The Washington Post reports: The United States has for several years been secretly releasing high-level detainees from a military prison in Afghanistan as part of negotiations with insurgent groups, a bold effort to quell violence but one that U.S. officials acknowledge poses substantial risks.

As the United States has unsuccessfully pursued a peace deal with the Taliban, the “strategic release” program has quietly served as a live diplomatic channel, allowing American officials to use prisoners as bargaining chips in restive provinces where military power has reached its limits.

But the releases are an inherent gamble: The freed detainees are often notorious fighters who would not be released under the traditional legal system for military prisoners in Afghanistan. They must promise to give up violence — and U.S. officials warn them that if they are caught attacking American troops, they will be detained once again.

There are no absolute guarantees, however, and officials would not say whether those who have been released under the program have later returned to attack U.S. and Afghan forces once again.

“Everyone agrees they are guilty of what they have done and should remain in detention. Everyone agrees that these are bad guys. But the benefits outweigh the risks,” said one U.S. official who, like others, discussed the issue on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the program.

The New York Times reports: A spokesman for the French military here said that about a fourth of French troops were on course to leave Afghanistan by the end of this year, while they awaited word on whether the new French president would speed up their withdrawal.

Troops from France, the fifth-biggest troop-contributing country in the NATO-led coalition, would drop to 2,600 by the end of the year, from 3,400 now, according to Lt. Col. Francois Guillermet, a spokesman for the French military.

About 200 French troops, mostly combat forces, left Afghanistan in March ahead of schedule in the wake of an attack by a rogue Afghan soldier that killed four French soldiers and wounded 15.

President-elect François Hollande of France had said during the election campaign that he would withdraw all French combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2012 — a year sooner than France’s already accelerated withdrawal.

Gareth Porter writes: The optics surrounding the Barack Obama administration’s “Enduring Strategic Partnership” agreement with Afghanistan and the Memorandums of Understanding accompanying it emphasise transition to Afghan responsibility and an end to U.S. war.

But the only substantive agreement reached between the U.S. and Afghanistan – well hidden in the agreements – has been to allow powerful U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to continue to carry out the unilateral night raids on private homes that are universally hated in the Pashtun zones of Afghanistan.

The presentation of the new agreement on a surprise trip by President Obama to Afghanistan, with a prime time presidential address and repeated briefings for the press, allows Obama to go into a tight presidential election campaign on a platform of ending an unpopular U.S. war in Afghanistan.

It also allows President Hamid Karzai to claim he has gotten control over the SOF night raids while getting a 10-year commitment of U.S. economic support.

But the actual text of the agreement and of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on night raids included in it by reference will not end the U.S. war in Afghanistan, nor will they give Karzai control over night raids.

The Obama administration’s success in obscuring those facts is the real story behind the ostensible story of the agreement. [Continue reading…]

Noah Shachtman writes: Maybe the reason that the Afghan counterinsurgency has been such a flop is that the people there are too traumatized and depressed to make nation-building work.

That’s the controversial conclusion of an Air Force colonel who recently spent a year in Afghanistan as the head of a reconstruction team. In an unpublished paper, Col. Erik Goepner, currently serving as a military fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argues that the Afghan counterinsurgency was all-but-doomed before U.S. troops ever landed there. The reason, he writes, is “the high rate of mental disorders” in Afghanistan and other fragile states. Pervasive depression and post-traumatic stress disorder leads to a sense of “learned helplessness” among the people. And that makes it next-to-impossible to build up the country’s economy and government.

Goepner’s argument has a gut-level appeal, observers of Afghanistan like Joshua Foust of the American Security Project say. But Goepner relies almost exclusively for his psychological data on a 2009 study-of-studies (.pdf) in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Foust complains. That’s not a strong enough foundation to make such broad conclusions about Afghanistan and every other insurgent battlefield.

“It’s an interesting but unsupported argument that needs a lot more support and data to be credible,” Foust says.

That JAMA paper finds that conflict-torn countries have average PTSD rates of 30% or higher — compared to just 5% in the rest of the world. That’s a six-fold difference between populations who are under the stress of war and those that are not. The results for depression were largely the same.

“If an American unit had PTSD and depression rates of 30% or higher, it would likely be declared combat ineffective,” Goepner writes. “When we conduct COIN (counterinsurgency) in weak and failed states, we are supporting a government and security force that is likewise combat, or perhaps more appropriately, mission ineffective. Mentoring and training them to a sufficient level of legitimacy and effectiveness is incredibly difficult, particularly so in the timeframes likely required by domestic political considerations at home.”

