US to bolster force in Afghanistan

The US is planning to send between 20,000 and 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan by next summer, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, has said.

The planned deployment follows a request of the US commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, for more than 20,000 extra US soldiers.

US troops are battling rising violence in Afghanistan, seven years after they first invaded the country to oust the Taliban from power.

"The troops that were asked for in joint discussions with General McKiernan is what we're going to need for the foreseeable future. So I don't see an increase any higher at this point than 20 to 30,000," Mullen said.

Mullen said he hoped the extra troops - including four combat brigades, an aviation brigade and other support forces - could be deployed by mid-2009.

"We're looking to get them here in the spring, but certainly by the beginning of summer at the latest," he said.

The build-up could nearly double the US military presence in Afghanistan, which currently stands at 31,000 soldiers.

Cautionary note

Mullen said he could not give the "exact number" of troops that would be sent, but said 20,000-30,000 represented "the window of the overall increase where we are right now".

But he cautioned against thinking that a massive influx of US forces would automatically bring peace to Afghanistan.

"It isn't going to make a difference after those troops get here, if we haven't made progress on the development side and on the government side," Mullen said.

Some 70,000 foreign troops are already in Afghanistan, fighting the Taliban with little success.

Bloodiest year

This year has been the bloodiest for international forces in Afghanistan since the Taliban fell, with nearly 290 soldiers killed.

About 1,000 Afghan troops and police, as well as more than 2,000 civilians, have also been killed in 2008.

George Bush, the outgoing US president, who made a surprise farewell visit to Afghanistan on Monday, acknowledged the difficulty of restoring peace to the country, warning that it would take time.

"This is going to be a long struggle. Ideological struggles take time," he said in Kabul.

Via Al Jazeera.

Explosives discovered in Paris shop

Explosives have been found in a central Paris department store following a bomb warning apparently from a group demanding the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan, French officials have said.


Sticks of dynamite tied together but with no detonators were found in the Printemps department store on Tuesday following a warning from the group calling itself the Afghan Revolutionary Front.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, speaking in the eastern French city of Strasbourg, urged caution but said France would "not negotiate with terrorists".

"At this point in time I would call on everyone to be very prudent and very moderate," he said.

Warning letter

The five sticks of explosives did not have detonators attached and French anti-terrorist police believe the devices had been placed as a warning.

The warning, sent to a French news agency by letter, said the explosives were in the men's restrooms on the third floor of the Printemps store in the city centre.

"If you do not send someone to intervene before Wednesday December 17, they will explode," said the letter, which was taken by police investigating the explosives.

"Send the message to your president that he must withdraw his troops from our country before the end of February 2009 or else we will take action in your capitalist department stores and this time, without warning," the letter said.

Explosives 'old'

The area where Printemps is located is crowded with large department stores which are normally packed with Christmas shoppers at this time of year.

Michele Alliot-Marie, the French interior minister, said the explosives were "relatively old" and had been hidden in the cistern of one of the lavatories.

"The explosives had not been primed which indicates there was no risk of explosion," she said outside the store on Boulevard Haussmann.

France has some 2,600 troops stationed in Afghanistan and has received threats of terrorist attacks in mainland France unless it removes the soldiers.

Via Al Jazeera.


Comment:

Probably the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades.

In other news, I'm about to take my last final.

Look on my works ye mighty and despair!

(Click for full size image.)

At long last, Tʜᴇ Mᴀᴘ is complete.

Due to the narrow width of Blogger's columns, I'm almost certainly going to have to migrate to WordPress.

9/11 suspects ask to 'plead guilty'

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged planner of the September 11 attacks, and four other suspects have asked to plead guilty to the charges they face at a Guantanamo Bay tribunal.

"We all five have reached an agreement to request from the commission an immediate hearing session in order to announce our confessions," said a note said to be from the five read out by the judge, Army Colonel Steven Henley, at a hearing on Monday.

The note said the confessions were being made "without being under any kind of pressure, threat, intimidations or promise from any party," Henley said.

Mohammed, a Pakistani, and four others - Ramzi Binalshibh, Mustafa Ahmed al Hawsawi, Walid bin Attash and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali - were charged earlier this year with conspiring with al-Qaeda to kill civilians.

