The NATO report follows a Human Rights Watch (HRW) study released in September, documenting abuses, including killings, sexual assault, and illegal detention, committed by the Afghan Local Police, or ALP.

The NATO investigation looked at 46 accusations from the HRW report and found seven were credible, 15 were partially credible, while 10 were not credible.

The NATO study conceded the ALP needs better training in basic human rights.

Both NATO and the HRW also raised concerns about the role of government-backed militia groups, known as arbakai, controlled by local strongmen.

Afghanistan’s security forces have grown to over 300,000 and receive billions of dollars of funding from the United States.

Source

The Iranian people know what it means to earn the enmity of the global godfather.

As William Blum documented in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1953′s CIA-organized coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, guilty of the “crime” of nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, may have “saved” Iran from a nonexistent “Red Menace,” but it left that oil-rich nation in proverbial “safe hands”–those of the brutal dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

Similarly today, a nonexistent “nuclear threat” is the pretext being used by Washington to install a “friendly” regime in Tehran and undercut geopolitical rivals China and Russia in the process, thereby “securing” the country’s vast petrochemical wealth for American multinationals.

As the U.S. and Israel ramp-up covert operations against Iran, the Pentagon “has laid out its most explicit cyberwarfare policy to date, stating that if directed by the president, it will launch ‘offensive cyber operations’ in response to hostile acts,” according to The Washington Post.

Citing “a long-overdue report to Congress released late Monday,” we’re informed that “hostile acts may include ‘significant cyber attacks directed against the U.S. economy, government or military’,” unnamed Defense Department officials stated.

However, Air Force General Robert Kehler, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) told Reuters, “I do not believe that we need new explicit authorities to conduct offensive operations of any kind.”

The Pentagon report, which is still not publicly available, asserts: “We reserve the right to use all necessary means–diplomatic, informational, military and economic–to defend our nation, our allies, our partners and our interests.”

Washington’s “interests,” which first and foremost include “securing its hegemony over the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia” as the World Socialist Web Site observed, may lead the crisis-ridden U.S. Empire “to take another irresponsible gamble to shore up its interests in the Middle East … as a means of diverting attention from the social devastation produced by its austerity agenda.”

Recent media reports suggest however, that offensive cyber operations are only part of Washington’s multipronged strategy to soften-up the Islamic Republic’s defenses as a prelude to “regime change.”

Terrorist Proxies

For the better part of six decades, terrorist proxies have done America’s dirty work. Hardly relics of the Cold War past, U.S. and allied secret state agencies are using such forces to carry out attacks inside Iran today.

Asia Times Online reported that “deadly explosions at a military base about 60 kilometers southwest of Tehran, coinciding with the suspicious death of the son of a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, have triggered speculation in Iran on whether or not these are connected to recent United States threats to resort to extrajudicial executions of IRGC leaders.”

And Time Magazine, a frequent outlet for sanctioned leaks from the Pentagon, reported that the blast at the Iranian missile base west of Tehran, which killed upwards of 40 people according to the latest estimates, including Major General Hassan Moqqadam, a senior leader of Iran’s missile program, was described as the work “of Israel’s external intelligence service, Mossad.”

An unnamed “Western intelligence source” told reporter Karl Vick: “‘Don’t believe the Iranians that it was an accident,’ adding that other sabotage is being planned to impede the Iranian ability to develop and deliver a nuclear weapon. ‘There are more bullets in the magazine,’ the official says.”

While Iranian officials insist that the huge blast was an “accident,” multiple accounts in the corporate press and among independent analysts provide strong evidence for the claim that Israel and their terrorist cat’s paw, the bizarre political cult, Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) were responsible for the attack.

Richard Silverstein, a left-wing analyst who writes for the Tikun Olam web site, said that the blast was a sign that “the face of the Israeli terror machine may have reared its ugly head in the world.”

Citing “an Israeli source with extensive senior political and military experience,” Silverstein’s correspondent provided “an exclusive report that it was the work of the Mossad in collaboration with the MEK.”

Hardly a stranger to controversial reporting, Silverstein published excerpts of secret FBI transcripts leaked to him by the heroic whistleblower Shamai Leibowitz. Those wiretapped conversations of Israeli diplomats caught spying on the U.S., “described an Israeli diplomatic campaign in this country to create a hostile environment for relations with Iran.”

In a Truthout piece, Silverstein wrote that Leibowitz, a former IDF soldier who refused to serve in the Occupied Territories, “explained that he was convinced from his work on these recordings that the Israel foreign ministry and its officials in this country were responsible for a perception management campaign directed against Iran. He worried that such an effort might end with either Israel or the US attacking Iran and that this would be a disaster for both countries.”

Unfortunately, while Leibowitz sits in a U.S. prison his warnings are all but ignored.

According to Silverstein’s latest account, “it is widely known within intelligence circles that the Israelis use the MEK for varied acts of espionage and terror ranging from fraudulent Iranian memos alleging work on nuclear trigger devices to assassinations of nuclear scientists and bombings of sensitive military installations.”