The question is how reliable those statistics about trauma and depression really are. The 181 surveys summed up in the JAMA paper largely rely on surveys of the population. That’s a legendarily imprecise way of gauging mental health. Moreover, those surveys stretch all the way back to 1980 — a time when the understanding of PTSD was quite a bit different than it is today. And there’s nothing in the paper that explicitly links all this trauma to whether governments under attack fail or succeed.

Afghan officials, however, say the figures match what they see. “Two out of four Afghans suffer from trauma, depression and anxiety — they make up some 50 percent of the population,” the director of the health ministry’s mental health department told Agence France-Presse in January. “They are in trauma mainly because of three decades of war, poverty, family disputes and migration issues.”

The traumatic effects of war on a population should not be underestimated, but in spite of this the crucial difference between an insurgency and a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan or anywhere else has to be the difference between people who know what they are fighting for and people who are being “mentored” to fight — it’s the difference between internal and external agency and the empowerment and disempowerment that flow from each of these.

In addition, the insurgents have an ideological advantage. Fighting to expel infidels and protect ones land and ones religion is a goal with much greater clarity than fighting to prevent the Taliban from regaining power. How different the story might have been had bin Laden not ordered the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud.

The Guardian reports: Documents found in the house where Osama bin Laden was killed a year ago show a close working relationship between top al-Qaida leaders and Mullah Omar, the overall commander of the Taliban, including frequent discussions of joint operations against Nato forces in Afghanistan, the Afghan government and targets in Pakistan.

The communications show a three-way conversation between Bin Laden, his then deputy Ayman Zawahiri and Omar, who is believed to have been in Pakistan since fleeing Afghanistan after the collapse of his regime in 2001.

They indicate a “very considerable degree of ideological convergence”, a Washington-based source familiar with the documents told the Guardian.

The news will undermine hopes of a negotiated peace in Afghanistan, where the key debate among analysts and policymakers is whether the Taliban – seen by many as following an Afghan nationalist agenda – might once again offer a safe haven to al-Qaida or like-minded militants, or whether they can be persuaded to renounce terrorism.

One possibility, experts say, is that although Omar built a strong relationship with Bin Laden and Zawahiri, other senior Taliban commanders see close alliance or co-operation with al-Qaida as deeply problematic.

Western intelligence officials estimate that there are less than 100 al-Qaida-linked fighters in Afghanistan, and last year the United Nations split its sanctions list to separate the Taliban and al-Qaida.

The New York Times reports: The first concentrated high-level talks aimed at breaking a five-month diplomatic deadlock between the United States and Pakistan ended in failure on Friday over Pakistani demands for an unconditional apology from the Obama administration for an airstrike. The White House, angered by the recent spectacular Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, refuses to apologize.

The Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Marc Grossman, left the Pakistani capital Friday night with no agreement after two days of discussions aimed at patching up the damage caused by the American airstrikes last November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghanistan border.

Both sides insist that they are now ready to make up and restore an uneasy alliance that at its best offers support for American efforts in Afghanistan as well as the battle against some extremist groups operating from Pakistan. The administration had been seriously debating whether to say “I’m sorry” to the Pakistanis’ satisfaction — until April 15, when multiple, simultaneous attacks struck Kabul and other Afghan cities.

“What changed was the 15th of April,” said a senior administration official.

American military and intelligence officials concluded the attacks came at the direction of a group working from a base in North Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal belt: the Haqqani network, an association of border criminals and smugglers that has mounted lethal attacks on foreign forces in Afghanistan. That confirmed longstanding American mistrust about Pakistani intentions — a poison that infects nearly every other aspect of the strained relationship. That swung the raging debate on whether Mr. Obama or another senior American should go beyond the expression of regret that the administration had already given, and apologize.

The negotiations are complicated by a complex web of interlocking demands from both sides. Without the apology, Pakistani officials say they cannot reopen NATO supply routes into Afghanistan that have been closed since November.

The Americans, in turn, are withholding between $1.18 billion and $3 billion of promised military aid — the exact figure depending on which side is speaking.

The continuing deadlock does not bode well for Pakistan’s attendance at a NATO meeting in Chicago in three weeks, assuming it is even invited. The administration has been eager to cast the event as a regional security summit meeting, and Pakistan’s absence would be embarrassing.

