Record bombs dropped on Afghanistan posted by Richard Seymour

Got this in the mail:

Air Force, Navy and other coalition warplanes dropped a record number of bombs in Afghanistan during April, Air Forces Central figures show.

In the past month, warplanes released 438 bombs, the most ever.

April also marked the fourth consecutive month that the number of bombs dropped rose, after a decline starting last July.

The munitions were released during 2,110 close-air support sorties.

The actual number of airstrikes was higher because the AFCent numbers don’t include attacks by helicopters and special operations gunships. The numbers also don’t include strafing runs or launches of small missiles.

Over Iraq, 26 bombs were released during 767 strike sorties.

Transport crews airdropped 1.8 million pounds of supplies, mostly in Afghanistan, and tankers off loaded 85 million pounds of fuel.

Reconnaissance aircraft flew 1,402 missions over Iraq and Afghanistan. [Italics mine].

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', afghanistan, air strikes, air war, NATO, US imperialism

The apex of moronia posted by Richard Seymour

HL Mencken's description of Arkansas might have been revived to describe everything under the NATO canopy in 1999. Then again, his castigating of the "booboisie" would scarcely have gone amiss that year either. The tenth anniversary of the bombing of Serbia, supposedly the summit of that decade's growing humanitarian concern, should be the occasion for some wrist-slashing or hara-kiri on the part of those hideous ghouls who actually cheered the slaughter on. Though it wasn't the bloodiest of American-led wars, it was the occasion for some screaming, shuddering wargasms.

The moral ratification for such concupiscence was the contention that, in a corner of Europe not as yet integrated into the civilized integument of the European Union, genocide was (once again) unfolding. It would be redundant to revisit every article cynically rousing Holocaust memory, every quotation from a leading statesperson blithering about 'Europe' or 'Western values' (Ignatieff had surprisingly little to say about such narcissism, presumably because he partook of it), or every barbarity from Thomas Friedman. It is not necessary to catalogue the calls to "cleanse" Serbia, the demands for Serbia to be placed into receivership, the racial essentialism, the cries of "Not yet enough bombs, and they are already too late", Huntington's civilizational crap about Western humanitarianism versus Orthodox Serb barbarism, etc. Nor need we once again rehearse the numbers game, all of which distasteful charade was purely designed to reinforce the idea that there was an ongoing genocide which nothing short of an orchestrated campaign of high-tech violence could stop. The diplomatic record has been amply covered elsewhere, while the CIA's activities in helping lay the ground for war by making the KLA a proxy army of provocateurs awaits further elucidation. And the cover-up over Serbian civilian casualties, concealed within the raiment of 'surgical', 'precision' warfare aimed exclusively at the machinery of 'genocide', need not detain us.

It is enough to note that the ideas which produced this effusive outpouring of support for war were utterly berserk, and contributed to the deranged imperialism that liberals were to espouse during the 'war on terror'. Fresh from having pledged to fight for his country over Kosovo, David Aaronovitch defended Tony Blair's remake-the-world conference speech after 9/11 not so much against charges of "liberal imperialism" which were made in the New Statesman, but against the idea that there was anything wrong with liberal imperialism. Liberals, he averred, should try to run the world. The lesson of the Nineties was clear - do nothing, and you get Kosovo. Michael Ignatieff, having compared Serbian counterinsurgency to the Nazi holocaust, and demanded to know why the war was so late in coming, became a staunch advocate of "humanitarian empire". The age of postcolonial independence was a failure, as "populations find themselves without an imperial arbiter to appeal to" and so have "set upon each other for that final settling of scores so long deferred by the presence of empire". It was only unfortunate that America was so reluctant to fully assume the white man's burden. The liberal-neocon coalition over Yugoslavia, expressed by the Balkan Action Committee and its ads demanding a full invasion of Serbia, was carried forward into the new millenium and may well have continued to thrive had it not been for Iraq. It may yet be revived, over Darfur or a similar issue. The allure of a righteous kill, whether it comes with explicit overtures for empire or not, has hardly disappeared.

