge crowds and galvanized public attention; Newt's would make C-SPAN, and maybe Fox, but most people would get them in 12-second snippets. Besides, it's tough to imagine Newt and his opponent (John McCain?) actually coming up with anything that they haven't broadcast in the news-and-gasbag venues to which they already enjoy full access.
Maybe we don't need a national debate. Maybe what we really need are leaders with more character, followers with more discrimination, deciders who hear as well as listen and media that know the difference between the public interest and what the public is interested in. National debates nicely fulfill the circus part of the bread-and-circuses formula of modern public life. Like psychoanalysis, national debates are basically interminable. And in our postmodern era, they do a nice job substituting for the hard work of actually figuring out what's true and what's good.
MARTIN KAPLAN is associate dean of the USC Annenberg School, where he directs the Norman Lear Center (learcenter.org).
-----------------------------
Citation: Martin Kaplan. "Does Iraq need more debate?," Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oekaplan19dec19,0,5958068.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
-----------------------------
By Martin Kaplan
Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2006
EVERYONE SAYS WE need a national debate on Iraq. Left, right, politicos, pundits, editorial writers, academics. If ever there was a universally held position, it's the belief that holding a national debate on Iraq is just the thing for what ails us in the Middle East.
Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), who coined the term "freedom fries," has called for it. So has Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), repeatedly. Conservative columnist William Rusher believes "the stage is set for a national debate." Liberal evangelical Jim Wallis thinks that what we really need is a "new national debate on Iraq." The only one not joining the parade seems to be President Bush, but that may just be because his Iraq "listening tour" has caused a scheduling conflict.
It's not just Iraq. From healthcare to education, immigration to entitlements, there's hardly an issue on the national radar screen that hasn't been nominated for a cleansing and clarifying national debate.
But what would a national debate on anything really look like? How would it be any different from what we're already doing now? Imagine the elements of a national debate on Iraq, and then ask whether what's going on today fits the bill.
Analysts offering opposing views on television shows? Check. Dueling Op-Ed pieces? Check. Senators and representatives making floor speeches? Check. Presidential candidates staking out positions, and critics taking them on? Check. Magazines and journals offering thoughtful, conflicting takes? Check. A take-no-prisoners brawl in the blogosphere? Check. Public opinion polls? You can't go to the restroom without tripping over a new one. Thousands of people in the streets? Well, it's not like the Vietnam era — without a draft, it won't ever be — but plenty of cities have seen plenty of passionate marchers.
So why, despite all appearances of actually having a national debate right now, do people keep insisting that we mount one?
Perhaps it's because the mainstream media are too timid to declare the difference between right and wrong. Imagine if journalism consisted of more than a collage of conflicting talking points. Imagine the difference it would make if more brand-name reporters broke from the bizarre straitjacket of "balance," which equates fairness with putting all disputants on equal epistemological footing, no matter how deceitful or moronic they may be.
There's a market for news that weighs counterclaims and assesses truth value. It just hasn't kept up with demand. No wonder Jon Stewart has such a loyal audience: He has a point of view, and it's rooted in the reality-based — not the ideology-based — world.
Anyone who's watched a presidential debate knows how useless they are for deciding our country's direction. The coming presidential primary season, which will stretch for more than a year, will be the scene of multi-candidate cattle calls in which entrants will moo canned messages, spring scripted attacks, ignore interlocutors' questions and declare inevitable victories.
The debates are also useless for finding common ground. There are no points to be scored with nuance. We're a nation of 300 million, which means there's one political party for every 150 million points of view. Politicians behave the way they do for a reason: Wedge issues work. Bipartisan consensus is a mug's game. The base is what counts. Swing votes win elections. Food fights win ratings.
Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has been calling for a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates across the nation. I'd like that. I'd also like a pony, an end to racism, a cure for cancer and a date with Scarlett Johansson. The actual Lincoln-Douglas debates drew huge crowds and galvanized public attention; Newt's would make C-SPAN, and maybe Fox, but most people would get them in 12-second snippets. Besides, it's tough to imagine Newt and his opponent (John McCain?) actually coming up with anything that they haven't broadcast in the news-and-gasbag venues to which they already enjoy full access.
Maybe we don't need a national debate. Maybe what we really need are leaders with more character, followers with more discrimination, deciders who hear as well as listen and media that know the difference between the public interest and what the public is interested in. National debates nicely fulfill the circus part of the bread-and-circuses formula of modern public life. Like psychoanalysis, national debates are basically interminable. And in our postmodern era, they do a nice job substituting for the hard work of actually figuring out what's true and what's good.
MARTIN KAPLAN is associate dean of the USC Annenberg School, where he directs the Norman Lear Center (learcenter.org).
-----------------------------
Citation: Martin Kaplan. "Does Iraq need more debate?," Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oekaplan19dec19,0,5958068.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
-----------------------------
Iraqi TV station plays up U.S. losses
By Borzou Daragahi and Molly Hennessy-Fiske
Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2006
BAGHDAD — The men with laptops sat around an unadorned conference table, chatting amicably about their plans and operations.
The scene on the newly launched Al Zawraa satellite television channel could have been footage from the boardroom of any company, if it weren't for the ski masks the men wore and the subject of the meeting: future mortar attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq.
The renegade, pro-insurgent Al Zawraa channel, with a 24-hour diet of propaganda against U.S. forces and the Iraqi government, has become something of a sensation throughout the country. It has drawn condemnation from U.S. officials, Iraqi politicians and Friday prayer leaders.
Most hours of the day it plays footage of U.S. soldiers in Iraq being shot and blown up in insurgent attacks, often with religious chants or Saddam Hussein-era nationalist anthems in the background. There are segments warning Iraq's Sunni Arabs to be wary of Shiite Muslims, and occasional English-language commentary and subtitles clearly meant to demoralize U.S. troops.
"Your new enlisting qualifications are kind of comical," an announcer says in slightly accented American English, over an image of a U.S. soldier in a field hospital, a bandage on his newly amputated arm. "I mean, what are you doing? Thirty-nine years old? That's the new age of recruiting? Are you recruiting nannies? I guess if we are patient, we might witness crippled people enlisting for the Marines."
The station attempts to present an alternative to images of the war appearing in U.S. and other Iraqi media. It shows footage of Americans abusing Iraqis and Baghdad government officials collaborating with the "occupier." Even Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911," the 2004 documentary critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy, gets drawn into the commentary.
"After all, there are honest guys in America," the announcer says in comments directed at President Bush. "If Mr. Moore can talk to you like that, so can I."
It's not clear how big an Iraqi audience Al Zawraa captures. But its very presence demonstrates the insurgency's abilities. Despite 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and intense diplomatic pressure on Iraq's neighbors, the station is able to circumvent U.S. and Iraqi forces and stage round-the-clock broadcasts, complete with news bulletins, graphics and commentary.
Al Zawraa started out several months ago as an aboveground hard-line Sunni channel, but it was shut down by the Iraqi government Nov. 5, the day Hussein received the death penalty. Iraqi police raided the station's headquarters after broadcasts criticized the verdict.
At the time, Mishaan Jaburi, a member of parliament said to be behind the station, disputed the sanction.
"If Saddam had ordered the killing of some hundreds of Iraqi people, the current officials in Baghdad deserve 1,000 death sentences because they cause the daily killing of more than those killed by Saddam," Jaburi, who has been accused of embezzling state funds, told the Associated Press from Syria.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki had warned stations in July not to broadcast footage that would jeopardize the nation's stability. But the attempt to stifle Al Zawraa backfired. It quickly reemerged as an underground station with violent, no-holds-barred content clearly meant to incite Sunnis.
Broadcast staples include images of U.S. soldiers manhandling Iraqi women, photos from the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and footage of Iraqi children burned and injured in alleged U.S. attacks.
The station also loops shaky, slow-motion footage of U.S. vehicles being blown up and American soldiers, often in crosshairs, crumpling to the ground after being shot by snipers.
One question-and-answer segment with insurgents shows them installing Katyusha rocket launchers on cars and assembling weapons to fire rocket-propelled grenades.
"And you still using this tactic?" the announcer asks.
"Oh yes. With the will of God, we will never give up," an insurgent replies.
Al Zawraa announcers dispute U.S. casualty statistics. They insist that instead of nearly 3,000 American soldiers killed, the death toll is closer, as one said, to "30,000 miserable, poor nobodies who you have convinced that they will win a scholarship after a tiny tour in a little place called Iraq."
They attempt to portray the insurgency as a powerful force to be reckoned with for years to come. "There will be no negotiating," an announcer states. "For us, it's straight and simple. We are fighting for our religion and for our soil. We will fight you while you are packing. We will fight you while you are sleeping. We will fight you as you are evacuating your last soldier."
