The American Bear

› Body of Zakaria Kandahari’s Videotaped Torture Victim Surfaces, 200 Yards from US Nerkh Base | Jim White

When last we left the saga of the US role relating to the “rogue” Afghan death squad in the Nerkh District of Maidan Wardak province of Afghanistan, the New York Times was studiously transcribing denials from various US government officials of any US involvement in the torture, disappearances and murders that are both the touchstone of US-trained death squad operations dating back at least to Central America in the 1980′s (if not all the way back to Vietnam) and the atrocities that prompted Hamid Karzai to announce that he was expelling US Special Forces from the province. Although Karzai eventually relented somewhat and agreed to only expel US Special Forces from the Nerkh District instead of the entire province, as I pointed out in my post on the Times’ transcription of US denials, evidence continues to accumulate that CIA paramilitary operations personnel almost certainly seem to have been involved in the training and deployment of the “rogue” Afghan Local Police unit based in Nerkh. With today’s new development, it seems very likely that these CIA paramilitary personnel (and their Afghan trainees) are still operating, with impunity, at the Nerkh base.

What we learn today is stunning and looks like a calculated move intended to strike fear into the local population around the Nerkh base (which is, of course, the aim of US-trained death squads organized under the COIN rubric). From the New York Times:

Family members on Tuesday found the body of a man missing since last November near the American Special Forces base to which he was last seen being taken, according to Afghan officials and victims’ representatives.

Afghan investigators said that after his disappearance, the man, Sayid Mohammad, was seen in a video undergoing torture at the hands of an Afghan-American named Zakaria Kandahari, who was the chief translator for an American Army Special Forces A Team stationed at the base in the Nerkh district of Wardak Province.

Mr. Mohammad’s body was found about 200 yards outside the perimeter of the Nerkh base, which is now occupied by Afghan special forces after the American unit was removed following protests by Afghan officials, including President Hamid Karzai.

Relatives of Mr. Mohammad said his body was largely intact but both of his feet had been cut off. They took his remains to the Nerkh district government center in protest. The partial remains of another missing person were also found near the base, family members and Afghan officials have said.

The article is silent on the question of how long the victim appeared to have been dead. Note that the Times reminds us that the Nerkh base no longer has US Special Operations Forces. I find it very hard to believe that a group of Afghan Local Police and Afghan Special Forces, after having drawn so much local anger and international attention to themselves through prompting Karzai’s outburst and expulsion of US Special Forces, would carry out such a brazen and brutal move on their own. However, if CIA paramilitary operatives are still present at the base and still directing (and protecting) the Afghan team, the move seems less surprising.

We also learn in today’s article that at least 17 people are now known to have been disappeared by this death squad. Nine of those victims have been found dead and eight are still missing. Afghan investigators are considerably less credulous of US denials of involvement than the Times is:

“There is no question that Zakaria directly tortured and murdered,” the investigator said. “But who is Zakaria? Who recruited him, gave him his salary, his weapons? Who kept him under their protection? He worked for Special Forces. That a member of their team was committing such crimes and they didn’t know it is just not credible.”

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› Taliban suicide blast in Afghanistan 'targeted Nato advisers'

Hizb-e-Islami claims deadliest attack in Kabul this year, which left 15 dead including two US soldiers, four Nato employees and two children.

› Afghans Claim to Have Video of U.S. Special Forces Guy Torturing Civilians | Danger Room

Afghan officials say they’ve got video of a man overseeing the torture of Afghan civilians. Exactly who ordered the man to torture is a matter of fierce dispute — and also helps explain this year’s erosion of trust between Washington and Kabul.

Allegedly, there’s a videotape in Afghan government hands showing a man named Zakaria Kandahari presiding over the torture of an Afghan civilian who, along with 15 others, recently disappeared from Wardak Province. According to the New York Times, Kandahari, an American citizen, is “seen conducting” the torture session and “supervising” others.

But there is great disagreement over who Kandahari actually is. The Afghans say that Kandahari leads a U.S. Army Special Forces unit recently kicked out of Wardak over allegations of torture, disappearances and executions. The U.S. military command says unequivocally that Kandhari was an interpreter for the unit, not a leader; that he’s not actually an American; and that the unit was not involved in any torture.

