A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Australia is ruled by craven fools, desperate to shield the public from the reality of the war in Afghanistan. We lost years ago.The Sunday Age:

Australian officials have rejected an expert report critical of conditions in Afghanistan, demanding that it be rewritten to match upbeat government claims of dramatic progress and improved security.

The independent consultants’ report, commissioned by the government’s aid and development agency AusAID, is at odds with optimistic official assertions about conditions in Afghanistan’s Oruzgan province, where Australian troops operate.

The Sunday Age has learnt that AusAID pressed for changes in the report, with some sections relating to security toned down and others cut entirely. The pressure came as the government accelerated the phased withdrawal of Australian troops, citing greater security and the growing ability of the Afghan army.

While AusAID denied trying to dictate the content of the report, a spokeswoman said it was standard practice for the agency to seek corrections to ”factual inaccuracies” and ”clarifications between fact, perception and analysis”.

She confirmed that AusAid ”suggested” the consultants cut a chapter on Afghan views on Australian and US troops in Oruzgan, as this ”did not fit within the terms of reference”. Similar chapters were included in earlier reports by the consultants.

A Canberra source familiar with the draft report said pressure on the consultants appeared to be part of government efforts to ”accentuate the positive” in Oruzgan where, despite improvements, security is fragile, the Taliban are resilient, and the Afghan army’s performance is patchy at best.

…

The report assesses changes in Oruzgan in the 18 months since Dutch troops pulled out. It is believed to be guardedly optimistic, noting improved security and an increase in territory controlled by the government. But this was still not positive enough for Australian officials, the Canberra source said.

The source said the report, which drew on hundreds of interviews, found locals thought Australian and US troops had become more assertive since the Dutch left, a change welcomed by some and resented by others.

The report stated that the Taliban, while weakened, were far from defeated and were capable of launching major attacks.

The political situation in Papua New Guinea remains tortured but one thing is constant; resource exploitation.

PNG’s Gary Juffa writes in a powerful Facebook post that history appears to be repeating itself and disaster capitalism must be resisted:

It appears that the lessons from Bougainville have yet to be learned. In an announcement this week, the Papua New Guinea Government has ordered military troops to the Southern Highlands to quell land owner threats and secure the project site for oil giant ExxonMobil. One wonders if this is the right thing to do. The information surrounding the deployment of troops suggests that the deployment is also for the purpose of preparations for the elections. If this is true, then why only Hela Province is the next logical question. 

The deployment of troops in developing economies to quell civil unrest, landowner issues, tribal concerns and so forth is nothing new worldwide. One only has to examine the events past and current surrounding oil, gas, gold, diamonds, copper, timber and other such resource developments throughout the world especially in developing nations and one can see parallels to what is happening in Hela. Ever since men became fascinated by the treasures of the earth, on it and in it, man has gone to great lengths to satisfy his curiosity and satiate his fascination, exploring, speculating, digging, mining, extracting, building, inventing, processing, manufacturing and all along the way, waging war and killing his fellow man. History has been filled to the brim with man’s violent and destructive antics on earth ever since he realized his superior intelligence to all creatures. 

History certainly provides lessons for all who examine the subject of the Bougainville Civil War. In Bougainville 20,000 lives were lost in a horrible civil war that lasted 10 years stretching from 1988 to 1998. There are a variety of explanations given for the war but fundamentally, the war was waged for economic purpose. Really, in retrospect, everything else is merely relative to that primary reason. If one were to examine the story of “Brokenville” more explicitly, one is led to conclude that the war was a result of hasty attempts to kick start the mine again by a government egged on by big business, to ensure the continuance of operations and therefore the continuous generation of profit. Profit, history teaches us, has been the major reason for wars since the first time man took a club up against his brother. In the case of Brokenville, the guilty parties are both Bougainville Copper Limited (the mining company operating the mine) and the Papua New Guinea Government. The Australian Government was unusually silent during the developing stages of the Bougainville War, although their media like to claim that they had a hand in alerting PNG Defence Force about the engagement of Tim Spicer and Co. This seeming lack of overt input by the Australian Government continued up until the Sandline Crisis, ending only with the offer to broker a peace deal after the expulsion of the mercenary force engaged by the PNG Government to eradicate the rebels on Bougainville.

Well, that’s one view about the war in Afghanistan, by Anatol Lieven in the New York Review of Books:

The attempt by US-led NATO forces in 2001 and 2002 to create a strong Pashtun alternative to the Taliban from among former Mujahedin forces failed because so many had either disgraced themselves by their oppressive policies and extortion when they ruled Afghanistan after the Communists fell in 1992, or had joined the Taliban and were brushed off or even killed by US forces when they made peace overtures. The best of the Pashtun Mujahedin commanders, Abdul Haq, who later fought against the Taliban (and who is commemorated in The Afghan Solution, a book by Lucy Morgan Edwards published last year by Pluto Press) was killed in a premature attempt to undermine the Taliban in October 2001.

Most ordinary Pashtuns in Pakistan are not supporters of Islamist parties (though support for these parties in the Pashtun territories is stronger than in other areas of Pakistan) and certainly do not want the Afghan Taliban to rule over them. They do however naturally tend to side with Pashtuns against rival ethnicities in Afghanistan, and above all, are disastrously responsive to the line that the Afghan Taliban are conducting a national resistance struggle, or in Islamic parlance, a “defensive jihad.” Hence the overwhelming majority of Pakistani Pashtuns with whom I have spoken express strong opposition to any Pakistani military action against the Afghan Taliban (and very often to the Pakistani Taliban too, insofar as they are seen as allies of the legitimate struggle in Afghanistan).

As far as I can see, the only way out of this ghastly mess is for the US first to promote a peace settlement between the different groups and ethnicities in Afghanistan, and then to cut the ground from the Taliban’s “war of resistance” propaganda by getting out completely. The first requires a radical decentralization of power, since I just cannot imagine the Taliban and their old enemies from the former Northern Alliance, (representing other ethnicities and a few Pashtun warlords) sharing real power in a Kabul government. The second requires a recognition of just how much the presence and actions of the US forces themselves have contributed to Taliban support. If there was any doubt about that before the burning of the Korans and the massacre by Sergeant Robert Bales in Kandahar, there can be no doubt now.

The killing of US and NATO soldiers by Afghan soldiers and police in response to these events also shows that the US needs to get out for the sake of its own servicemen. The plan to leave thousands of US military advisors deployed with the Afghan National Army after the withdrawal of ground forces in 2014 is intended to avoid the possibility of a collapse of the US-backed regime after the US army leaves, along the line of South Vietnam in 1975. The problem is that it risks repeating what happened in South Vietnam eleven years earlier.