bbc

The claim was one of the main justifications for invading Iraq

Intelligence that Saddam Hussein could launch a chemical attack on UK targets within 45 minutes came from a taxi driver in Iraq, an MP has claimed.

Downing Street ignored advice that the claim was not credible when writing the dossier spelling out the case for the Iraq War, Adam Holloway's report said.

A Commons Defence Committee member, he claims military advice was matched to the "prevailing political wind".

The government has yet to respond to the claims by the Tory MP.

Mr Holloway, the MP for Gravesham, Kent, is a former officer in the Grenadier Guards and journalist.

He published his paper The Failure of British Political and Military Leadership through First Defence, the centre-right think-tank he chairs.

In it, he said the claim that Saddam could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45-minutes arose as British intelligence were "squeezing" agents in Iraq for information, under pressure from Downing Street to back up its case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

"The provenance of this information was never questioned in detail until after the Iraq invasion, when it became apparent that something was wrong," he said.

"In the end it turned out that the information was not credible, it had originated from an emigre taxi driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border, who had remembered an overheard conversation in the back of his cab a full two years earlier."

Mr Holloway stated that an intelligence analyst had at the time flagged up - via a footnote - that the claims were "demonstrably untrue".

"Despite this glaring factual inaccuracy... the report was characterised as reliable," he said.

more

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

* Spokesman says Berlin discussing demands for compensation for September’s airstrike victims

BERLIN: Germany’s government will pay compensation to the families of civilian victims of September’s German-ordered airstrike in Afghanistan, which Kabul says killed 30 civilians as well as insurgents, a spokesman said on Monday.

A Defence Ministry spokesman told reporters that German officials had been in contact with a lawyer representing the victims’ relatives. “We have said we will be in touch with him to discuss the demands for compensation. We will look at how this is to be done in concrete terms,” Defence Ministry spokesman Christian Dienst said at a regular government news conference.

“The question will be whether we want a legal battle stretching over years or whether we can come to an agreement out of court,” said Dienst, adding a solution would be found. New revelations about the controversial airstrike, near the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, has thrust the issue of Afghanistan into the spotlight and caused Chancellor Angela Merkel a major headache at the start of her second term. Former Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung was forced to resign from the cabinet last month over accusations he covered up the civilian toll of the strike in the weeks leading up to a federal election on September 27.

Top US general, envoy in Afghanistan face Congress

* Critics to question McChrystal about troop surge

* Eikenberry to face concerns about Afghan government

* Gates will press Karzai on "honest" cabinet in Kabul

(Adds Gates on Afghan forces, Taliban, paragraphs 16-18)

By Phil Stewart

WASHINGTON, Dec 8 (Reuters) - The top U.S. military commander and top U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan face Congress on Tuesday to explain to skeptical lawmakers how a surge of 30,000 soldiers will turn around the eight-year-old war.

Critics have branded President Barack Obama's new strategy as vague and contradictory, pointing to his call for U.S. forces to begin pulling out of Afghanistan in July 2011 just as he orders new troops into the country.

Obama is sending in less than the 40,000 troops requested by General Stanley McChrystal -- a lightning-rod issue for many lawmakers, even though part of the gap will be filled by NATO contributions.

"Did that (30,000) number just come out of a hat?" said Howard "Buck" McKeon, the senior Republican on the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, which will hear McChrystal's testimony starting at 9:30 a.m. (1430 GMT).

"What I want to find out is what McChrystal got compared to what he asked for," he told Reuters. "We have never seen actual numbers."

Supporters are looking to McChrystal and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry to explain how the U.S. military will reverse the Taliban insurgency's momentum in time to meet Obama's drawdown goal, which offers hope for a gradual exit from a costly, unpopular war in which casualties are rising.

For McChrystal, it will be his first appearance before Congress since he warned in a bleak August assessment that the mission would fail without more troops. He and Eikenberry have said improvement by Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government, widely seen as corrupt, was also critical.

Lawmakers are expected to press Eikenberry, a former U.S military commander in Afghanistan, about his concerns leaked to the media about sending in more troops before that improvement by Karzai's government.

Analysts played down chances the envoy would signal a split with McChrystal or Obama's decision on the surge.

"I think they (Eikenberry and McChrystal) both felt that clear conditions needed to be established with Karzai," said Anthony Cordesman, a security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"I think (the Obama administration) acted on Eikenberry's cable and that there were some fairly frank exchanges about what would be required from the Afghan government."

more

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N08191123.htm
By Phil Stewart

WASHINGTON, Dec 8 (Reuters) - The United States will reverse Taliban momentum within a year and accomplish its mission in Afghanistan, but it will be "undeniably difficult" and costly, the top U.S. commander there said on Tuesday.

General Stanley McChrystal, making his first appearance in Congress since his grim August assessment warned the mission would fail without more troops, applauded President Barack Obama's decision last week to deploy 30,000 additional forces.