Some of the images of Americans being attacked are available on the Web and in video shops in Iraq. Some U.S. military officers shrug off Al Zawraa, saying it rarely broadcasts anything new.
Some viewers acknowledge the station's sectarian biases but say it's no different from other new Iraqi channels beholden to political blocs.
"Al Zawraa is not serving the interest of the Iraqi people," said Zaid Farooq, a 33-year-old Baghdad electrical engineer. "They are saying bad things about the government. But we can't blame Al Zawraa when there are other channels like Al Iraqiya," the state-owned station.
Though Al Zawraa rarely praises or shows footage of the many insurgent attacks on Iraqi civilians and security forces, it's the station's sectarian agenda that most irks the Shiite-dominated government. After Iraqis held a reconciliation conference Saturday meant to heal wounds between Sunnis and Shiites, the station quickly broadcast denunciations of the meeting by the Muslim Scholars Assn., a leading Sunni clerical group.
A recent segment showed Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr sitting among a group of clerics and ordering an unseen person to "send them in there as soldiers," a suggestion that his men had infiltrated the security forces and were taking part in death-squad operations against Sunnis.
An announcer alleged that Sadr, a critic of U.S. policies here, had stopped his fight against the Americans and was now focusing his efforts against Sunnis.
Iraqi government efforts to track down the renegade station have come to naught. No one's quite sure where it broadcasts from or even who is behind it. Iraqi national security advisor Mowaffak Rubaie and a senior U.S. military official said it was broadcasting from somewhere near the Kurdish city of Irbil at one point and recently signed a distribution deal with the Egyptian satellite company NileSat.
There are indications that the Iraqi government is still looking for Al Zawraa. Police in the Sunni city of Hawija near Kirkuk raided the home of another member of Jaburi's parliamentary bloc Sunday, arresting him and two others on unspecified security charges.
---------------------------
Citation: Borzou Daragahi and Molly Hennessy-Fiske. "Iraqi TV station plays up U.S. losses," Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-zawraa19dec19,1,3228846.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
---------------------------
Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2006
BAGHDAD — The men with laptops sat around an unadorned conference table, chatting amicably about their plans and operations.
The scene on the newly launched Al Zawraa satellite television channel could have been footage from the boardroom of any company, if it weren't for the ski masks the men wore and the subject of the meeting: future mortar attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq.
The renegade, pro-insurgent Al Zawraa channel, with a 24-hour diet of propaganda against U.S. forces and the Iraqi government, has become something of a sensation throughout the country. It has drawn condemnation from U.S. officials, Iraqi politicians and Friday prayer leaders.
Most hours of the day it plays footage of U.S. soldiers in Iraq being shot and blown up in insurgent attacks, often with religious chants or Saddam Hussein-era nationalist anthems in the background. There are segments warning Iraq's Sunni Arabs to be wary of Shiite Muslims, and occasional English-language commentary and subtitles clearly meant to demoralize U.S. troops.
"Your new enlisting qualifications are kind of comical," an announcer says in slightly accented American English, over an image of a U.S. soldier in a field hospital, a bandage on his newly amputated arm. "I mean, what are you doing? Thirty-nine years old? That's the new age of recruiting? Are you recruiting nannies? I guess if we are patient, we might witness crippled people enlisting for the Marines."
The station attempts to present an alternative to images of the war appearing in U.S. and other Iraqi media. It shows footage of Americans abusing Iraqis and Baghdad government officials collaborating with the "occupier." Even Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911," the 2004 documentary critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy, gets drawn into the commentary.
"After all, there are honest guys in America," the announcer says in comments directed at President Bush. "If Mr. Moore can talk to you like that, so can I."
It's not clear how big an Iraqi audience Al Zawraa captures. But its very presence demonstrates the insurgency's abilities. Despite 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and intense diplomatic pressure on Iraq's neighbors, the station is able to circumvent U.S. and Iraqi forces and stage round-the-clock broadcasts, complete with news bulletins, graphics and commentary.
Al Zawraa started out several months ago as an aboveground hard-line Sunni channel, but it was shut down by the Iraqi government Nov. 5, the day Hussein received the death penalty. Iraqi police raided the station's headquarters after broadcasts criticized the verdict.
At the time, Mishaan Jaburi, a member of parliament said to be behind the station, disputed the sanction.
"If Saddam had ordered the killing of some hundreds of Iraqi people, the current officials in Baghdad deserve 1,000 death sentences because they cause the daily killing of more than those killed by Saddam," Jaburi, who has been accused of embezzling state funds, told the Associated Press from Syria.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki had warned stations in July not to broadcast footage that would jeopardize the nation's stability. But the attempt to stifle Al Zawraa backfired. It quickly reemerged as an underground station with violent, no-holds-barred content clearly meant to incite Sunnis.
Broadcast staples include images of U.S. soldiers manhandling Iraqi women, photos from the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and footage of Iraqi children burned and injured in alleged U.S. attacks.
The station also loops shaky, slow-motion footage of U.S. vehicles being blown up and American soldiers, often in crosshairs, crumpling to the ground after being shot by snipers.
One question-and-answer segment with insurgents shows them installing Katyusha rocket launchers on cars and assembling weapons to fire rocket-propelled grenades.
"And you still using this tactic?" the announcer asks.
"Oh yes. With the will of God, we will never give up," an insurgent replies.
Al Zawraa announcers dispute U.S. casualty statistics. They insist that instead of nearly 3,000 American soldiers killed, the death toll is closer, as one said, to "30,000 miserable, poor nobodies who you have convinced that they will win a scholarship after a tiny tour in a little place called Iraq."
They attempt to portray the insurgency as a powerful force to be reckoned with for years to come. "There will be no negotiating," an announcer states. "For us, it's straight and simple. We are fighting for our religion and for our soil. We will fight you while you are packing. We will fight you while you are sleeping. We will fight you as you are evacuating your last soldier."
Some of the images of Americans being attacked are available on the Web and in video shops in Iraq. Some U.S. military officers shrug off Al Zawraa, saying it rarely broadcasts anything new.
Some viewers acknowledge the station's sectarian biases but say it's no different from other new Iraqi channels beholden to political blocs.
"Al Zawraa is not serving the interest of the Iraqi people," said Zaid Farooq, a 33-year-old Baghdad electrical engineer. "They are saying bad things about the government. But we can't blame Al Zawraa when there are other channels like Al Iraqiya," the state-owned station.
Though Al Zawraa rarely praises or shows footage of the many insurgent attacks on Iraqi civilians and security forces, it's the station's sectarian agenda that most irks the Shiite-dominated government. After Iraqis held a reconciliation conference Saturday meant to heal wounds between Sunnis and Shiites, the station quickly broadcast denunciations of the meeting by the Muslim Scholars Assn., a leading Sunni clerical group.
A recent segment showed Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr sitting among a group of clerics and ordering an unseen person to "send them in there as soldiers," a suggestion that his men had infiltrated the security forces and were taking part in death-squad operations against Sunnis.
An announcer alleged that Sadr, a critic of U.S. policies here, had stopped his fight against the Americans and was now focusing his efforts against Sunnis.
Iraqi government efforts to track down the renegade station have come to naught. No one's quite sure where it broadcasts from or even who is behind it. Iraqi national security advisor Mowaffak Rubaie and a senior U.S. military official said it was broadcasting from somewhere near the Kurdish city of Irbil at one point and recently signed a distribution deal with the Egyptian satellite company NileSat.
There are indications that the Iraqi government is still looking for Al Zawraa. Police in the Sunni city of Hawija near Kirkuk raided the home of another member of Jaburi's parliamentary bloc Sunday, arresting him and two others on unspecified security charges.
---------------------------
Citation: Borzou Daragahi and Molly Hennessy-Fiske. "Iraqi TV station plays up U.S. losses," Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-zawraa19dec19,1,3228846.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
---------------------------
18 December 2006
U.S. to triple number of military trainers in Iraq
By Ross Colvin
Reuters, 17 December 2006
The U.S. military plans to speed up the training of Iraq's army by tripling its number of embedded trainers to about 9,000, while keeping a close eye on units' sectarian loyalties, a U.S. general said on Sunday.
Brigadier General Dana Pittard, whose Iraqi Assistance Group oversees training of Iraq's security forces, also said each of the nine police brigades would be taken off the streets over the next nine months for one month-long training.
A number of police units have been accused of colluding with, or being infiltrated by Shi'ite militia death squads targeting minority Sunnis. An explosion of sectarian violence since February has pushed the country toward all-out civil war.
"Over the next couple of months we will augment the transition teams to double or triple their size," Pittard said, noting that the teams training the Iraqi army were now 3,000-strong.
