Hardline monks and Buddhist groups are trying to outlaw halal certification

(h/t: msmrishan)

The hardline Buddhists targeting Sri Lanka’s Muslims

(BBC)

After a series of attacks on mosques, wild rumours about animal slaughter and an attempt to outlaw the halal system of classification, the BBC’s Charles Haviland investigates how Sri Lanka’s Muslim minority is being targeted by hardline Buddhists.

On a January morning a crowd of Buddhist monks storm a law college, yelling, chanting and even hitting one or two seemingly random people and pushing back the police. Furiously they shout that the exam results have been distorted to favour Muslims.

A few weeks later, apparently abetted by the police, monks attack a slaughterhouse in Dematagoda, Colombo, alleging that calves are being slaughtered inside (illegal in the capital) or the meat is improperly stored.

Both are incorrect, but the monks spread rumours that the facility is Muslim-owned as most of the truck drivers are Muslim.

Sri Lankan monks are now taking this so-called “direct action” every few days. It is part of a growing wave of anti-Muslim activities in Sri Lanka carried out by new hardline Buddhist groups – a trend that is making many people anxious, even fearful.

It comes four years after the army in this mainly Sinhalese Buddhist country defeated Tamil separatists.

Regular attacks

During Sri Lanka’s bitter civil war war the Muslims – a small Tamil-speaking minority, about 9% of the population – kept a low profile, although many suffered violence.

Muslim leaders have shied away from any kind of confrontation with the state

Muslims are seen as having remained largely loyal to the state during the 26-year conflict. Indeed in 1990 they were expelled en masse from the north of Sri Lanka by Tamil rebels with just a few hours’ notice.

But they now fear that ethnic majority hardliners are trying to target them.

At their recent rallies, the most prominent new hardline group, the Buddhist Strength Force (Bodu Bala Sena, BBS) have used coarse, derogatory language to describe Muslim imams and have told the Sinhalese majority not to rent property to Muslims.

At one meeting attracting thousands, the organisation’s secretary, Gnanasara Thero, told each Buddhist present to become “an unofficial policeman against Muslim extremism” and said “so-called democrats” were destroying the Sinhala race.

Away from the rallies, I visited a temple in the suburb of Dehiwala as the early morning sun hit the majestic bo tree.

The presiding monk, Akmeemana Dayarathana, has founded another ultra-nationalist Buddhist group, Sinhala Echo. He says the Sinhalese have real grievances, that Muslims are trying to convert people, building too many mosques – even having too many children. In fact statistics show that both the Sinhalese and Muslim population percentages have grown slightly over three decades.

He says, without giving any evidence, that Muslims propagated a message that Sinhalese families should be small.

“Then they started to increase their own population,” he says. “This is the only country for the Sinhalese.”

He proceeds to give a unique take on geography and religion.

“Look around the world – Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and others, they were all Buddhist countries – but the Muslims destroyed the culture and then took over the country. We worry they’re planning it here too.”

A few days later his organisation stormed a house where they alleged Christian conversions were taking place and verbally abused the family inside, some of them – according to a local website – physically assaulting a woman.

Top-level support

Since last April, when monks led an attack on a mosque during Friday prayers in the town of Dambulla, there have been regular accounts of mosques being attacked or vandalised, for instance with graffiti or pictures of pigs. There have also been assaults on churches and Christian pastors but it is the Muslims who are the most concerned.

In the south of the country on 18 March, a mob of hundreds including monks surrounded a pastor’s house, set fire to tyres outside and shouted abusively to those inside.

Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has said monks are there to protect country, religion and race

“Muslims are worried all over the country,” Mufti MIM Rizwe tells me. “Everybody is [in] fear.”

He is president of the All Ceylon Jamiyyathul Ulama (ACJU), the main organisation of Muslim clerics, and meets me at a hotel where imams have come together for emergency discussions on the situation.

He defends the halal system of food classification, which the hardline monks are now trying to outlaw, and strongly denies that the community is fostering extremism as they claim. He rejects their accusation that Muslims have been destroying Buddhist holy sites.

“You can’t show one incident that Muslims have reacted in this way,” he says. “No single statue or any religious worship places have been targeted by Muslims, totally not. Muslims have never done this. We hope we are guiding our Muslims to be calm and respect every religion.”

Days later his organisation appears on a platform with moderate Buddhist monks who have decided to distance themselves from the hardliners. The hardliners are withering in their description of the moderates, calling them “unethical and immoral”.

It has become clear that the BBS has top-level support. At its ceremony to open a new training school, the guest of honour was the powerful Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, brother of the president.

“It is the monks who protect our country, religion and race,” he said in a speech.