Andrew J. Bacevich writes: For too long now, command accountability for our troops’ misconduct in wartime has been more theoretical than real. The latest scandal to erupt in Afghanistan — photographs of American soldiers amusing themselves with dismembered Taliban corpses — suggests that it’s past time to confront this problem.

On the question of accountability, the military’s ethic is clear: With authority comes responsibility. More specifically, commanders bear responsibility for everything that happens within their jurisdiction. This decree supposedly applies to high-ranking generals as much as lowly lieutenants.

Once upon a time, the standard for implementing this code was straightforward: Win, and you gain fame and fortune; fail to win, and you’re toast. As commander in chief during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln enforced this standard ruthlessly. As a result, Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman achieved a measure of immortality. Meanwhile, Irvin McDowell, George McClellan, John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker and George Meade, among a host of other mediocrities, found themselves unemployed or consigned to lesser positions.

In the post-9/11 era, President George W. Bush abandoned this standard. In 2003, Gen. Tommy Franks presided over a campaign in Iraq that dispersed a pathetic local army even as Franks neglected to consider what might ensue. The answer was not long in coming: chaos and a far uglier and more costly conflict than Americans had bargained for.

Historians will probably place Franks in the company of Burnside and Hooker rather than Grant and Sherman. Yet, for whatever reason, Bush glossed over his field commander’s shortcomings, ordained him a great leader and awarded him the Medal of Freedom. Franks had neither won nor lost his war; he had merely mismanaged it and then moved on, washing his hands of the mess. Here was a troubling precedent.

War induces barbarism, and the Iraq war proved no exception. Soon enough, egregious transgressions by U.S. troops surfaced. Abu Ghraib provides one especially notorious example; the massacre at Haditha another. But there were others, now mostly forgotten, at least by Americans — among them the Iraq insurgency’s equivalent of the Boston Massacre. In Fallujah on April 28, 2003, with Franks still in command, U.S. troops opened fire on Iraqi demonstrators, killing more than a dozen and wounding several dozen more.

The Pentagon declared each of these an aberration. In each instance, extensive investigation singled out a handful of minions for punishment. In each, senior commanders escaped unscathed. (Abu Ghraib is the partial exception that proves the rule: In the scandal’s aftermath, a female Army Reserve brigadier general — not quite a member of the club — lost her star, a fate thus far shared with no male counterpart and no regular officer.)

In an earlier day, this misconduct might not have mattered. When Sherman’s troops marched to the sea in 1864, few cared about any atrocities they might commit. The object of the exercise, after all, was not to win Confederate hearts and minds but, as Sherman succinctly put it, to “make Georgia howl.” Similarly, although the desecration of remains by U.S. troops today pales in comparison with the treatment visited upon Japanese dead during World War II, ensuring that Marines at Peleliu or Okinawa complied with the Hague Conventions did not figure as a priority. Their job was to kill.

Yet, like it or not, our wars differ from those wars. The attenuated definition of command responsibility that prevailed after Sept. 11, 2001, not only let senior commanders off the hook; in wars where killing is not enough, it also compromised overall military effectiveness.

Much to his credit, when Robert Gates became secretary of defense in 2006, he sought to reverse this erosion of senior officer accountability. When the Air Force demonstrated a cavalier attitude toward managing its nuclear inventory, Gates fired the service’s chief of staff. When The Washington Post broke a story about wounded warriors warehoused in substandard conditions at Walter Reed, Gates handed both the two-star hospital commander and the three-star Army surgeon general their walking papers.

When Gen. Stanley McChrystal, chosen by President Obama to run the Afghanistan war, sat idly by as members of his staff expressed their contempt for administration officials, he too lost his job. McChrystal himself hadn’t said anything all that objectionable. His offense lay in failing to school his loud-mouthed subordinates in the principle of civilian control of the military.

Yet when it comes to misdeeds on or near the battlefield — troops urinating on Taliban corpses, burning Korans, allegedly wandering away from base to murder civilians in cold blood — the pre-Gates norms stubbornly persist. If fault is found, it invariably fixes responsibility and imposes penalties at echelons well below those occupied by the people said to be in charge. The fall guy ends up being the little guy. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Western military and intelligence officials acknowledged on Monday that they were surprised by the scale and sophistication of the synchronized attacks in Afghanistan on Sunday, seeing it as a troubling step in the evolution of the Haqqani Taliban network from a crime mob to a leading militant force.