The bipartisan Iraq Study Group has recommended to President George W. Bush that he accelerate the training of Iraqi forces to allow the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops by early 2008.
Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki agreed to this at a summit in Jordan last month. Maliki said then that Iraqi forces would be able to assume security control by next June. Pittard said he thought that was an achievable goal.
The general said the new trainers would be drawn from combat troops already in Iraq. He was unaware of reports that they might come from reinforcements heading to the region.
While analysts have questioned the effectiveness and sectarian loyalties of Iraq's 300,000-strong security forces, saying they could splinter if communal fighting worsens, Pittard said he had not seen much evidence of this.
"They rebel against the allegation that this is anything else but a national army that they are trying to build," he told journalists in Baghdad.
SHI'ITE OR SUNNI?
Nevertheless, the American training teams were asking soldiers whether they were Shi'ites or Sunni Arabs because it was crucial to know the religious affiliation of the units.
"But we are seeing comparatively a lot less sectarian leanings than in other security forces," he said, referring to the Iraqi national police. "It is a concern to us and to the Iraqi government."
He also highlighted three factors which he said were inhibiting the performance of the army. The absence of a Uniform Code of Justice meant that Iraqi commanders had no way of disciplining soldiers who went absent without leave.
The absence, too, of a national banking system meant that many soldiers whose units were far away from their families disappeared for days when they traveled home to give them their pay. Some simply deserted because the travel costs ate up much of their small salaries.
"If we had a banking system, that would help retention. At present there is a 12 to 14 percent attrition rate," he said.
Regional recruitment also meant that many soldiers were reluctant to serve in areas of the country that took them away from their families.
U.S. commanders have complained that Operation Together Forward, a major security crackdown aimed at reclaiming the streets of Baghdad from death squads, suffered because the Iraqi military committed too few troops.
------------------------
Citation: Ross Colvin. "U.S. to triple number of military trainers in Iraq," Reuters, 17 December 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061217/ts_nm/iraq_military_training_dc_1
------------------------
Reuters, 17 December 2006
The U.S. military plans to speed up the training of Iraq's army by tripling its number of embedded trainers to about 9,000, while keeping a close eye on units' sectarian loyalties, a U.S. general said on Sunday.
Brigadier General Dana Pittard, whose Iraqi Assistance Group oversees training of Iraq's security forces, also said each of the nine police brigades would be taken off the streets over the next nine months for one month-long training.
A number of police units have been accused of colluding with, or being infiltrated by Shi'ite militia death squads targeting minority Sunnis. An explosion of sectarian violence since February has pushed the country toward all-out civil war.
"Over the next couple of months we will augment the transition teams to double or triple their size," Pittard said, noting that the teams training the Iraqi army were now 3,000-strong.
The bipartisan Iraq Study Group has recommended to President George W. Bush that he accelerate the training of Iraqi forces to allow the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops by early 2008.
Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki agreed to this at a summit in Jordan last month. Maliki said then that Iraqi forces would be able to assume security control by next June. Pittard said he thought that was an achievable goal.
The general said the new trainers would be drawn from combat troops already in Iraq. He was unaware of reports that they might come from reinforcements heading to the region.
While analysts have questioned the effectiveness and sectarian loyalties of Iraq's 300,000-strong security forces, saying they could splinter if communal fighting worsens, Pittard said he had not seen much evidence of this.
"They rebel against the allegation that this is anything else but a national army that they are trying to build," he told journalists in Baghdad.
SHI'ITE OR SUNNI?
Nevertheless, the American training teams were asking soldiers whether they were Shi'ites or Sunni Arabs because it was crucial to know the religious affiliation of the units.
"But we are seeing comparatively a lot less sectarian leanings than in other security forces," he said, referring to the Iraqi national police. "It is a concern to us and to the Iraqi government."
He also highlighted three factors which he said were inhibiting the performance of the army. The absence of a Uniform Code of Justice meant that Iraqi commanders had no way of disciplining soldiers who went absent without leave.
The absence, too, of a national banking system meant that many soldiers whose units were far away from their families disappeared for days when they traveled home to give them their pay. Some simply deserted because the travel costs ate up much of their small salaries.
"If we had a banking system, that would help retention. At present there is a 12 to 14 percent attrition rate," he said.
Regional recruitment also meant that many soldiers were reluctant to serve in areas of the country that took them away from their families.
U.S. commanders have complained that Operation Together Forward, a major security crackdown aimed at reclaiming the streets of Baghdad from death squads, suffered because the Iraqi military committed too few troops.
------------------------
Citation: Ross Colvin. "U.S. to triple number of military trainers in Iraq," Reuters, 17 December 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061217/ts_nm/iraq_military_training_dc_1
------------------------
New manual at odds with key Iraq tactics
The counterinsurgency doctrine warns about practices still in use, such as big bases that may signal occupation.
By Julian E. Barnes
Los Angeles Times, 16 December 2006
WASHINGTON — The U.S. military's new counterinsurgency doctrine takes issue with some key strategies that American commanders in Iraq continue to use, most notably the practice of concentrating combat forces in massive bases rather than dispersing them among the population.
The 282-page counterinsurgency field manual, unveiled Friday, seeks to bring together the best practices in fighting sustained insurgencies that the United States has learned during the Iraq war. It also lists tactics that have tripped up American forces, such as trying to make local security forces act like the U.S. military and overemphasizing killing or capturing enemies rather than providing for the safety of the population.
Although the military has moved away from some of these tactics, others are widely used in Iraq.
Most special operations forces in Iraq spend the bulk of their time and resources trying to kill or capture Al Qaeda members and insurgents. But the manual says the best use of those troops is not hunting enemies but training Iraqi security forces or police.
Perhaps the most controversial section may be the manual's warning about large, sprawling bases, the very kind the Army has erected in Baghdad. The manual warns that such military bases could suggest "a long-term foreign occupation."
A cornerstone of the Iraq plans of Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, and Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has been to concentrate Baghdad's U.S. Army forces in a few large forward operating bases, or FOBs. Counterinsurgency experts have questioned the practice, arguing that to protect the populace from insurgents, military forces must have a constant presence in the area.
The authors of the manual say the new doctrine is not meant as a critique of the Iraq strategy. Retired Army Col. Conrad Crane, who helped oversee the manual's development, said they were not criticizing the practice of putting soldiers on large bases but rather were saying they simply did not want people to hole up and become "fobbits."
"You have to get out and mingle among the people," Crane said. "You can't cede control of the night and the street to the enemy."
Retired Gen. John Keane, former acting chief of staff of the Army, said the military needed to move off the big bases in Baghdad and establish small bases peppered throughout key neighborhoods, as had been done in the Iraqi cities of Tall Afar and Ramadi.
"You put a protect force in that lives in the neighborhood. They stay 24/7 to protect the people," Keane said at a briefing this week. "That piece is what we have never been able to execute in Baghdad."
Although the manual is meant to apply generally to all fights against insurgency, it was clearly written with Iraq in mind. And at some points the introduction and first chapter of the new manual read like a plea for more time for the military to succeed in Iraq.
The new doctrine, which was begun in January and released in draft form in June, cautions that campaigns against insurgents are "often long and difficult" and that progress is hard to measure. Conventional militaries often stumble in the beginning of an insurgency but can succeed if they learn, adapt and push ahead against it, according to the manual.
"The military forces that successfully defeat insurgencies are usually those able to overcome their institutional inclination to wage conventional war against insurgents," the doctrine says.
If there is a theme for the manual, Crane said, it is that the military can adapt and correct its missteps. "That is the historical record: You learn as you go," he said.
Overall, the doctrine says, a counterinsurgency operation is "a struggle for the population's support." To win that confidence, militaries must learn about the culture and people they are trying to protect as well as fight the insurgents who are attempting to destabilize the country, it says.
Lt. Col. Lance A. McDaniel, one of the Marines who helped write the new doctrine, said he expected the manual to influence new strategies in Iraq, although he was not sure exactly what lessons would be embraced.
"I do not know how they will translate this to the field," he said. "But I do think this will be No. 1 on the reading list."
The manual, a public document, can be read at http://usacac.army.mil/cac/repository/materials/coin-fm3-24.pdf.
------------------------------
Citation: Julian E. Barnes. "New manual at odds with key Iraq tactics," Los Angeles Times, 16 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-manual16dec16,1,2371107.story?coll=la-news-a_section&ctrack=1&cset=true
------------------------------
By Julian E. Barnes
Los Angeles Times, 16 December 2006
WASHINGTON — The U.S. military's new counterinsurgency doctrine takes issue with some key strategies that American commanders in Iraq continue to use, most notably the practice of concentrating combat forces in massive bases rather than dispersing them among the population.