“No one should doubt these clergy. We’re here to give you encouragement.”

President Mahinda Rajapaksa was reported to have told a BBS delegation in January not to promote “communal hatred”, but the official communique was issued only in English, not in Sinhala.

It is also apparent that Muslim leaders have shied away from any kind of confrontation with the powerful monks or any supporters they may have in government on this issue, remaining largely conciliatory in their language and actions.

Mood of triumphalism

Civic society activists are concerned. Sanjana Hattotuwa, editor of a citizen media initiative, groundviews.org, showed me some of the anti-Muslim web pages that are fast growing in number.

Some civil society activists believe the dominant mood in the country is one of triumphalism

The main picture on a Sinhala Facebook page called “My Conscience”, with more than 8,000 followers, shows a lion – symbol of the Sinhalese – devouring a wild boar depicted with a crescent and star on its forehead.

Mr Hattotuwa believes the dominant mood in the country is one of triumphalism, four years after the Tamil Tigers were beaten, and that this is encouraging victimisation of a new minority.

“The country is seen today as Sinhala Buddhist,” he says. “Everybody else has a rightful place. If they articulate concerns that question the dominant narrative then they should be put into their place. So the end of the war ironically has given the space for new social fault lines to occur.”

He rejects the concern voiced by some people that the socially conservative Muslim community is doing too little to integrate.

“Integration means a recognition that this country is comprised of many communities and each one of them has the right to live where they want, how they want.”

Clearly not everyone in the government – which in any case contains Muslim ministers – is happy with the rise of the hardliners.

Some Sinhalese ministers have expressed unease and a prominent newly retired diplomat, Dayan Jayatilleka, calls the BBS an “ethno-religious fascist movement from the dark underside of Sinhala society”.

Many Sri Lankans feel there are uncomfortable echoes of the 1983 pogroms, when Sinhala violence against Tamils precipitated the war.

But hardline Buddhist rallies and “direct action” stunts are happening all the time now. And their social and political influence is expanding.

Stop saying targeted killings protect Muslim women

A justification for targeted killings in the middle east was to shield women from violence. They’ve made it worse

BY EMAAN MAJED

In 2001, first lady Laura Bush discussed the need “to kick off a world-wide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al-Qaeda terrorist network” as a principal justification for the Afghanistan War. Following that line of thinking, President Bush repeatedly referred to “women of cover” who needed reprieve from the misogyny of Islamic extremists, and war hawks seized upon the issue of helpless Muslim women to advance conflict in the Middle East through the 2000s.

The truth is that in our post 9/11 world, Muslim women are not beneficiaries of violence in Muslim countries, but a gimmick used to justify it. Indeed, women are themselves major, underappreciated victims of the war in terror, including the recent incidence of drone strikes.

The disastrous effect of drone attacks on women is threefold. First, Muslim women themselves are killed devastatingly. Though their deaths have been largely ignored by the Western media and denied by the U.S. government, the wealth of data on drone strikes is clear: “targeted” killings murder scores of civilians, including many women and children (a report by the Investiture Bureau of Journalism put the civilian death toll between 411 and 884). In late spring 2011, the women of Mir Ali village in North Pakistan were encased in their modest stone houses when the sky starting falling. Though they did not know it then, five of those women were about to die in U.S. drone attacks that have proliferated over the past two years.

Moreover, the deaths of Muslim men have an additional negative impact on Muslim women. The male civilians killed in drone attacks (and they are often civilians) do not exist in a vacuum; they are the husbands, fathers and sons of Muslim women. They are breadwinners, community leaders and parts of families. Their killings dissolve and disintegrate whole communities. Their absence can lead to economic ruin in places where instability has already made economic prosperity impossible. Paying the resulting medical bills of men injured by strikes can put untenable financial burdens on women. Interviewees in the tribal area of Pakistan report that drones often destroy the buildings upon attack, and rebuilding these structures is another monetary strain in a region dominated by poverty.

Afghan Student Details Capture, Torture by CIA ‘Strike Force’

Karzai Bans US Forces From University Campuses After Incident

by Jason Ditz, March 10, 2013

An engineering student at Kandahar University, Abdul Qayum was at the center of a major incident over the weekend, when he was detained by a CIA “strike force” that attacked his university and tortured in detention before President Karzai secured his release.

Qayum reported that the strike force put a black hood over his head and took him to an “undisclosed location” where he was beaten and asked if he knew any “Taliban commanders.” They also asked if he could help them capture a neighbor from his home village.

Qayum says the whole interest in capturing him seems to have been that he was from a village frequented by the Taliban. When he insisted he wasn’t working with Taliban nor did he know them, he was beaten further and whipped with cords.

