Nato urged to allow partition of Afghanistan
Afghanistan should be allowed to partition along ethnic lines by pulling back Nato forces and acknowledging that the Taliban will not be defeated in their heartland, a senior former American national security adviser has warned.
Robert Blackwill said that there had been a decade of ‘innumerable errors’ in the Western approach to Afghanistan Photo: REUTERS
Robert Blackwill, who was Condolezza Rice’s deputy as National Security Adviser in 2003 to 2004, will use a speech at the International Institute of Strategic Studies think tank in London on Monday to call on President Barack Obama to make drastratic changes in the war’s objectives.
He told The Daily Telegraph that the surge of forces launched last year to stabilise Afghanistan was “high likely” to fail and that the death toll in the conflict was too high a price to pay.“The Taliban are winning, we are losing,” he said. “They have high morale and want to continue the insurgency. Plan A is going to fail. We need a Plan B
“Let the Taliban control the Pashtun south and east, the American and allied price for preventing that is far too high.”
Mr Blackwill said that there had been a decade of “innumerable errors” in the Western approach to Afghanistan. Most notably American policy shifted after the atttacks on September 11, 2001 from expelling al Qaeda from its Afghan sanctuaries to crushing the Taliban and installing a democratic government in Kabul.
The result was that America now had 1,000 soldiers deployed for every one of the estimated 100 al Qaeda operatives now believed to be based in Afghanistan and was hemorraging $100 billion a year on the conflict.
A review of the Afghan war that Mr Obama will present to the US public in November, represents an opportunity to change the contours of the conflict. The US committed an extra 35,000 troops to Afghanistan in attempt to reverse Taliban gains.
Mr Blackwill believes the US should only seek to defend those areas dominated by Afghanistan’s Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities by pulling out of bases in the south.
By accepting that the Taliban would overrun Kandahar and other big population centres, the US would threaten the Taliban only if it allowed al Qa’eda to reform or if the movement started to encroach northwards.
“How many people really believe that Kandahar is central to Western civilisation. We did not got to Afghanistan to control Kandahar ,” he said.
“Our preference at the time of the attack was for the Taliban to give up al Qaeda not to change the regime. Mr Obama himself and the administration say what we are trying to do in Afghanistan is to destroy al Qaeda.”
Alongside misdirected strategy, the “utter corruption” of the government of President Hamid Karzai had eclipsed Nato’s hopes to keeping the Taliban at bay after its defeat in late 2001.
In contrast to Mr Blackwill’s view that Afghanistan’s army and police could not be made ready to control the whole country, Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, said the forces would assume responsibility by 2015.
“If we were to leave before 2015, a point at which on current progress we expect to have achieved our security aims, it would be a shot in the arm to violent jihadists everywhere, re-energising violent radical and extremist Islamists,” he said.
“It would send a signal that we did not have the moral resolve and the political fortitude to see through what we ourselves have described as national security imperative.”
by Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Published: 7:00AM BST 13 Sep 2010
Source: The Telegraph
More on the war on terror:
– Robert Fisk: Nine years, two wars, hundreds of thousands dead – and nothing learnt
– US Soldiers Killed Afghan Civilians For Sport And Collected Fingers As Trophies’
– American Deaths In Afghanistan Surpass Highest Annual Record
– US Colonel Lawrence Sellin Sacked After Afghan Rant
– Al Qaeda Doesn’t Exist or How The US Created Al Qaeda (Documentary)
– Afghanistan Discovers 1.8 Billion Barrel Oilfield
– US Afghan War: Unsustainable, Un-Winnable
– President Obama Kills 66 More US Soldiers in July
– Afghanistan War Logs: US Marines Sanitised Record of Bloodbath
– ‘Sangingrad’ Troop Withdrawal: Four Years In Hell, And Taliban Remain Undefeated
– Audit: US Can’t Account For $8.7 Billion In Iraqi Cash
– U.S. War Crimes: Cancer rate in Fallujah worse than Hiroshima
– Iraq inquiry: UK Government lied, ‘intentionally and substantially’ exaggerated WMD threat
– U.S. To Buy Russian M-17 Helicopters For Afghan Air Force
– The Truth About Afghanistan: ‘We’re f***ing losing this thing.’
– General Stanley McChrystal Recalled To Washington Over Rolling Stone Article
– US ‘Discovers’ Vast Mineral Riches Worth Nearly $1 Trillion In Afghanistan
– US ’secret war’ expands globally as Special Operations forces are deployed in 75 countries
– German President Horst Köhler had to resign for telling the truth (!)