Even as the Western officials praised the Afghan security forces’ response and sought to play down the attacks’ strategic impact, they privately agreed with the criticism by President Hamid Karzai on Monday. He said the assaults — involving dozens of attackers who crossed hundreds of miles to strike at seven different secured targets, all around 1:45 p.m. on Sunday — represented an “intelligence failure for us, and especially NATO.”

The officials said the episode raised two pivotal questions: whether the militants now had the ability to mount such audacious assaults repeatedly, rather than just once every several months, and whether the Afghan government would be able to blunt such plots after 2014, the deadline for Western troop withdrawal, when its access to allied intelligence assistance would be limited.

“It certainly seems there’s some kind of gap in intelligence collection or in sifting through the volume of what’s collected,” said John K. Wood, an associate professor at the National Defense University who was senior director for Afghanistan on the National Security Council in the Bush and Obama administrations, and who just visited Kabul.

For the Haqqani network, a family of border criminals and smugglers that has gained an astonishing notoriety in recent years as a leading killer of allied troops in Afghanistan, the attacks on Sunday represented more than just the ability to paralyze the mostly tightly secured districts of Kabul for hours. They were proof that the Taliban offshoot could create the vast network of logistical support and planning needed to mount terrorist attacks without anything leaking to the intelligence groups so tightly focused on it.

The New York Times reports: Taliban suicide bombers and gunmen barraged the diplomatic quarter and the Parliament in the Afghan capital for hours on Sunday and struck three eastern provinces as well, in a complex attack clearly designed to undermine confidence in NATO and Afghan military gains.

Though the overall confirmed death toll was low, with six victims initially reported across four provinces, they were among the most audacious coordinated terrorist attacks here in recent years. The multiple sieges ended in Kabul on Monday morning after nearly 18 hours, and silence fell on the city with roads in the bullet-strafed areas beginning to reopen. The last of the attacks to be resolved was the one on the Parliament, which ended at 7:30 a.m., according to a statement by the Afghan Interior Ministry. “The situation is normal,” the ministry said.

The attacks came near the peak of the American military troop “surge” in Afghanistan, some of it designed around ensuring the security of the capital. And they were an early test for the Afghan National Security Forces, who responded with only minimal help from NATO, Western military officials said.

Reuters reports: Gunmen launched multiple attacks in the Afghan capital Kabul on Sunday, assaulting Western embassies in the heavily guarded, central diplomatic area and at the parliament in the west.

Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility for the assault, one of the most serious on the capital since U.S.-backed Afghan forces removed the group from power in 2001.

“These attacks are the beginning of the spring offensive and we had planned them for months,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters.

The Taliban said the main targets were the German and British embassies and the headquarters of Afghanistan’s NATO-led force. Several Afghan members of parliament joined security forces repelling attackers from a roof near the parliament.

Taliban fighters also launched assaults in at least two provinces, a spokesman for the insurgents said.

Immanuel Wallerstein writes: The two candidates for the U.S. presidency seem to be trying to outshout each other concerning Iran, Syria, and Israel/Palestine. Each is claiming he is doing more to support the same objectives. Isn’t it therefore strange that no similar verbal contest is going on at the moment concerning Afghanistan? [ Shah Marai/Agence France-Presse/Getty] In February 2012, some Korans were burned by U.S. soldiers, which led to violent public protests in Afghanistan. (Photo: Shah Marai/Agence France-Presse/Getty

Not so long ago, we were witness to the same Democratic-Republican game about Afghanistan. Which party was the more macho? Remember the concept that a “surge” in troops would win the war, a concept embraced by President Obama in his speech to the U.S. Military Academy in December 2009. Now all of a sudden, since March 2012, it seems to have become a subject no one wants to espouse too loudly.

There are some simple explanations. In the longest war that the United States has ever waged, the war in Afghanistan, the United States has precious little to show for it. The designated enemy, the Taliban, constitute an ever-resilient force, particularly of course in the Pashtun areas, which constitute the largest single ethnic zone in the country.

The United States more or less single-handedly imposed Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun but not a Taliban, as president of Afghanistan. Karzai was not, is not, appreciated by the leaders of the various other ethnic zones in the north and west of the country, who have tried over the years to oust him. These other groups find support in some external powers: Russia, Iran, and India, all of which are as determined as the United States to prevent the return to power of the Taliban. But the United States won’t work with Iran, is doubtful about working with Russia, and doesn’t seem to co-ordinate with India.

