Just keep up the mantra: 'We are the good guys; we are the good guys...'ad infinitum

[Peter Lemkin]

JUAN GONZALEZ: Afghan President Hamid Karzai is set to meet today with the families of 16 civilians killed in a massacre allegedly committed by a single U.S. soldier. Yesterday Karzai called on U.S. troops to withdraw from Afghan villages. Meanwhile, the Taliban has announced they're suspending peace talks, even as U.S. officials say they hope to stick around to a 2014 withdrawal schedule for troops in Afghanistan.

After meeting with Karzai, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta again promised the unnamed suspect in the shooting rampage that killed mostly women and children would be brought to justice

DEFENSE SECRETARY LEON PANETTA: I assured him that, first and foremost, that I shared his regrets about what took place, that we extended our deepest condolences to the families, to the villages and to the Afghan people over what occurred. And I again pledged to him that we arewe are proceeding with a full investigation here, and that we will bring the individual involved to justice. And he accepted that.

JUAN GONZALEZ: That was Defense Secretary Panetta.

Many Afghans have raised questions about the U.S. military's statements on the massacre. On Thursday, the Pajhwok Afghan News agency reported an Afghan parliamentary probe determined up to 20 U.S. troops were involved in the massacre. The Afghan lawmaker Hamizai Lali told the agency, quote, "We are convinced that one soldier cannot kill so many people in two villages within one hour at the same time, and the 16 civilians, most of them children and women, have been killed by the two groups."

AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. soldier accused in the massacre has been flown out of Afghanistan to a detention center in Kuwait despite several Afghan lawmakers and residents saying he should have been tried in Afghanistan. A senior U.S. commander defended the move, saying it was made to help ensure a proper investigation and trial. The suspected killer's name has not been released, but he has been identified as a 38-year-old staff sergeant who served three tours of duty in Iraq, where he suffered a head injury. This was his fourth tour of duty, in Afghanistan.

Yesterday, prominent Seattle defense attorney John Henry Browne announced he will represent the soldier. Browne's past clients include serial burglar Colton Harris-Moore and serial killer Ted Bundy. At a news conference in Seattle, Browne said the soldier's family was shocked at what happened.

JOHN HENRY BROWNE: He was told that he was not going to be redeployed. And they werethe family was counting on him not being redeployed. And so, he and the family were told that his tours in the Middle East were over. And then, literally overnight, that changed. So I think that it would be fair to say that he and the family were not happy that he was going back...

Oh, they were totally shocked. He's never said anything antagonistic about Muslims. He's never said anything antagonistic about Middle Eastern individuals. He's, in general, been very mild-mannered. So, they were very shocked by this.

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined now by journalist Neil Shea. He's joining us from Raleigh, North Carolina, has reported on Afghanistan for many years for Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, and The Christian Science Monitor, among others. His latest article in The American Scholar is called "Afghanistan: A Gathering Menace: Traveling with U.S. Troops Gives Insights into the Recent Massacre."

We welcome you, Neil, to Democracy Now! Yours is an extremely disturbing article. Tell us what you have found. Just walk us through the descriptions you share in your piece.

NEIL SHEA: Well, good morning, Amy and Juan.

I found that during one of my last trips to Afghanistan, I met up with a group of soldiers who were the first I had ever come across who made me feel pretty nervous about what I was going to see while I was with them. And I spent a few days with them and came to just really understand that they had gotten to the edge of violence, as we understand it, in Afghanistan, and they seemed ready and capable of doing some pretty bad things. I didn't actually witness them do anything too terrible, but the way that they talked and the way that they acted toward Afghan civilians and animals and property in the country was sort of stunning to me. And that's what I describe in the article. It's talking about thesethis group of soldiers and sort of their mental state during a multi-day mission in a central part of Afghanistan that was supposed to be a Taliban stronghold. Many of these guys seemed like they had reached the end of their rope in terms of stability and controlling their aggression.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Neil, what I found amazing about your story is, as you say, you focus not on any high-profile event that might be considered something illegal done by the troops or a war crime, but on the everyday occurrences that created greater and greater distance between this particular group of U.S. soldiers and the civilian population. At one point, you write, "Evil or atrocity often explodes from a furnace built by the steady accretion of small, unchallenged wrongs. Some men in Destroyer platoon had been drifting that way for a long time." Can you talk about some of those incidents that you witnessed that were part of this buildup of the psychological perspective, viewpoint of these men?

NEIL SHEA: Sure, Juan. In some ways, this article was a culmination of things that I've seen since 2006, when I first started covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And during those years, I've seen soldiers and marines sort of build up through these cycles of aggression, to the point where they start doingthey begin with small things. They'll insult Iraqis or Afghans behind their backs, and that's sort of the very mild beginning of it. And then they sort of move up the chain, if we can call it that, into more serious acts of aggression, where they'll kill animals or they'll beat somebody or treat them roughly, and it sort of builds up from there.

What I saw with these guys in Afghanistan when I was with them was that several of them had already been through multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they had reached a point where they hated Afghans, they hated the country, and they were really not interested in doing any of the hearts and minds stuff anymore that's a crucial part of the mission. So by the time I reached these guys, they had already been sort ofthey had been building up anger and aggression in strange ways for a number of years. And when I saw them, they had just shot a dog that had been a pet in an Afghan home that they had confiscated during the mission, and they treated Afghan civilians fairly roughly, and they took a few prisoners and treated them very roughly, as well. Nothing that would rise to necessarily thesort of a crime at that time, but the way that they talked about things and the way that they sort of handled themselves was really aggressive. And it was onlyit seemed to me only to be barely kept in check.