The video is only one component of the evidence Afghans told the paper they’ve compiled against Kandahari and the Special Forces A-Team that was in Wardak’s Nerkh District. A 16-year old named Hikmatullah said Kandahari picked him up on incorrect suspicion of being an insurgent. “Mr. Kandahari beat and kicked him until his shoulder was dislocated. He was released after three days, he said,” the paper reports, “but his brothers are missing.”

The suspicion helps explain why President Hamid Karzai abruptly called in February for U.S. special operators to leave Wardak Province. It took only a few weeks for Karzai, the recipient of CIA money, to soften his position: the elite troops immediately left Nerkh, but they’re still working out a timetable with the Afghan government to vacate Wardak entirely.

Kandahari’s story is as wild as it is disputed. The A-Team, a detachment of 12 soldiers, moved to Nerkh from Kandahar, onto a base formerly used by Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Along with other soldiers in the unit, Kandahari wore a long beard and was seen riding “motorized four-wheeled bikes on hunts for insurgents.” When the Afghans came to arrest Kandahari on murder and torture charges, Kandahari — apparently in his late 20s or early 30s with a big tattoo of a green sword on his upper arm — split. Afghans thought the U.S. was protecting Kandahari; the U.S. denies it.

› U.S. Kicks Drug-War Habit, Makes Peace With Afghan Poppies | David Axe

“They’re a source of stability,” Maj. Charles Ford, the bookish operations officer at 3-41 Infantry, says of Afghanistan’s poppies. Sitting in a plywood-walled office at a Forward Operating Base in Kandahar city in early April, Ford cites all the people in Afghanistan who rely on poppies for some or all of their income: the Taliban, granted, but also millions of everyday farmers and their families as well as all levels of corrupt Afghan government from the subdistricts up to Kabul.

Fortunately for all these groups, there are some 400,000 acres of poppies in Afghanistan — “enough to go around,” according to Ford, who is responsible for devising his battalion’s combat strategy. Plentiful and lucrative — 15 pounds of poppy paste, the output of a typical acre family plot, sells for around $600 in a country where $.25 buys bread for a day — the illicit crop offers “access to prosperity” for much of Afghanistan. And that access is all that most Afghans really want.

Leave the poppies alone, and most Afghans will happily go about their business farming and selling the colorful crop — or so Ford’s line of thinking goes. …

Conversely, attempting to eradicate poppies — as has been the Army’s policy in the recent past — could mean destitution for countless Afghans. Sure, destroying the flowers might deprive the Taliban of one of its major revenue streams, but the violent popular backlash against eradication would probably represent a net victory for the insurgent group.

› Karzai Says U.S. Can Keep Afghan Bases After 2014 | NYT

The United States and Afghanistan are negotiating a security agreement that would allow American forces to stay here beyond the end of 2014, and Mr. Karzai said the Obama administration had asked for nine bases spread across the country.

“We agree to give them these bases,” Mr. Karzai told students during a speech at Kabul University. “We consider our relations with the United States beyond 2014 to be positive for Afghanistan.”

The American reaction, though, was far less positive than one would expect. Officials characterized Mr. Karzai’s comments as premature at best, and said they appeared to reflect the Afghan government’s desire for a larger force than the United States is likely to be willing to commit.

The Obama administration has yet to decide how large a force it would like to keep in Afghanistan, but administration officials have signaled that it is unlikely to total more than 10,000 service members. They said it was more important now to hash out a range of issues, like whether American troops would continue to have legal immunity in Afghanistan after next year, than to talk about the specifics of where troops would be based.

› We Are So Disappointed With the Corrupt Afghan Government | A Tiny Revolution

I’m sure it’s tough for many reasons to work for the Sulzbergers and Carlos Slim at the New York Times. But I’d have an especially hard time coming into the office every day and being forced to write paragraphs like this in today’s story about Afghanistan:

American and NATO officials in Kabul…said that [development] aid would continue, although the amounts given were likely to be reduced over time. And the Afghan government would have to live up to its commitments to battle corruption and run a more open government for the aid to keep flowing.

It’s not just that the New York Times itself uncovered the story of the CIA giving the Karzai government millions in bags of cash one week ago. It’s that the bags of cash article was written by the same reporter, Matthew Rosenberg.

