This article titled “US and Libya in face-to-face talks” was written by Ewen MacAskill in Washington, for The Guardian on Tuesday 19th July 2011 00.08 UTC

The US and Libya on Saturday held their first face-to-face talks since the conflict in Libya began four months ago, officials from both governments have confirmed.

But the two sides disagreed about what was discussed – and what happens next.

The three-hour talks were held on neutral ground in Tunisia.

A US state department official said Washington agreed to the meeting, after several requests from Tripoli, in order to deliver a message to the Libyan government that its leader, Muammar Gaddafi, had to step down.

It was not the start of negotiations and no further talks were planned, the official said.

But the Libyan government spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, speaking in Tripoli, described it as a first step.

“We support any dialogue, any peace initiative, as long as they don’t decide Libya’s future from outside,” Ibrahim told journalists in Tripoli.

“We will discuss everything, but do not condition your peace talks. Let the Libyans decide their future.”

The discussions took place amid concern in the US and Europe that the conflict – which Britain and France expected to lead quickly to Gaddafi’s exit – was dragging on. Washington, too, is keen on a quick resolution, with Barack Obama conscious of the war weariness in the US, with Libya coming on top of missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama has been calling publicly for several months for Gaddafi to stand down.

The weekend meeting came after the US on Friday joined other countries in officially recognising the Libyan rebels as the new government, bringing the total of such countries to 30.

A US state department official said the meeting was a one-off to emphasise that Gaddafi had to depart. Ibrahim has said in the past that negotiations that involved Gaddafi’s exit were a non-starter.

The Americans who took part in the talks included the US ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz, who was forced to leave Libya in December after embarrassing leaked cables on WikiLeaks, and Jeffrey Feltman, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. Four members of Gaddafi’s inner circle also took part.

The French foreign minister, Alain Juppe, last week said Paris was talking to representatives of the Gaddafi government.

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This article titled “Taliban is demoralised, says British forces commander” was written by Richard Norton-Taylor, for The Guardian on Wednesday 13th April 2011 19.26 UTC

Amid widespread predictions of a bloody fighting season in Afghanistan, the commander of British forces there has described the Taliban-led insurgency as “increasingly fractured and increasingly demoralised”.

Brigadier James Chiswell, said that in response to increasing attacks from British, US, and Afghan, forces in Helmand province, insurgents were “examining their options”.

However, though he suggested the insurgency had been badly hit by the deployment of 30,000 US marines who joined the 9,500 British troops over the past year, the insurgency had proved in the past to be “adaptable and resilient”.

Chiswell, just returned from Helmand after commanding 16 Air Assault Brigade there, predicted that the Taliban would shift to asymetric tactics and intimidation – soft civilian targets. Referring to recent spectacular attacks in neighbouring Kandahar province, he said those were unlikely to endear the Taliban to the local population.

Taliban suicide bombers used an ambulance to attack a police training centre in Kandahar in an incident the Taliban promised to investigate. A suicide bomber killed 10 people in an attack on peace talks between tribal elders in Afghanistan’s eastern Kunar province.

However, Chiswell said the insurgency was “under pressure” and there was a sense of optimism, above all confidence, among the local population. Whether it was the result of a “seasonal feel-good factor or something more profound and enduring”, could really only be answered this time next year.

Senior British officials in London predict that the forthcoming fighting season will be bloody and that there is a political vacuum around the commitment to end Britain’s military combat role in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

Growing frustration about the lack of political or diplomatic progress, was reflected by David Miliband, the former foreign secretary who wrote in the New York Times: “Our leverage will decline, not improve, as 2014 approaches.” He added: “The insurgency can spread, outstripping the ability of international and Afghan forces to check its growth.”

Asked whether it was time for a political surge, Chiswell replied: “Our take is it is all politics, as much politics as war amongst the people”. He added: “If you get the politics locally right, it sucks the oxygen out of the insurgency… Only time will tell but I’m very positive we are heading in the right direction. It comes down to a local sense of confidence”.

British military chiefs, including General Sir David Richards, chief of the defence staff, are foremost among those increasingly frustrated by the lack of political progress now that they say they have sufficient troops in Afghanistan and that the international – foreign – force there cannot achieve more. It is now up to Afghan leaders at the local as well as national level, and the growing number of Afghan security forces, they say.