So it's just this smallwhen we cycle our soldiers and marines through these wars that don't really have a clear purpose over years and years, I write in the article that we beginwe expect light-switch control over their aggression. We expect to be able to turn them into killers and then turn them back into winners of hearts and minds. And when you do that to a man or a woman over many years, that light-switch control begins to fray. And that's what I believe I was seeing with these guys in Afghanistan.

JUAN GONZALEZ: You also mention something that I don't think many Americans here realize, that when these platoons go out, especially on multi-day patrols, that they often just take over the homes of Afghans, evict them, and give them a few dollars and basically order them out of their homes and take them over for their ownfor their own refuge. And this createsyou quote one soldier saying, "Well, we helped create more Taliban today," because ofthe soldiers themselves recognizing that their actions were creating enormous hostility in the population.

NEIL SHEA: Right. This isthis was a fairly standard practice in Afghanistan, and even in Iraq. When platoons were moving out through really rural areas or even some urban areas, they needed a place to bed down for the night. They'd try to find either an abandoned house or, if they couldn't find an abandoned one, they would move into a place that was relatively secure, and they'd sort of kick the family out and try to pay them for their trouble. In this particular case, I was told that the Afghans didn't take the money from the American troops, because they didn't want anyone in the region to think that they were siding with the Americans. They were afraid that by taking the money, they'd be seen as American sort of collaborators and perhaps killed later.

But the point I was trying to make when I talked aboutwhen I quoted that soldier as saying that they were on a Taliban recruiting drive, he was actually talking about the fact that they hadthey had treated the Afghans so badly during the mission that the Afghans were going to obviously choose the side of the Taliban, because now they hated the Afghan army and they hated the Americans. So the brutal treatment that the Americans had sort of pushed upon them drove these civilians into the arms of the Taliban. And that's what that particular soldier was talking about. And American soldiers all across Afghanistan run into that problem, just as they did in Iraq, where they have a job to do, but sometimes they have to do it so roughly that the civilian population actually turns against them. And so, that's what that was about.

AMY GOODMAN: Neil Shea, you quote an American Army sergeant, who said to you, "This is where I come to do f*****-up things." And I wanted to ask you about this report we can't confirm that says "Up to 20 U.S. Troops Executed Panjwai Massacre: Probe" by Bashir Ahmad Naadimon. And it's from Kandahar city (PAN). It says, "A parliamentary probe team on Thursday said up to 20 American troops were involved in Sunday's killing of 16 civilians in southern Kandahar province." Now, all the information that we are getting about what took place is from the militaryyou know, who this man is; the number of tours of dutyhe had three in Iraq, one in Afghanistan; that he had a TBI, a traumatic brain injury, in a rollover in Iraq; and now he's been taken out, so we don't have any access to him. So that's what the U.S. is saying. And the New York Times spoke to family members of some of the people who were killed, so we know what happened to some of the people killed. But what about this kind of story that is going around in Afghanistan? Do you find it credible, the idea that it was more than one person who did the killing?

NEIL SHEA: At this point, I don't really think that it's credible. While it still is possible that it was more than just this one soldier who were involved in it, I think that the idea that it was 20 soldiers from one particular unit going into a village to just sort of slaughter people, that actually sounds very far off base to me. And I do know that in Afghan culture, at least from my observations, rumors travel very quickly, and they take on their sort ofthey gather facts as they go, in sort of like a game of telephone. So, I wouldn't be surprised if this story was sort of exaggerated and built up by this point. It would really shock me if it was an organized effort by a group of 20 U.S. soldiers, becausewell, for the simple reasons that it would be difficult forto keep a heinous crime like that so quiet. Even though the U.S. military is sometimes good at keeping things quiet, that would be almost too big for them to squash.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Neil, I'd like to ask youyou've been reporting, as you say, from Iraq and Afghanistan now for several yearsthe length of this war in Afghanistan, more than 10 years now, what it's done to the American military?

NEIL SHEA: Well, I was askingwhen I was there last time, I was actually asking specific soldiers about this, what they thought the militarywhat damage had been done to the military during the war. And many of them felt that the military had actually been broken by this continued cycle of war. These were usually staff sergeants, command sergeants, mid-level sergeants who are sort of the backbone, as they call them, of the Army. And they really felt that thea lot of things had deteriorated and eroded during the last 10 years. And soldiers and marines, even airmen in the other branches, told me this. So I think that there's been a great degree of strain on the American military, particularly in Afghanistan. And that's partly because, since the beginning of the war, the goal has changed, and the mission has changed, so every few years the military is having to adapt to something new. And there doesn't really seem to be a clear exit strategy. And so, just sort of constantly refitting itself to adapt to a changing set of demands has created incredible strain.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, theyou know, how we know what we know right now about what's happened. Of course, there was the story of Pat Tillman, the belieforiginally, the U.S. military put out that he was killed by enemy fire, and ultimately, of course, it was, if you call it, "friendly fire." It was fellow soldiers. And then taking that to this story.

NEIL SHEA: So I guess you're asking about whether or not it could be sort of a cover-up, or the nature of information?