– Afghans Are Convinced That The US Is Funding The Taliban
– Taliban get £1,600 bounty for each Nato soldier killed
– Taliban attack biggest NATO base in Afghanistan
– President Obama Wins The Right to Detain People With No Habeas Review
– Law Prof. David Glazier: CIA Drone Pilots Could Be Tried for ‘War Crimes’
– German troops in Afghanistan call on Angela Merkel to explain why they are at war
– Rioters vent fury at US after Nato troops kill Afghan civilians on bus
– WikiLeaks Plans to Post Video Showing US Massacre of Afghani Civilians
– Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld ‘Knew Guantánamo Prisoners Were Innocent’
– Obama Administration Approves Targeted Killing of American Cleric
– John Pilger: Have a Nice World War III, Folks
– US shipping hundreds of powerful bunker buster bombs for coming attack on Iran
– Secret Pentagon Spy Network Hired To ‘Track And Kill’
– Rep. Ron Paul: Five Minute Speech in Support of Rep. Kucinich’s Afghanistan Resolution
– US Drone Strikes in Pakistan: 1 in 3 Killed Are Civilians
– Blackwater Guards Stole Hundreds Of Weapons In Kabul And Went On Deadly Rampage
– Judge Napolitano and Angela Keaton on Freedom Watch: Obama’s Bush Foreign Policy
– The New Vision of the Obama Administration: War Without End
– International Fund to Buy Off Taliban Leaders in Afghanistan Will Cost Hundreds of Millions
– Ron Paul: US Foreign Policy is Bankrupting America
– Pentagon backtracks after Defense Secretary Robert Gates ‘admits’ Blackwater operating in Pakistan
– US Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret ‘Jesus’ Bible Codes (ABC News Investigation)
– US Marine Commander: Afghan surge troops won’t target drug crops
– Afghan CIA suicide bomber ‘was courted as potential informant’
– 857 US Soldiers Died in Afghanistan Region Since 2001
– Obama’s surge comes at a cost: At least $57,077.60 per minute
– Nato appeals to Russia for more help with the war in Afghanistan
– US Forces Chief Admiral Mike Mullen Warns of More Fighting And Casualties in Afghanistan
– Rep. Dennis Kucinich: ‘These Wars Are Corrupting The Heart Of Our Nation!’
– Rep. Dennis Kucinich: The Truth About Afghanistan
– Obama administration tells Pakistan: Tackle Taliban or we will
– Dennis Kucinich: Afghans ‘don’t want to be saved by us, they want to be saved from us.’
– MSNBC Rachel Maddow: War President Obama
– Ron Paul: ‘Obama is Actually Preparing Us For Perpetual War’
– Afghanistan Surge to Cost At Least $40 Billion, That Is $1.333.333 For One US Soldier Per Year
– President Obama ‘to deploy 30,000 troops to Afghanistan’
– CIA Secret ‘Torture’ Prison Found at Fancy Horseback Riding Academy Outside Vilnius, Lithuania
– British military forces told to ‘bribe’ the Taliban with ‘bags of gold’
– Afghanistan: New 67-Million-Dollar US Prison At Bagram
– The ‘Obama Market’ in Kabul: US Military Rations, Sleeping Bags, Tactical Goggles on Sale
– Paul Craig Roberts: Republic of Fools & The Evil Empire
Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.
Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan’s natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.
“The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.
“There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, it’s about oil, it’s not about democracy.”
“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”
– Three US helicopters crash in Afghanistan, 14 Americans killed
– Morale dips for American marines in Afghanistan:
“I’m not much for this war. I’m not sure it’s worth all those lives lost,” said Sergeant Christian Richardson as we walked across corn fields that will soon be ploughed up to plant a spring crop of opium poppy.
– Afghanistan opium production reaches 6,900 tons:
Opium production rate has soared to 6,900 tons in Afghanistan in the past 10 years ‘despite‘ the presence of 100,000 foreign troops in the country for nearly eight years.
A report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said on Wednesday that Afghanistan produces 92 percent of the world’s opium that has devastating global consequences.
The UN report also noted that Afghanistan’s illegal opium production is worth 65 billion dollars.
The heroin and opium market feeds 15 million addicts, with Europe, Russia and Iran consuming half the supply, UNODC reported.
– Ron Paul: ‘The more troops we send the worse things get!’
– Ron Paul On The US Afghanistan War Policy
– Italians bribed the Taleban all over Afghanistan, say two senior Afghan officials
– Pentagon spends $400 per gallon of gas in Afghanistan
– I was ordered to cover up President Karzai election fraud, sacked UN envoy says
– President Obama quietly deploying 13,000 more US troops to Afghanistan
– Congressman Alan Grayson on Afghanistan
– Ten more US soldiers killed in Afghanistan
– ‘We’re pinned down:’ 4 US Marines die in Afghan ambush
– Top US commander in Afghanistan: The Taliban have gained the upper hand:
The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict by increasing the number of troops in heavily populated areas like the volatile southern city of Kandahar, the insurgency’s spiritual home. Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned that means U.S. casualties, already running at record levels, will remain high for months to come.
(Source: The Wall Street Journal)
– General Sir David Richards: Afghanistan will take 30 to 40 years