One other aspect of the war fever generated in the spring of 1999 was the sheer gratitude that many UK commentators expressed toward Tony Blair. I raise this because in a couple of talks and meetings, I have been asked to say something about why the lib imps so adore Tony Blair. It occurs to me that the love affair really began with Kosovo. Andrew Marr, later to issue a gushing benediction as the BBC's chief political commentator for Blair's war in Iraq, fell over himself praising the "brave, bold, visionary" new PM in the Observer. The liberal press were, as a rule, overjoyed to discover that their ally in Downing Street was no calculating cynic, but a true believer whose ministrations were as impassioned as their own. So unlike the previous, sleazy Major administration and its unprincipled stance toward Bosnia. Why, just look at the images of him, in his short-sleeved shirt, cuddling Kosovan refugees while his wife gently weeps in the background. Moreover, he was even more aggressive in pursuing that war than Clinton had been. There were strong indications that he would have favoured a ground invasion. As Blair became more adept at manipulating the commentariat, the loyalty he generated ensured that many backed him during his worst moments. Just as the antiwar movement was surging in numbers and feeling in early 2003, the neoconservative writer and current Tory MP Michael Gove wrote "I can't fight my feelings any more - I love you Tony". He was not the first or last to express such admiration. American warmongers always much preferred Blair to Bush, and the more the public hated him, the more they treasured for being so contemptuous of public opinion. Ten years on, the best the Atlanticists can do is groom a perpetually puzzled-looking David Miliband to take his place.

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', air war, kosovo, liberal imperialism, serbia, the liberal defense of murder, tony blair, yugoslavia

It has come to something... posted by Richard Seymour

...when you think a Status of Forces Agreement would be an improvement. The recent massacre in Afghanistan turns out to have killed up to 96 civilians (a "legitimate strike", says the Pentagon), and after a series of incidents in which US soldiers have murdered civilians and declined to take responsibility, the Karzai administration is getting desperate. But such agreements always entail immunity for US troops, and no US administration is going to negotiate one that doesn't. Historically, these agreements have tended to be seen as humiliating in themselves. In fact, one of the earliest opposition statements from Khomeini attacked such an agreement between the US military and the Shah, which he said reduced the status of an Iranian to beneath that of a dog, since a US soldier would have more to answer for if he ran over a dog in America than if he ran over a human being in Iran.

This just speaks of the subjection of the Afghan parliament, and its absolute lack of authority either with its paymasters or in Afghanistan as a whole. Every indication is that they are struggling to keep their heads above water even as a nominal administration. The Taliban have long held most of the country, it seems. And this article by Jason Burke suggests that the Taliban are winning simply by creating a "parallel administration, which is more effective, more popular and more brutal than the government's". Maybe take Burke's reporting with a little pinch of salt, however: apparently, he doesn't know when he's talking to a well-known member of the Taliban and minister in Mullah Omar's cabinet.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, air war, hamid karzai, taliban, US imperialism

Afghanistan: the air war intensifies. posted by Richard Seymour

Remember that this is how it's done:

"Yes, it is a civilian village, mud hut, like everything else in this country. But don’t say that. Say it’s a military compound. It’s a built-up area, barracks, command and control. Just like with the convoys: If it really was a convoy with civilian vehicles they were using for transport, we would just say hey, military convoy, troop transport."

As Tom Engelhardt has pointed out, this is an American tradition:

"On its front page, the New York Times labeled the operation in and around a village called My Lai 4 (or "Pinkville," as it was known to U.S. forces in the area) a significant success. "American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement on the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day-long fighting." United Press International termed what happened there an "impressive victory," and added a bit of patriotic color: "The Vietcong broke and ran for their hide-out tunnels. Six-and-a-half hours later, ‘Pink Village' had become ‘Red, White and Blue Village."

All these dispatches from the "front" were, of course, military fairy tales. (There were no reporters in the vicinity.) It took over a year for a former GI named Ronald Ridenhour, who had heard about the bloody massacre from participants, and a young former AP reporter named Seymour Hersh working in Washington for a news service no one had ever heard of, to break the story, revealing that "red, white, and blue village" had just been red village -- the red of Vietnamese peasant blood. Over 400 elderly men, women, children, and babies had been slaughtered there by Charlie Company of Task Force Barker in a nearly day-long rampage."