AMY GOODMAN: Right, not trying to figure out how we know what we know, as the people in the United States and Afghanistan deal with what took place.

NEIL SHEA: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to be very aware of what our source of information is, that we don't have independent confirmation.

NEIL SHEA: Yeah, indeed. I think that it's entirely possible that right now we're just sort of being led along with the thinnest of facts. So I'm reluctant to talk about this too much. But, you know, the U.S. military does have a history of trying to keep things under wraps, and particularly something like this. I know the temptation is very strong for them to sort of try to control the story and the message very tightly. So it will be very difficult for journalists to get into this story and sort of crack it open, but absolutely necessary for us to understand not only what happened in Kandahar, but what's happening to the men and women that we ask to go fight this war.

AMY GOODMAN: Neil, we want to thank you very much for being with us. Neil Shea has reported in Afghanistan for many years for Stars and Stripes, The Christian Science Monitor, among others. His latest article is in The American Scholar; it's called "Afghanistan: A Gathering Menace: Traveling with U.S. Troops Gives Insights into the Recent Massacre." We will link to it at our website, democracynow.org. Neil is speaking to us from Raleigh, North Carolina.

[Peter Lemkin]

In a new film, psychologist and filmmaker Jan Haaken embeds with military therapists in Afghanistan and at their training at Joint Base Lewis-McChord where the alleged U.S. shooter of Afghan civilians is from. Lewis-McChord has a controversial record of addressing mental health problems, including high rates of suicides, domestic violence and homicides by soldiers. It was also home to the notorious "kill team," a group of soldiers who murdered Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies. Haaken's forthcoming documentary, "Mind Zone: Therapists Behind the Front Lines," shows the ethical dilemmas faced by therapists in Afghanistan who guide soldiers through the trauma of war. "The military has relied quite extensively on therapists to kind of help hold people together psychologically in war zones," Haaken says. "But they have to show that they are efficiency multipliers, force multipliers in other words, that they can help the military get more out of their fatigued assets."

JUAN GONZALEZ: While the name and motive of the U.S. soldier who allegedly massacred 16 Afghans civilians remains unknown, speculation has grown about his mental condition. The soldier's home base in Washington state, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, has a controversial record of addressing mental health problems, including high rates of suicides, domestic violence and homicides by soldiers. The base was also home to the notorious "kill team," a group of soldiers who murdered Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.

The mental health of soldiers and the challenges faced by those who care for them are the subject of a forthcoming documentary called Mind Zone: Therapists Behind the Front Lines. The film shows the ethical dilemmas faced by therapists in Afghanistan who guide soldiers through the trauma of war. This is a clip from the film where two soldiers talk about their mental stress.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: I think soldiers at a giant base like Kandahar Airfield are under a lot of stress, and stress that needs to be treated. It's like being in prison.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: We're tired. We'reas a force.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: After nine months, you're really running on fumes, and you see guys getting more aggressive. No 18-year-old has any business being over here.

AMY GOODMAN: A clip from Mind Zone: Therapists Behind the Front Lines, the film directed by Jan Haaken, who is a psychologist, who followed military therapists through training at Fort Lewis, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and then in Afghanistan. She's joining us now from Portland, Oregon.

Jan, thank you for joining us. Talk about Fort Lewis, what you found there, what the role of psychologists are there and on the front lines in Afghanistan.

JAN HAAKEN: Well, psychologists and psychiatrists have been deployed to war zones since World War I, but the U.S. military has invested very heavily in these combat stress control units since the '80s and, particularly over the last decades with these repeated long deployments, have really enlisted psychologists and mental health workers in a substantial way in preparing them not only in soldieringthey're trained as any other soldierbut then they are also trained in a variety of stress management and mental health techniques to treat soldiers inon the battlefield or in war zones.

And they have these two conflicting missions. One is to prevent psychiatric casualties, and the other is to maintain the fighting forces. And in going through the deployment and the pre-deployment trainings, there was quite a bit of discussion about these conflicting missions. And a key aim behind the documentary, Mind Zone, was to understand how they managed what many people see as ethically conflicted missions, that normally you would, as a clinician, not treat someone in a traumatic situation by putting them right back into that situation. But that is very much what they are expected to do.

Since World War I, therapiststheir effectiveness has been evaluated primarily by return-to-duty rates. So the aim is to treat people veryas close as possible to their units, to convey to them the expectation that they will return to duty, that they will be fine, to normalize their reactions, and to send them back. And when youas we moved into the war zone and saw them moving into their work, replacing a combat stress control unit that had been there for the previous year, I mean, these pressures are palpable. But that is the expectation, that people are patched up pretty quickly and told they're expected to return to duty and asked if they feel they can do their job.

If you feel you can do your job, even though theirmost of the effects of war are manifested in a certain amount of preoccupation with violence, preoccupation with killing, being around weapons a lot, these arethis is a kind of common emotional landscape of war, as we all know.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Jan

JAN HAAKEN: But where to draw the line clinically is a difficultdifficult line to draw.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Jan, let's go to a clip from your documentary, Mind Zone, where one therapist is talking about the ethical conflicts faced by mental health providers in the military, and then you hear two other therapists actually defending their role, saying it's strategically good for the military mission. Let's play that now.

THERAPIST 1: One of the unique challenges to being a mental health provider in the military has to do with a question I think probably all of us ask ourself at some point: should I have sent this soldier back to their unit, or should I have worked harder to get them evacuated from that unit? We have these competing missions.