President Karzai issued a statement surrounding Qayum’s capture, saying that his staff intervened after complaints from other students and secured his release. Heannounced a full ban of US forces from universities nationwide, saying abuse of students would not be tolerated.

US Troops Attacked Afghan Hospital Before

Provincial Banning

Troops Stormed Clinic, Destroyed Medical Equipment

Afghan President Hamid Karzai addesses military officers in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Feb. 16, 2013. Photograph: Ahmad Jamshid/AP

Is the US maintaining death squads and torture militias in Afghanistan?

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and local residents insist that the answer is yes

by Glenn Greenwald, guardian.co.uk,

(updated below)

In 2010, as WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of classified documents relating to the conduct of the US government, government defenders dismissively claimed that they revealed nothing new. Among the many documents disproving that claim were ones relating to a US policy in Iraq set forth in “Frago 242″, which ordered coalition troops not to stop or even investigate torture and other war crimes by the Iraqi forces they were training, but simply to “note” them.

And note them they did: the logs record thousands of cases of Iraqi forces severely beating, brutalizing and torturing Iraqi civilians while US forces, with rare exception, did nothing to stop it (when the documents were released, the Guardian detailed just some of the illustrative cases). As the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder wrote at the time, the documents contain “incredibly awful reports of systematized detainee abuse by Iraqi soldiers and security forces right under the noses of the American-led coalition, which appears to have had virtually no incentive to put a stop to them” (as usual, these documents were classified not to safeguard US national security but rather to conceal bad and embarrassing acts on the part of the US government: that is why it is not hard to understand why the US government is so aggressive about punishing Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, and other whistleblowers and journalists who expose these secrets).

In Afghanistan on Sunday, President Hamid Karzai alleged that the US is doing something much worse: not merely standing by and watching their trained forces torture and kill, but actively and systematically participating. As the Guardian’s Golnar Motevalli reported:

“The Afghan government has ordered US special forces to leave one of Afghanistan’s most restive provinces, Maidan Wardak, after receiving reports from local officials claiming that the elite units had been involved in the torture and disappearance of Afghan civilians. . . .

“The provincial governor and other officials from Maidan Wardak presented evidence against US forces at the national security council meeting. The presidential palace later issued a statement saying: ‘After a thorough discussion, it became clear that armed individuals named as US special forces stationed in Wardak province engage in harassing, annoying, torturing and even murdering innocent people.

“‘A recent example in the province is an incident in which nine people were disappeared in an operation by this suspicious force and in a separate incident a student was taken away at night from his home, whose tortured body with throat cut was found two days later under a bridge,’ the statement added” . . . .

“Aimal Faizi, spokesman for Karzai, said the decision came after of months of reports of abuse.

“‘People have been complaining about US special forces units torturing people, killing people in that province, and nine individuals were taken from their homes recently and they have just disappeared and no one knows where they have gone,’ Faizi said.”

Since Sunday, the New York Times’ Matthew Rosenberg has written two detailed articles on these events. On Monday, he noted that the Karzai spokesman specifically cited “a raid on a village on 13 February, when American troops and Afghans working with them detained a veterinary student. ‘His dead body was found three days later in the area under a bridge,” the spokesman said.” This morning, Rosenberg noted that the student was actually beheaded.

Motevalli noted that “US military officials have rejected the allegations”. Rosenberg also notes that military officials express bewilderment over the allegation that these abuses are being “committed by Afghan irregulars who worked with elite American forces” and that “some Afghan officials believe the suspects are part of a force whose existence has been kept secret by the Americans.” And a NATO spokesman said that it was unable to confirm past claims of torture on the part of their Afghan forces.

But there’s no question, as Rosenberg notes, that “throughout the war,the United States military and the CIA have organized and trained clandestine militias. A number still operate, and remain beyond the knowledge or control of the Afghan government.” Recall that the CIA got caught making payments for years to Karzai’s suspected drug-running brother, Ahmed, “for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the CIA’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar”. These are the US-controlled militias, beyond the authority of the Afghan government, on which the US intends to rely if and when it “withdraws” from that country.

It may very well be that US military officials are telling the truth when they claim they are not involved with these specific units, but that the Afghan grievances are completely accurate. That is because, as Rosenberg explains:

“One possibility that would match the descriptions of attackers offered by local Afghan officials and, at the same time, exclude American military forces would be that the suspects were working with the Central Intelligence Agency, whose operatives run militias in a number of provinces. A spokesman for the CIA refused to comment on the issue.

“One senior Afghan official said it was possible: Afghans, he said, make no distinction between military-type outfits. Americans with weapons, high-end gear and facial hair were ‘all special forces. It’s a phrase that catches all.’”

