Mission & Justice

Patrick Seale; 19/9/08

One of the most explosive spots on Earth today is the so-called Durand Line, the 2,640 kilometre border, much of it in harsh mountain country, between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is where the United States and its Nato allies are battling the Taliban - and are facing the possibility of military defeat. Of all the challenges which will face the new American administration next January, the ongoing war across the Afghan-Pakistan border could be the most difficult and dangerous. It is likely to overshadow the contest with Russia in the Caucasus, the rise of Iran as a major regional power, the search for an honourable exit strategy from Iraq, the impact of the collapsing Arab-Israeli peace process, and even the horrors of global warming. The Durand Line was a British creation.

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Mark Dodd; 19/9/08

An Afghan government official has been confirmed killed in a friendly fire incident involving Australian special forces. The Australian Defence Force confirmed this afternoon, Chora District Governor, Rozi Khan, was among several Afghans killed in the exchange near the main base at Tarin Kowt. The number of casualties remains unclear. The NATO-backed International Security Assistance Force said yesterday, it was investigating claims Mr Khan was among three Afghan nationals identified as police who were killed in the exchange which left two others wounded.

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Rami G. Khouri;19/9/08

It was almost exactly 20 years ago this month that Al Qaeda was born in Afghanistan, as a movement of zealous holy warriors that was prepared to fight and die to protect the Islamic umma, or community, from foreign assault. The Russian occupation of Afghanistan was the immediate catalyst that sparked its creation, though the formative motivations sending thousands of young men from Arab and Asian lands to join the jihad were usually anchored in local events and personal experiences. The several phenomena that Al Qaeda represents - defensive jihad, militant self-assertion, a puritanical interpretation of religious doctrine, cosmic theological battle and political struggle to purify tainted Islamic societies - appeal to a wide variety of individuals who gravitate to its call in the same manner that zealots join any other such movements of true believers. Coming to grips with the phenomena it represents - especially the continuing threat of terrorism - requires grasping the combination of social, economic and political conditions in local societies from which Al Qaeda recruits emanate - mainly in the Arab world, South Asia and immigrant quarters of urban Europe.

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Bruce Loudon;18/9/08
Ameriucas’s top military officer met urgently with Pakistani officials yesterday to try to defuse mounting anger over recent US military incursions into Pakistan in pursuit of al-Qa’ida and Taliban extremists. The unannounced visit by Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came hours after a Pakistani army spokesman was reported as saying the country’s soldiers had orders to “open fire” if US forces attempted a cross-border raid similar to a September 3 operation in which an estimated 20 people were killed. The incursions, launched by US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan, have forced a tense standoff between the two countries, who are allies in the global war on terrorism, and raised the stakes in a dispute over how to tackle militant havens in Pakistan’s unruly border zone with Afghanistan. The new firing orders, disclosed by Pakistani army spokesman Athar Abbas, was the strongest statement since Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani raised eyebrows last week by vowing to defend Pakistani territory “at all cost”.

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Mustafa Qadri; 17/9/08

Early on the morning of Wednesday, 3 September, just before people were waking for the first of their daily prayers, a squad of US and Afghan commandos attacked the small village of Angoor Adda in South Waziristan, Pakistan. ‘I saw 15 bodies inside and outside two homes,’ Habib Khan Wazir told Associated Press. ‘They had been shot in the head.’ Most of those killed were women and children. The attack may not have been the first ground attack by US forces in Pakistan — it has maintained a military presence since soon after September 11, 2001 — but it is the first to be publicly confirmed. Pakistan has also been conducting attacks against militants in Waziristan, but this and other US attacks have not been cleared by Islamabad.

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Patrick Cockburn; 17/9/08

Covert action is frequently a substitute for policy, was an aphorism first coined by the former director of the CIA Richard Helms. Its truth is exemplified by the decision of President George Bush in July to secretly give orders that US special forces will in future carry out raids against ground targets inside Pakistan, without getting the approval of the Pakistani government. Bush’s order is fraught with peril for the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan. In one respect, it is a recognition at long last by Bush that the Taleban and their Al-Qaeda allies could not stay in business without the backing of Pakistan. This is hardly surprising, since it was Pakistani military intelligence which largely created them in the first place. It was always absurd for the White House and the Pentagon to pour praise on the former Pakistani leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf as their greater ally against terrorism, despite the clearest evidence that it was the Pakistani Army which has been keeping the Taleban going since 2001.

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Bruce Loudon; 17/9/08

Leaders of an estimated 500,000 tribesmen who have so far remained largely neutral over the conflict in Afghanistan warned last night they were poised to support al-Qa’ida and the Taliban unless US forces retreated from their strategy of attacking targets inside Pakistan. In a major jolt to Washington’s new policy of allowing cross-border raids in defiance of the Government in Islamabad, key tribal elders were reported to have met and warned that they were also prepared to raise an army to fight coalition forces in Afghanistan. “If America doesn’t stop attacks in the tribal areas, we will prepare a lashkar (army) to attack US forces in Afghanistan,” Pashtun tribal chief Malik Nasrullah Khan was reported as saying in Miranshah, the largest town in North Waziristan, which has been the target of repeated US attacks in the past week.

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Bruce Loudon; 16/9/08

A significant escalation in the confrontation between US and Pakistani forces along the Afghan border was reported last night after Pakistani soldiers and local tribesmen fired into the air to repel an invading unit of US special forces. The border clash came as a spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said a US military operation that killed as many as 90 civilians on August 22 was based on false information provided by a rival tribe and did not kill a single Taliban fighter - contradicting US claims that the raid had killed up to 35 militants.  Pakistani security officials said last night that seven US helicopters landed on the Afghan side of the border, close to Angoor Adda, the South Waziristan village that last week became the first target of a ground attack launched inside Pakistan by US forces.

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Christina Lamb; 15/9/08

The Americans picked an inauspicious day to open a new front in the war on terror. It was 4am on the third day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan and the villagers of Angoor Adda, a small Pakistani mountain town near the Afghan border, were lighting their stoves for breakfast before a long day of fasting. Two US helicopters supported by an AC130 Spectre gunship landed close to the shrine of a local saint. Out jumped about three dozen heavily armed marines and Navy Seals from a crack unit called Detachment One. As they emerged from the churning dust on to the rock-strewn hills, they were a terrifying sight in their night-vision goggles. Within minutes, the commandos had surrounded the mud-walled compound of Payo Jan Wazir, a 50-year-old woodcutter and cattle-herd. They believed an al-Qa’ida leader was hiding inside.

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Bruce Loudon; 13/9/08

Key corps commanders of Pakistan’s 600,000-strong army issued orders last night to retaliate against “invading” US forces that enter the country to attack militant targets. The move has plunged relations between Islamabad and Washington into deep crisis over how to deal with al-Qa’ida and the Taliban What amounts to a dramatic order to “kill the invaders”, as one senior officer put it last night, was disclosed after the commanders - who control the army’s deployments at divisional level - met at their headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi under the chairmanship of army chief and former ISI spy agency boss Ashfaq Kayani.

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