THERAPIST 2: We are there to not take people out of the game, but to keep them in the game.

THERAPIST 3: We're not here to send your soldiers home. We're a force multiplier.

JUAN GONZALEZ: That was three different therapists, one talking about the ethical conflicts of military therapists, the other two actually defending the strategic value of their work. Jan Haaken, your response?

JAN HAAKEN: Well, the mental health workers, therapists, clinicians in the military have a big sales job to do, and they always have. And that is that therapists are associated with a kind of feminizing influence, and they have to show that they are really about soldiering and that their presence there, which always has been controversial, all the way back to World War Itherapists are associated with kind of weakening people, undermining the military mission, because part of our training is to protect people from situations that make them disturbed and are destructiveso, to justify their presence. And the military has relied quite extensively on therapists to kind of hold peoplehelp hold people together psychologically in war zones, but they have to show that they are efficiency multipliers, force multipliersin other words, that they can help the military get more out of their fatigued assets. And the military has done quite a bit over the last few years in resiliency training, integrating psychological techniques into the kind of middle echelon of leadership in the field.

But I think they've really oversold the job. I mean, they've oversold the capacity of clinicians to control what is a very combustible situation. I mean, even this issue of mild traumatic brain injury, which is a disturbing diagnosis, and one would think if you have had concussions, you would be pulled off the line. But concussions are quite common in war zones. And there's a continuum of concussions that are more or less severe, and most of them are treated by a few days' rest and then expected to go back, back to their units. And this is just part of the territory of war. And to think that skilled clinicians can separate the most disturbed from less disturbing effects and always predict who is going to go off the rail at that critical stress point, I think, is putting far moreexpecting far more than we realistically can from these combat stress control units.

AMY GOODMAN: We don't have much time, but Jan Haaken

JAN HAAKEN: They have an impossible job.

AMY GOODMAN: Jan Haaken, very quickly, specifically on the Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the base that some have called the worst in the country, that some have called on the brink, your assessment of the soldiers? This is the home of the "kill team," as well as this alleged killer.

JAN HAAKEN: Well, it's a huge base, these three Stryker brigades. I think anytime you have a large base with a lot of infantry, you're going to have problems that soldiers carry back from the field. I only worked with or filmed the 113th Medical Detachment as they were preparing theirdoing their pre-deployment training. But I think there is something about this perpetual surprise that we need to attend to, why we're shocked that domestic violence and other expressions of mental pathology or disturbances are associated with these bases, because some of that goes with the territory.

AMY GOODMAN: Jan Haaken, we want to thank you very much for being with us, psychologist and director of the film, Mind Zone: Therapists Behind the Front Lines. She's a psychologist but also a filmmaker who embedded with the mental therapists who went to Afghanistan, and she filmed them at Fort Lewis, where the alleged killer comes from, as well.

[Magda Hassan]

Some more back ground information of the 'lone nut'

Afghan Murder Suspect Bales 'Took My Life Savings,' Says Retiree

By BRIAN ROSS and MEGAN CHUCHMACH | ABC News 11 hrs ago

• 
  

Robert Bales, the staff sergeant accused of massacring Afghan civilians, enlisted in the U.S. Army at the same time he was trying to avoid answering allegations he defrauded an elderly Ohio couple of their life savings in a stock fraud, according to federal documentsreviewed by ABC News.
"He robbed me of my life savings," Gary Liebschner of Carroll, Ohio told ABC News.
Financial regulators found that Bales "engaged in fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, churning, unauthorized trading and unsuitable investments," according to a report on Bales filed in 2003. Bales and his associates were ordered to pay Liebschner $1,274,000 in compensatory and punitive damages but have yet to do so, according to Liebschner.
"We didn't know where he was," Liebschner told ABC News. "We heard the Bahamas, and all kinds of places."
Liebschner says he recognized Bales after news reports named him as the American soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers in a shooting rampage.
Liebschner filed a complaint against Bales in May 2000, claiming Bales took his life savings of $852,000 in AT&T stock and through a series of trades reduced its value to nothing.
The Ohio retiree recalled Bales as a "smooth talker." Asked if he regarded Bales as a con man, Liebschner said, "You've hit the nail on the head."
At the time, Bales worked for an Ohio brokerage firm, MPI.
According to federal documents, Bales failed to appear at an arbitration hearing to resolve Liebschner's complaint.
http://news.yahoo.com/afghan-murder-susp...-news.html

[Magda Hassan]

Sgt Bales' secret and an Afghan endgame
By M K Bhadrakumar

Despite the insistence by Washington that the Kandahar killings a week ago were a "rampage" by an "apparently deranged" or "probably deranged" American sergeant, Afghan people believe in the finding by their parliamentarians that up to 15 to 20 US troops were involved. The Afghan president Hamid Karzai also agreed the US version is "not convincing."

Even within the Afghan military establishment, the opinion publicly aired by the Afghan army chief of staff Sher Mohammad Karimi's condemnation of the US troops will prevail. Lieutenant General Karimi who visited the scene of the crime called it a pre-meditated massacre carried out by a number of US troops.

This is going to make the signing of a strategic agreement between Washington and Kabul before the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Chicago in May highly problematic. Washington expects Karzai to put his signature on

Dilbert

the dotted line before May and Karzai knows his political future depends on his performance.