What is absolutely certain is that what Rosenberg calls the “aggressive tactics” of US special forces have previously “resulted in abuses, and attempted cover-ups” of exactly the type being alleged now.

As but one illustrative example: in 2010, as I wrote at the time, US forces in the Paktia Province, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager). When local villagers loudly complained, the Pentagon lied about what happened, claiming that the dead males were “insurgents” or terrorists; the bodies of the three women had been found by US forces bound and gagged inside the home, and suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the US had arrived, likely the victim of “honor killings” by the Taliban militants killed in the attack. US media outlets, needless to say,mindlessly recited the US government’s claims (CNN: “Bodies found gagged, bound after Afghan ‘honor killing’”), but the Pentagon was finally forced to admit that its Special Forces had killed the women and then covered-up and lied about what happened.

Whatever is true about these latest human rights abuses, the perception is widespread in Afghanistan that the US is responsible and that the militias it is training are no better than the Taliban. From Rosenberg:

“The action also reflected a deep distrust of international forces that is now widespread in Afghanistan, and the view held by many Afghans, President Hamid Karzai among them, that the coalition shares responsibility with the Taliban for the violence that continues to afflict the country. . . .

“But Afghan officials cited as even more troubling American Special Operations units’ use of Afghan proxy forces that are not under the government’s control. Afghan civilians and local officials have complained that some irregular forceshave looked little different from Taliban fighters or bandits and behaved little differently.”

So that’s where the US is after almost 12 years of waging war in that country, the longest war in its history. The US is blamed on equal terms with the Taliban, at least. It maintains and supports (if not directs) non-government militias which are perceived, with ample evidence, as being death squads and torture units. Thus do we find, yet again, that the fruits of US humanitarian interventions – liberating the oppressed and bringing freedom and democracy to the world – are little more than replicating the abuses of the tyrannical regime it targeted, just under a different owner. Most amazing of all, the next time a new “Good War” is proposed, none of this will stop large numbers of Americans from believing that both the goals and the likely outcome will be beneficent.

UPDATE

A 2009 Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, found as follows regarding Afghanistan:

Children were a potential threat because they were used by the Taliban to assist in attacks against coalition forces, Marion Carrington said. Photograph: Adek Berry/AFP

by Amago

The U.S. military has detained more than 200 Afghan teenagers (though some put the number much higher), characterizing them as “enemy combatants,” at a military prison next to the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. Also, according to the U.S. military, these children/teen detainees have not been charged with any crime.

Are you confused yet? You should be.

Why would someone, especially a juvenile, be sent to prison if they didn’t do anything? Is this similar to the explanation given by senior officer, Marion Carrington, that the US military is on the lookout for children with “potential hostile intent?”

In fact, these Bagram imprisoned children were not held or charged for any particular crime or seemingly even “strategic purposes.” Treated as combatants they have been held without any legal assistance and generally have to defend themselves. Tina N. Foster, executive director for the International Justice Network which represents adult and juvenile Bagram detainees called such proceedings a “sham.”

According to the huffington post,

Foster said that the teens seized are not in uniform or even typically taken in combat.”We’re not talking about battlefield captures, we’re talking about people who are living at home, and four or five brothers might be taken together. It might take them a year or more to figure out that one of them was younger than 18, to determine the identities of these kids,” she said.

This is what happens when we shred our Constitution and disregard international treaties and conventions on the rights of children and prisoners of war.

Here are more facts regarding the treatment of these children :

1. Some of those detained were children as young as 11 or 12.
2. Some of these kids were detained for over a year.
3. The number of 200 is a low estimate.
4. At the times of the capture, parents explained that their children are under the age of 18, but the U.S. doesn’t allow the detainees or their families to contest their age.
5. The U.S. State Department was called for comment on the criticism, and a representative said they were “seeking an officer to reply.”
6. In 2008, the U.S. said it held about 500 juveniles in Iraqi detention centers and then had only about 10 at the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan when in fact a total of some 2,500 youths had been detained, almost all in Iraq, from 2002 through 2008 under the Bush administration.

The last fact shows that the American public has been lied to before, and so we should ask ourselves: what makes this situation any different?

***************

In other news the UN is launching a probe into drone strikes and whether resultant civilian deaths constitute a war crime:

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has launched an investigation into drone strikes and will review resultant civilian casualties to determine whether the attacks constitute a war crime.

Ben Emmerson, a UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, formally launched the inquiry on Thursday, in response to requests from Russia, China and Pakistan.

A statement released by the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights states that the inquiry will provide a “critical examination of the factual evidence concerning civilian casualties”.

It also states that the inquiry ultimately intends to make recommendations to the UN General Assembly to prompt countries to “investigate into the lawfulness and proportionality of such attacks”.