Silverstein noted that “a similar act of sabotage happened a little more than a year ago at another IRG missile base which killed nearly 20.”

Terrorist attacks targeting defense installations coupled with the murder of Iranian scientist, five “targeted killings” have occurred since 2010, aren’t the only aggressive actions underway.

On Friday, The Washington Post reported that “a series of mysterious incidents involving explosions at natural gas transport facilities, oil refineries and military bases … have caused dozens of deaths and damage to key infrastructure in the past two years.”

According to the Post, “suspicions have been raised in Iran by what industry experts say is a fivefold increase in explosions at refineries and gas pipelines since 2010.”

With Iran’s oil industry under a strict sanctions regime by the West, maintenance of this critical industrial sector has undoubtedly suffered neglect due to the lack of spare parts.

However, “suspicions that covert action might already be underway were raised when four key gas pipelines exploded simultaneously in different locations in Qom Province in April,” the Post disclosed.

“Lawmaker Parviz Sorouri told the semiofficial Mehr News Agency that the blasts were the work of ‘terrorists’ and were ‘organized by the enemies of the Islamic Republic’,” hardly an exaggerated charge given present tensions.

Whether or not these attacks were the handiwork of Mossad, their MEK proxies or even CIA paramilitary officers and Pentagon Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) commandos, as Seymour Hersh revealed more than three years ago in The New Yorker, it is clear that Washington and Tel Aviv are “preparing the battlespace” on multiple fronts.

‘Collapse the Iranian Economy’

Along with covert operations and terrorist attacks inside the Islamic Republic, on the political front, a bipartisan consensus has clearly emerged in Washington in favor of strangling the Iranian economy.

Indeed, congressional grifters are threatening to crater Iran’s Central Bank, an unvarnished act of war. IPS reported that neocon Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), “a key pro-Israel senator,” has offered legislation “that would effectively ban international financial companies that do business with the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) from participating in the U.S. economy.”

“Dubbed the ‘nuclear option’ by its critics,” Jim Lobe reported that “the measure, which was introduced Thursday in the form of an amendment to the 2012 defence authorisation bill, is designed to ‘collapse the Iranian economy’… by making it virtually impossible for Tehran to sell its oil.”

However, “independent experts,” Lobe wrote, “including some officials in the administration of President Barack Obama, say the impact of such legislation, if it became law, could spark a major spike in global oil prices that would push Washington’s allies in Europe even deeper into recession and destroy the dwindling chances for economic recovery here.”

That amendment was introduced as tensions were brought to a boil over allegations by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in its latest report that Iran may be seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano claims the Agency has “identified outstanding issues related to possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme and actions required of Iran to resolve these.”

“Since 2002,” Amano averred, “the Agency has become increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed nuclear related activities involving military related organizations, including activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile, about which the Agency has regularly received new information.”

However, despite the fact that the “Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at the nuclear facilities,” to whit, that such materials have not been covertly channeled towards military programs, Amano, reprising former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s famous gaff that “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” the IAEA “is unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”

Far from being an independent “nuclear watchdog,” the IAEA under Amano’s stewardship has been transformed into highly-politicized and pliable organization eager to do Washington’s bidding.

As a 2009 State Department cable released by WikiLeaks revealed, U.S. Ambassador Glyn Davies cheerily reported: “Yukiya Amano thanked the U.S. for having supported his candidacy and took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded Ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77, which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.” (emphasis added)

Although the new report “offered little that was not already known by experts about Iran’s nuclear programme” IPS averred, “it cited what it alleged was new evidence that ‘Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device’ since 2003–the date when most analysts believe it abandoned a centralised effort to build a nuclear bomb’.”

But as the United States, with the connivance of corporate media, bury the conclusions of not one, but two National Intelligence Estimates issued by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, it is clear to any objective observer that “nonproliferation” is a cover for aggressive geopolitical machinations by Washington.

Both estimates, roundly denounced by U.S. neoconservatives and media commentators when they were published, insisted that “in fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” a finding intelligence analysts judged with “high confidence.”

In contrast, the highly-politicized IAEA report is a provocative document whose timing neatly corresponds with the imposition of a new round of economic sanctions meant to crater the Iranian economy. Never mind that even according to the IAEA’s own biased reporting, they could find no evidence that Iran had diverted nuclear materials from civilian programs (power generation, medical isotopes) to alleged military initiatives.

Indeed, with sinister allusions that hint darkly at “undeclared nuclear materials,” the agency fails to provide a single scrap of evidence that diverted stockpiles even exist.

Another key allegation made by the Agency that Iran had constructed an “explosives chamber to test components of a nuclear weapon and carry out a simulated nuclear explosion,” was denounced by former IAEA inspector Robert Kelley as “highly misleading,” according to an IPS report filed by investigative journalist Gareth Porter.

