Category: Central Asia

Quagmire?

Fighting across southern Afghanistan has left 28 suspected Taliban rebels dead as violence continues in the run-up to legislative elections next month, officials said yesterday.

The bloodiest battle occurred in Zabul province on Sunday when Afghan forces attacked suspected militants, killing 16 and arresting one, according to the defence ministry. Among the dead was a local Taliban commander, Mullah Nasir, the ministry said.

I ask again, with fighting raging “across southern Afghanistan,” is this finally the quagmire war opponents had predicted? The story seems to give the impression that the Afghan Dixie is a madhouse. Well, two little details lead me to say ixnay on the agmirequay. First, as is clear in the story, the bad guys are getting killed in bunches. This is certainly not a new development. Second, somehow omitted from this tale is that this is not a random outbreak of violence. Rather, this is the beginning of a joint Afghan-American offensive. This offensive has certainly drawn very little press — were it not for the military utilization of donkeys, there might have been no press at all.

Chad at In the Bullpen was on the story of the offensive two days ago. In an update to that posting, ItB contributor Mac added the donkey aspect, pointing out the corresponding usage of horses by U.S. Special Forces early in the Afghan theater.

This development is certainly a concession to the negative spotlight continuously focused on the Gitmo detention facilities.

Prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention center and the U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan would be handed over to the custody of Afghan authorities.

For its part the Afghan government accepts responsibility for the returnees and will work to ensure that they do not pose a continuing threat to Afghanistan, the coalition, or the international community.

Not all Afghans however will be handed over.

Some could remain at Guantanamo indefinitely. Fifteen have been selected to be tried by special military commissions.

I harbor little hope that these transferred detainees will be kept as securely as they obviously are in the isolated Gitmo. On the other hand, I have great doubt that they will be kept as secure in their persons or treated as humanely by their Afghan captors. Quite the conundrum — some scum may escape, possibly to find their way again to the battlefield, but some scum may finally get the treatment that they deserve.

I truly doubt this maneuver will relieve any of the pressure on the Gitmo detentions. Rather, it may encourage those participating in the intermittent frenzy. On the whole, I’d rather enemy combatants not subject to the Geneva conventions be kept stuck on an island for the duration. By duration, I certainly mean until the radical, expansionist Islamist threat is no longer a threat. Should this mean the detainees only leave Gitmo as elderly corpses in body bags, well, so be it.

Think it’s not a global war against an expansionist radical Islamist ideology? Russia disagrees.

A powerful explosion ripped through a half-empty carriage of a commuter train near the Dagestani town of Khasavyurt Sunday, killing a young woman and wounding several people.

Police announced the apparent terror bombing as an almost routine event, the latest of nearly 80 deadly attacks by Islamic extremists that have rocked the multiethnic mountain republic of Dagestan so far this year. The Kremlin insists the wave of attacks that threaten to unhinge Russia’s mainly-Muslim Caucasus region is being orchestrated by the same global jihad groups that have struck in London and Sharm-el-Sheikh in recent days.

[…]

“Our forces have captured or killed citizens of 52 countries operating with the terrorists in the north Caucasus,” says Sergei Markov, a Kremlin adviser. “The enemy brings an ideology of radical Islam that seeks political power through terrorist methods.”

Recent incidents, including a bath-house bombing that killed 10 Russian soldiers in the Dagestani capital of Makhachkala two weeks ago, suggest the attackers have absorbed sophisticated tactics used by jihadis in Iraq and elsewhere. A report issued last week by Igor Dobayev, an expert with the official Academy of Sciences, found that as many as 2,000 Islamist insurgents, many belonging to the Al Qaeda-linked Sharia Jamaat, are behind the wave of roadside explosions, car bombings, and assassinations.

I would argue that this is indeed World War IV, with the oft-feared World War III already having been survived with the end of the Cold War and its collection of multiple hot theaters. At stake this time around is no less than western civilization as we know it. Again.

A secret report by the Kremlin’s special envoy to the north Caucasus, Dmitry Kozak, leaked to a Moscow newspaper earlier this month, warned of the emergence of “Islamic Sharia enclaves” amid the high Caucasus peaks.”Further ignoring the [social, economic, and political] problems and attempts to drive them deep down by force could lead to an uncontrolled chain of events whose logical result will be open social, interethnic, and religious conflict in Dagestan,” Mr. Kozak wrote.

Sharia law. That is what our opponents want to enforce upon the future generations of the entire world. That is, on those that they allow to live at all.

Even within this article, there is finger-pointing to Russia’s tactics in separatist Chechnya. Perhaps, at one time, there was some validity to this. That time, however, has passed.

The first Chechnya war, 1994-96, was effectively won by the nationalist, independence-seeking rebels. But experts say that since rebel president Aslan Maskhadov was killed by Russian security forces earlier this year, the Chechen insurgency is led by Islamic radicals such as Shamil Basayev, architect of a mass hostage-taking in a Moscow theater two years ago and last September’s bloody school siege in Beslan. “We are no longer talking about Chechen secessionists challenging Moscow,” says Mr. Markov. “Now it’s radical religious ideologues who aim to destroy the unbelievers and establish an Islamic caliphate.“

It seems that the United States is not the only one cursed with a blame-America-first, keep-wearing-blinders crowd. Russia certainly has its own equivalent.