At a press conference on Thursday in London, Emmerson said that the British government had already agreed to co-operate with the investigation and that he was ‘optimistic’ that the US would do the same.

He also requested the US to release ‘before and after’ videos of the drone strikes and internal reports of those killed, including civilians.

Emerson’s team will conduct the inquiry in consultation with military experts and journalists from the UK, Yemen and Pakistan.

John Gilbert aka Baron Gilbert aka Lord Gilbert suggested a neutron bomb be dropped in the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I guess that’s the civilized man for you! What if they were Muslim?

Neutron bomb idea shocks Lords

LONDON: A Labour former defence minister stunned peers by suggesting that a neutron bomb could be used to create a “cordon sanitaire” in troubled border regions such as the one between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In a Lords debate on multi-lateral nuclear disarmament, Lord Gilbert said the use of such weapons could “greatly reduce problems of protecting those borders”, adding: “These things are not talked about but they should be….”

Lord Gilbert said that what used to be called a neutron bomb, but was actually an enhanced radiation reduced blast weapon (ERRB), could have “many uses” today.

“I think you could use an ERRB warhead to create a cordon sanitaire around various borders where people are causing trouble these days.”

Meanwhile, Labour former defence secretary Lord Browne of Ladyton rounded on Lord Gilbert over his remarks, accusing him of being at his “most challenging and contrarian”.

Cabinet Office spokesman Lord Wallace of Saltaire said the Government did not share Lord Gilbert’s “rumbustious” views on the sensitive issue. “The UK retains a firm commitment to the long-term goal of a world without nuclear weapons,” he said. “Our aim is to build an international environment in which no state feels the need to possess nuclear weapons – an environment that will allow nuclear states to disarm in a balanced and verifiable manner.”

There is a group of propagandist for the Afghanistan/drone war who have made it their mission to deny or undermine evidence that civilian casualties create new enemies.

Now there is a study to confirm what we already knew:

Civilian Casualties Create New Enemies, Study Confirms

By Spencer Ackerman

Yes, we needed economists to tell us this. A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds “strong evidence for a revenge effect” when examining the relationship between civilian casualties caused by the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan and radicalization after such incidents occur. The paper even estimates of how many insurgent attacks to expect after each civilian death. Those findings, however intuitive, might resolve an internal military debate about the counter-productivity of civilian casualties — and possibly fuel calls for withdrawal.

“When ISAF units kill civilians,” the research team finds, referring to the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, “this increases the number of willing combatants, leading to an increase in insurgent attacks.” According to their model, every innocent civilian killed by ISAF predicts an “additional 0.03 attacks per 1,000 population in the next 6-week period.” In a district of 83,000 people, then, the average of two civilian casualties killed in ISAF-initiated military action leads to six additional insurgent attacks in the following six weeks.

The team doesn’t examine the effect of CIA drone strikes in neighboring Pakistan, the subject of fierce debate concerning both the level of civilian deaths the strikes generate and their radicalizing effect.

A team of four economists — Stanford’s Luke N. Condra and Joseph H. Felter, the London School of Economics’ Radha K. Iyengar, and Princeton’s Jacob N. Shapiro — used the International Security Assistance Force’s own civilian-casualty data to reach their conclusions, breaking it down by district to examine further violence in the area in which civilians died. They examined the effect of over 4000 civilian deaths from January 2009 to March 2010 by looking at the sometimes-lagging indications of reprisal attacks in the same areas. To be clear, the team’s research is inferential, creating a statistical model to examine spikes in violence following civilian-casualty incidents, rather than interviewing insurgents as to their specific motivations.

But in their study, the researchers found that there’s a greater spike in violence after ISAF-caused civilian deaths than after insurgent-caused ones. “An incident which results in 10 civilian casualties will generate about 1 additional IED attack in the following 2 months,” the researchers write. “The effect for insurgents is much weaker and not jointly significant.”

In other words, even if the insurgents possess a “total disregard for human life and the Afghan people,” as an ISAF press release reacting to this weekend’s insurgent bombings in Herat put it, Afghans effectively would rather be killed by other Afghans than foreigners.

That’s not all. The researchers found that ISAF-caused civilian casualties corollate with long-term radicalization in Afghanistan. Plotting reprisal incidents of violence in areas where civilians died at coalition hands, the data showed that “that the Coalition effect is enduring, peaking 16 weeks after the event. This confirms the intuition that civilian casualties by ISAF forces predict greater violence through a long-run effect.” That’s consistent with intuitions that civilian casualties “are affecting future violence through increased recruitment into insurgent groups,” although they find no direct evidence for such a thing. Interestingly, the researchers found the opposite to be the case in Iraq: U.S.-caused civilian casualties are more likely to cause short-term retaliatory spikes than they are violence over the long term. (Yet.)