The 282-page counterinsurgency field manual, unveiled Friday, seeks to bring together the best practices in fighting sustained insurgencies that the United States has learned during the Iraq war. It also lists tactics that have tripped up American forces, such as trying to make local security forces act like the U.S. military and overemphasizing killing or capturing enemies rather than providing for the safety of the population.
Although the military has moved away from some of these tactics, others are widely used in Iraq.
Most special operations forces in Iraq spend the bulk of their time and resources trying to kill or capture Al Qaeda members and insurgents. But the manual says the best use of those troops is not hunting enemies but training Iraqi security forces or police.
Perhaps the most controversial section may be the manual's warning about large, sprawling bases, the very kind the Army has erected in Baghdad. The manual warns that such military bases could suggest "a long-term foreign occupation."
A cornerstone of the Iraq plans of Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, and Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has been to concentrate Baghdad's U.S. Army forces in a few large forward operating bases, or FOBs. Counterinsurgency experts have questioned the practice, arguing that to protect the populace from insurgents, military forces must have a constant presence in the area.
The authors of the manual say the new doctrine is not meant as a critique of the Iraq strategy. Retired Army Col. Conrad Crane, who helped oversee the manual's development, said they were not criticizing the practice of putting soldiers on large bases but rather were saying they simply did not want people to hole up and become "fobbits."
"You have to get out and mingle among the people," Crane said. "You can't cede control of the night and the street to the enemy."
Retired Gen. John Keane, former acting chief of staff of the Army, said the military needed to move off the big bases in Baghdad and establish small bases peppered throughout key neighborhoods, as had been done in the Iraqi cities of Tall Afar and Ramadi.
"You put a protect force in that lives in the neighborhood. They stay 24/7 to protect the people," Keane said at a briefing this week. "That piece is what we have never been able to execute in Baghdad."
Although the manual is meant to apply generally to all fights against insurgency, it was clearly written with Iraq in mind. And at some points the introduction and first chapter of the new manual read like a plea for more time for the military to succeed in Iraq.
The new doctrine, which was begun in January and released in draft form in June, cautions that campaigns against insurgents are "often long and difficult" and that progress is hard to measure. Conventional militaries often stumble in the beginning of an insurgency but can succeed if they learn, adapt and push ahead against it, according to the manual.
"The military forces that successfully defeat insurgencies are usually those able to overcome their institutional inclination to wage conventional war against insurgents," the doctrine says.
If there is a theme for the manual, Crane said, it is that the military can adapt and correct its missteps. "That is the historical record: You learn as you go," he said.
Overall, the doctrine says, a counterinsurgency operation is "a struggle for the population's support." To win that confidence, militaries must learn about the culture and people they are trying to protect as well as fight the insurgents who are attempting to destabilize the country, it says.
Lt. Col. Lance A. McDaniel, one of the Marines who helped write the new doctrine, said he expected the manual to influence new strategies in Iraq, although he was not sure exactly what lessons would be embraced.
"I do not know how they will translate this to the field," he said. "But I do think this will be No. 1 on the reading list."
The manual, a public document, can be read at http://usacac.army.mil/cac/repository/materials/coin-fm3-24.pdf.
------------------------------
Citation: Julian E. Barnes. "New manual at odds with key Iraq tactics," Los Angeles Times, 16 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-manual16dec16,1,2371107.story?coll=la-news-a_section&ctrack=1&cset=true
------------------------------
Afghanistan government fires governor
By Jason Straziuso
The Associated Press, 18 December 2006
The Afghan government has fired the governor of its biggest drug-producing province, a center of Taliban resistance that has seen some of the country's heaviest fighting this year, officials said Monday.
Helmand Gov. Mohammad Daud, who has led the province that grows more than a third of the world's opium, was replaced over the weekend.
Opium production in Afghanistan this year rose 49 percent to 6,700 tons — enough to make about 670 tons of heroin. Helmand which makes up 42 percent of Afghanistan's poppy crop, according to U.N. figures.
Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary said the appointment of Asadullah Wafa would help increase security in Helmand, but insisted the increase in poppy cultivation had nothing to do with the change.
A Western official in Kabul said Daud, who had been governor for about a year, was a "high-integrity guy" and said media reports claiming the United States wanted him replaced were false. The official asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Wafa has previously served as the governor of Paktia and Kunar provinces, Bashary said.
The French defense minister, meanwhile, said France is willing to send its troops to Afghanistan's violent south and east if requested.
NATO allies agreed last month to rush to one another's aid anywhere in Afghanistan in emergencies. But key alliance nations including France, Germany, Italy and Spain have refused to send troops regularly to fight alongside the British, Canadian, Dutch and U.S. forces on the front lines of battles with the resurgent Taliban in the south and east.
French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie — on her ninth trip to Afghanistan — said that "our forces in Kabul will be able to go to other regions at the request of our allies to help in a situation that necessitates it."
She made her comments a day after announcing that France would withdraw its 200-strong special forces from the eastern city of Jalalabad.
East of Kandahar city on Monday, a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into a U.S.-led coalition convoy east of Kandahar city on Monday, wounding two soldiers, a statement said. Two vehicles also were damaged.
On Sunday, coalition troops called for airstrikes after clashing with suspected militants in Kandahar's Sperwan Ghar district. The fighting left four insurgents dead and three soldiers wounded, the military said.
The military did not disclose the nationalities of the wounded soldiers, but most troops serving with the coalition are American.
While NATO took over command of some 32,800 personnel earlier this year, about 8,000 U.S. troops continue to work independently on anti-terror operations throughout the country.
___
Associated Press reporter Alisa Tang contributed to this report.
----------------------------------------
Citation: Jason Straziuso. "Afghanistan government fires governor," The Associated Press, 18 December 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/afghanistan
----------------------------------------
The Associated Press, 18 December 2006
The Afghan government has fired the governor of its biggest drug-producing province, a center of Taliban resistance that has seen some of the country's heaviest fighting this year, officials said Monday.
Helmand Gov. Mohammad Daud, who has led the province that grows more than a third of the world's opium, was replaced over the weekend.
Opium production in Afghanistan this year rose 49 percent to 6,700 tons — enough to make about 670 tons of heroin. Helmand which makes up 42 percent of Afghanistan's poppy crop, according to U.N. figures.
Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary said the appointment of Asadullah Wafa would help increase security in Helmand, but insisted the increase in poppy cultivation had nothing to do with the change.
A Western official in Kabul said Daud, who had been governor for about a year, was a "high-integrity guy" and said media reports claiming the United States wanted him replaced were false. The official asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Wafa has previously served as the governor of Paktia and Kunar provinces, Bashary said.
The French defense minister, meanwhile, said France is willing to send its troops to Afghanistan's violent south and east if requested.
NATO allies agreed last month to rush to one another's aid anywhere in Afghanistan in emergencies. But key alliance nations including France, Germany, Italy and Spain have refused to send troops regularly to fight alongside the British, Canadian, Dutch and U.S. forces on the front lines of battles with the resurgent Taliban in the south and east.
French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie — on her ninth trip to Afghanistan — said that "our forces in Kabul will be able to go to other regions at the request of our allies to help in a situation that necessitates it."
She made her comments a day after announcing that France would withdraw its 200-strong special forces from the eastern city of Jalalabad.
East of Kandahar city on Monday, a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into a U.S.-led coalition convoy east of Kandahar city on Monday, wounding two soldiers, a statement said. Two vehicles also were damaged.
On Sunday, coalition troops called for airstrikes after clashing with suspected militants in Kandahar's Sperwan Ghar district. The fighting left four insurgents dead and three soldiers wounded, the military said.
The military did not disclose the nationalities of the wounded soldiers, but most troops serving with the coalition are American.
While NATO took over command of some 32,800 personnel earlier this year, about 8,000 U.S. troops continue to work independently on anti-terror operations throughout the country.
___
Associated Press reporter Alisa Tang contributed to this report.
----------------------------------------
Citation: Jason Straziuso. "Afghanistan government fires governor," The Associated Press, 18 December 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/afghanistan
----------------------------------------
In Afghanistan, money tips the scales of justice
The nation's legal system is driven by bribes, and the public's disgust is stoking nostalgia for the Taliban.
By Paul Watson
Los Angeles Times, 18 December 2006
Kabul, Afghanistan — In the halls of justice here, almost everything is for sale.
It can take one bribe to obtain a blank legal form and another to have a clerk stamp it.
Lawyers openly haggle in corridors and parking lots over the size of payoffs. A new refrigerator delivered to the right official might help solve a long-running property dispute.
Court dockets don't exist. The Koran, the basis of Islamic law and also the Afghan legal code, is often the only book on the shelves of poorly trained judges. Even a 93-year-old man depending on the courts to save his family home can be threatened with jail.