In February 2012, some Korans were burned by U.S. soldiers, which led to violent public protests in Afghanistan. Then 16 Afghan children, women, and men were massacred by a U.S. soldier. The United States apologized for both of these, but that hardly calmed the storm. On March 18, President Karzai denounced the Americans in Afghanistan as “demons” engaged in “Satanic acts.” He said Afghanistan was beset by two demons – the Taliban and the Americans.

The New York Times cited an anonymous European diplomat as saying: “Never in history has any superpower spent so much money, sent so many troops to a country, and had so little influence over what its president says and does.”

Karen Leigh writes: Near a busy intersection where burqa-clad women beg for spare change at car windows, Mahmoud Saikal, Afghanistan’s former deputy foreign minister, sat under a photo of this capital city’s crowded hillside neighborhoods in the stately living room of his compound.

“If you are from Kabul,” he says, “you can find your place of birth in this photo.”

It’s the only landscape not changing in Afghanistan.

A series of American blunders in the past few months has raised questions about whether the decade-long U.S. mission in Afghanistan is doomed to failure. In February, reports that copies of the Quran had been burnt at a NATO base sparked protests across the country that left dozens dead. And last month, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales murdered 17 Afghan civilians in cold blood — returning to his base in Kandahar province mid-massacre before going out to kill again. Meanwhile, the Afghan security forces are increasingly turning on their trainers: Three NATO soldiers were killed by Afghan police and military members on March 26 — the latest of more than 80 coalition troops who have lost their lives in this way since 2007.

The escalating string of disasters has led to an increasingly contentious debate within President Hamid Karzai’s inner circle between officials who say Afghanistan is better off without the United States and those who see the American presence as necessary for security. But even among America’s erstwhile allies, there is a profound disappointment at the gap between the grandiose U.S. pledges and the dismal reality on the ground in Afghanistan.

Reuters reports: Afghanistan named a three star general to take over Bagram prison from the U.S. military and with him, final say over which prisoners are released, an issue with the potential to open another rift in relations between Washington and Kabul.

The issue of the release of any of the 3,200 people held in the prison at the sprawling American base, north of Kabul, is sensitive to both countries as Afghanistan assumes full security responsibilities ahead of departure of most NATO combat forces in 2014.

Washington fears the prisoners, most of whom it says are mid to high level members of the Taliban, might return to the battlefield as has happened in the past, citing the case of a Taliban commander transferred from Guantanamo Bay to Afghan custody in 2007 who ended up fighting coalition forces again.

“They (the United States) can have a consultative role, but not a veto,” said Aimal Faizi, chief spokesman of President Hamid Karzai.

“What’s the point of the transfer if we don’t have full control,” he said, in remarks that have become increasingly assertive following a string of incidents that have strained U.S.-Afghan ties, notably the killing of 17 villagers blamed on a U.S. soldier and the burning of Korans at the Bagram base.

An edited extract from Point Man by Mark Townsend: It was dusk and shadows were spilling across the courtyard of the British forward operating base in Sangin when I first met Kenny Meighan. He shuffled over meekly, olive eyes blinking in the fading light. He looked like a child soldier, yet his stories were those of an old warhorse. At first Kenny was reticent but gradually he warmed up, speaking matter-of-factly about the time he should have been a goner.

“I was pinned down on the domed roof of a compound getting smashed by the enemy. They had a bead on us. I couldn’t move a muscle. I was trapped there for ages just waiting to be hit, RPGs, small-arms fire coming right up at me.” He made an exploding noise with the back of his throat and gestured with his hands to replicate rubble tumbling upon his body.

Even among the young soldiers, there was something particularly boyish about Kenny. Open-faced and glossy-eyed with a button nose, at times he had the look of a choirboy. Other things set him apart. He had the widest smile of all the troops. And he talked the quickest. Conversations would start and pick up in excitement until thoughts toppled out while his tongue tried to keep up.

He was a small, almost fragile figure compared to some of the other soldiers. It was hard to believe the weight he could carry unless you saw it for yourself.

After a supper of boil-in-the-bag beans I had wandered around the base asking guys who they thought had a few stories to tell. A few names were touted, but one in particular kept cropping up. “Kenny,” they said. “Talk to young Kenny.” Kenny was point man, they said.
Point man Kenny on tour in Afghanistan.