In an extraordinary commentary last week, the influential French troubleshooter Bernard Henri-Levy threatened that the international community should never have "blindly depended upon the corrupt government of Hamid Karzai".

Echoing the views of many US commanders, he lambasted the planned 2014 pullout date as "an admission of failure and impotence", but said that prolonging the military presence beyond 2014 is also difficult "considering the human cost". So, the only course available is to "go and stay" - ie,withdraw combat troops "but leave the military bases and instructors".

Levy has the answer: "Admit that Afghanistan cannot be reduced ... to a desperate confrontation between the Taliban killers and the corrupt members of Karzai's regime ... In Kabul ... there are, then, the heirs of [late Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah] Massoud. And perhaps before we pull up the ladder, it would be advisable to try to turn to them, in an ultimate attempt, a last-chance operation."

Karzai is once again being threatened that his potential successor is all dressed up and waiting in the green room. The point is, through all the watershed events of the past six to eight weeks - US troops urinating on Taliban corpses, burning the Koran or massacring civilians - the constant has been the signing of a strategic pact with Kabul that ensures long-term military presence.

The US President Barack Obama repeated last Tuesday during his joint press conference with the visiting British Prime Minister David Cameron that Karzai has been left in no doubt. But post-Panjwayi, this can no longer be reduced to a battle of wits between Obama and Karzai alone.

Moscow enters. In the course of an exclusive 30-minute interview telecast over an Afghan channel last night, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov repeated not fewer than four times that Russia expects a "neutral" Afghanistan - code word for the vacation of foreign military presence.

Russian policy is moving on two tracks. One, Moscow hopes to work closely with Karzai. "Unlike some others [read Washington], we do not dictate to the [Kabul] government how it should build the process of national reconciliation. We know that a part of Pashtuns, there are Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras. [sic] They all must find their way in the political system so they all feel being part of the process, not isolated. This is the general principle; how to apply them in practice, it's not for us to tell the Afghan authorities."

On the other hand, Lavrov questioned how the Obama administration or the North Atlantic Treaty Organizatoin (NATO) could unilaterally decide on matters such as "transition" or ending the "combat mission". He demanded that the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) should first confirm to the United Nations Security Council that its mandate has been fulfilled before jumping the gun and proposing the withdrawal of the NATO and US contingents.

Lavrov pointed out that there is a fundamental contradiction in the US stance. On the one hand, Washington is assuming that the ISAF mandate has been fulfilled and is withdrawing the troops from Afghanistan, while on the other hand it is discussing with Kabul "very purposefully the establishment of four or five military bases for the post-2014 period". In forceful language, he drew Moscow's bottom line:

"I don't think why this should be done this way because if you need the military presence, then you continue to implement the mandate of the Security Council. If you don't want to implement the mandate of the Security Council or you believe that you have implemented the mandate already, but still want to establish and keep the military bases, I don't think it is logical. I also believe that Afghan territory should not be used to create some military sites, which would cause concern by third parties.

"I don't think it is logical that by 2014 the job would be over but we will stay for a much longer period inside military bases. I don't understand the purpose of the military bases, and, besides, the United States is talking to Central Asian countries asking for long-term military presence. WE want to understand the reason for it and why this is needed. We don't think it would be helpful for the stability of the region."

Lavrov then asserted that Moscow is a stakeholder:One, terrorism hasn't abated in Afghanistan;
Two, terrorists are being "pushed" into the northern regions from where they are infiltrating into the "Central Asian neighbors of the Russian Federation and they don't add stability in this region";
Three, the ISAF is using the so-called Northern Distribution Network and "we [Russia] believe this is our contribution to fulfill the mandate which the international forces received from the Security Council", and,therefore, "we have the right to demand" that the mandate should be implemented before the ISAF deems its"combat mission" over.

In essence, Moscow served notice that Obama administration can no longer dictate the trajectory of this war. Lavrov's interview was carefully timed, since the ISAF's mandate will be reviewed this week in the Security Council.

Moscow is adding Afghanistan to the litany of issues on which will take a "muscular" approach - alongside the planned US missile defence system, Syria and Iran. Last week, Moscow disclosed that it might offer a military base in Ulyanovsk on the Volga for NATO as transportation hub for ferrying supplies for the war.

The characteristic Russian offer puts the Pentagon and NATO in a dilemma. From a logistical point of view, it is a vital lifeline, but from the geopolitical point of view, Washington may think twice. The alternative is to go back to Pakistan and get the two transit routes reopened. The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey has done just that.

Dempsey told the Charlie Rose Show that Washington is communicating "directly" and "privately" with Rawalpindi and "I'm personally optimistic that we can reset the relationship in a way that meets both of our needs." He mentioned Pakistani army chief Ashfaq Kayani as someone with whom he has had the "most, candid, frank conversations" - and "he will do what he can".

Dempsey even played the "India card", underscoring that the main challenge for the US was to get the Pakistani military to shift from its rooted belief that "India poses their greatest existential threat". (He didn't disclose how Washington proposes to assuage the Pakistani fears.)

Quite obviously, several templates are overlapping this week. Russia intends to throw down the gauntlet on Washington's Afghan strategy when the renewal of ISAF's mandate comes up before the Security Council this week. The US, in turn,anxiously awaits a positive outcome of the parliamentary processes in Islamabad that may lead to a resumption of the two countries' partnership.