As Afghans try to piece their legal system back together after decades of war, many spend long months shopping for justice in the gloomy corridors of Kabul's central courts complex. More than 90% of lower-court cases end up in the capital's appeals court, landing on the glass top of Judge Muzafarddin Tajali's large wooden desk.
A former Supreme Court justice, Tajali fled to Pakistan when the Taliban seized most of the country. Now he's back, sitting in a high-back swivel chair with the Chinese price tag still dangling from the black upholstery, amid a dangerous mess created by incompetence and corruption.
"In the whole country, we may not have even two qualified defense lawyers," Tajali said.
"Everybody has expectations, and of course they get upset," he added. "They don't threaten me inside the courtroom. But when their hopes are broken, they get mad and go and scream outside.
"This kind of justice system, which is not clean and transparent, threatens the government and democracy."
Systematic injustice stokes searing humiliation and resentment, turning many Afghans against President Hamid Karzai's government and his foreign backers. Nostalgia for the ruthless rule of the Taliban is growing as the line between judges and criminals blurs. When they can't find justice in the courts, Afghans are tempted to turn back to what they've trusted most for a generation: their weapons.
Sometimes prisoners in white pinstripes hobble into the carpeted office that serves as Tajali's courtroom. Their wrists shackled to heavy bars, linked by jangling chains to irons padlocked around their ankles, they stand accused of murder, kidnapping, rape and other crimes.
But Tajali spends most of his time trying to settle arguments over land, the legacy of almost constant war that drove millions of Afghans into exile and made squatters out of many of those who stayed. Most government records survive, but forgers have tampered with many of them, Tajali said.
"Houses have been sold to three or four different people while the owners were totally unaware of what was happening," the judge said.
One laborer, Abdul Jamil, spends most of his time in a nasty legal fight with a neighbor who claimed a piece of his family's land and persuaded a lower-court judge to ignore Jamil's deed.
"If I had a gun, I would take it and fire 30 bullets into the judge's head," Jamil said, touching a leathery finger to the center of his forehead. "But I worry about my children because they would suffer. No justice exists in this country. Justice is only for those who have money to buy it."
Real or forgery?
AMONG the disputes that have landed in Tajali's court is the case of Khaliq Dad, the 93-year-old patriarch of an extended family of 30 who all live in a single-story, dun-colored house that Dad says he bought 16 years ago.
A cold, damp draft blows through gaps in the windows. The walls are cracked and the paint is chipped. Dad lives in a front room, his aluminum cane standing in a corner by the door. He keeps a 1990 deed to the property tucked under the corner of his mattress.
But Maliha Ali, a refugee returned from Canada, says the house belongs to her and has gone to court to get it back. Her photograph and thumbprint, along with those of Dad and two witnesses, are on Dad's copy of the deed, but she insists she only leased the property to him.
The witnesses can't be found, nor can a copy of the deed filed with the Treasury Department. Ali doesn't have documents to prove her side of the story. But she says that Dad's copy is a forgery.
"He is a gangster," sneered Ali, who brought a relative named Wahidullah, a tall, thick-necked man with a booming voice, to court as her bodyguard. "I have not given them any documents, so it is all made up."
A senior Supreme Court official who reviewed the deed at The Times' request said he was confident the document was authentic. The official spoke on the condition he not be identified because the court had not ruled on Dad's appeal.
But in separate trials, three lower-court judges declared Dad's copy a forgery. Dad said they also rejected a letter from Karzai's palace asking for a Supreme Court review of the case.
One judge sentenced the old man to a year in prison, which will stretch to three years if he doesn't give up his court battle.
Dad, wearing lenses as thick as magnifying glasses, says he can see just one logical reason justice would turn against him.
"I think the woman has paid all of the judges who worked on this case," he said. "She has also paid the police."
Dad says he refuses to bribe anyone because it would dishonor him before God. He doesn't have much money anyway. One of his sons is a driver for the government. The other, a guard at a children's hospital, lost a leg in a land mine blast.
He doesn't have a lawyer, but his opponent does: She hired Ahmad Shah, an edgy young man in a black leather cap and matching jacket. Shah said he didn't want to talk about the case.
"Don't drag me into these problems," he said with a sheepish grin. "I am a poor guy working to earn some money for my children."
'Give me $4,000'
WHEN Kabul pharmacist Nader Naderi fled Afghanistan's civil war in 1992, a warlord named Gulabuddin Shirzai took over the family home.
Naderi returned briefly to find a tank parked outside, and recalls that Shirzai told him, "If you like your life, leave and don't come back."
The arrival of foreign troops five years ago made it safe for Naderi to return more permanently. By that time, Shirzai was renting out the three-room house for $10,000 a year. Naderi spent the next several years trying to persuade numerous judges to return his property, but they kept telling him his file was lost.
Naderi started treating them to lunch. Suddenly his documents surfaced.
"One day when I was sitting with the judges and some other people, one of them was complaining that his washing machine wasn't working," he said. "Then another guy sitting there told me, 'He is talking to you.' "
The next day, Naderi said, he delivered a new washing machine to Abdul Wakil Amini, a prosecutor involved in his case.
"Later, when some monitors came from the court, the police station and other departments to see my house and to gather all my documents, the same guy asked for a refrigerator," Naderi said. "So I bought a fridge for him."
But after paying off every clerk, prosecutor and judge who held out a hand, Naderi said, he still didn't have his house. So this year he went to the justice minister's office and stood his ground.
"Every morning when he was coming in, I said, 'Good morning, minister,' and every afternoon when he was leaving I said, 'Good afternoon, minister.' Then finally, after 10 days, he said, 'Do you work here?' "
Naderi explained his predicament. The justice minister listened and wrote an order to the court to give him his house back.
"The next day, when I went to the court with his letter, the guy there told me: 'Give me $4,000, because you have direct orders. For others, it costs a lot more,' " Naderi said.
He estimates it cost $11,000 to reclaim what was his in the first place. Amini, the prosecutor, was fired this fall, but he still lives in a luxurious villa. He denies taking bribes.
Like many Afghans, Naderi feels betrayed by the promise of freedom and wants to leave his homeland again.
"You can never have democracy if you can buy justice," he said.
Lack of training
KABUL'S central courts are housed in a complex of dilapidated buildings called the Wulayat, where hundreds of people squat in the dirt parking lot or sit on broken chairs in dingy hallways, waiting to see a judge. Many have spent several years trapped in this legal labyrinth.
Most of the courtrooms are small offices, where judges preside at rickety desks decorated with fake potted plants. Among those seeking justice recently were half a dozen women covered in full-length burkas who sat on the floor, waiting in the shadows for resolution of marital disputes. Children nestled quietly beside them, looking worried but unable to make eye contact with their mothers through the heavy mesh that covered their faces. An argument erupted when a family court judge's tea bearer offered to sell them quicker access to the court.
"Shame on you, you old man!" one woman shouted as the angry servant retreated into the court. "You're demanding a bribe. I'll go tell the judge."
Nearby, another lower-court judge, a soft-spoken Muslim cleric in a dark, tent-shaped hat, sat at a splintering desk in an office with no heat or power. He admitted taking at least $100 a month in bribes. But the judge, who spoke on condition he not be named, insisted that he had no choice because after working 30 years in the justice system, his monthly salary was only $140.
The real crooks are in the higher courts and the department that assigns cases to each court, where the big money changes hands, he said. "There is no justice for judges themselves," he griped.
Karzai promised foreign donors in January that he would fix the justice system by 2010, part of a package of reforms demanded in exchange for billions of dollars more in aid.
Tajali was appointed head of the appellate court this fall. Several people who brought appeals to Tajali said he was a big improvement over his predecessor, who was removed after complaints that he was taking bribes.
The Supreme Court also has removed about 80 lower-court judges. But most will be shifted to new courtrooms after they take retraining seminars, officials said.
An international effort to clean up Afghanistan's courts, led by Italy, has sputtered from the start.
"Most of the training courses that we've had from the government of Italy lasted 10 to 15 days, and that isn't enough time to train a judge or a lawyer," Tajali said.
Before Afghanistan collapsed into a generation of war, university graduates received oral and practical training in the courts for a year, he said.
Six weeks after Tajali was appointed, a man in a shabby gray suit accompanied by a man in traditional Afghan clothing entered his chambers with a bulging shopping bag. They left empty-handed but happy. The men became nervous when a reporter asked what was in the bag. They said they had given the judge a gift but wouldn't say what it was.
"We only wanted to congratulate the judge for getting his new position," one said as the pair rushed off.
