Massacre darkens Afghan outlook for
US By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - While US officials insisted
their counterinsurgency strategy is still working,
Sunday's pre-dawn massacre by a US staff sergeant
of 16 people, including nine children, in their
homes in Kandahar province has dealt yet another
body blow to Washington's hopes of sustaining a
significant military presence in Afghanistan after
2014.
The massacre was perpetrated by one
person acting entirely on his own, the Pentagon
said on Monday. But it was the latest in a series
of recent incidents, including the dissemination
on the Internet of a video showing four American
soldiers urinating on the corpses of dead Afghans
and the apparently inadvertent burning of copies
of the Koran outside a US military base, that have
stoked popular outrage against US and other
foreign troops.
It also took place amid
indications that the US electorate and
congress are increasingly
disillusioned with what last year had already
become the longest war in US history.
A
new Washington Post/ABC public opinion poll
released on Sunday found that 60% of respondents
now believe the Afghanistan campaign was not worth
fighting, close to an all-time high in the
decade-long war.
Moreover, only 30% of
respondents said they believed most Afghans
support US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) efforts in their country; 55% said they
believed that most Afghans oppose the foreign
presence.
The massacre took place just
after Washington and the Afghan government of
President Hamid Karzai had finally agreed on one
of two key points of contention that have stood in
the way of the signing of a strategic partnership
agreement that would permit Washington to retain a
substantial military advisory force and possibly
access to several key bases after 2014, the
deadline by which foreign combat troops are to
have left Afghanistan.
The two sides
reached an agreement last week on transferring
some 3,200 suspected Taliban insurgents detained
by US forces at the Parwan prison at the
US-controlled Bagram air base to Afghan custody
over the next six months.
Under the
accord, the United States will retain a veto over
whether specific detainees could be released by
Afghan authorities so long as US troops remain in
the country. In addition, the two sides agreed
that Washington would retain custody of non-Afghan
prisoners believed to be affiliated with al-Qaeda.
Yet to be resolved, however, is Karzai's
demand that night raids be ended against alleged
Taliban targets by US special forces. The raids,
which US military officials say have resulted in
the capture or killing of thousands of Taliban
fighters in recent years, have also been cited by
many Afghans and international non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) as perhaps the most important
cause of local discontent with the US military
presence. Sunday's massacre, which did not
involve special forces, took place in three
villages in Kandahar's Panjwai district, a Taliban
stronghold until the US "surged" troops into the
region as part of the counterinsurgency strategy
adopted by President Barack Obama in late 2009.
According to various reports, a
38-year-old army staff sergeant who had served
several tours of duty in Iraq and was deployed to
Afghanistan in December left his base in the early
morning, walked to a nearby village, and broke
into three houses in a 500-meter radius, shooting
and stabbing its residents, including young
children. He then returned to his base, where he
surrendered and is under detention.
According to the Pentagon account, the
base authorities sent troops aboard helicopters to
treat and evacuate the wounded, thus fueling
rumors that more than one rogue soldier was
involved in the attacks.
"This latest
assault was reportedly the work of a single
soldier, but many Afghans won't believe or care
that it was not another routine US raid. The
effects are the same," said Ann Jones, author of
the 2006 book Kabul in Winter and a
prominent critic of US counterinsurgency tactics
in Afghanistan.
"US officials miss the
point entirely, insisting this massacre was a
one-off tragedy, when Afghans know something like
it will happen again any day."
US
officials including Obama, Defense Secretary Leon
Panetta and top military commanders have issued a
number of statements of regret since the incident,
promising to investigate fully what took place and
hold anyone responsible accountable.
Speaking at the United Nations on Monday,
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton also
noted that Washington "had a difficult and complex
few weeks in Afghanistan" but stressed that "our
steadfast dedication to protecting the Afghan
people" remained unchanged.
But while some
officials expressed relief that the massacre had
not yet sparked the kinds of violent
demonstrations - or apparent revenge killings by
Afghan troops against US soldiers - that followed
the Koran burning, independent analysts said it
was bound to add to the mutual distrust that has
become increasingly evident in recent months.
"Coming right after the unintentional
desecration of Korans and the deaths of several
NATO soldiers from rogue Afghan soldiers, this
latest tragedy will further inflame anti-foreign
sentiment in Afghanistan and strain ties between
President Karzai('s) government and his NATO
allies," Bruce Reidel, a former top US Central
Intelligence Agency South Asia analyst and an
architect of Obama's strategy in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, wrote in The Daily Beast on Monday.
The killings "will increase pressure to
find a political solution to the Afghan war", he
noted, adding that the fact that the Taliban have
not renounced peace talks and have agreed to open
an office in Qatar to facilitate negotiations in
spite of these incidents were favorable signs.
But Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistan expert on
Afghanistan who enjoys some influence in
policymaking circles in Washington and also favors
peace talks with the Taliban, wrote in the
Financial Times on Monday that the Western forces
in Afghanistan were facing a "crisis of
confidence" and Karzai's "desire to seek a
strategic partnership agreement with the US is
becoming more and more unacceptable to the Afghan
people".
The latest incident will also add
to the war fatigue in the United States.
Republican presidential candidate Newt
Gingrich, a foreign-policy hawk who has called,
among other things, for bombing Iran, admitted on
Sunday after news of the massacre reached
Washington that the US mission in Afghanistan was
"not doable" and Washington's intervention there
was "probably counter-productive".
Unlike
Democrats and independents, who have been
consistently more skeptical about the war,
Republicans in the latest poll were evenly split
on whether it was worth fighting, and some
Republican lawmakers were balking at the proposed
budget for Afghanistan next year before the latest
incident.
The soldier, whose name will not
be released pending completion of an
investigation, was reportedly taking part in a
"village stabilization" operation, a key part of
US counterinsurgency strategy that seeks to win
over village elders and organize local police
forces.
His home base, where his wife and
three children reportedly live, is at Joint Base
Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Washington. That is the
same home base of the so-called "kill team", a
unit led by another staff sergeant that killed at
least three Afghan civilians in separate incidents
and then cut off their body parts as trophies in
2009.
Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs was
convicted of murder and other crimes and sentenced
to a life term by a military tribunal at the base
last November, but he could be freed in as little
as 10 years.
Jim Lobe's blog on
US foreign policy can be read at
http://www.lobelog.com.
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