The new fighting season, which will start as soon as the poppy harvest is in, is likely to hit Afghans, security forces in uniform, as well as civilians, observers – including senior British government officials, warn.

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This article titled “Two US soldiers killed in friendly-fire drone attack in Afghanistan” was written by Ewen MacAskill in Washington, for The Guardian on Monday 11th April 2011 21.05 UTC

Two members of the US military were accidentally killed last week in a drone attack, the first American victims of the unmanned aircraft, NBC has reported.

The two had been on foot and were approaching Helmand province’s Sangin base, centre of some of the fiercest fighting in Afghanistan over the last decade. They were mistaken for the Taliban by marines, who were under fire at the time and who called in a missile strike from a Predator drone, NBC said.

The Pentagon is refusing to confirm or deny the story, saying that the incident is still under investigation. It reported last week that the two were killed but did not say where or how.

The two killed were named by the Pentagon as Marine Staff Sergeant Jeremy Smith, 26, from Texas and Navy Corpsman Benjamin Rast, 23, from Michigan.

The US has increasingly been using drones in both Afghanistan and Pakistan against suspected Taliban and al-Qaida targets, a controversial policy mainly because of the number of innocent civilians killed.

The marines under fire had been watching pictures of the battlefield being fed to them by the Predator. NBC said they saw a number of ‘hotspots’ – infra-red images – moving towards them and assumed, wrongly, they were the Taliban.

The hotspots had, in fact, been Smith and Rast, part of a unit sent to reinforce those under fire.

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This article titled “Curveball’s admission ‘raises questions about CIA’” was written by Ed Pilkington in New York, for The Guardian on Wednesday 16th February 2011 01.05 UTC

A senior aide to Colin Powell at the time of his pivotal speech to the United Nations said on Tuesday that Curveball’s admission raised questions about the CIA’s role.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to the then US secretary of state Powell in the build-up to the invasion, said the lies of Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, also known by the codename Curveball, raised questions about how the CIA had briefed Powell ahead of his crucial speech to the UN security council presenting the case for war.

In particular, why did the CIA’s then director George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin believe the claim by Curveball, “and convey that to Powell even though the CIA’s own European chief Tyler Drumheller had already raised serious doubts.

“And why did Tenet and McLaughlin portray the presence of mobile biological labs in Iraq to the secretary of state with a degree of conviction bordering on passionate, soul-felt certainty?”

Richard Perle, a prominent neocon who chaired the Pentagon’s advisory board under the Bush administration at the time of the invasion, said the Janabi admission pointed to a clear failure in intelligence vetting. “It’s the job of intelligence agencies to distinguish between defectors who claim to have something to say and defectors who are lying and they obviously didn’t do their job. The Germans didn’t, and we didn’t.”

Perle said that Janabi wrote to him directly shortly before the invasion, setting out his claims about weapons of mass destruction and bemoaning that he wasn’t being taken seriously by the US.

Groups of US veterans involved in the invasion and occupation of Iraq expressed their dismay at the revelation that key information had been fabricated. “This is very damning testimony and an indictment of the work the US put into the pre-war intelligence. The decision to go to war, to spend billions on sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the region, was in large part taken on the basis of an admitted liar,” said Ashwin Madia, head of an organisation of progressive US military veterans, VoteVets.

Stephen Biddle, an Iraq expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Janabi’s admission undermined those critics who accused the Bush administration itself of having lied. “The source did actually tell them those things. But it does support the idea that they didn’t do due diligence on checking out the information in part because they were being told what they wanted to hear.”

Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst on Iraq now at the National Defence University in Washington, said there were “bitter lessons” from the handling of Janabi. “It was an intelligence failure and very poor tradecraft”.

She said that the syndrome of “false confirmation” – where just one source was shared by many different intelligence outlets none of whom realised they were talking to the same person – had come heavily into play. And the Bush administration had been far too willing to believe incredible witnesses.

“There were people at the time who doubted what Curveball was saying, but if the administration doesn’t want to believe it, it doesn’t make much difference.”

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This article titled “US tanks go in to Afghanistan amid warnings over air strikes toll” was written by Chris McGreal in Washington, for The Guardian on Friday 19th November 2010 18.59 UTC

The US is escalating its assault on the Taliban with a sharp rise in bombing and missile raids, more relaxed rules on the destruction of civilian property and the deployment of heavily armoured M1 Abrams tanks to Afghanistan for the first time.