Tajali confirmed that he had received several gifts, including cloth for a new suit and a tall artificial plant with white flowers from the provincial governor. The judge said he hadn't broken any rules because they came from friends and relatives who didn't have cases in his court.
Missing the Taliban
MANY Afghans lay the blame for widespread injustice on the president. Karzai backed an elderly, hard-line cleric who had been appointed chief justice by the transitional government that followed the Taliban.
When the new parliament refused to confirm the judge's reappointment, Karzai chose a U.S.-educated moderate. But by that time, Chief Justice Fazl Hadi Shinwari had stacked the courts. Appointees such as Abdul Rahman, a gruff, long-bearded man, praise harsh Taliban rule for eliminating theft and corruption.
"Now," Rahman said, "you see thieves stealing whole banks in the cities."
But in the view of one impoverished man, a ruling by Rahman sanctioned just such a theft by a man of power and prestige.
Jamil, the poor laborer, is trying to protect his land from a retired army officer who lives next door. He said Rahman ruled against him even though he provided the judge with a decades-old deed, tax receipts and supporting letters from local elders and a mullah.
The Supreme Court finally reassigned the case, but only after Jamil went to court every day for 2 1/2 months, losing the little money he could have earned doing odd jobs.
In this conservative Muslim country, many also regard Karzai's refusal to put murderers, rapists, adulterers and others to death as a grave insult to God. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, executions were a public spectacle for cheering crowds in Kabul's Olympic Stadium.
Since the mullahs were ousted, the only Afghan put to death has been Abdullah Shah, a member of a militia loyal to warlord Faryadi Sarwar Zardad that manned a notorious checkpoint on the road from Jalalabad to Kabul during the 1990s civil war. Known to most Afghans as "Zardad's dog," he was found guilty of killing 20 people, including his wife, and executed with a bullet to the back of the head in 2004.
Zardad escaped Afghan justice. He was convicted of kidnapping and torture in Britain, where he is a refugee. Britain has banned the death penalty.
About 500 people sentenced to die have not been executed because Karzai hasn't signed the orders, said Rasheed Reshaad, a Supreme Court justice. European governments that are major aid donors to Afghanistan strongly oppose the death penalty.
But Karzai also has the authority to seek alternatives to executions, such as asking a murder victim's family to pardon the killer in return for compensation, said Reshaad, a former California resident. Karzai has upheld at least a dozen death sentences in the last few months.
Reshaad was among the thousands of educated Afghans who fled after the 1979 Soviet invasion. He lived for more than 20 years in San Francisco, where he worked as a paralegal, then returned to Kabul after U.S. and Afghan forces overthrew the Taliban five years ago.
This year, parliament appointed him to the Supreme Court, where he is in charge of some of the most dangerous public security cases, including those involving narcotics and terrorism.
Karzai's defenders maintain that some of the president's worst mistakes in rebuilding the justice system, such as making former warlords police chiefs and putting them in other powerful positions, were forced on him by foreign backers, led by the United States.
"He was put in this unfortunate position that even his mistakes were made for him," said Jawed Ludin, Karzai's chief of staff.
"There were different ways of doing things, and he would have chosen the way that the Afghan people wanted. There would have been a clean slate. He would have acted decisively, gotten rid of troublemakers and had a fresh start.
"But then he had to draw up another strategy, a strategy of inclusion giving everyone a right — criminals, gangsters, the Taliban," Ludin said. "Everyone had a right to be part of this process."
Still fighting
TAJALI passed the case of Dad, the patriarch, back down to officials for another review on Nov. 12. But the same day, police took Dad from his home to an interrogation room at the courts complex, where he was grilled by prosecutors and his opponent's lawyer.
He emerged trembling with rage, on the verge of tears. He walked slowly to the street, through mud and cold winter rain, trying to steady himself with his cane.
"It is brutal, it is really brutal. There is no justice. Now I will have to kill them," he said, glancing over his shoulder at the glaring prosecutor and police.
But the next day he was back in the fight, appealing to the Supreme Court. During an argument in a hallway, the lawyer beat Dad, bruising the elderly man's forehead and hands.
The next day, several police officers with assault rifles were at Dad's gate. The prosecutor, who refused to identify himself, shouted death threats.
They finally backed off after senior officers intervened.
The Supreme Court sent the case back to Tajali, leaving 30 people wondering whether the police would come again to kick them out in the middle of winter.
Dad, a proud, battered man shamed in front of his family, doesn't blame his government, the foreign advisors who are trying to help it rebuild the country or the thousands of foreign troops who are fighting the resurgent Taliban. While the corrupt and powerful tilt the scales of justice in their favor, he said, ordinary Afghans also have been poisoned by greed.
Taliban-led insurgents exploit the disenchantment to recruit new fighters, and a fragile democracy hangs in the balance.
"The government has tried everything. Why should other countries lose their sons fighting here?" Dad asked. "There is no justice. We just chase after the money."
---------------------------------
Citation: By Paul Watson. "In Afghanistan, money tips the scales of justice," Los Angeles Times, 18 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-justice18dec18,1,6521701.story?track=rss
---------------------------------
By Paul Watson
Los Angeles Times, 18 December 2006
Kabul, Afghanistan — In the halls of justice here, almost everything is for sale.
It can take one bribe to obtain a blank legal form and another to have a clerk stamp it.
Lawyers openly haggle in corridors and parking lots over the size of payoffs. A new refrigerator delivered to the right official might help solve a long-running property dispute.
Court dockets don't exist. The Koran, the basis of Islamic law and also the Afghan legal code, is often the only book on the shelves of poorly trained judges. Even a 93-year-old man depending on the courts to save his family home can be threatened with jail.
As Afghans try to piece their legal system back together after decades of war, many spend long months shopping for justice in the gloomy corridors of Kabul's central courts complex. More than 90% of lower-court cases end up in the capital's appeals court, landing on the glass top of Judge Muzafarddin Tajali's large wooden desk.
A former Supreme Court justice, Tajali fled to Pakistan when the Taliban seized most of the country. Now he's back, sitting in a high-back swivel chair with the Chinese price tag still dangling from the black upholstery, amid a dangerous mess created by incompetence and corruption.
"In the whole country, we may not have even two qualified defense lawyers," Tajali said.
"Everybody has expectations, and of course they get upset," he added. "They don't threaten me inside the courtroom. But when their hopes are broken, they get mad and go and scream outside.
"This kind of justice system, which is not clean and transparent, threatens the government and democracy."
Systematic injustice stokes searing humiliation and resentment, turning many Afghans against President Hamid Karzai's government and his foreign backers. Nostalgia for the ruthless rule of the Taliban is growing as the line between judges and criminals blurs. When they can't find justice in the courts, Afghans are tempted to turn back to what they've trusted most for a generation: their weapons.
Sometimes prisoners in white pinstripes hobble into the carpeted office that serves as Tajali's courtroom. Their wrists shackled to heavy bars, linked by jangling chains to irons padlocked around their ankles, they stand accused of murder, kidnapping, rape and other crimes.
But Tajali spends most of his time trying to settle arguments over land, the legacy of almost constant war that drove millions of Afghans into exile and made squatters out of many of those who stayed. Most government records survive, but forgers have tampered with many of them, Tajali said.
"Houses have been sold to three or four different people while the owners were totally unaware of what was happening," the judge said.
One laborer, Abdul Jamil, spends most of his time in a nasty legal fight with a neighbor who claimed a piece of his family's land and persuaded a lower-court judge to ignore Jamil's deed.
"If I had a gun, I would take it and fire 30 bullets into the judge's head," Jamil said, touching a leathery finger to the center of his forehead. "But I worry about my children because they would suffer. No justice exists in this country. Justice is only for those who have money to buy it."
Real or forgery?
AMONG the disputes that have landed in Tajali's court is the case of Khaliq Dad, the 93-year-old patriarch of an extended family of 30 who all live in a single-story, dun-colored house that Dad says he bought 16 years ago.
A cold, damp draft blows through gaps in the windows. The walls are cracked and the paint is chipped. Dad lives in a front room, his aluminum cane standing in a corner by the door. He keeps a 1990 deed to the property tucked under the corner of his mattress.
But Maliha Ali, a refugee returned from Canada, says the house belongs to her and has gone to court to get it back. Her photograph and thumbprint, along with those of Dad and two witnesses, are on Dad's copy of the deed, but she insists she only leased the property to him.
The witnesses can't be found, nor can a copy of the deed filed with the Treasury Department. Ali doesn't have documents to prove her side of the story. But she says that Dad's copy is a forgery.
"He is a gangster," sneered Ali, who brought a relative named Wahidullah, a tall, thick-necked man with a booming voice, to court as her bodyguard. "I have not given them any documents, so it is all made up."