Repeated efforts to get in touch with the four researchers by email and phone were unsuccessful by publication time.

The relationship between civilian casualties and the creation of new enemies is no mere academic debate. As the paper notes, there can be “strategic military returns” for U.S. troops who incur greater risk to themselves in order to prevent civilian casualties if that stops Afghans from taking up arms against the U.S. in revenge. Some troops in Afghanistan bridled against General Stanley McChrystal’s rules of engagement, considering them too restrictive against a violent insurgency. General David Petraeus’ letter to his troops on Sunday indicates that he’s trying to strike a balance between protecting the Afghan people and allowing troops to finish the battles they fight.

Additionally, some in the military consider a preoccupation with civilian casualties to be a media-driven phenomenon. Last December, the Air Force’s intel chief, Lieutenant General David Deptula, told Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman that “there appears to be an almost complete lack of indication to support the conventional wisdom, popularized in the media, that air attacks have been provoking deep hostility toward the U.S. and the Kabul government.” Deptula was talking specifically about the air war, and the researchers found that only about six percent of civilian casualties caused by ISAF come through air strikes. (Of course, that’s after McChrystal and his predecessor, General David McKiernan, scaled back ISAF’s use of air strikes.) But after the study, Deptula might want to reconsider his contention that “there is little reason based on the admittedly limited data available in open source to expect that drastically reducing the civilian casualty issue would produce game changing results on the political battlefield.”

The most recent United Nations quarterly study of political and security affairs in Afghanistan found that civilian casualties caused by the U.S. and its allies dropped from 33 percent to 30 percent of total civilian casualties, a dip the U.N. attributed to measures resulting from “a reiteration of the July 2009 tactical directive by the Commander of the International Security Assistance Force limiting the use of force.” But the researchers suggest that Afghans aren’t going say, “Those Americans are OK! They only cause one out of three dead innocent Afghans!” — especially if, as the U.N. also found, civilian casualties in the escalated war are on the rise overall.

After all, if the goal is just to stop U.S.-caused civilian casualties, then the policy implications are clear: stop the war. If it’s to erode the influence of al-Qaeda’s allies in Afghanistan while reducing civilian casualties to the “absolute minimum” Petraeus describes in his letter, then getting the balance between fighting insurgents and protecting civilians wrong risks making the Afghanistan war counterproductive for its stated purpose.

And while some recent academic research suggests that across the border in Pakistan, the CIA’s drone strikes may not kill as many civilians as commonly believed — a very difficult thing to verify in any case — it’s not as if the U.S. has much margin for error. At his sentencing last month, Faisal Shahzad testified that his failed attempt to detonate an SUV filled with explosives came as revenge for what he considered an avaricious U.S. foreign policy. “I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people, and on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attacks,” said Shahzad, a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen, “because only — like living in U.S., the Americans only care about their people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.”

Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, conceded the point made by the four researchers this weekend. He wouldn’t argue, he said, “that some of our actions have not led to some people being radicalized,” Leiter told an Aspen Institute security forum. “It doesn’t mean you don’t do it. It means you craft a fuller strategy to explain why you’re doing it.” Good luck with that. If the U.S. is killing innocent civilians — however accidentally, and however in pursuit of dangerous fanatics — what story can Washington tell to reassure the relatives of the innocent dead?

Credit: ISAF

Would you like your endless war with Coke or Pepsi?

As most of us grow eager for the deluge of campaign ads to finally come to an end, Philip Giraldi’s timely article strikes at the root of America’s misguided policies of bullying, preemption, scapegoating, and denial, all of which are likely to continue no matter who is elected this November.

Blaming the Muslims

It is perhaps human nature to seek to blame someone else for one’s own personal failings. But what is possibly only a misdemeanor in personal interactions becomes rather more serious when entire nations and races are systematically and comprehensively blamed for the failures of other nations to comprehend simple truths. I am, of course, referring to the disastrous foreign policy that we Americans have endured for the past 11 years, which is coming home to roost now in places such as Libya and Syria.

Consider what we have been hearing repeated over and over again about the Middle East and other trouble spots. American bullying, preemption, and a policy of might makes right have not been the problem; some ignorant folks just dislike us because of our freedom. The United States is “exceptional,” which means that it should set the standards for the “free world” and even the not-so-free world, whether they all like it or not. Washington has the right to intervene militarily anywhere in the world if there is even the slightest chance that there is some kind of threat lurking.