The judge also allowed defendants Walid bin Attash and Ali Abdul-Aziz Ali to withdraw all their motions and go to pleas, but he refused to allow the same for two other defendants saying he had concerns over their mental competence, AFP reported.

All five face the death penalty if convicted.

[More]


Comment:

I have been unable to determine why the mental competence of bin al-Shibh and Hawsawi is in question.

Crunch time

Sorry for the extreme dearth of posts; this is end of the semester crunch time. I'm working pretty much full time on my cartography final project, which is to be the first of the long awaited Afghanistan maps for this site.

Karzai urges Afghan war timeline

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called for a timetable for ending the war against the Taleban in his country.

Mr Karzai made the call in a speech to a visiting UN Security Council team.

He said if Afghans had "no light at the end of the tunnel" they had the right to pursue other options, such as peace negotiations with the Taleban.

Mr Karzai also demanded an end to arrests of Afghans "in their homes, in the roads" by international forces, saying it was the job of Afghan police.

[snip]

Mr Karzai said there were two options.

First would be to set a timeline, saying that what had not been achieved in the past seven years would be achieved in the next "four years, five years or another seven years".

But he added: "If we cannot give a light at the end of the tunnel to the Afghan people, [do] the Afghan people have a right to ask for negotiation for peace? [Do] the Afghan people have a right to seek other avenues?"

Mr Karzai said he would continue to fight al-Qaeda and Taleban members "who are ideologically against the rest of the world".

However, he said Taleban members who were "part of the Afghan community" could be brought back to serve Afghanistan.

[More]


Comment:

That last part is the crux of the matter. Karzai has been (rightly) calling for negotiation with the reconcilables for quite some time now — indeed, he has actually engaged in some negotiation with the mediation of King Abdullah. His borrowing of the words "timeline" and "withdrawal" from Iraq is blatant electioneering, and nothing more.

The fact that he felt it would be beneficial to say it, however, is emblematic of a real problem, which is that we are running out of time. The good will of the Afghan people cannot last forever, and it is beginning to wear thin.

Zawahiri on Obama's election

Before anyone asks, the term that he used for "house negro" was zanujī al-beit, a word for word translation. The text under each of the pictures reads, from left to right, "Barack Hussein Obama", "Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri", and "Malcolm X Rahimatu'llah (mercy of God be upon him)".

This is a very worrying video. It's primary purpose seems to be to drive a wedge between Obama and the Black community, or at least elements thereof. Why on earth would al-Qaeda attempt something that obviously hopeless? Well, the only explanation that comes to my mind is that al-Qaeda has been making inroads into parts of the Black Muslim community, and that they're worried about losing them due to Obama's election. This would also explain why it took so long for them to respond; they probably wanted to very carefully gauge what their quarries responses would be— long term as well as the initial jubilation— so that they could act accordingly. It is, of course, impossible to tell which part of the Black Muslim community they've been working on— the focus on Malcolm X would initially suggest Nation of Islam, but when you think about it there aren't very many prominent Black Muslim civil rights activists they could have chosen.

The most interesting part of the video, in my opinion, was the subtitles, or, more precisely, the lack thereof during the first set of excerpts from Malcolm X's speeches. Obviously, American Muslims would not need the subtitles, but the Arabs, Pashtuns, etc. who would also be watching would, and they are provided during the rather lengthy explanation of the term "house negro" (which I suspect would be something of a nonce-word to the Arab audience). They were not, however, provided during the first set. Indeed, this is the only part of the video that lacks subtitles. This suggests that it was intended for the American Muslims, and explicitly not for the others. The reason for this becomes evident once the excerpts in question are considered. Of the three, only the last one has anything to do with the point Zawahiri was making about the global revolution. The other two are about the importance of those in America accepting help from their bretheren across the sea. Al-Qaeda seems to be trying to sell different jihads to different audiences— for the Black Muslims, it's about race, protecting the blacks from their white oppressors; for the others— especially the Arabs, who do not have a very amicable history with the blacks— it's about Islam.

Will this apparent attempt at damage control be successful? As I do not know who the Black Muslims in question are it is difficult to say, but I doubt it; indeed, I'm more inclined to think that it will backfire. Azzam al-Amriki, the presumed mastermind behind this video, has been away from his homeland for far too long; he is beginning to forget what it's like here. He does not seem to have fully understood the pure, unadulterated joy African Americans felt.