Taking point means you are the lead soldier of a patrol, the figure who guides the unit through enemy terrain. The point man walks ahead, scanning for danger. It is the most exposed position in a warzone. Taking point guarantees you will be first to wander into an ambush, first to tread upon a hidden bomb, first to be framed in the sights of an opposing sniper. Those who take point accept a vastly reduced chance of surviving. Men can “take point”, “walk point”, “do point”, “be point”, but it all amounts to the same thing: high risk.

Out here, Kenny had felt his senses sharpen until his instincts were tripwire taut, honed to notice the tiniest inconsistency. He could hear the crunch of loose rock across the valley, decipher scratches in tree bark and determine the anxiety of a stranger from the depth of their footprint. Kenny compared himself to a great white shark, a creature capable of sniffing blood in water up to 5km away. Sometimes, Kenny said, it was as if the land talked to him. “It’s weird. Your senses become so highly tuned that you get all these subconscious instincts that start to read what’s going on around you.”

Kenny had convinced himself he had secured the most coveted position on the team. Before leaving, he had promised his father he would be the best infantryman he could possibly be, a man future Meighans would be proud to call their own.

Kenny’s father couldn’t have been prouder of his son, but inwardly John Meighan was deeply anxious. He had begged his son not to join the army. The price was too high.

“You’ll see things you wished you never saw. Carry them around too long and you’ll end up praying for a lobotomy,” the 43-year-old told his son in his dense Glaswegian brogue. John had seen the world, known bravery and sacrifice, inspired unflinching loyalty among men. But he could not escape the drumbeat of his past. The things he had seen were destroying him.
Point man John with Kenny on his knee.

For the past 12 years, Kenny’s father would lie in bed and wait for the memories – the torso of his friend Big Jim Houston twitching on a South Armagh road after being gunned down by the Provisional IRA. Houston had a chin like Bruce Forsyth [a long-chinned British TV personality] and hours before his death John had stroked it teasingly, just like he always did. Now in the night, Big Jim’s long face lay staring back, pale and wide-eyed on the Irish tarmac.

For 14 years and 47 days, Corporal John Meighan served his country with distinction. But he had seen what most could never imagine. He left the military because he couldn’t risk seeing another corpse. The images of big-chinned Jim and mutilated Iraqis grew more real over time; they began visiting him in the morning, when he woke, in the afternoon and on the way to bed, gradually eclipsing everyday reality. John tried to obtain psychiatric help – counselling, medication, anything – to shoo away the dead, but no one wanted to know.

In broad daylight, out shopping, he became lost in his visions. The waft of drains transported him outside a sewage works in the pissing rain. The smell of meat from a butcher’s would make him freeze, incapacitated by the stench of death. During this period he stopped eating bacon because it smelt like burning flesh. The simplest things felt beyond him. His taut nerves failed him during the most mundane tasks. John overcompensated, planning trips to collect the morning milk with military precision.

Even then mysterious figures would appear from behind, forcing him to cross the road until the mother and child or the dog walker passed. Navigating the city grew increasingly terrifying.

On 21 August 1996 he reached breaking point. That night was worse than any other. Big Jim, his brain like a grey cauliflower hanging from the side of his head, asked why? Why did you send me to the checkpoint that day?

He went downstairs and hit the vodka. He apologised to Jim, to his sons, to his wife. Beside the bathroom cabinet he calculated how many paracetamol tablets he might need. Thirty was medically sufficient to kill. He took 60. His wife Beverley found him two hours later, weeping in a foetal position on the lounge floor. She drove him to Glasgow Royal Infirmary. The following day John was referred to a psychiatrist and was diagnosed with extreme post-traumatic stress disorder. John suspected he was the first British soldier to have caught such a thing. He’d never heard of it. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: After a series of violent episodes and setbacks, support for the war in Afghanistan has dropped sharply among both Republicans and Democrats, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The survey found that more than two-thirds of those polled — 69 percent —thought that the United States should not be at war in Afghanistan. Just four months ago, 53 percent said that Americans should no longer be fighting in the conflict, more than a decade old.

The increased disillusionment was even more pronounced when respondents were asked their impressions of how the war was going. The poll found that 68 percent thought the fighting was going “somewhat badly” or “very badly,” compared with 42 percent who had those impressions in November 2011.