“In the [north Caucasus crisis] we can see the complete failure of Putin’s policies,” says Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the independent Center for Strategic Studies in Moscow. “It is a fairy tale to explain it as the work of outside factors, Islamic terrorists from the Middle East, or whatever. The truth is that internal problems are generating social unrest, which leads people to turn to Islamic ideas.”

Internal problems are an issue, but trying to pass it all off as such is ludicrous. The fairy tale is ignoring outside factors with scumbags from at least 52 countries in the fray for the Islamists.

Sooner or later, we will have to wake up to the fact that Russia is fighting the same opponent that has attacked us, attacked Europe, attacked the Asian Pacific, and attacked their own fellow Moslems in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

If only Col. Klink was running the show at the Bagram detention facility.

Four suspected Arab terrorists broke out of a U.S. military detention facility in Afghanistan on Monday, fleeing through barbed wire stockades in the first escape from the compound since the American military took over the former Soviet airbase.

[…]

U.S. and Afghan forces launched a manhunt for the suspects, identified as Arabs from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Libya. U.S. soldiers set up roadblocks and helicopters clattered low over villages near the heavily guarded base north of the capital, Kabul.

Bagram is in a wide, dusty plain at the foot of the Hindu Kush mountains, and much of the area around the base remains mined from Afghanistan’s civil war and Soviet occupation. The base itself is surrounded by a series of barbed wire fences and is intensely guarded by U.S. troops. The main entrance is a series of checkpoints and all visitors are checked several times by U.S. military guards.

The escapes were another setback for the U.S. military as it struggles with insurgent fighting that has left more than 700 people dead in three months and threatened to sabotage three years of progress toward peace. Over the weekend, 22 Afghan soldiers were killed, including 10 who were beheaded.

It should be noted that a very large portion of those 700 deaths were terrorists and Taliban holdouts taken out by U.S. and Afghan forces, something not made clear in the story.

The four terrorist suspects who escaped Monday from the U.S. military detention facility at Bagram were identified as Abdullah from Syria, Mohammed al-Qatari from Saudi Arabia, Mahmood Ahmad from Kuwait and Abulbakar Mohammed Hassan from Libya, according to local police chief Abdulrahman Mawalana.

“They are considered dangerous and are suspected terrorists,” U.S. military spokeswoman Lt. Cindy Moore told The Associated Press.

Local government chief Kaber Ahmad said, “coalition forces, police and Afghan troops have surrounded several villages near the base,” and have distributed photos of the four, who have short hair and long beards.

In the pictures, the men are wearing orange prison outfits and one man is grinning. Descriptions under the photos describe two of them as of Middle Eastern descent and the other as Arab. There is no description of the fourth.

Moore declined to identify the four escapees or elaborate on why they were being held. Another military spokesman, Lt. Col. Jerry O’Hara, described them only as “enemy combatants.”

He said it was the first time anyone has broken out of Bagram’s detention facility, where most of about 500 detainees in Afghanistan are held.

I’m hoping to be able to follow up on this story, as it could prove interesting. Terrain does not seem to favor the escapees, and they are just as likely to find friend and foe among the populace unless they have prior knowledge of safehouses. I would not at all be surprised to hear some of these four being found clad in women’s garb, a ruse not unprecedented among the Islamist terrorists.

I would also like details on the escape itself, though I understand that it may be extremely unwise to publish any weaknesses in the security of the detention facility. I do know that any such expoitable weakness better be addressed and in a hurry.

This is certainly a wait, hope and see kind of story, at least for those of us on the home front.

The U.S. commando missing in Afghanistan is being held by the Taliban who have decided to kill him, a purported spokesman for the group said Thursday, but offered no proof for the claim he has made earlier.

The commando is the last of a four-member U.S. Navy SEAL team missing for 10 days in Kunar province, near the Pakistani border. One of the men was rescued and the other two have been found dead.

About 300 troops and several aircraft are searching for the U.S. Navy SEAL in the rugged mountains in eastern Afghanistan, American military spokeswoman, Lt. Cindy Moore said.

“We hope he is not in harm’s way,” Ms. Moore said.

The Taliban spokesman, Mullah Latif Hakimi, has said previously that the Taliban are holding the commando, who has been missing in Afghanistan for 10 days. But his information has in the past frequently proven exaggerated or untrue, and his exact tie to the Taliban leadership cannot be independently verified.

“This American will never be forgiven. Definitely he will be killed,” Mr. Hakimi said. He said the group would release a video after the man’s death.

While we may be stuck fretting and wishing, I’m quite certain the troops in-country are doing all they reasonably can for this SEAL. However, should harm befall the American at the hand of captors, I look forward for a comparison of detainee treatment by Sen. Dick Durbin.

In all due seriousness to the matter at hand, my best wishes for this man and his family.