Yet here he is today, faithfully passing along the news about how anonymous American officials sincerely want Karzai to be less corrupt. It’s like breaking the Eliot Spitzer prostitution story, and then quoting him a week later explaining how he’s going to continue paying Ashley Dupré as long as she lives up to his longstanding demand that she be less of a prostitute.

(I have much more sympathy for the payee in both situations. In Karzai’s case, he likely remembers that after the Soviets left, their last puppet was castrated, dragged through the streets of Kabul behind a jeep, and then publicly hanged. So you can understand if he wants to keep some cash on hand.) [read]

› Karzai: CIA vows cash payments will continue despite scandal | The Hill

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Saturday he’s been assured by the CIA’s Kabul station chief that regular cash payments to his government will continue after a New York Times exposé created a scandal in his country and the United States.

Karzai told the Associated Press he’s been receiving monthly payments from the CIA for more than a decade as part of U.S. assistance to his government. He said he’s been told that regular source of funding will not be cut off.

“The help and assistance from the U.S. is for our National Directorate of Security. That is state-to-state, government-to-government regular assistance,” Karzai said, according to the AP. “So that is a government institution helping another government institution, and we appreciate all this assistance and help, all this assistance is very useful for us. We have spent it in different areas (and) solved lots of our problems.”

The New York Times first brought the payments to light last weekend. The newspaper estimated that the cash transfers, which were brought in plastic bags and suitcases and referred to as “ghost money” by Karzai aides, totaled tens of millions of dollars since the U.S. invasion of 2001.

› What the CIA’s cash has bought for Afghanistan | Bill Van Auken

… Traveling in northern Europe on another money-gathering trip, Karzai made the improbable claim that the CIA cash wasn’t really that much and was being spent on “providing assistance to the wounded, the sick.”

In reality, whatever doesn’t go into the pockets and off-shore accounts of the Karzai family and its immediate periphery is still being used to pay off the warlords, including war criminals like Abdul Rashid Dostum, who, while on the CIA payroll, organized the massacre of thousands of Taliban prisoners near Mazar-i-Sharif in 2001. According to some reports, he alone has received up to $100,000 a month.

Until his assassination in 2011, the president’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was also on the CIA payroll, running a death squad known as the Kandahar Strike Force while playing a pivotal role in Afghanistan’s multi-billion-dollar heroin trade.

Also getting a share of the cash is the chief of Karzai’s National Security Council, Mohammed Zia Salehi, who was arrested in 2010 after a US-led investigation implicated him in smuggling money out of the country, heroin trafficking and the financing of the Taliban. Karzai and the CIA intervened, forcing his release within hours and terminating the investigation.

To keep this puppet regime of killers, drug dealers and kleptocrats in power, the US has waged the longest war in its history, claiming the lives of some 2,200 American and 1,000 other foreign occupation troops, while leaving tens of thousands suffering grievous wounds, both physical and mental. The cost of the war, CIA cash not included, reached some $60 billion a year in 2009.

For the Afghan people, the number of dead and wounded number in the millions since the CIA first began organizing military operations in the country nearly 35 years ago.

The huge amounts of money poured into the criminal US operations in Afghanistan have done nothing to aid the Afghan people. According to some estimates, ninety cents out of every dollar in the $20 billion in foreign aid spent there over the past decade has been lost to corruption.

More than half of the country’s families live in extreme poverty, while over one third suffer from hunger. One out of ten Afghan children die before they start primary school. Less than a quarter of the population has access to clean drinking water and a similar fraction among those over the age of 15 is able to read and write.

The slaughter of Afghan civilians continues on a daily basis. On Sunday, Karzai’s office issued a formal protest over the fatal shooting of four civilians by a US military convoy in the eastern province of Nangarhar. Earlier this month, a NATO air strike killed eleven children, aged between two months and seven years, in Kunar province near the border with Pakistan.

While a formal deadline for the withdrawal of foreign occupation troops has been set for the end of 2014, the Obama administration has no intention of ending the US military presence. Plans are being prepared to leave anywhere between 6,000 and 20,000 US troops behind to continue killing those who resist the rule of Karzai and his criminal clique.

This regime, installed against the will of the Afghan people, is a tool of a financial oligarchy in the US that is determined to advance its interests by militarily asserting its hegemony over Central Asia and its strategic energy reserves, while leaving working people in both Afghanistan and the US to pay the price.