Meanwhile, a third vector is hanging in the air - Afghan anger over the Panjwayi killings. The best hope is that Afghans accept the Sergeant Bales version. But Bales himself is locked up in solitary confinement in Kansas at Fort Leavenworth, where by a curious twist of irony, Dempsey and Kayani were once classmates at the School of Advanced Military Studies - studying Theatre Operations.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/NC20Df04.html

[Peter Lemkin]

As you are all aware, the recent massacre in Afghanistan has
resurrected the spectre of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

What you may not know was that the My Lai massacre was the result of a
Phoenix program operation: http://www.whale.to/b/ph2.html

As you may know, Phoenix is the model for the war on terror. See
David Kilkullen "Countering Global Insurgency" in :
http://smallwarsjournal.com/documents/kilcullen.pdf

Page 40: A Global Phoenix Program'

"As discussed in Part 1, the enemy in this War comprises a
multifarious, intricately ramified web of dependencies that like a
tribal group or crime family exists for its own sake. This network
behaves more like a traditional Middle Eastern patronage network than
a mass guerrilla movement. The jihad is what the network does, it is
not the network itself.

"As the organic systems model of insurgency shows, disrupting this
network demands that we target the links (the web of dependencies
itself) and the energy flows (inputs and outputs that pass between
actors in the jihad) as the primary method of disrupting the system.
An exclusive focus on attacking the boundary interactions of the
system that is, attempting to stop terrorist attacks or catch
terrorists themselves simply imposes an evolutionary dynamic that
causes the insurgent system to develop better means of attack.

"This concept of de-linking' is central to the Disaggregation
strategy. It would result in actions to target the insurgent
infrastructure that would resemble the unfairly maligned (but highly
effective) Vietnam-era Phoenix program. Contrary to popular mythology,
this was largely a civilian aid and development program, supported by
targeted military pacification operations and intelligence activity to
disrupt the Viet Cong Infrastructure. A global Phoenix program
(including the other key elements that formed part of the successful
Vietnam CORDS system) would provide a useful start point to consider
how Disaggregation would develop in practice.78"

Warren Milberg (a CIA officer in the Phoenix program in Quang Tri in
1967-8), describes an operation similar in every respect to Task Force
Barker's in his thesis, "The Future Applicability of the Phoenix
Program" written for Air University in 1974. If any of you wants one,
I can send you a copy (fot cost of disk and postage).

Douglas Valentine
PO Box 60262
Longmeadow MA 01116

[Magda Hassan]

[url=http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/EconomicAndFinancialCrime][/url]


The US soldier accused of murdering 16 Afghan civilians in this month's unprovoked shooting spree was $1.5 million (£950,000), in debt and in danger of losing his home, according to reports yesterday.

Robert Bales, a 38-year-old Staff Sergeant, was found guilty of securities fraud before joining the army, and still owed his victims hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation and punitive damages.
He carried out the financial crimes while working at MPI, a brokerage firm in Ohio. A report filed by federal regulators in 2003 concluded he had "engaged in fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, churning, unauthorised trading and unsuitable investments" on behalf of clients.
A former victim called Gary Liebschner described Bales as a smooth-talking conman who had caused him to lose $1.2million (£756,000) in savings. Working as a stockbroker, he had sold AT&T shares on Liebschner's behalf, but disappeared with the proceeds. "He robbed me of my life savings," Mr Liebschner told ABC News. "We didn't know where he was. We heard the Bahamas, and all kinds of places."
The next time Mr Liebschner saw Robert Bales was when his face was splashed across the front pages after the 11 March shooting spree. It emerged that, despite his dubious past, he had joined the US army.
Lawyers working on behalf of victims had spent years attempting to track him down to seek the compensation they were owed. He turns out to have been living between deployments in Washington State, with a wife and children, where he owned several properties that were underwater on their mortgage.
Bales met with his lawyer, John Henry Browne, on Monday. He apparently claimed to have forgotten many details of this month's massacre. "He has some memory of some things that happened that night," Browne told the Associated Press. "He has some memories of before the incident and he has some memories of after the incident. In between, very little."

In a statement, Bales's wife, Karilyn, offered her condolences to the victims, and said she was still struggling to come to terms with what happened. Reports of the shootings that she had read and seen in news reports were "completely out of character of the man I know and admire," she said. "My family are all profoundly sad. We extend our condolences to all the people of the Panjawai District. Our hearts go out to all of them."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/...79491.html

[Peter Lemkin]

Some more back ground information of the 'lone nut'

Afghan Murder Suspect Bales 'Took My Life Savings,' Says Retiree

By BRIAN ROSS and MEGAN CHUCHMACH | ABC News 11 hrs ago




Robert Bales, the staff sergeant accused of massacring Afghan civilians, enlisted in the U.S. Army at the same time he was trying to avoid answering allegations he defrauded an elderly Ohio couple of their life savings in a stock fraud, according to federal documentsreviewed by ABC News.
"He robbed me of my life savings," Gary Liebschner of Carroll, Ohio told ABC News.
Financial regulators found that Bales "engaged in fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, churning, unauthorized trading and unsuitable investments," according to a report on Bales filed in 2003. Bales and his associates were ordered to pay Liebschner $1,274,000 in compensatory and punitive damages but have yet to do so, according to Liebschner.
"We didn't know where he was," Liebschner told ABC News. "We heard the Bahamas, and all kinds of places."
Liebschner says he recognized Bales after news reports named him as the American soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers in a shooting rampage.
Liebschner filed a complaint against Bales in May 2000, claiming Bales took his life savings of $852,000 in AT&T stock and through a series of trades reduced its value to nothing.
The Ohio retiree recalled Bales as a "smooth talker." Asked if he regarded Bales as a con man, Liebschner said, "You've hit the nail on the head."
At the time, Bales worked for an Ohio brokerage firm, MPI.
According to federal documents, Bales failed to appear at an arbitration hearing to resolve Liebschner's complaint.
http://news.yahoo.com/afghan-murder-susp...-news.html