The one thing the United States military can always be counted on to do, in other words, is to kill large numbers of civilians and then brazenly lie about it. This is why a US bombing raid that kills 76 civilians, following an attack the previous day that killed at least twenty, is described as a successful strike against 30 'insurgents'. The truth is that the entire military strategy of the US-led occupation is implicated in these massacres. As the quote from Chief Warrant Officer Dave Diaz above indicates, the American military is fully aware that a) it is fighting an unconventional guerilla force that doesn't have formal military outposts, bases and convoys, and b) it is a movement with roots in the civilian population itself. And since the US is increasingly reliant on aerial bombardment (more so in Afghanistan than in Iraq), it is inevitably going to slaughter large numbers of civilians. And then lie about it. Marc Garlasco, who used to work as an adviser to the Pentagon on high-value targeting, told Salon last year that the "magic number" was thirty: if the anticipated number of civilians who would die in an air strike was to be lower than thirty, it could go ahead without executive approval. Otherwise Bush or the Secretary of Defense would have to give approval. Well, of course, such expectations are entirely framed by the military's own requirements. They're not obliged to 'expect' large numbers of civilian casualties in a particular area, even where there are large numbers of civilians. If they want to hit the target, they can simply determine an area to be exclusively populated by insurgents, get JTAC to confirm a 'successful strike' and then move on to the next target.

Recall the data published by the CSIS last year, confirming a massive spike in US bombing raids in the summer of 2007, with 368 major strikes in July and 670 in August. This July, it was reported that air strikes had almost doubled since the previous year according to official figures (and, incidentally, the official figures seem to suggest an even higher daily strike rate than last year's CSIS figures did). This means that on average there are 68 major air strikes across Afghanistan each day, using 500 - 2,000lb bombs to pummel the area and then cannon fire to finish off the target. That's well over 2000 air strikes a month. I should say that increases the odds of blitzing someone's house, or a wedding ceremony, somewhat. This is a very rough extrapolation from last year's chart (click to enlarge):



I should point out that support for these bombing raids has rapidly evaporated even among the client elite. Every major political figure from Karzai downward prefers a truce with the opposition whom we so lazily dub 'Taliban' - but, of course, they don't run the show any more than the population, which also overwhelmingly prefers negotiations to the American escalation. Afghan newspapers, including the daily Hasht-e Sobh which broadly supports the occupation, have publicly called for an end to the bombing raids and no increases in foreign troops. They will be disappointed. On both sides of the Atlantic, the signs are that the war on Afghanistan is going to be intensified. The UK military leadership is recommending pulling troops out of Iraq and increasing troop levels in Helmand by 50%. Obama has consistently called for an increase in troop levels in Afghanistan, talking recently of an increase of 10,000 American soldiers to start with, more than a fifty percent increase on present levels.

The main aim of a future US presidency will be to get NATO members to commit more soldiers, and stop the coalition from fragmenting any further, especially after the Georgian debacle. An interesting article by Ian Traynor in today's Guardian confirms the diagnosis that NATO is hobbled by divisions, and overstretched in its commitments. Some of its members are wondering what use such an alliance has in this era. The fact is that in its main current role as an international fighting force in Afghanistan, it is currently being beaten by a poorly armed guerilla army which it substantially outnumbers. And you have to wonder what proportion of those guerillas are well-trained, seasoned combatants. If it were to get drawn into a simmering conflict with Russia, it would less resemble the military alliance of the Cold War than one of the pre-WWI treaty organisations like the Triple Alliance. Its longevity and stability would be in question, because of the differing orientations toward Russia within the organisation.

However, Obama would have the chance in the short-term to turn matters around, at least so far as Afghanistan is concerned. The Canadian government, and European governments which have sent troops to Afghanistan, continue to resist popular pressure to stop sending the troops there. Sarkozy, for example, is a strong backer of the war in Afghanistan. He will have to allow a parliamentary vote in September on whether France should continue to participate in the occupation, due to recent constitutional changes. Despite a clear majority wanting troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan, parliament is sure to approve Sarkozy's policy of getting up America's arse and staying there (although it would seem an opportune point for mobilising the French antiwar movement). The German Defense Minister is pushing to increase troop levels by a thousand, about a 20% increase. Berlusconi has removed restrictions on Italian troop operations to enable them to take on more dangerous missions. All indications are that European political elites remain strongly committed to pacifying Afghanistan and by extension, the adjacent, strategically crucial, region. Obama can sell American hegemony on that front, for the time being, and it seems that some of his 'progressive' supporters are quite keen on the occupation of Afghanistan. So, lucky Afghanistan: a heightened sense of liberation, at gunpoint as well as from 20,000 feet, is coming soon.