Neither President Barack Obama nor Gov. Mitt Romney has dared to say the truth, which is that the past 11 years have been disastrous for the United States because of a gross overreaction to a terrorism problem that we helped create. That overreaction has led to one unnecessary major war in Iraq that has helped bankrupt the country while also killing more than 100,000 people who had nothing to do with any threat against the United States. We have even punished the children of those we have killed: witness the stunning rise in birth defects caused by depleted uranium in parts of Iraq where the fighting was most intense.

America’s lashing out has also led to a prolonged slaughter in Afghanistan, which will be worse off when Washington leaves than it was when the U.S. military and CIA arrived. Elsewhere, the U.S. footprint is heavier than ever, with drone operations becoming the warmaking du jour in Africa and Asia. This week we have learned that the CIA is seeking more drones to extend its operations. It seems that the poor folks at Langley actually had to shift some drones from Pakistan to Yemen because they just did not have enough to go around. For those who care, it marks the beginning of the end of the CIA as an intelligence organization and its transition into an international outside-the-Geneva-Conventions killing machine under Director David Petraeus.

At home, the foreign wars have also had an impact. Drones have arrived in America while whole sections of the U.S. Constitution have been abandoned by “temporary” legislation to fight terrorists. Mitt and Barack are both intelligent men and they know perfectly well what is happening, but they will not say anything about it, as it would ruin the narrative that the United States is always good and noble. If only those damned Muslims just didn’t hate our freedom so much.

Make no mistakes that Muslims are the target of American wrath, even if it is largely unstated. The Republican Party is obsessed with bigger defense budgets to fight more wars in Muslim lands and, domestically, making illegal the greatly feared spread of Shariah law. Shariah, for what it’s worth, is the criminal code in only two Islamic countries: Saudi Arabia and Iran. Most other majority-Muslim states use a version of British common law or Roman law. In the United States the threat of any state adopting Shariah is nonexistent, unless one believes the content of the GOP platform.

Opinion polls suggest that Americans do not like Muslims very much. No surprise there, considering the steady diet of negative commentary. On the New York City subway one can learn from posters that Palestinians are savages while Israelis are civilized. For many years, the word “Islamic” has been used in much of the media as an obligatory prefix to the word “terrorist.”

No other group in the U.S. since the Communist purges of the 1950s has been singled out as much as Muslims as the enemy within. Congressman Peter King of New York has held a number of hearings on “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and That Community’s Response.” Muslims have been targeted as a group by the New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The young Muslims who suddenly find themselves with a new friend in the form of an FBI informant eventually are entrapped into a confession or plea bargain and sent off to jail, with each arrest heralded as a major terrorism case. That many of those cases relied on an informant who offered the suspect a phony gun or bomb and then provided encouragement to commit a terrorist act is eminently clear if one reads the news accounts of the arrest and trial. If there is any evidence that American Muslims are not law-abiding, I have not seen it, and I suspect that if such a statistic were actually compiled it would demonstrate the opposite.

More recently, some Republicans have called for eliminating foreign aid for countries that don’t like us very much and appear reluctant to support our policies. All those countries are, of course, Islamic, and the emails circulating to make the case show burning cars and buildings. All that is needed is cameos of angry-looking men in beards to seal the case. The what-have-you-done-for-me-lately argument fails to take into account what exactly the U.S. has been playing at in those countries for the past 50 years, supporting dictators and turning a blind eye to egregious violations of human rights.

And when the countries in question shake off the shackles of dictatorship and elect a government that takes its religion seriously, there is dismay in the post-Enlightenment West. The development is referred to as a problem that has to be closely monitored by the wise leaders in Washington and Brussels. What is wrong with those people? Don’t they want our freedom? For a Muslim, one’s religion shapes the relationship with the state. It is not firewalled from it and conditions how one behaves when in office, but the distinction apparently escapes those who are shaping our policies in the White House.

There are, of course, a number of political objectives to the Muslim bashing. A large, undifferentiated threat keeps the military industrial complex happy. For the friends of Israel, since Muslims are savages and terrorists, it means that negotiating with them in any serious way or treating them as human beings is a waste of time. For the politicians who spout an anti-Muslim agenda, it keeps them in the limelight and they see an opportunity to become a player in foreign policy. The real lesson should be that the turning on Muslims is not necessarily a problem with those who practice Islam but rather a problem with us. We are the ones who have created the enemy and we are the ones who should have the sense to realize that it is our policies and actions that have poisoned relationships all around the world, and not just in Islamic countries. Will Mitt Romney or Barack Obama someday express that reality? Somehow I don’t think so.

Philip Giraldi is a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). His recent interview debunking claims that Muslims are stuck in medieval times and have no yearning for democratic governance and commenting on recent events in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan can be found here. 