A senior Supreme Court official who reviewed the deed at The Times' request said he was confident the document was authentic. The official spoke on the condition he not be identified because the court had not ruled on Dad's appeal.
But in separate trials, three lower-court judges declared Dad's copy a forgery. Dad said they also rejected a letter from Karzai's palace asking for a Supreme Court review of the case.
One judge sentenced the old man to a year in prison, which will stretch to three years if he doesn't give up his court battle.
Dad, wearing lenses as thick as magnifying glasses, says he can see just one logical reason justice would turn against him.
"I think the woman has paid all of the judges who worked on this case," he said. "She has also paid the police."
Dad says he refuses to bribe anyone because it would dishonor him before God. He doesn't have much money anyway. One of his sons is a driver for the government. The other, a guard at a children's hospital, lost a leg in a land mine blast.
He doesn't have a lawyer, but his opponent does: She hired Ahmad Shah, an edgy young man in a black leather cap and matching jacket. Shah said he didn't want to talk about the case.
"Don't drag me into these problems," he said with a sheepish grin. "I am a poor guy working to earn some money for my children."
'Give me $4,000'
WHEN Kabul pharmacist Nader Naderi fled Afghanistan's civil war in 1992, a warlord named Gulabuddin Shirzai took over the family home.
Naderi returned briefly to find a tank parked outside, and recalls that Shirzai told him, "If you like your life, leave and don't come back."
The arrival of foreign troops five years ago made it safe for Naderi to return more permanently. By that time, Shirzai was renting out the three-room house for $10,000 a year. Naderi spent the next several years trying to persuade numerous judges to return his property, but they kept telling him his file was lost.
Naderi started treating them to lunch. Suddenly his documents surfaced.
"One day when I was sitting with the judges and some other people, one of them was complaining that his washing machine wasn't working," he said. "Then another guy sitting there told me, 'He is talking to you.' "
The next day, Naderi said, he delivered a new washing machine to Abdul Wakil Amini, a prosecutor involved in his case.
"Later, when some monitors came from the court, the police station and other departments to see my house and to gather all my documents, the same guy asked for a refrigerator," Naderi said. "So I bought a fridge for him."
But after paying off every clerk, prosecutor and judge who held out a hand, Naderi said, he still didn't have his house. So this year he went to the justice minister's office and stood his ground.
"Every morning when he was coming in, I said, 'Good morning, minister,' and every afternoon when he was leaving I said, 'Good afternoon, minister.' Then finally, after 10 days, he said, 'Do you work here?' "
Naderi explained his predicament. The justice minister listened and wrote an order to the court to give him his house back.
"The next day, when I went to the court with his letter, the guy there told me: 'Give me $4,000, because you have direct orders. For others, it costs a lot more,' " Naderi said.
He estimates it cost $11,000 to reclaim what was his in the first place. Amini, the prosecutor, was fired this fall, but he still lives in a luxurious villa. He denies taking bribes.
Like many Afghans, Naderi feels betrayed by the promise of freedom and wants to leave his homeland again.
"You can never have democracy if you can buy justice," he said.
Lack of training
KABUL'S central courts are housed in a complex of dilapidated buildings called the Wulayat, where hundreds of people squat in the dirt parking lot or sit on broken chairs in dingy hallways, waiting to see a judge. Many have spent several years trapped in this legal labyrinth.
Most of the courtrooms are small offices, where judges preside at rickety desks decorated with fake potted plants. Among those seeking justice recently were half a dozen women covered in full-length burkas who sat on the floor, waiting in the shadows for resolution of marital disputes. Children nestled quietly beside them, looking worried but unable to make eye contact with their mothers through the heavy mesh that covered their faces. An argument erupted when a family court judge's tea bearer offered to sell them quicker access to the court.
"Shame on you, you old man!" one woman shouted as the angry servant retreated into the court. "You're demanding a bribe. I'll go tell the judge."
Nearby, another lower-court judge, a soft-spoken Muslim cleric in a dark, tent-shaped hat, sat at a splintering desk in an office with no heat or power. He admitted taking at least $100 a month in bribes. But the judge, who spoke on condition he not be named, insisted that he had no choice because after working 30 years in the justice system, his monthly salary was only $140.
The real crooks are in the higher courts and the department that assigns cases to each court, where the big money changes hands, he said. "There is no justice for judges themselves," he griped.
Karzai promised foreign donors in January that he would fix the justice system by 2010, part of a package of reforms demanded in exchange for billions of dollars more in aid.
Tajali was appointed head of the appellate court this fall. Several people who brought appeals to Tajali said he was a big improvement over his predecessor, who was removed after complaints that he was taking bribes.
The Supreme Court also has removed about 80 lower-court judges. But most will be shifted to new courtrooms after they take retraining seminars, officials said.
An international effort to clean up Afghanistan's courts, led by Italy, has sputtered from the start.
"Most of the training courses that we've had from the government of Italy lasted 10 to 15 days, and that isn't enough time to train a judge or a lawyer," Tajali said.
Before Afghanistan collapsed into a generation of war, university graduates received oral and practical training in the courts for a year, he said.
Six weeks after Tajali was appointed, a man in a shabby gray suit accompanied by a man in traditional Afghan clothing entered his chambers with a bulging shopping bag. They left empty-handed but happy. The men became nervous when a reporter asked what was in the bag. They said they had given the judge a gift but wouldn't say what it was.
"We only wanted to congratulate the judge for getting his new position," one said as the pair rushed off.
Tajali confirmed that he had received several gifts, including cloth for a new suit and a tall artificial plant with white flowers from the provincial governor. The judge said he hadn't broken any rules because they came from friends and relatives who didn't have cases in his court.
Missing the Taliban
MANY Afghans lay the blame for widespread injustice on the president. Karzai backed an elderly, hard-line cleric who had been appointed chief justice by the transitional government that followed the Taliban.
When the new parliament refused to confirm the judge's reappointment, Karzai chose a U.S.-educated moderate. But by that time, Chief Justice Fazl Hadi Shinwari had stacked the courts. Appointees such as Abdul Rahman, a gruff, long-bearded man, praise harsh Taliban rule for eliminating theft and corruption.
"Now," Rahman said, "you see thieves stealing whole banks in the cities."
But in the view of one impoverished man, a ruling by Rahman sanctioned just such a theft by a man of power and prestige.
Jamil, the poor laborer, is trying to protect his land from a retired army officer who lives next door. He said Rahman ruled against him even though he provided the judge with a decades-old deed, tax receipts and supporting letters from local elders and a mullah.
The Supreme Court finally reassigned the case, but only after Jamil went to court every day for 2 1/2 months, losing the little money he could have earned doing odd jobs.
In this conservative Muslim country, many also regard Karzai's refusal to put murderers, rapists, adulterers and others to death as a grave insult to God. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, executions were a public spectacle for cheering crowds in Kabul's Olympic Stadium.
Since the mullahs were ousted, the only Afghan put to death has been Abdullah Shah, a member of a militia loyal to warlord Faryadi Sarwar Zardad that manned a notorious checkpoint on the road from Jalalabad to Kabul during the 1990s civil war. Known to most Afghans as "Zardad's dog," he was found guilty of killing 20 people, including his wife, and executed with a bullet to the back of the head in 2004.
Zardad escaped Afghan justice. He was convicted of kidnapping and torture in Britain, where he is a refugee. Britain has banned the death penalty.
About 500 people sentenced to die have not been executed because Karzai hasn't signed the orders, said Rasheed Reshaad, a Supreme Court justice. European governments that are major aid donors to Afghanistan strongly oppose the death penalty.
But Karzai also has the authority to seek alternatives to executions, such as asking a murder victim's family to pardon the killer in return for compensation, said Reshaad, a former California resident. Karzai has upheld at least a dozen death sentences in the last few months.
Reshaad was among the thousands of educated Afghans who fled after the 1979 Soviet invasion. He lived for more than 20 years in San Francisco, where he worked as a paralegal, then returned to Kabul after U.S. and Afghan forces overthrew the Taliban five years ago.
This year, parliament appointed him to the Supreme Court, where he is in charge of some of the most dangerous public security cases, including those involving narcotics and terrorism.
Karzai's defenders maintain that some of the president's worst mistakes in rebuilding the justice system, such as making former warlords police chiefs and putting them in other powerful positions, were forced on him by foreign backers, led by the United States.
"He was put in this unfortunate position that even his mistakes were made for him," said Jawed Ludin, Karzai's chief of staff.
"There were different ways of doing things, and he would have chosen the way that the Afghan people wanted. There would have been a clean slate. He would have acted decisively, gotten rid of troublemakers and had a fresh start.