The latest poll was conducted by telephone from March 21 to 25 with 986 adults nationwide. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

The Times/CBS News poll was consistent with other surveys this month that showed a drop in support for the war. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll, 60 percent of respondents said the war in Afghanistan had not been worth the fighting, while 57 percent in a Pew Research Center poll said that the United States should bring home American troops as soon as possible. In a Gallup/USA Today poll, 50 percent of respondents said the United States should speed up the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Negative impressions of the war have grown among Republicans as well as Democrats, according to the Times/CBS News poll. Among Republicans, 60 percent said the war was going somewhat or very badly, compared with 40 percent in November. Among Democrats, 68 percent said the war was going somewhat or very badly, compared with 38 percent in November. But the poll found that Republicans were more likely to want to stay in Afghanistan for as long as it would take to stabilize the situation: 3 in 10 said the United States should stay, compared with 2 in 10 independents and 1 in 10 Democrats.

The Associated Press reports: Mohammad Wazir can barely take a sip of water because it reminds him of his 7-year-old daughter, who brought him a glass three days before she was killed with 10 other loved ones in a shooting spree allegedly carried out by a U.S. soldier in southern Afghanistan.

Wazir said he had asked his wife for a drink but his daughter Masooma brought it instead.

“She said: ‘Ask me, daddy. I can bring you water, too,’ ” Wazir recalled. “She was the beauty of my house. She had black magical eyes.”

Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was charged Friday with 17 counts of premeditated murder and could face a possible death penalty if convicted. But that has done little to ease the pain of those left behind, who are demanding justice as they struggle to rebuild their shattered lives.
[…]
Wazir — who also lost his wife, five other children ages 2 to 15, his mother, his brother, his sister-in-law and his nephew — said he would travel to the U.S. for the trial if given the opportunity but the death penalty for just one man would not be enough.

The only child he has left is his 4-year-old son Habib, who was with him in another town when the shootings occurred.

“They took everything from me,” he said.

Wazir, who is in his mid-30s and splits his time tending his grape fields and helping with a family electronics store, was not home in Balandi that night because he had taken his youngest son to the nearby border town of Spin Boldak to have dinner with his cousins. The area is dangerous so Wazir and his son spent the night. As they were getting ready to return home in the morning, Wazir got a phone call.

The caller said Wazir’s house had been the target of a U.S. attack and some relatives had been injured, but didn’t mention any dead. He rushed home to find hundreds of people gathered outside around some bodies that they were preparing to take to Kandahar city for a funeral.

“I didn’t know that all of them were members of my family,” Wazir recounted as he sat in a friend’s courtyard in the nearby market town of Harmara, where he is staying to avoid the ghosts waiting for him at home. As he spoke, he stared down at his hands, focusing on the knife tattoo on his right knuckles.

People tried to pull him into the crowd but he said he needed to check on his family first.

“Then one of my relatives hugged me and said, ‘Nobody is there for you to talk to.’ ”

Still disbelieving, Wazir ran to his house and found the kitchen still filled with smoke, ashes and blood.

“I was crying and I said to my uncle, ‘Tell me, is anyone in my family alive?’ And my uncle said, ‘It is God’s will. Pull yourself together and come out.’ “

Mohammed Wazir

The Wall Street Journal reports: Mohammed Wazir says he was having breakfast with his brother in the town of Spin Boldak when he received the phone call from his village three hours away. “All your family members are martyred,” a neighbor told him.

When Mr. Wazir, a 33-year-old farmer with a sun-creased face and graying beard, reached his small mud home in the Panjway district of Kandahar province, he says he discovered that 11 relatives had been killed and set on fire, victims of a predawn rampage allegedly perpetrated by U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales.

Mr. Wazir and other villagers shared with The Wall Street Journal in Kandahar their accounts of the March 11 tragedy that has inflamed anti-American sentiment here and poisoned U.S.-Afghan relations, possibly affecting the course of the war.

Panjway and the neighboring districts have been a battlefield between the Taliban and U.S.-led coalition forces for years. Many houses in the area remain in ruins and explosion craters dot the fields.

The U.S. special-operations forces base where Sgt. Bales served was set up under a strategy to protect the local population. Instead, the arrival of U.S. troops provoked Taliban attacks—and prompted more villagers to flee the already sparsely populated area.