With “information provided by Member States,” presumably Israel and the United States, the IAEA said it “had ‘confirmed’ that a ‘large cylindrical object’ housed at the same complex had been ‘designed to contain the detonation of up to 70 kilograms of high explosives’. That amount of explosives, it said, would be ‘appropriate’ for testing a detonation system to trigger a nuclear weapon.”

“Kelley rejected the IAEA claim that the alleged cylindrical chamber was new evidence of an Iranian weapons programme,” Porter wrote. “We’ve been led by the nose to believe that this container is important, when in fact it’s not important at all,” the former nuclear inspector said.

But as Mark Twain famously wrote, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This is certainly proving to be the case with the IAEA under Yukiya Amano.

Another player “solidly in the U.S. court” is David Albright, the director of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington, D.C. “think tank” funded by the elitist Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

In an earlier piece for IPS, Porter demolished Albright’s “sensational claim previously reported by news media all over the world that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for a nuclear weapon.”

“But it turns out that the foreign expert, who is not named in the IAEA report but was identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist but one of the top specialists in the world in the production of nanodiamonds by explosives,” Porter wrote.

“In fact,” Porter averred, “Danilenko, a Ukrainian, has worked solely on nanodiamonds from the beginning of his research career and is considered one of the pioneers in the development of nanodiamond technology, as published scientific papers confirm.”

“It now appears that the IAEA and David Albright … who was the source of the news reports about Danilenko, never bothered to check the accuracy of the original claim by an unnamed ‘Member State’ on which the IAEA based its assertion about his nuclear weapons background.”

It is no small irony, that Albright, corporate media’s go-to guy on all things nuclear, penned an alarmist screed in 2002 entitled, “Is the Activity at Al Qaim Related to Nuclear Efforts?”, an article which lent “scientific” credence to false claims made by the Bush White House against Iraq.

As investigative journalist Robert Parry pointed out on the Consortium News web site, “Albright’s nuclear warning about Iraq coincided with the start of the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign to rally Congress and the American people to war with talk about ‘the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud’.”

“Yet,” Parry noted, “when the Washington Post cited Albright on Monday, as the key source of a front-page article about Iran’s supposed progress toward reaching ‘nuclear capability,’ all the history of Albright’s role in the Iraq fiasco disappeared.”

History be damned. Congressional warmongers and corporate media who cite these fraudulent claims, are “spurred by Israel’s whisper campaign to create a sense of urgency on Capitol Hill where the Israel lobby, acting mainly through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, exerts its greatest influence,” as IPS noted, and punish Iran for the “crime” of opening its nuclear facilities to international inspection!

That “whisper campaign” has now bloomed into a full court press for war by “liberal” Democrats and “conservative” Republicans alike, even as public approval of Congress’s work by the American people tracks only slightly higher than the popularity enjoyed by child molesters or serial killers.

As tensions are dialed up, the United States is spearheading a relentless drive to throttle Iran’s economy. The New York Times reported that “major Western powers took significant steps on Monday to cut Iran off from the international financial system, announcing coordinated sanctions aimed at its central bank and commercial banks.”

A strict sanctions regime was also imposed on Iran’s “petrochemical and oil industries, adding to existing measures that seek to weaken the Iranian government by depriving it of its ability to refine gasoline or invest in its petroleum industry,” the Times reported.

In a move which signals that even-more stringent sanctions are on the horizon, the U.S. Treasury Department “named the Central Bank of Iran and the entire Iranian banking system as a ‘primary money laundering concern’.”

That’s rather rich coming from an administration which slapped Wachovia Bank on the wrist after that corrupt financial institution, now owned by Wells Fargo Bank, pleaded guilty to laundering as much as $378 billion for Mexico’s notorious drug cartels as Bloomberg Markets Magazine reported last year!

Going a step further, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy called on the major imperialist powers “to freeze the assets of the central bank and suspend purchases of Iranian oil.”

The Guardian reported that Britain “went the furthest by, for the first time, cutting an entire country’s banking system off from London’s financial sector.”

Playing catch-up with war-hungry Democrats and Republicans, President Obama stated that the “new sanctions target for the first time Iran’s petrochemical sector, prohibiting the provision of goods, services and technology to this sector and authorizing penalties against any person or entity that engages in such activity.”

“They expand energy sanctions, making it more difficult for Iran to operate, maintain, and modernize its oil and gas sector,” Obama said.

“As long as Iran continues down this dangerous path, the United States will continue to find ways, both in concert with our partners and through our own actions, to isolate and increase the pressure upon the Iranian regime.”

Last summer, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), a strong backer of punishing sanctions, echoed Richard Nixon’s vow to “make the economy scream” prior to the CIA’s overthrow of Chile’s democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and wrote in The Hill that “critics … argued that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that.”

With a new round of crippling economic sanctions on tap from the West, “liberal” Democrat Sherman might just get his wish.

Targeting Civilian Infrastructure

While the Obama administration claims that their aggressive stance towards Iran is meant to promote “peace” and “help” the Iranian people achieve a “democratic transformation,” ubiquitous facts on the ground betray a far different, and uglier, reality.