"We can and will accomplish this mission," McChrystal said in prepared testimony to Congress. "By this time next year ... it will be clear to us that the insurgency has lost the momentum."

"And by the summer of 2011, it will be clear to the Afghan people that the insurgency will not win, giving them the chance to side with their government."

Critics of Obama's Afghan strategy have taken aim at his plan for U.S. forces to begin pulling out of Afghanistan from July 2011, and McChrystal said ramping up training of Afghan security forces for an eventual handover was critical.

Obama is also sending in less than the 40,000 troops requested by McChrystal -- a lightning-rod issue for many lawmakers, even though part of the gap will be filled by NATO contributions.

"Did that (30,000) number just come out of a hat?" Howard McKeon, the senior Republican on the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, told Reuters ahead of the panel's hearing.

Appearing with McChrystal was U.S. envoy to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, who in the build-up to the surge sent a memo to Obama expressing concern about sending in more U.S. troops until the Afghan government did more to fight corruption.

But in testimony on Tuesday, he sought to play down any disagreements and said he "fully" supported the new strategy.

"I want to underscore at the outset that General McChrystal and I are united in a joint effort in which civilian and military personnel work together every day, often literally side-by-side with our Afghan partners and allies," he told lawmakers.

McChrystal said it was critical to address concerns among Afghans that their government was "corrupt, or, at the very least, inconsequential."

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/08/mcchrystal.afghanistan/

Many Afghans prefer decisive rule to disarray of Karzai government

By Griff Witte
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 8, 2009

LAGHMAN, AFGHANISTAN -- Like nearly all provinces in Afghanistan, this one has two governors.

The first was appointed by President Hamid Karzai and is backed by thousands of U.S. troops. He governs this mountainous eastern Afghan province by day, cutting the ribbons on new development projects and, according to fellow officials with knowledge of his dealings, taking a generous personal cut of the province's foreign assistance budget.

The second governor was chosen by Taliban leader Mohammad Omar and, hunted by American soldiers, sneaks in only at night. He issues edicts on "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" stationery, plots attacks against government forces and fires any lower-ranking Taliban official tainted by even the whiff of corruption.

As the United States prepares to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to bolster Karzai's beleaguered government, Taliban leaders are quietly pushing ahead with preparations for a moment they believe is inevitable: their return to power. The Taliban has done so by establishing an elaborate shadow government of governors, police chiefs, district administrators and judges that in many cases already has more bearing on the lives of Afghans than the real government.

"These people in the shadow government are running the country now," said Khalid Pashtoon, a legislator from the southern province of Kandahar who has close ties to Karzai. "They're an important part of the chaos."

U.S. military officials say that dislodging the Taliban's shadow government and establishing the authority of the Karzai administration over the next 18 months will be critical to the success of President Obama's surge strategy. But the task has been complicated by the fact that in many areas, Afghans have decided they prefer the severe but decisive authority of the Taliban to the corruption and inefficiency of Karzai's appointees.

When the Taliban government was ousted in 2001 following five disastrous years in power, a majority of Afghans cheered the departure of a regime marked by the harsh repression of women and minorities, anemic government services and international isolation. Petty thieves had their hands chopped off, and girls were barred from school.

Today, there is little evidence the Taliban has fundamentally changed. But from Kunduz province in the north to Kandahar in the south, even government officials concede that their allies have lost the people's confidence and that, increasingly, residents are turning to shadow Taliban officials to solve their problems.

Pashtoon said that on a recent visit to Kandahar, he heard from constituents who were pleased with the Taliban's judges. "Islamic law is always quicker. You get resolution on the spot," he said. "If they had brought the case to the government courts, it would have taken a year or two years, or maybe it would never be resolved at all. With the Taliban, it takes an hour."

For many Afghans, there is no choice. Across broad swaths of the country, especially Afghanistan's vast rural areas, the government has little to no presence, leaving the Taliban as the only authority.

Shadow government officials collect taxes, forcing farmers at gunpoint to turn over 10 percent of their crops, according to accounts of officials and residents. Taliban district chiefs conscript young men into the radical Islamist movement's army of insurgents, threatening death for those unwilling to serve. And the Taliban's judges issue rulings marked by a ruthless efficiency: With no jails in which to hold prisoners, execution by hanging or automatic rifle is the swiftly delivered punishment for convicted murderers and rapists, or for anyone found guilty of working with the government.

"Whether people like them or not, they have to support them," said Fatima Aziz, a parliament member from Kunduz, a province where she said the shadow government has emerged only in the past year.

There are no clear lines between the Taliban's fighting force and its shadow administration. Insurgents double as police chiefs; judges may spend an afternoon hearing cases, then take up arms at dusk.

But the shadow government represents an essential element of the Taliban's strategy. The Taliban emerged in the mid-1990s as an alternative to the lawlessness of the warring mujaheddin factions, and its leaders quickly imposed rigid rules of order in areas under their control.