He certainly seems to be the ALL-American-Boy!...with memory loss...16 killings? what killings? I was out for a walk...all I remember.

In a statement, Bales's wife, Karilyn, offered her condolences to the victims, and said she was still struggling to come to terms with what happened. Reports of the shootings that she had read and seen in news reports were "completely out of character of the man I know and admire," she said. "My family are all profoundly sad. We extend our condolences to all the people of the Panjawai District. Our hearts go out to all of them."

Wow, She sure is the emotional type - full of compassion and remorse too. NOT! What a tepid and wet sqwib response.

[Magda Hassan]

Search and destroy: Military tries to delete Staff Sgt. Bales from Web

Published: [COLOR=#999999 !important]22 March, 2012, 21:07
[/COLOR]


[COLOR=#999999 !important]This August 23, 2011 photograph obtained courtesy of the Defense Video & Imagery Distribution System (DVIDS) shows Staff Sgt. Robert Bales (L) at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, the US soldier who allegedly shot and killed 16 civilians in Afghanistan who was identified March 16, 2012 (AFP Photo / Dvids / Spc. Ryan)
[/COLOR]

The US soldier accused of massacring 16 civilians in Afghanistan has disappeared without a trace from army websites. All photos and combat service details have been removed but even the military can't clear the world's caches.
Immediately after the Pentagon released his name to the press, thousands of copies of Staff Sgt. Bales' photo were published, and details of his four tours of combat shared. There were even excerpts from his wife's blog. So why bother trying to delete the un-deletable?
According to McClatchy DC, the military said its intention in removing the material wasn't to lessen the army's embarrassment over the horrific attack, but to protect the privacy of Bales' family. Quoting an unnamed Pentagon official, the paper said that "protecting a military family has to be a priority" and that they "owe it to the wife and kids to do what we can."
The wife and kids, who have been moved to a military base in Washington State for "security reasons", have refrained from speculative comments, but Karylin Bales has issued a statement saying both her and her husband's extended families are "profoundly sad" and offering condolences to the people of the Panjawai District in Afghanistan, where the massacre occurred.
Staff Sgt Bales' wife went on to add: "Our family has little information beyond what we read and see in the media. What has been reported is completely out of character of the man I know and admire." As his wife of some years and mother to his two kids, her statement of knowing this man certainly appears to carry some weight at least, at first glance. But constantly emerging details of the man, his past, his combat tours create such a conflicting profile that it becomes almost impossible to say who knew him, or how well.
Robert Bales enlisted in the army two months after the tragedy of 9/11. He is still referred to as "our Bobby" in his hometown of Norwood, Ohio, where neighbors say his family's motto was "God, country, family" and Robert, the youngest of five brothers, was a respectful and well-liked boy. "That's not Bobby" was the sentiment of his mother, one which was echoed by the community.
He was a good student, and a good football player. But apparently he was never great and that seems to be a leitmotif of his life. He was never the star of the team. He didn't graduate from college. His career as a stockbroker was brief and unsuccessful, ending with accusations of defrauding an elderly couple out of their life savings. He ignored the $1.5 million fine he was ordered to pay. His own investment company appears to have failed. A 2002 arrest for drunken assault and a 2009 charge of a hit-and-run were, if not indicators of a potentially troubled man, then at least signs of his existing personal demons.
His military career, which some suggest may have been a way to reinvent himself, seems to follow the same pattern. His platoon leader spoke highly of him, his fellow officers respected him. Yet his military record is an undistinguished one. He was never deployed as a sniper, despite being trained as one. He didn't receive the Purple Heart that would be expected following a serious injury in combat. And last year he didn't receive a much- hoped-for promotion to sergeant first class.
His lawyers are planning to put the emphasis on his four tours of duty, claiming that injuries and mental trauma created diminished mental capacity. But military officials insisted that Bales had been properly screened and declared fit for combat.
Now, legal experts say the 38-year-old soldier could face the death penalty if convicted of the crime. But with his record and injuries he might be shown some leniency by the military jury even if convicted.
Of the long list of alleged US atrocities from prison massacres in World War II to the slaughter of civilians at My Lai in Vietnam relatively few high-profile war crimes believed to have involved Americans in the past century have resulted in convictions, let alone the death penalty.
In the case of My Lai, President Richard Nixon reduced the only prison sentence given to three years of house arrest. In the 2005 Haditha shooting of Iraqi civilians, eight Marines were charged but plea deals and promises of immunity in exchange for testimony meant there were no prison sentences.
The military hasn't executed a service member since 1961 and even if the death sentence was passed, the military wouldn't have the equipment to carry it out. Over the last 50 years, more than half the death penalty cases have been overturned by military appeals courts. So only time will show what military justice deems an appropriate punishment for murdering 16 civilians, nine of whom were children. But the mystery of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales and why he pulled the trigger that night will most likely remain unsolved.
http://www.rt.com/news/military-delete-soldier-web-222/