Anonymous U.S. “intelligence officials” told The Daily Beast “that any Israeli attack on hardened nuclear sites in Iran would go far beyond airstrikes from F-15 and F-16 fighter planes and likely include electronic warfare against Iran’s electric grid, Internet, cellphone network, and emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers.”

According to Newsweek national security correspondent Eli Lake, “Israel has developed a weapon capable of mimicking a maintenance cellphone signal that commands a cell network to ‘sleep,’ effectively stopping transmissions, officials confirmed. The Israelis also have jammers capable of creating interference within Iran’s emergency frequencies for first responders.”

But Israel isn’t the only nation capable of launching high-tech attacks or, borrowing the Pentagon’s euphemistic language, conduct “Information Operations” (IO).

The U.S. Air Force Cyberspace & Information Operations Study Center (CIOSC) describe IO as “The integrated employment of the core capabilities of electronic warfare, computer network operations, psychological operations, military deception and operations security, in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making while protecting our own.”

In this light, The Daily Beast disclosed that “Israel also likely would exploit a vulnerability that U.S. officials detected two years ago in Iran’s big-city electric grids, which are not ‘air-gapped’–meaning they are connected to the Internet and therefore vulnerable to a Stuxnet-style cyberattack–officials say.”

The anonymous officials cited by Lake informed us that “a highly secretive research lab attached to the U.S. joint staff and combatant commands, known as the Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC), discovered the weakness in Iran’s electrical grid in 2009,” the same period when Stuxnet was launched, and that Israeli and Pentagon cyberwarriors “have the capability to bring a denial-of-service attack to nodes of Iran’s command and control system that rely on the Internet.”

But as Ralph Langer, the industrial controls systems expert who first identified the Stuxnet virus warned in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, the deployment of military-grade malicious code is a “game changer” that has “opened Pandora’s box.”

Among a host of troubling questions posed by Stuxnet, Langer said: “It raises, for one, the question of how to apply cyberwar as a political decision. Is the US really willing to take down the power grid of another nation when that might mainly affect civilians?”

But as we have seen, most recently during the punishing air campaign that helped “liberate” Libya–from their petrochemical resources–the U.S. and their partners are capable of doing that and more.

Future targeting of Iran’s civilian infrastructure may in fact have been one of the tasks of the recently-discovered Duqu Trojan, which Israeli and U.S. “boutique arms dealers” are suspected of designing for their respective governments.

And whom, pray tell, has the means, motives and expertise to design weaponized computer code?

As BusinessWeek disclosed in July, when one of America’s cyber merchants of death, Endgame Systems, pitch their products they “bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices. The executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems.”

According to BusinessWeek, “Endgame weaponry comes customized by region–the Middle East, Russia, Latin America, and China–with manuals, testing software, and ‘demo instructions’.”

“A government or other entity,” journalists Michael Riley and Ashlee Vance revealed, “could launch sophisticated attacks against just about any adversary anywhere in the world for a grand total of $6 million. Ease of use is a premium. It’s cyber warfare in a box.”

Kaspersky Lab analyst Ryan Naraine, writing on the Duqu FAQ blog averred that Duqu’s “main purpose is to act as a backdoor into the system and facilitate the theft of private information. This is the main difference when compared to Stuxnet, which was created to conduct industrial sabotage.”

In other words, unlike Stuxnet, Duqu is an espionage tool which can smooth the way for future attacks such as those described by The Daily Beast.

As The Washington Post disclosed last May, while the military “needs presidential authorization to penetrate a foreign computer network and leave a cyber-virus that can be activated later,” it does not need such authorization “to penetrate foreign networks for a variety of other activities.”

According to the Post, these activities include “studying the cyber-capabilities of adversaries or examining how power plants or other networks operate,” and can “leave beacons to mark spots for later targeting by viruses.”

Or more likely given escalating tensions, Iranian air defenses and that nation’s power and electronic communications grid which include “emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers” who would respond to devastating air and missile attacks.

Countdown to War

We can conclude that Israel, NATO and the United States are doing far more than placing “all options on the table” with respect to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Along with ratcheting-up bellicose rhetoric, moves to collapse the economy, an assassination and sabotage campaign targeting Iranian scientists and military installations, cyberwarriors are infecting computer networks with viruses and “beacons” that will be used to attack air defense systems and civilian infrastructure.

After all, as Dave Aitel, the founder of the computer security firm Immunity told BusinessWeek, “nothing says you’ve lost like a starving city.”

As Global Research analyst Michel Chossudovsky warned last year, now confirmed by CIA and Pentagon leaks to corporate media: “It is highly unlikely that the bombings, if they were to be implemented, would be circumscribed to Iran’s nuclear facilities as claimed by US-NATO official statements. What is more probable is an all out air attack on both military and civilian infrastructure, transport systems, factories, public buildings.”

With the global economy in deep crisis as a result of capitalism’s economic meltdown, and as the first, but certainly not the last political actions by the working class threaten the financial elite’s stranglehold on power, the ruling class may very well gamble that a war with Iran is a risk worth taking.