Wow. Just…wow. This story comes out of Texas, where elected officials still say things like this. (h/t: CriticalDragon):

Texas Republican To Pakistani-American Law Student: Maybe You Should Go To Afghanistan With All the Radical Muslims

(The Daily Dolt)

*Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly implied that Riddle referred to the Afghan people as “terrorists.” She referred to the Afghan people as “radical Muslims” “who want us all dead.” Our bad.

Oh, Minnesota. We know you feel bad about the fact that your state has a crazy lady representing you in Congress. And you should feel bad. Because she really is crazy. But cheer up, because today’s story is not about Michele Bachmann. As it turns out, Texas also elects crazy people to represent them:

Texas Rep. Debbie Riddle (R) took to Facebook recently to vent her absolute disgust at a newspaper article describing the sensitivity training for American soldiers in Afghanistan:

“Our soldiers do NOT need to be taught how to be sensitive to radical Muslims [Dolt ed. note: have a look at the "radical Muslims" in the photo from the newspaper article about which she is complaining]. They do not need to be worried about blowing their nose wrong or using their left hand and offending someone. . . . They should not be bothered with being sensitive to people who want us all dead! We need a true leader in the White House — a vote for Obama is a vote to destroy our country.”

Abdul Pasha, 23, a student at South Texas College of Law, then provided a link to the article in question and responded that Riddle and her followers should actually read it before making “bigoted” comments: “Go educated [sic] yourself, if yall have real guts.”

Debbie did not like this:

“Abdul, if you are so offended by our soldiers then you don’t need us or our money in Afghanistan. As an American I am greatly offended that we have had American soldiers killed by the very ones we were attempting to train and help — Afghanistan soldiers. Get a grip fellow — if you want to be an American act like one and be proud of our country and stand up for our military. If you can’t do that then go where people are sensative [sic] enough for you – I guess that would be Afghanistan – where they still live like they are in the Stone Age – but still very sensative.”

But Pasha doesn’t need to “act” like an American” — he is an American. Also, it would be a little difficult for him to move back to Afghanistan since he wasn’t born there. Pasha, who is an American citizen, was born in Pakistan and moved to Houston when he was 10 years old — which he then awesomely pointed out to Debbie and her followers [sic for typos throughout]:

I’m not offended by our soldiers. They are the most underpaid and unappreciated members of our society. With that being said, there is nothing wrong with being critical of our policies and military industrial complex. Furthermore, Im offend by yall, who are so close minded that, its your way or get the hell out of here. The amount of xenophobia is incredible! A society does NOT work that way. All this does is alienate people. I would go to Afghanistan but only if all of yall come with me and see the truth rather than relay on what Fox News feeds yall. And, I don’t have to “act” like an American. I am an American and I’m not going anywhere.

Riddle then got a little maternal on his ass, telling him that young people should not question their elders:

Abdul – I guess it is OK that the Muslims kill and torture people when they get their feelings hurt. I guess we should not have 1st Amendment rights – we might hurt your feelings. I guess we should all bow and scrape to Muslims because we don’t want to be politically incorrect. Well, I suggest that you step out of your easily offended world and appreciate those of us who pay the taxes and provide your education and your freedom. We provide benefits for you and you call us names because we are angry at the Muslim world for killing our citizens. So, be proud of your country and stand against people that murder our people. I would also advise you that it is not nice to insult those of us who are old enough to be your parents or grandparents because we have lived more life and know a little more about the real world than you do. It is called respect and you will do far better in life appreciating what others have done for you. I won’t burn a building or kill someone because you are insulting – I just consider it ignorance on your part and you will grow up someday.

It looks like Texas is going to be stuck with Riddle for some time to come. First elected to the Texas State Legislature in 2002,  in the upcoming election Riddle faces Democrat Brad Neal, whom she already defeated in 2010 with more than 70 percent of the vote.

And in case you were wondering, no, this is not Riddle’s first visit to Crazytown. Here are some souvenirs from her past vacations there:

• “Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell.“
• Riddle claimed on Anderson Cooper 360 that Middle Eastern women were coming to the United States to give birth and were then returning to their home countries to raise their babies as “little terrorists” who also had US citizenship.
• “Formal prayer has been taken out of our schools. How about this idea? Read from the book of Proverbs from the Bible. Proverbs is a book of wisdom. Proverbs is in the Holy Scriptures for Christians and Jews. As for other religions — the wisdom won’t do them any harm. This nation was built on Christian and Jewish values and the Bible was actually used in the classrooms in our early days. To toss the very foundation on which our country was built because of political correctness is wrong and we see the results in society today. I say have a reading out of Proverbs each day in our classrooms. What do you think?”