"But then he had to draw up another strategy, a strategy of inclusion giving everyone a right — criminals, gangsters, the Taliban," Ludin said. "Everyone had a right to be part of this process."
Still fighting
TAJALI passed the case of Dad, the patriarch, back down to officials for another review on Nov. 12. But the same day, police took Dad from his home to an interrogation room at the courts complex, where he was grilled by prosecutors and his opponent's lawyer.
He emerged trembling with rage, on the verge of tears. He walked slowly to the street, through mud and cold winter rain, trying to steady himself with his cane.
"It is brutal, it is really brutal. There is no justice. Now I will have to kill them," he said, glancing over his shoulder at the glaring prosecutor and police.
But the next day he was back in the fight, appealing to the Supreme Court. During an argument in a hallway, the lawyer beat Dad, bruising the elderly man's forehead and hands.
The next day, several police officers with assault rifles were at Dad's gate. The prosecutor, who refused to identify himself, shouted death threats.
They finally backed off after senior officers intervened.
The Supreme Court sent the case back to Tajali, leaving 30 people wondering whether the police would come again to kick them out in the middle of winter.
Dad, a proud, battered man shamed in front of his family, doesn't blame his government, the foreign advisors who are trying to help it rebuild the country or the thousands of foreign troops who are fighting the resurgent Taliban. While the corrupt and powerful tilt the scales of justice in their favor, he said, ordinary Afghans also have been poisoned by greed.
Taliban-led insurgents exploit the disenchantment to recruit new fighters, and a fragile democracy hangs in the balance.
"The government has tried everything. Why should other countries lose their sons fighting here?" Dad asked. "There is no justice. We just chase after the money."
---------------------------------
Citation: By Paul Watson. "In Afghanistan, money tips the scales of justice," Los Angeles Times, 18 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-justice18dec18,1,6521701.story?track=rss
---------------------------------
13 December 2006
Throw the Iraq report in the trash
Baker-Hamilton's recommendations don't amount to more than wishful thinking.
By Max Boot
Los Angeles Times, 13 December 2006
BLUE-RIBBON panels are easy to mock, but some actually do perform a valuable service. The base-closing commissions, for example, were able to close down military installations that weren't needed but that Congress couldn't pull the plug on. The 9/11 commission produced a definitive and enthralling account of the worst terrorist attack on American soil.
And then there is the Iraq Study Group. The money spent on its deliberations should have been redirected to some worthier purpose, such as figuring out once and for all how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Its much-vaunted report was an anticlimactic combination of banalities and stay-the-course recommendations leavened with generous dollops of wishful thinking.
The group's report begins with the obvious: "The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." Everyone knows that (even, probably, in his heart of hearts, President Bush), but no one is sure what to do about it, and the group doesn't help any.
Its flagship recommendation has been described as calling for the departure of U.S. combat troops within a year, but it says nothing of the sort. Here is the key sentence: "By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq." Note the weasel words I've italicized. Without those caveats, this would have been a Murtha-esque call for withdrawal. With all those caveats, this is the policy Bush is already following: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down."
Of course, the Iraqis haven't been standing up as fast as we want, and so we haven't seen the troop reductions that have been promised regularly by the Pentagon since April 2003. If you read the fine print, the report doesn't really call for this policy to change, because it warns (rightly) of the risks of "precipitate withdrawal."
If there is one area where the report disdains the current course, it is in the Bush administration's failure to do more to "engage" Syria and Iran. The report demands that "Iran should stop the flow of arms and training to Iraq" and that "Syria should control its border with Iraq," but it gives no idea of how these elusive goals could possibly be achieved. The report does not recommend letting Iran go nuclear or letting Syria subjugate Lebanon, which would most likely be the price of any deal. Instead, it dangles such unappetizing carrots as "enhanced diplomatic relations with the United States." As if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is just dying to have afternoon tea with Condoleezza Rice.
The intellectual bankruptcy of the report is revealed in its long section calling for "a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace." What is this doing in a report on Iraq? Do the study members imagine that if Israel made nice with Hamas, that this would lead Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites to stop slaughtering one another? The report doesn't actually make this nonsensical claim. The closest it comes to finding a link between Israel and Iraq is its call for Israel to return the Golan Heights to Syria, which presumably would make Syrian strongman Bashar Assad less grouchy and more cooperative.
So one of Washington's closest allies is expected to make dangerous concessions to one of its bitterest enemies on the off chance that this might somehow improve the situation in Iraq? This could only make sense to someone like group co-chairman James A. Baker III, whose approach to the Mideast could be described as "blame Israel first."
Some of the group's other recommendations are more compelling — for example, beefing up the military advisory effort in Iraq and devoting more intelligence resources "to the task of understanding the threats and sources of violence in Iraq." But the report takes scant account of the difficulties of implementation. Most of its 79 recommendations are lofty demands, such as No. 36: "The United States should encourage dialogue between sectarian communities" in Iraq. Note to the study group: A succession of U.S. envoys has been trying to do just that for almost four years.
If there's one thing calculated to make the administration's failed Iraq policy look good, it's the inability of all these gray eminences to find a compelling alternative. Hmm. You don't suppose that was what that crafty old Bush family courtier, Jimmy Baker, intended all along, do you?
---------------------------------
Citation: Max Boot. "Throw the Iraq report in the trash," Los Angeles Times, 13 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-boot13dec13,0,946198.column?coll=la-opinion-center
---------------------------------
By Max Boot
Los Angeles Times, 13 December 2006
BLUE-RIBBON panels are easy to mock, but some actually do perform a valuable service. The base-closing commissions, for example, were able to close down military installations that weren't needed but that Congress couldn't pull the plug on. The 9/11 commission produced a definitive and enthralling account of the worst terrorist attack on American soil.
And then there is the Iraq Study Group. The money spent on its deliberations should have been redirected to some worthier purpose, such as figuring out once and for all how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Its much-vaunted report was an anticlimactic combination of banalities and stay-the-course recommendations leavened with generous dollops of wishful thinking.
The group's report begins with the obvious: "The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." Everyone knows that (even, probably, in his heart of hearts, President Bush), but no one is sure what to do about it, and the group doesn't help any.
Its flagship recommendation has been described as calling for the departure of U.S. combat troops within a year, but it says nothing of the sort. Here is the key sentence: "By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq." Note the weasel words I've italicized. Without those caveats, this would have been a Murtha-esque call for withdrawal. With all those caveats, this is the policy Bush is already following: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down."
Of course, the Iraqis haven't been standing up as fast as we want, and so we haven't seen the troop reductions that have been promised regularly by the Pentagon since April 2003. If you read the fine print, the report doesn't really call for this policy to change, because it warns (rightly) of the risks of "precipitate withdrawal."
If there is one area where the report disdains the current course, it is in the Bush administration's failure to do more to "engage" Syria and Iran. The report demands that "Iran should stop the flow of arms and training to Iraq" and that "Syria should control its border with Iraq," but it gives no idea of how these elusive goals could possibly be achieved. The report does not recommend letting Iran go nuclear or letting Syria subjugate Lebanon, which would most likely be the price of any deal. Instead, it dangles such unappetizing carrots as "enhanced diplomatic relations with the United States." As if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is just dying to have afternoon tea with Condoleezza Rice.
The intellectual bankruptcy of the report is revealed in its long section calling for "a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace." What is this doing in a report on Iraq? Do the study members imagine that if Israel made nice with Hamas, that this would lead Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites to stop slaughtering one another? The report doesn't actually make this nonsensical claim. The closest it comes to finding a link between Israel and Iraq is its call for Israel to return the Golan Heights to Syria, which presumably would make Syrian strongman Bashar Assad less grouchy and more cooperative.
So one of Washington's closest allies is expected to make dangerous concessions to one of its bitterest enemies on the off chance that this might somehow improve the situation in Iraq? This could only make sense to someone like group co-chairman James A. Baker III, whose approach to the Mideast could be described as "blame Israel first."
Some of the group's other recommendations are more compelling — for example, beefing up the military advisory effort in Iraq and devoting more intelligence resources "to the task of understanding the threats and sources of violence in Iraq." But the report takes scant account of the difficulties of implementation. Most of its 79 recommendations are lofty demands, such as No. 36: "The United States should encourage dialogue between sectarian communities" in Iraq. Note to the study group: A succession of U.S. envoys has been trying to do just that for almost four years.
If there's one thing calculated to make the administration's failed Iraq policy look good, it's the inability of all these gray eminences to find a compelling alternative. Hmm. You don't suppose that was what that crafty old Bush family courtier, Jimmy Baker, intended all along, do you?
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Citation: Max Boot. "Throw the Iraq report in the trash," Los Angeles Times, 13 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-boot13dec13,0,946198.column?coll=la-opinion-center
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