Having been forced underground or into exile in 2001, the Taliban has returned not just to wage war but also to demonstrate that it is capable of delivering a different model of governance from the one offered by Karzai and his allies. Afghans who live under Taliban control say the group's weaknesses remain the same as during the movement's five-year tenure ruling the country. The Taliban provides virtually no social services, leaving Afghans on their own when it comes to health care, education and development.

Fed up with corruption

more

New York Times, By Mark Landler, December 9

WASHINGTON — America’s involvement in Afghanistan could stretch on for years and cost upward of $10 billion annually just to finance an adequate Afghan security force, the overall commander in the region told Congress on Wednesday.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, one of the military’s most influential generals, estimated that building and maintaining a combined army and police force of 400,000 — a size that American commanders believe may eventually be needed to fully secure the country — would cost more than $10 billion a year.

“There’s no question, as President Karzai was highlighting yesterday, that Afghanistan will require substantial international funding for years to come in a whole host of different areas, not the least of which is their security forces,” said General Petraeus, the commander of the military’s Central Command, which oversees operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan and other regional trouble spots.

On Tuesday, President Hamid Karzai, at a news conference with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, said Afghanistan would not be able to pay for its own security until at least 2024, an assertion that surprised Mr. Gates and drew expressions of concern from senators of both parties.

On Monday, the anonymous blogger Security Crank noticed something interesting: all the U.S. and NATO airstrikes in Afghanistan seemingly kill exactly 30 people every time. How can that be?

Security Crank documented no less than 12 occasions in which news reports, relying on field commanders' estimates, noted that exactly 30 suspected Taliban were killed in airstrikes and, occasionally, artillery attacks. He said:

But the much more important point remains: how could we possibly have any idea how the war is going, here or anywhere else, when the bad guys seem only to die in groups of 30? The sheer ubiquity of that number in fatality and casualty counts is astounding, to the point where I don’t even pay attention to a story anymore when they use that magic number 30. It is an indicator either of ignorance or deliberate spin… but no matter the case, whenever you see the number 30 used in reference to the Taliban, you should probably close the tab and move onto something else, because you just won’t get a good sense of what happened there.

So, why is it always 30? Do thirty casualties seem like enough to justify a military attack, or few enough to not attract too much attention to an incident? More

_{Tolerating prostitution is tolerating abuse and torture of women and children.}

Aid groups working in Afghanistan have accused the US of trying to "militarise" their work by attaching conditions to aid and grants.

A number of aid organisations have told Al Jazeera they have turned down funding from the US government as the money has strings attached to military operations.

One such stipulation is "battlefield clean-up", which tasks aid groups with working directly under military reconstruction teams.

Anne Richard, of the International Rescue Committee, told Al Jazeera: "Sometimes, military leaders assume that because we are in the same place, we share the same over-arching goals.

"Our goal is to help the Afghan people - ideally, they help themselves. The military's goal is to fight in a war and to provide security.

"They are motivated by US national interest, we are motivated by humanitarian causes, humanitarian principals."

Aid shortfall

Humanitarian groups said that in 2009 their fundraising fell $200 million short of what they needed to help the Afghan people.

But William Frej, the mission director for USAID, said: "Militarisation of aid is a gross mischaracterisation of what actually happens on the ground.

"Without [counterinsurgency] and without the military's support, many of the humanitarian agencies - such as Oxfam - that raise such complaints would not be able to enter the areas once controlled by insurgents."

Beyond risks of being closely associated with the military, aid organisations also argue that they are simply better at delivering aid.

"I just don't think the military should be telling Americans if they want to work in humanitarian fields, they should go into the military," Richard said.

"I think that if Americans want to do this good work, perhaps even veterans, they should join our organisation."
Source

_{Tolerating prostitution is tolerating abuse and torture of women and children.}

On the heels of a U.S. announcement of a massive troop surge for Afghanistan, an al Qaeda spokesman Saturday appeared to be trying to improve the group's image in the region with a new audio message in English.

Adam Gadahn, also known as Azzam the American, appeared in a 17-minute video released on Islamist online forums late Friday, offering condolences to the families of innocent people killed in al Qaeda attacks.

Gadahn said al Qaeda "have condemned and continue to condemn" all attacks by Western powers or "secular political forces."

"We express our condolences to the families of the Muslim men, women and children killed in these criminal acts and we ask Allah to have mercy on those killed and accept them as shohadaa (martyrs)," he says in the video.

"We also express the same in regard to the unintended Muslim victims of the mujahedeen's operations against the crusaders and their allies and puppets, and to the countless faceless and nameless Muslim victims of the murderous crusades" in Afghanistan, Pakistan's Waziristan regions and Swat Valley, and elsewhere, he said.

It is a rare example of al Qaeda offering condolences to the families of those killed in the group's own attacks.

CNN