Nick Turse

globalpost:

“The big threat is that if they arrest me, they will behead me from the back of the neck,” said Mawlawi Pir Mohammed Rohani, a former member of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
“Any person who is working for peace is under threat from different sides, not only from one side,” he told GlobalPost’s Chris Sands.
Read more: Afghanistan: For ex-Taliban, it’s peace or death

“The big threat is that if they arrest me, they will behead me from the back of the neck,” said Mawlawi Pir Mohammed Rohani, a former member of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

“Any person who is working for peace is under threat from different sides, not only from one side,” he told GlobalPost’s Chris Sands.

Read more: Afghanistan: For ex-Taliban, it’s peace or death

Nothing succeeds in Washington like being tougher than the next guy. And woe to those who express doubt… the Times quoted retired Admiral Dennis Blair, the Obama Administration’s first director of National Intelligence, who was replaced after just sixteen months on the job, as saying that the drone and predator strikes were talked about as “the only game in town”—in a way that “reminded me of body counts in Vietnam.” Vietnam. And Iraq, and Afghanistan. We have a lot of anniversaries to forget.

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—	Seymour Hersh, “Iraq, Ten Years Later: What About the Constitution?” The New Yorker

doctorswithoutborders:

Afghanistan: Treating Child Malnutrition in Helmand

“She was vomiting and had diarrhea, and she kept losing weight,” says Mariam of her five-month-old granddaughter Nazia. “Her mother just didn’t have enough milk to feed her. We went to a private clinic but they couldn’t help us, and finally we drove here from our home district of Sangin. Nazia is feeling a little better now.”

Nazia, who still has a distended belly and a clearly visible rib cage, is one of the patients in the MSF herapeutic feeding center in Boost hospital in Lashkargah, the capital of Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

Boost hospital, where MSF has been working since 2009, is one of only two hospitals in all of southern Afghanistan. Helmand is one of the country’s most war-ravaged provinces, and has seen intense fighting over the past decades. It is home to a largely poor, rural population, even if there are signs of a growing middle class in Lashkargah.

MSF opened its feeding center in December 2011 to tackle the chronic problem of malnutrition among children in Helmand. This specialized unit helps children on the verge of starvation gain weight through assisted feeding.

Photo: An MSF staff member examines a child for malnutrition at Boost hospital.

Afghanistan 2012 © Camille Gillardeau

Afghan forces handle civilian casualties poorly, report claims - The Washington Post

The Center for Civilians in Conflict, a Washington-based research organization, said in a newly-released report that “the capacity of the Afghan government and security forces to prevent and respond appropriately to civilian casualties is woefully underdeveloped.”

The report additionally notes that the Afghan government has “often failed to award condolence payments to victims’ families or to properly investigate incidents in which civilians were harmed.”

…one day in Afghanistan in 2010, my patrol got into a firefight and ended up killing two people on a motorcycle who we thought were about to attack us. They ignored or didn’t understand our warnings to stop, and according to the military’s “escalation of force” guidelines, we were authorized to shoot them in self-defense. Although we thought they were armed, they turned out to be civilians. One looked no older than 16.
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It’s been more than two years since we killed those people on the motorcycle, and I think about them every day. Sometimes it’s when I’m reading the news or watching a movie, but most often it’s when I’m taking a shower or walking down my street in Brooklyn.

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—	Marine Capt. Timothy Kudo, a graduate student at New York University, who deployed to Iraq in 2009 and to Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011. From “I killed people in Afghanistan. Was I right or wrong?” The Washington Post

…the official American view of events in Afghanistan is wonderfully black and white. The president, for instance, speaks of the way U.S. forces heroically “pushed the Taliban out of their strongholds.” Like other top U.S. officials over the years, he forgets whom we pushed into the Afghan government, our “stronghold” in the years after the 2001 invasion: ex-Taliban and Taliban-like fundamentalists, the most brutal civil warriors, and serial human rights violators.
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Afghans, however, haven’t forgotten just whom the U.S. put in place to govern them — exactly the men they feared and hated most in exactly the place where few Afghans wanted them to be. Early on, between 2002 and 2004, 90% of Afghans surveyed nationwide told the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission that such men should not be allowed to hold public office; 76% wanted them tried as war criminals.

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—	Ann Jones, The Afghan End Game? \| TomDispatch

In January, I went to Kabul to learn what old friends and current officials are thinking about the critical months ahead. At the same time, Afghan President Karzai flew to Washington to confer with President Obama. Their talks seem to have differed radically from the conversations I had with ordinary Afghans. In Kabul, where strange rumors fly, an official reassured me that the future looked bright for the country because Karzai was expected to return from Washington with the promise of American radar systems, presumably for the Afghan Air Force, which is not yet “operational.” (He actually returned with the promise of helicopters, cargo planes, fighter jets, and drones.) Who knew that the fate of the nation and its suffering citizens hinged on that? In my conversations with ordinary Afghans, one thing that never came up was radar.

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—	Ann Jones, The Afghan End Game? \| TomDispatch

Kabul, Afghanistan — Compromise, conflict, or collapse: ask an Afghan what to expect in 2014 and you’re likely to get a scenario that falls under one of those three headings. 2014, of course, is the year of the double whammy in Afghanistan: the next presidential election coupled with the departure of most American and other foreign forces. Many Afghans fear a turn for the worse, while others are no less afraid that everything will stay the same. Some even think things will get better when the occupying forces leave. Most predict a more conservative climate, but everyone is quick to say that it’s anybody’s guess.
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Only one thing is certain in 2014: it will be a year of American military defeat.

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—	Ann Jones, The Afghan End Game? \| TomDispatch

I was on Democracy Now yesterday to discuss my new book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam as well as the current Afghan War and Obama’s Vietnam veteran national security post nominees: Chuck Hagel and John Kerry. Video above or here, if you’d like to take a look.

The consensus U.S. solution to [Afghanistan’s] security problem is… a large and competent army. However reasonable this may seem to us, such a vision is revolutionary and destructive in Afghanistan. There, for centuries, the real power has resided not in Kabul but among cultural and tribal forces that are highly geographic, not centralized.

….why [has] the Afghan resistance to the presence of U.S. and NATO forces… steadily increased over the past 10 years. Could it be that non-westernized Afghans see the foreign military effort not as a benign facilitator of peace but as an increasingly ominous threat to their traditional way of life?

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—	Clark Rumrill, second secretary at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul from 1966 to 1969 from U.S. solutions will not work in Afghanistan - The Washington Post