As Chossudovsky warned in a subsequent Global Research report, “there are indications that Washington might envisage the option of an initial (US backed) attack by Israel rather than an outright US-led military operation directed against Iran.”

“The Israeli attack–although led in close liaison with the Pentagon and NATO–would be presented to public opinion as a unilateral decision by Tel Aviv. It would then be used by Washington to justify, in the eyes of world opinion,” Chossudovsky wrote, “a military intervention of the US and NATO with a view to ‘defending Israel’, rather than attacking Iran. Under existing military cooperation agreements, both the US and NATO would be ‘obligated’ to ‘defend Israel’ against Iran and Syria.”

This prescient analysis has been borne out by events. As regional tensions escalate, the USS George H.W. Bush, “the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, has reportedly parked off the Syrian coast,” The Daily Caller reported.

Earlier this week, the financial news service Zero Hedge disclosed that “the Arab League (with European and US support) are preparing to institute a no fly zone over Syria.”

“But probably the most damning evidence that the ‘western world’ is about to do the unthinkable and invade Syria,” analyst Tyler Durden wrote, “and in the process force Iran to retaliate, is the weekly naval update from Stratfor.”

According to Zero Hedge, “CVN 77 George H.W. Bush has left its traditional theater of operations just off the Straits of Hormuz, a critical choke point, where it traditionally accompanies the Stennis, and has parked… right next to Syria.”

In an earlier report, citing Kuwait’s Al Rai daily, Zero Hedge warned that “Arab jet fighters, and possibly Turkish warplanes, backed by American logistic support will implement a no fly zone in Syria’s skies, after the Arab League will issue a decision, under its Charter, calling for the protection of Syrian civilians.”

The BBC reports that the Arab League “has warned Syria it has one day to sign a deal allowing the deployment of observers or it will face economic sanctions.”

“Meanwhile,” BBC averred, “France has suggested that some sort of humanitarian protection zones,” à la Libya, “be created inside Syria.”

American moves towards Syria are fraught with dangerous implications for international peace and stability. As analyst Pepe Escobar disclosed in Asia Times Online the Arab League, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia and repressive Gulf emirates, dances to Washington’s tune.

“Syria is Iran’s undisputed key ally in the Arab world–while Russia, alongside China, are the key geopolitical allies. China, for the moment, is making it clear that any solution for Syria must be negotiated,” Escobar wrote.

“Russia’s one and only naval base in the Mediterranean is at the Syrian port of Tartus. Not by accident,” Escobar notes, “Russia has installed its S-300 air defense system–one of the best all-altitude surface-to-air missile systems in the world, comparable to the American Patriot–in Tartus. The update to the even more sophisticated S-400 system is imminent.”

“From Moscow’s–as well as Tehran’s–perspective, regime change in Damascus is a no-no. It will mean virtual expulsion of the Russian and Iranian navies from the Mediterranean.”

“In other words,” Zero Hedge warned, “if indeed Europe and the Western world is dead set upon an aerial campaign above Syria, then all eyes turn to the East, and specifically Russia and China, which have made it very clear they will not tolerate any intervention. And naturally the biggest unknown of all is Iran, which has said than any invasion of Syria will be dealt with swiftly and severely.”

Despite, or possibly because no credible evidence exists that Iran is building a nuclear bomb as a hedge against “regime change,” belligerent rhetoric and regional military moves targeting Syria and Iran simultaneously are danger signs that imperialism’s manufactured “nuclear crisis” is a cynical pretext for war.

Source

KABUL (Reuters) – An Afghan woman, jailed two years ago for adultery after she was raped by her cousin’s husband, is seeking a presidential pardon that her lawyer hopes could set a legal precedent for other women in a similar position.

Gulnaz, now 21, became pregnant following the attack in 2009 and her baby daughter was born behind bars. When her pregnancy brought the crime to light, she was, like her attacker, convicted and jailed for the crime of adultery by force.

She was initially sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, but on appeal, this was increased to 12 years. A further appeal last week saw that cut back again to three years.

Gulnaz’s attacker received a 12-year prison term, later reduced on appeal to seven years.

Her case has drawn attention to the challenges still faced by Afghan women, 10 years after the overthrow of the Taliban regime that banned women from almost all work and education.

With foreign combat troops set to return home by the end of 2014, some activists inside and outside Afghanistan fear that women’s rights may be sacrificed in the scramble to ensure the West leaves behind a relatively stable state.

Human rights campaigners have condemned her conviction, and the court’s decision that she could go free if she married her attacker, which she later agreed to. He is still married to her cousin, but under Afghan law can take a second wife.

This requirement for her release has now been lifted, said her lawyer Kimberley Motley, of law firm Motley Legal, although she could not comment on whether Gulnaz would reconsider her decision to marry him.

“The fact that the court eliminated the portion of the sentence that says she has to marry this man is definitely something that supports the Elimination of Violence against Women law which was signed by the government,” Motley said.