[Magda Hassan]

Afghan Villagers Were Threatened by US Troops Ahead of Massacre

Witnesses: Troops Lined Up All Men From Mokhoyan, Told Them They'd 'Pay'

by Jason Ditz, March 20, 2012

| Print This | Share This | Antiwar Forum

The incongruous stories surrounding the March 11 massacre on Afghan civilians in two villages took another turn today, with reports from witnesses in Mokhoyan, one of the two villages targeted, that they were threatened by US troops just days before the massacre.The witnesses say that troops rounded up all the men from the villages after a roadside bombing, lined them up against a wall, and told them they would "pay a price" for the attack.The witnesses put the date of the bombing at either March 7 or 8. Previous stories had massacre suspect Robert Bales supposedly "upset" about a bombing in which one of his friends lost a leg.The military would neither confirm or deny any bombings in the area, only insisting that they would investigate anything that might be related to the shootings. They likewise gave no comments about the threats in Mokhoyan.If confirmed, the threats would also appear to support the Afghan probe's version of the massacre, which had an organized group of over a dozen US troops carrying out the massacre, as opposed to a lone man, as the US maintains.
http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/20/afgha...-massacre/

[Lauren Johnson]

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/...s-accounts

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan Conflicting reports from eyewitnesses, US officials and local leaders show, if anything, how little is known for certain about what happened in the early morning hours of March 11, when Staff Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine women and children.
About the only facts the US military and local Afghans agree on is the number of people killed during the shooting which took place in two remote villages in Kandahar Province, a half-mile from a US military outpost and that the killings occurred sometime in the early morning hours.
While Sgt. Bales is in custody in the United States for the shooting, locals swear that multiple soldiers participated and that they communicated via walkie-talkies, indicating the attack might have been a more organized operation.
Such accounts, however, stand in stark contrast to the story being told by US officials of a lone US soldier, Bales, who snapped under the pressures of multiple deployments.





"This is a night raid," he remembered telling her.
Night raids surprise attacks by US soldiers on houses they suspect are associated with the Taliban, are common in this volatile region. "The Americans usually pick one house to raid, and then they leave."
But a few moments later residents from neighboring houses began fleeing to Habibullah's, telling everyone to hide. The attacker or attackers soon followed, he said.
"I didn't hear a lot of shooting and I didn't hear helicopters," Habibullah recalled. But he did see "two or three Americans" enter his compound, "using lights and firing at my father, who was wounded."

Karzai also spoke to Mullah Baran. Baran's brother was killed in the shooting spree, but he didn't see the shooting happen. Baran said he told Karzai what his sister-in-law, who was at the scene, had told him.
When GlobalPost asked Baran to speak directly with his sister-in-law, he initially refused.
"You don't need to talk her," Baran said. "I did, and I can tell you the story."
Eventually Baran relented, allowing GlobalPost to interview her by phone.
Massouma, who lives in the neighboring village of Najiban, where 12 people were killed, said she heard helicopters fly overhead as a uniformed soldier entered her home. She said he flashed a "big, white light," and yelled, "Taliban! Taliban! Taliban!"
Massouma said the soldier shouted "walkie-talkie, walkie-talkie." The rules of engagement in hostile areas in Afghanistan permit US soldiers to shoot Afghans holding walkie-talkies because they could be Taliban spotters.
"He had a radio antenna on his shoulder. He had a walkie-talkie himself, and he was speaking into it," she said.
After the soldier with the walkie-talkie killed her husband, she said he lingered in the doorway of her home.
"While he stood there, I secretly looked through the curtains and saw at least 20 Americans, with heavy weapons, searching all the rooms in our compound, as well as my bathroom," she said.
After they completed their search, the men left, Massouma said. She said that all seven of her children saw the attackers, but she refused to let GlobalPost speak with them.

An Afghan journalist who went to Massouma's home in the days after the shooting and spoke with one of her sons, aged seven, said the boy told him he looked through the curtains and saw a number of soldiers although he couldn't say how many.
Based on hard-to-verify testimonies like these, local and national politicians in Afghanistan claim publicly to have definitive accounts of the massacre making public statements that have further increased tensions among Afghan civilians, the Taliban and the Americans.
Massoud Akhundzada, a member of a prominent religious family in Kandahar who lost relatives in the massacre, said he is angry about the attack. But he has appealed for calm, warning against a rush to judgment by those who claim to know what happened.
"There are a lot of assumptions," Akhundzada said. "But we still don't know the truth. We have to be very careful."
Local Afghan journalists are among those searching for the truth. While several local reporters have visited the scene, they said actual eyewitnesses have been difficult to find, because most villagers are reluctant to talk and authorities have prevented journalists from visiting wounded survivors.
US officials in Afghanistan gave several Afghan journalists permission last week to visit survivors of the massacre, who are being treated at the hospital at Kandahar Airfield, a major military base in southern Afghanistan. But when the journalists arrived they ISAF officials only allowed them to take a few photographs and then asked them to leave.
"The wounded survivors, who saw everything of the massacre, are crucial to the story," said one of the frustrated reporters. "But the Americans didn't allow us to talk to them."