Labels: afghanistan, air war, isaf, NATO, russia, US imperialism

Secret Air War Confirmed posted by Richard Seymour

A recent (typically apologetic) study by the CSIS of US bombing raids in Iraq and Afghanistan has produced figures that confirm what many of us have been arguing - that the US has drastically escalated its aerial assault on Iraq and Afghanistan, below the radar of the corporate media. You may not have realised by how much, though. These are the figures (click to enlarge):



Which statistics, fed into Excel, produce this (click to enlarge):



As you can see, both countries have taken a hammering, but Afghanistan in particular has taken the brunt of a massive series of air attacks in part due to the 'risk-transfer' conception of war, in which civilians are to bear the brunt of death and destruction rather than US combatants. The hostile terrain of Afghanistan, and the fact that few are actually covering it very extensively, makes it an ideal target for this kind of ferocious assault - with, as we saw last year, a rolling wave of massacres in the country. Inevitably, since the air war hasn't been covered much by the media, and given its insensitivity to 'enemy' casualties, those massacres reported are a tiny sample of the true total. Without a Lancet-style survey, we will remain very much in the dark about the true nature of this assault and its effects.

Labels: afghanistan, air war, iraq, massacre, secret air war

Fixing evidence around the policy posted by Richard Seymour

Iraqi fighters tortured for 'evidence' of Iranian involvement in insurgency.

Labels: air war, iran, US imperialism

Turn off the lights: you don't want to see this. posted by Richard Seymour

As if it was necessary to dim the solar rays so that the Bush administration could carry on its massacres discreetly. What's the point, when you can simply seal off towns, bust them up, and then let a former green beret posing as a reporter follow you around as you point out evil-doers and evil-dones? From time to time, there is a glimmer of good news: the troops openly saying the war is 'unwinnable', for example; the all-too-late withdrawal of troops from Basra, for another. But, with Democrat complicity assured, and little sign as yet that the antiwar movement is going to emerge from that canopy under which all life withers and dies, the Bush administration is going for the kill. This report, based on media reports, says Iraqi death rates resulting from the war have doubled in the last year, probably in large part due to the 'surge'. Now, I think you may remember me pointing out that the death rate had, according to the Lancet survey, doubled every year since the occupation began. If that trend has indeed continued, then there have been 1.3m excess deaths as a result of the war as of two months ago. For all that, Bush is so absurdly confident that he provocatively raises comparisons with Vietnam, while Cheney pushes for aggression against Iran. He doesn't have to worry - it isn't as if anyone is going to impeach him for anything he's done. Hardly any of it is being reported, at any rate.

The number of US troops in Iraq is at an all-time high, and there are 180,000 mercenaries at work alongside them. We hear that their operations are only beginning. We hear that the US is very disappointed with the Maliki government, and that US officials are starting to worry that the Iraqis can't hack democracy. As usual, the racist assumptions are wheeled out in support of the claim. A senior Republican from the House Select Committee on Intelligence says that Iraqi culture simply doesn't prepare its people for self-government - and so the troops must stay indefinitely. (At least this accurately summarises US elite thinking: it is always more obscene when Bush pretends that it is the arguments of opponents of the war that Iraqis are unfit for self-government.) And meanwhile Iyad Allawi - the ruthless thug who oversaw the destruction of Fallujah - is putting himself forward as the solution, and is paying Washington lobbyists $300,000 to promote him (this is how the old 'exile' community used to do business, in fact, which is how Makiya and Chalabi ended up bonding with neocons and Christian fundamentalists).