› U.K. Conducts Firsts Reaper Drone Strike Controlled From Britain | Bloomberg

› C.I.A. Delivers Cash to Afghan Leader’s Office | NYT

For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.

Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”

The United States was not alone in delivering cash to the president. Mr. Karzai acknowledged a few years ago that Iran regularly gave bags of cash to one of his top aides.

At the time, in 2010, American officials jumped on the payments as evidence of an aggressive Iranian campaign to buy influence and poison Afghanistan’s relations with the United States. What they did not say was that the C.I.A. was also plying the presidential palace with cash — and unlike the Iranians, it still is. [continue]

Jim White adds:

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these cash payments is that they seem to have been designed in large part to pay off Afghan warlords:

Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

And it’s not just any warlords who are being funded by this cash. We learn in the article that the current corruption pay for Rashid Dostum, who committed the largest single war crime in the Afghan war, is now $80,000 per month.

And in the funding of warlords, keep in mind that they form the backbone of David Petraeus’ Afghan Death Squads Local Police under the “direction” of US special operation forces and the CIA.

› UK starts controlling drones in Afghanistan from British soil | guardian.co.uk

Remotely controlled armed drones used to target insurgents in Afghanistan have been operated from the UK for the first time, the Ministry of Defence said on Thursday.

Missions of the missile-carrying Reaper aircraft began from a newly built headquarters at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire earlier this week – five years after the MoD bought the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to monitor and attack the Taliban.

Since then the UK has been controlling the RAF’s five Reaper aircraft from Creech airforce base in Nevada because the British military did not have the capability to fly them from here.

However, the MoD made building a new UAV hub at Waddington a priority following the 2010 strategic defence and security review, and the centre “stood up” at the end of last year.

Waddington has become the home of XIII squadron, and defence officials said pilots from the unit have now started to take command of Reapers, working in tandem with the team in America. [++]

› After U.S. Troops Leave, Armed Drones Will Patrol Afghanistan's Skies | Danger Room

One of the major elements of Afghanistan’s air war will remain after most U.S. troops have headed home, the U.S. military command confirmed today. Armed drones, operated by the U.S., will remain over Afghanistan after 2014.

“I come back to the remotely piloted aircraft,” Air Force Maj. Gen. H.D. Polumbo, the commander of the U.S./NATO air war over Afghanistan, told reporters at the Pentagon today. “They can collect intelligence, but they also are armed. And they’re armed to be able to provide force protection to our coalition forces and then when our coalition ground force commanders, when they deem it appropriate, they can control that air-delivered munition capability from the RPAs to be put in support of the Afghans.”

The drones will not be the only air support available to the Afghan army after 2014, when most U.S. forces are slated to leave Afghanistan. But only “some fixed wing” manned fighters and bombers will remain on the battlefield, Polumbo said. Navy jets flown off of nearby aircraft carriers and Air Force planes flown from Gulf airbases will supplement them when the Afghans’ small supply of Mi-17 and Mi-35 attack helicopters, and their forthcoming Super Tucano planes, are overwhelmed.

And the drones will remain. “You’ll have that hybrid ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] as I call it, that armed ISR, remotely piloted aircraft capability all the way through ’14,” Polumbo said, “and then once [the follow-on Operation] Resolute Support mission and operations is fully understood and agreed upon by our coalition partners and our leadership, you will likely see it into 2015 to provide force protection.”

Polumbo did not mention the use of armed drones flown from Afghanistan over the border into Pakistan after 2014. Western Pakistan, the epicenter of the U.S. drone war from 2009 to 2011, experienced a surge in U.S. drone strikes at the beginning of this year. Those drones are under the control of the CIA, and U.S. military officials believe that’s likely to remain the case even if the Obama administration takes away many of the CIA’s drone operations, since there is no declared U.S. war in Pakistan. Those drones are flown from Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan war is the central battlefield for the U.S. drone campaign. In 2012, U.S. drones above Afghanistan fired their missiles 447 times, a vastly greater barrage than existed in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia or anywhere else U.S. drones strike. But the military recently purged drone strike data for the Afghanistan from its public websites, part of a recent trend in opacity as the war winds down.

[…] But the post-2014 drones, Polumbo explained, will not be operated by the Afghans. They’ll remain under the control of U.S. military officials, and most likely piloted thousands of miles away at Air Force bases in Nevada and New Mexico.