But aid groups warned today that the dramatic increase in air strikes in recent months is contributing to “rapidly deteriorating” security for most Afghans and what is expected to be a rising number of civilian casualties.

The shift away from the previous emphasis on protecting civilians from the insurgents has drawn stinging criticism from the Afghan president, Hamad Karzai, but American military commanders say that it is working.

The number of “special operations” missions targeted at Taliban leaders has more than tripled since General David Petraeus took over as Nato commander in Afghanistan in July. Nato planes dropped about 1,000 bombs and missiles last month, more than at any time since the early stages of the war in 2001.

One US official told the Washington Post that the new strategy is forcing back the Taliban.

“We’ve taken the gloves off, and it has had huge impact,” the official said.

The military’s claim of new successes with aggressive tactics appears in part aimed at strengthening Petraeus’s hand at the Nato meeting in Lisbon. It will also be used by the general to argue that his military strategy is producing results when the White House reviews the conduct of the war next month.

The Americans say they plan to deploy a company of M1 Abrams tanks, considered among the most lethal of US military vehicles with an ability to destroy buildings more than a mile away. The fast 68-tonne tanks will be used by US marines in Helmand province where the Americans say the Taliban are equipped with weapons such as rocket propelled grenades.

Under Petraeus’s predecessor, General Stanley McChrystal, who was sacked by the White House over criticism of his civilian superiors, the US counter-insurgency strategy laid a heavy emphasis on separating and protecting Afghan civilians from the Taliban.

Although that is not being formally abandoned, Petraeus has decided to take the fight to the insurgents and American forces have taken a more aggressive stance.

McChrystal’s emphasis on protecting civilian lives did not sit well with many in the military, including front line troops who were prevented, for example, from destroying houses that might be used to hide roadside bombs or provide shelter for attack. American troops now routinely destroy houses they believe to be a threat. But the shift has angered Karzai who has argued that night raids by special forces and other tactics are fuelling support for the Taliban.

A report by Oxfam and about 30 other foreign and Afghan aid agencies today said that the more aggressive tactics, particularly the air strikes, threaten to reverse a reduction in civilian deaths caused by foreign forces.

Restraints on the use of air power by Nato led to a 30% drop in deaths and injuries caused by foreign forces in the first six months of this year against the same period in 2009. However, those restraints have now been eased.

“Security for the vast majority of Afghans is rapidly deteriorating. It is likely that increased violence in 2011 will lead to more civilian casualties,” the report said.

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This article titled “Afghan elections: British commander predicts surge in Taliban violence” was written by Richard Norton-Taylor, for The Guardian on Wednesday 15th September 2010 20.12 UTC

The British commander of 30,000 foreign troops in Kandahar has today warned that he expects a surge in violence by Taliban-led insurgents as Saturday’s Afghan parliamentary elections approaches.

“We have already seen a pattern of intimidation,” Major General Nick Carter said, speaking by video link from the Taliban’s heartland to journalists in London. “There will be a good deal of violence because the insurgency will want to prevent people from voting,” he added.

He said that though the number of US troops and Afghan national army and police forces had increased significantly over the past few months, “our sense is that it is too early to predict which way this will go”.

Carter added: “I am not, and never have been from my time in Afghanistan, optimistic. The reality is that the insurgency will have a go on election day. I just hope they don’t do as well as they did last year”.

He described the latest stages of a drawn-out Nato Afghan campaign – codenamed Hamkari, the Dari word for cooperation – designed to weaken the influence and presence of the Taliban and their supporters in Kandahar city and surrounding districts, an area with a population of about 1 million.

International forces had been undertaking a series of “proactive operations” against insurgents. Operations had also disrupted what he called lower and mid-level Taliban commanders.

He referred to operations in the areas bordering Pakistan where, though he did not mention them, British and American special forces have also been pursuing leading Taliban commanders.

Carter compared Kandahar to Moscow in the 1990s, with “mobs, mafia and protection rackets” as well as the Taliban. The police were loyal to powerful individuals rather than to the Afghan state, he said. Afghan security forces had to “wrestle with the influence of power brokers”.

He said he expected that by Christmas “much of the population” in Kandahar city and the surrounding districts of Arghandab, Zharay, and Panjwai, would be protected by Afghan security forces backed up by foreign, Nato-led, troops.