So, anyway, with all this happening, will someone kindly answer the following: why should any military opposition to the US, even 'Al Qaeda', stop what they are doing? I don't wish to blur important distinctions, or imply that 'Al Qaeda' has a legitimate war, but consider Bush's remarks to the National Endowment for Democracy in October 2005:

Over the years, these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence: Israeli presence on the West Bank or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia or the defeat of the Taliban or the crusades of a thousand years ago.

In fact, we're not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We're facing a radical ideology with unalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world.

Set aside the fact that demoting the political aspects of an insurgency, and emphasising the allegedly irrational aspects is a classical technique of empire. This is a transparent case of projection: the reality is that the fanatical, adept, resourceful, devoted, imaginative and uncompromising servants of American power have for years used a litancy of excuses for violence. Their foes don't face a set of grievances that can be soothed or addressed. They intend to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No bribe, no soothing gesture, and no appeasement could compel them to stop. On Bush's logic, there is no reason for any group engaged in a war against the US to cease its activities, even if thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or into the millions of people are killed. Intransigence in the service of one's interests, however one chooses to moralise them, is evidently considered a virtue by American policy makers (hence, surely, the constant references to Frontier mythology and in particular to America's Last Stand). I realise that by saying this I don't add anything to mankind's sum of knowledge, but the United States government poses a far greater threat to what is called, without a trace of irony, civilisation, than any of its opponents, however unpleasant. Since this happens to be unambiguously the case, and understood worldwide if polls are any guide, the remaining supporters of the 'war on terror' in any of its aspects, have the unenviable distinction of being morally inferior by a very long shot to the supporters of 'Al Qaeda'.

Labels: 'surge', air war, escalation, iraq

"The Afghans are sick of our armies killing their people" posted by Richard Seymour

You might want to have a look at this article by Leo Docherty, who served in the British Army in Iraq and Afghanistan before resigning. (He's got another one here). It's not an anti-imperialist piece, but it is a story of disillusionment and of Docherty's encounter with the massive displacement and killings resulting from occupation violence. At least some of the deaths are being caused by a secret air war, rather similar to the one being inflicted on Iraq. Until a Lancet-style cluster survey is taken of deaths in Afghanistan, we will - of course - have only gross underestimations of the deaths. Yet, given a similar number of air strikes in the two countries, here is what we know. In Iraq, between 50 and 100 Iraqis die as a result of air strikes every day. Every airstrike kills, on average, one Iraqi, and wounds three more. If the same logic applies in Afghanistan, then the death rate is much greater than the occasional reports of clustered deaths in the dozens would give us to believe.

Interestingly, among the many barmy things Blair has cooed in his swan song, this has to be the most pathetic: "The mistake was not understanding the fundamentally rooted nature of this global movement that we face and that actually in a situation – whether Iraq or Afghanistan – where you are trying to bring about a different form of government, these people will try to stop us". This is a predictable ruse in many ways, and Blair has to acknowledge the reality that Afghanistan is going the same way as Iraq. Yet it's also so miserable, so abject in its refusal of responsibility, that it makes the phrase "a new low" seem entirely inadequate. Here is a man who had the moxy to start these wars, who must have heard some decent advice about the structure of those societies, and who surely heard a little bit about the history of occupations. He has probably been handed innumerable intelligence reports advising him of the reality that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis and Afghans are queuing up to take shots at occupying soldiers or assist someone else in doing so. He certainly knows about the human cost of the war in Iraq, because the MoD's top experts will have apprised him. And he relies on this conspiracy theory, this cheap yellow press tat about Al Qaeda manipulating everything. All because he can't take responsibility for the predictable results of his decisions. What a wretched figure he finally cuts.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, air war, taliban

More on the Secret Air War in Iraq. posted by Richard Seymour

Nick Turse has been assiduously covering this neglected story for two years now, and has a further update, detailing the extent of documented bombardment, and the use of cluster bombs. He quotes Les Roberts: "our survey data suggest that there were more deaths from bombs dropped by our planes than there were deaths from roadside explosives and car bombs ... If you had been reading the U.S. papers and watching the U.S. television news at the time, you would have gotten the impression that anti-coalition bombs were more numerous. That was not just wrong, it probably was wrong by a factor of ten!" That's why it's a secret.

Labels: 'war on terror', air war, iraq, occupation, US imperialism