“The only people who have remained are those who couldn’t afford the expense of moving their families to the city,” says Mullah Baran, a 38-year-old whose brother, Mohammad Dawood, was the first victim of the March 11 rampage, according to witnesses to the shooting, and other villagers. “The Americans said they came here to bring peace and security, but the opposite happened. Now, this village is a nest of ghosts.”

Mr. Baran, who says he had to scrape his brother’s brain and pieces of skull from the floor of their home, lost only one relative. His brother’s wife started screaming at the intruder, he says, and the gunman spared her and her six children.

In the Wazirs’ mud compound a few hundred yards away—a dwelling so poor that a piece of cloth served as a front door—no one was spared.

Mr. Wazir—judging by bloodstains, the layout of his home, and his knowledge of where his family sleeps—says his 60-year-old mother, Shah Tarina, was shot first as she greeted the intruder. In his bare bedroom, his wife Bibi Zohra was shot together with their daughters, 4-year-old Nabiya, 6-year-old Farida and 9-year-old Masooma.

In another room, Mr. Wazir’s sons Faizullah, 12, and Ismatullah, 13, were shot dead in their beds. Then, in a third room, Mr. Wazir’s brother, Akhtar Mohammed, 20, his brother’s new bride, 18-year-old Bibi Nazia, and a nephew, Essa Mohammed, 15, were killed.

All of the bodies were found afterward, after being dragged into the front room, blankets and clothes piled on top, and then torched, Mr. Wazir and other witnesses say.

Mr. Wazir says the corpse of his 2-year-old daughter Palwasha was amid the charred bodies. He believes she was burned alive. “I checked her body, and there were no bullet marks.”

The intruder faced no resistance because the locals were used to U.S. night raids. There was one in the same cluster of houses just five days earlier, Mr. Wazir says, after a roadside bomb hit a U.S. armored vehicle nearby.

He says U.S. troops threatened village elders after the bombing, warning them the village will pay a price if such attacks occur again.

A U.S.-led coalition spokesman in Kabul, U.S. Army Col. Gary Kolb, said the military “won’t speak to any specifics of what some of the villagers are saying.” He said he had no information about the bombing described by Mr. Wazir because not every such incident is reported to Kabul.

Like other villagers — and Afghan President Hamid Karzai — Messrs. Wazir and Baran say they believe more than one shooter was involved, if only because of the effort needed to move and burn 11 bodies. U.S. officials say they believe there was a single assailant.

Mr. Wazir says he is haunted by guilt. “It hurts me a lot when I remember occasions when I shouted at my sons because I asked them to do something and they ignored it,” he says. “I feel so very sorry now.” [Continue reading…]

CNN spoke to Bales’ lawyer, John Henry Browne: Browne predicted the case — whenever it comes to trial — is going to be “extremely difficult” for the prosecution.

“They have no murder scene, no forensics,” the lawyer said Thursday night from outside his Seattle office. “I’m going to make them prove every claim.”

U.S. officials have alleged that Bales carried out the killings alone in two neighboring villages in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province, in southern Afghanistan. Bales was flown out of Afghanistan last week and is being held at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Afghans are insisting that the suspect be returned to Afghanistan to face trial, with villagers and lawmakers questioning the U.S. military’s account of what happened. But a military official said in Afghanistan on Sunday that Bales will be tried in the United States.

The rampage has strained already tense U.S.-Afghan relations and intensified a debate about whether to pull American troops ahead of their planned 2014 withdrawal. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has demanded that troops withdraw from villages in his nation and return to their bases, saying relations between the two countries were “at the end of their rope.”

On Wednesday, Afghanistan’s foreign minister called for a “swift and transparent investigation” into the killings of 16 men, women and children. But CNN legal contributor and defense attorney Paul Callan told CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” that the case against the lone suspect in their deaths, Bales, may be largely circumstantial.

“There were admissions allegedly made by Sgt. Bales to some of his fellow soldiers, in which he claimed at least that he wasn’t shooting women and children, (and rather) was shooting men of military age,” Callan said. “Now, that would be an admission by him that would link him to the crime scene. If they then link his gun to the specific victims, then they easily make a connection and they can prove their case.”

Callan said he believed prosecutors would seek the death penalty against Bales,”because this is one of the biggest alleged massacres in memory.”

“You have the diplomatic and political problems that are being caused by this crime,” Callan said. “Afghan citizens will be looking, saying, ‘Is the U.S. seeking justice in this case?’ “