“Once President Karzai chooses to grant her clemency, which I am very confident of, that will… set precedent and will show his support for the Elimination of Violence against Women act and his support for Afghan women.”

That law was passed more than two years ago, but the United Nations warned last week that there was still a “long way to go” in implementing it, and only a small number of cases have been prosecuted under the Act.

MORAL CRIMES

Female victims of rape and abuse can find themselves accused of “moral crimes,” and like Gulnaz, face heavy sentences, the United Nations found.

Some such offences, such as running away from home, are not technically crimes under Afghan law, but judges can interpret the law to cover them, Motley said.

Motley said she believed Gulnaz’s appeal was already setting a precedent for some moral crimes cases.

“Hopefully they can use this case… as an example to argue their particular cases in court,” she said of defense lawyers.

Motley delivered a petition with nearly 5,000 signatures, collected in less than a week, to Kabul’s Presidential Palace on Sunday, demanding Gulnaz’s immediate release.

Hundreds more signatures had been added by early Monday, some with strong words of condemnation attached.

“The whole world is watching and every decent person would be disgusted by this and other gross injustices, when the victims are punished instead of the perpetrators just because they are female,” one signatory to the petition wrote.

Motley, who worked with an Afghan lawyer on the appeal that reduced Gulnaz’s sentence, said she expects President Hamid Karzai to grant clemency as the case has a weak legal basis.

“There is not one person that I’ve talked to, or that knows about this case, that can find any justification in her sentence,” she said after visiting the palace.

“I am very encouraged by the fact that the president’s office found out about this case this week, and as I understand it they immediately called the attorney general’s office to find out more information,” she told Reuters.

The attorney general’s office declined immediate comment on Gulnaz’s case.

Source

Drawdown plans announced by the U.S. and more than a dozen other nations will shrink the foreign military footprint in Afghanistan by 40,000 troops at the close of next year, leaving Afghan forces increasingly on the frontlines of the decade-long war.

The United States is pulling out the most – 33,000 by the end of 2012. That’s one-third of 101,000 American troops who were in Afghanistan in June, the peak of U.S. military presence in the war, according to figures provided by the Pentagon.

Others in the 49-nation coalition have announced withdrawal plans too, while insisting they are not rushing to leave. Many nations have vowed to keep troops in Afghanistan to continue training the Afghan police and army in the years to come. And many have pledged to keep sending aid to the impoverished country after the international combat mission ends in 2014.

Still, the exit is making Afghans nervous.

They fear their nation could plunge into civil war once the foreign forces go home. Their confidence in the Afghan security forces has risen, but they don’t share the U.S.-led coalition’s stated belief that the Afghan soldiers and police will be ready to secure the entire nation in three years. Others worry the Afghan economy will collapse if foreigners leave and donors get stingy with aid.

Foreign forces began leaving Afghanistan this year.

About 14,000 foreign troops will withdraw by the end of December, according to an Associated Press review of more than a dozen nations’ drawdown plans. The United States is pulling out 10,000 service members this year; Canada withdrew 2,850 combat forces this summer; France and Britain will each send about 400 home; Poland is recalling 200; and Denmark and Slovenia are pulling out about 120 combined.

Troop cutbacks will be deeper next year, when an estimated 26,000 more will leave. That figure includes 23,000 Americans, 950 Germans, 600 more French, 500 additional Britons, 400 Poles, 290 Belgians, 156 Spaniards, 100 Swedes and 50 Finns.

Gen. James F. Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, told the AP that the number of Marines in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan will drop “markedly” in 2012, and the role of those who stay will shift from countering the insurgency to training and advising Afghan security forces.

Amos declined to discuss the number of Marines expected to leave in 2012.

There are now about 19,400 Marines in Helmand, and that is scheduled to fall to about 18,500 by the end of this year.

“Am I OK with that? The answer is ‘yes,’” Amos said. “We can’t stay in Afghanistan forever.”

“Will it work? I don’t know. But I know we’ll do our part.”

Additional troop cuts or accelerated withdrawals are possible.

Many other countries, including Hungary and Italy, are finalizing their withdrawal schedules. Presidential elections in Europe and the European debt crisis also could speed up the pullout. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said this week that Australia’s training mission could be completed before the 2014 target date.

Back in June, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that when the Obama administration begins pulling troops from Afghanistan, the U.S. will resist a rush to the exists, “and we expect the same from our allies.” Gates said it was critically important that a plan for winding down NATO’s combat role by the end of 2014 did not squander gains made against the Taliban that were won at great cost in lives and money.

“The more U.S. forces draw down, the more it gives the green light for our international partners to also head for the exits,” said Jeffrey Dressler, a senior research analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. “There is a cyclical effect here that is hard to temper once it gets going.”

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings Jr. said the cutbacks that have been announced will not affect the coalition’s ability to fight the insurgency.

“We are getting more Afghans into the field and we are transferring more responsibility to them in many areas,” Cummings said, adding that many leaders of the Taliban, al-Qaida and the Haqqani militant networks have been captured or killed.

Afghan security forces started taking the lead in seven areas in July. They soon will assume responsibility for many more regions as part of a gradual process that will put Afghans in charge of security across the nation by the end of 2014.

Some countries are lobbying to start transition as soon as possible in areas where they have their troops deployed – so they can go home, said a senior NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss transition. The official insisted that those desires were not driving decisions on where Afghan troops are taking the lead.

The official said that because they want to leave, a number of troop-contributing nations faced with declining public support at home have started working harder to get their areas ready to hand off to Afghan forces.

“The big question (after 2014) is if the Afghan security forces can take on an externally based insurgency with support from the Pakistani security establishment and all that entails,” Dressler said. “I think they will have a real challenge on their hands if the U.S. and NATO countries do not address Pakistani sponsorship of these groups.”

Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of “keeping us safe” or “promoting democracy” or “protecting their strategic interests.”

Imagine that they operated outside of US law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up checkpoints on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops, and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence.

Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed, or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land. Imagine that the occupiers’ attitude was that if they just killed enough Americans, the resistance would stop, but instead, for every American killed, ten more would take up arms against them, resulting in perpetual bloodshed. Imagine if most of the citizens of the foreign land also wanted these troops to return home. Imagine if they elected a leader who promised to bring them home and put an end to this horror.

Imagine if that leader changed his mind once he took office.

The reality is that our military presence on foreign soil is as offensive to the people that live there as armed Chinese troops would be if they were stationed in Texas. We would not stand for it here, but we have had a globe-straddling empire and a very intrusive foreign policy for decades that incites a lot of hatred and resentment towards us.

According to our own CIA, our meddling in the Middle East was the prime motivation for the horrific attacks on 9/11. But instead of re-evaluating our foreign policy, we have simply escalated it. We had a right to go after those responsible for 9/11, to be sure, but why do so many Americans feel as if we have a right to a military presence in some 160 countries when we wouldn’t stand for even one foreign base on our soil, for any reason? These are not embassies, mind you, these are military installations. The new administration is not materially changing anything about this. Shuffling troops around and playing with semantics does not accomplish the goals of the American people, who simply want our men and women to come home. 50,000 troops left behind in Iraq is not conducive to peace any more than 50,000 Russian soldiers would be in the United States.

Shutting down military bases and ceasing to deal with other nations with threats and violence is not isolationism. It is the opposite. Opening ourselves up to friendship, honest trade and diplomacy is the foreign policy of peace and prosperity. It is the only foreign policy that will not bankrupt us in short order, as our current actions most definitely will. I share the disappointment of the American people in the foreign policy rhetoric coming from the administration. The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome’s did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted.

Foreign troops are starting to head home anyway, he argues, and the Taliban are tough enough to keep on fighting for years.

“The only way to finish the fight against the Taliban is to bring them to power and get foreigners out,” Muttawakil said in an interview at his Kabul home, perched on a mock tiger-skin sofa and dressed in a traditional white shalwar kameez baggy tunic and trousers.

Besides, he adds, corruption, insecurity and immorality have flourished since U.S.-backed troops ousted the group from Kabul, and their return would end much of that.

Other Afghans are not as enthusiastic about the reappearance in government of a group they remember as cruel and oppressive rulers. But as foreign troops start to head home with the war far from over, it is a future many are planning for.

“When the U.S. leave, in one week, the Taliban will return. I believe 100 percent they will take back power, whether the Afghan people want them or not,” said Khalid Ahmad, who sells women’s clothes adorned with glitter and embroidery.

“If they return, they’ll reintroduce their Islamic laws, they’ll do the same as they did before. If that happens, I won’t leave, but I doubt I will be able to have a business like this.”

During their 1996-2001 rule the Taliban implemented heavily oppressive policies, including shutting women out from most work and study and restricting their movements.

They publicly executed adulterers, brought back physical punishments including amputation, and the Pashtun-dominated movement discriminated against Afghans from other ethnic groups.

Their austere interpretation of Islam also alienated Afghans who were not affected by their harsher rules. They banned television, some sports and most music, arrested men without beards, and beat those who didn’t attend prayers.

BACK BY GUN OR TREATY

The U.S. and other Western and regional powers have insisted their commitment to Afghanistan will last beyond the Dec. 31, 2014, deadline agreed by NATO and Afghan President Hamid Karzai for getting foreign combat troops out.

Top U.S. officials including the ambassador in Kabul say months of tentative moves to talk to the Taliban about a political end to a decade-long war will progress only if the military pressure on the group is sustained or increased.

“The Taliban needs to be further weakened to the point where they will come to the table prepared to accept the conditions we have set jointly with the Afghans,” Ambassador Ryan Crocker told Reuters in a recent interview.

But many Afghans see efforts to reach out to the Taliban, by both Karzai and the West, as a sign that cash and commitment for the war are waning.

Confidence in the Afghan police and army, riven by corruption, drug use and illiteracy, is not high.

So there is a growing sense that the Taliban are likely to be back, either through force or through a settlement more advantageous to the group than to departing Western powers.

“I’m worried the Taliban will return. If the foreign forces leave us halfway along this journey all the gains will be dramatically lost,” said 24 year-old shop owner Abbas.

But for others weary of violence after three decades of fighting, the return of the insurgent group would be preferable to another descent into full-blown civil war.

And although foreign troops were initially welcomed as liberators across swathes of anti-Taliban Afghanistan, their presence has brought many deaths, and the billions of dollars channelled into the country funded corruption as much as change.

More than 11,000 civilians are believed to have died in the war, and thousands more were injured. Although insurgents caused about 80 percent of civilian deaths this year, the foreign forces are seen by some as the root cause of the suffering.

“The rise in immoral activities, suicide bombings, and all our misery is because of American presence in Afghanistan,” said Abdul Nazir, an imam at a Kabul mosque. He agrees with Muttawakil that if they leave, the violence will end.

“I know that Taliban also kill innocent people and want to enforce strict sharia law, but they are still Muslims and better than the infidels here. The Taliban are successful because many Muslims see them as sole guardians of Islamic values.”

A CHANGING TALIBAN?

The Taliban themselves have also been changed by a decade of guerilla warfare inside their country, and technological and political changes globally, though they still espouse an austere brand of Islam and want it enforced in Afghanistan.

There have been hints in statements and from former Taliban officials that they may have softened their stance on issues like education and private enterprise.

Some analysts say they are seeking to position themselves as a pan-Afghan movement capable of running a civilian government, rather than a Pashtun-dominated militant group.

Leader Mullah Omar issued a rare statement in August to mark Eid al-Fitr, Islam’s most important festival, saying that Taliban rule would be an inclusive meritocracy.

“Our manifesto is that Afghanistan should have a real Islamic regime which is acceptable to all people of the country. All ethnicities will have participation in the regime and portfolios will be dispensed on the basis of merits,” an English translation of his speech provided by the group said.

The Taliban would boost the country’s mining and energy sectors, he continued, to free Afghans from the “tentacles of poverty, unemployment, backwardness and ignorance”.

And although attacks on schools continue in the provinces, Karzai’s education minister suggested this year the Taliban may no longer seek to bar girls from studying.

Sceptics caution however that political positioning can be very different from real change, and the Taliban if they do grab or negotiate a stake in Afghanistan’s government may want to rule their country in a way little changed from 2001.

“With their mentality and ideology, it would be very difficult for them to accept others and also, for others to accept them,” said Ghulam Jelani Zwak, director of the Afghan Analytical and Advisory Centre in Kabul.

“We have a long, long way to go before this could happen.”

The peaceful demonstration in downtown Kabul was meant to mark the Oct. 7 invasion of Afghanistan 10 years ago, following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the United States.

The U.S. invasion came after Taliban leader Mullah Omar refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, purportedly because of his disbelief that the al-Qaida chief was responsible for the attacks and because it went against the Afghan tradition of hospitality and protection of guests.

U.S. forces killed bin Laden in a raid on his hideout in Pakistan in May.

The demonstrators chanted “no to occupation,” and “Americans out” as they marched through the streets holding pictures of Afghans killed in violence, and later burned an American flag. The demonstration was organized by a small left wing party.

No official events have been announced so far to mark the invasion, neither by the government nor NATO.

“The United States said it came to help the Afghan people and provide a good life to Afghan people, but their true purpose was to occupy our country,” said Farzana, a 22-year-old woman who goes by one name. “It is 10 years since the invasion of Afghanistan and all it has left behind is the blood of the Afghan people. We want the U.S. to leave our country.”

She added that “suicide attacks, insecurity and corruption are increasing day-by-day.”

In Copenhagen, military officials said a Danish soldier was seriously wounded by an explosive device during an operation Thursday in southwestern Afghanistan. The blast occurred west of a Danish base in Helmand province, the military said, providing no other details.

The Danish Army Operational Command says the soldier was taken by helicopter to a field hospital for treatment.

Denmark, which has about 750 soldiers in Afghanistan, will begin withdrawing them this year and gradually shift its role to the training of Afghan forces.

Also in Helmand, insurgents opened fire on a civilian bus traveling in the Girishk district, killing a man and a child and wounding 16 others, the governor’s office reported. And in southern Uruzgan province, a car bomb killed the commander of a highway security force, Wali Jan, as he walked out of his home, the police said.

And in the southern Herat province, two Taliban gunmen shot and killed acting police chief of Shindan district as he was riding his motorcycle. Kahmir Khan was on his way to work when he was attacked, said the governor’s spokesman, Mohyaddin Noori.

The U.S.-led coalition currently has more than 130,000 troops in Afghanistan, with about 98,000 from the United States.

International forces have begun handing over responsibly for security to Afghan forces and all foreign combat troops are to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014. President Barack Obama in July announced that he would pull 10,000 troops out of Afghanistan this year and 23,000 more by next September.

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