Major General Gordon Messenger, chief military spokesman at the Ministry of Defence, suggested that in central Helmand province, west of Kandahar and where 9,500 British troops are based, the security situation was improving. The Afghan army was conducting more operations on its own, without help from foreign forces.

But he said he was not “for a second suggesting [the situation] had been cracked and there were not going to be setbacks”.

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This article titled “US officials in Iraq face uphill task without troops” was written by Ewen MacAskill in Washington, for The Guardian on Thursday 19th August 2010 21.00 UTC

Thousands of American civilian officials poised to take over from the US military in Iraq next month face a daunting range of obstacles in nation-building that include reduced security, cutbacks in their budget and the continued failure of the Iraqis to form a government.

The US state department has never in its history had to take on such a monumental exercise independent of troop support. Although the last full US combat brigade has now crossed from Iraq to Kuwait, a hugely important symbolic moment, the department is not due to formally take over from the military until 1 September. At that point, the mission the US labelled Operation Iraqi Freedom, which has been in use since the 2003 invasion, gives way to Operation New Dawn.

As the military role winds down, the state department’s role is set to increase. One of the biggest concerns it faces is that while 50,000 “non-combat” troops are to be left in Iraq as back-up for Iraqi forces, they will not provide security for US civilians engaged in reconstruction projects.

The state department will have to recruit thousands of private security contractors, increasing the existing force of 2,700 to 6,000-7,000, to provide protection. This comes in spite of the problems in the past created by the private security firms, in particular Blackwater (now renamed Xe), which gained a reputation as being trigger-happy.

The state department will also have to buy expensive equipment or persuade the financially stretched Pentagon to donate it. It wants to almost double its helicopter fleet in the country to 29, increase the number of armoured cars to 1,320 and add 60 mine-resistant vehicles.

State department spokesman PJ Crowley said: “We are ending the war … but we are not ending our work in Iraq. We have a long-term commitment to Iraq.”

Chris Hill, the outgoing US ambassador to Iraq, expressed optimism this week in Washington that the state department would fulfil its new role but admitted: “It is not easy.”

Crowley also predicted that the Iraqi government – which remains unformed since elections in March – would eventually come together. The inability of the Iraqi political elite to form a government means that many of the tasks the US military planned to hand over to the Iraqis will now be added to an already over-burdened state department.

One of its biggest concerns is how much money Congress, less interested in Iraq as it has dropped off the national agenda and sceptical about what some see as the failing war in Afghanistan, is prepared to continue pouring into Iraq.

The state department, in the face of budget cuts, is drawing up plans for reduced operations in Iraq that include scaled-back police training, one of the tasks it is to inherit from the US military.

The formal hand-over from the military will take place at a ceremony presided over the senior American commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno.

Major Chris Perrine, a Pentagon spokesman, said today: “On September 1, Operation Iraqi Freedom will end and Operation New Dawn will begin, and the transition from a US defence-led effort to a department of state-led effort.”

Perrine said the departure of the combat brigade meant there were 56,000 US troops left in Iraq, of which 6,000 would be gone by the 31 August deadline for reducing the force to 50,000.

Still embarrassed by former president George Bush’s premature declaration soon after the 2003 invasion of “mission accomplished”, US military and diplomatic officials were extra careful today to avoid claiming that combat had ended. “I don’t think anybody declared the end of the war as far as I know. There’s still fighting ahead,” said Geoff Morell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman.

The state department is considering reducing the number of reconstruction teams as a way of scaling back. It requested .8bn for Iraq for the coming financial year, a figure subsequently slashed by the House and Senate.

Members of Congress say that Iraq, with its huge oil reserves, should take a bigger share of the financial burden, but state department officials believe it will be eight to 10 years before Iraq is self-sustaining financially.

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I think it’s pretty clear that North Korea can do whatever it wants whenever it wants and to whomever it wants. No matter how outrageous the act there are never any consequences from anyone. They can launch ballistic missiles, they can detonate nuclear bombs, they can sell nuclear technology to rogue regimes, they can counterfeit US currency, they can starve their own people, and now they can murder South Korean sailors by sinking their ship.

A submarine from the DPRK (North Korea) launched a torpedo at a South Korean Navy ship causing it to sink. 46 South Korean sailors lost their lives in the explosion. I repeat 46 sailors died in the attack. I don’t think you have to be Dick Cheney to call that a pretty clear act of war.

What’s the worlds response to this? Officials from South Korea and the US are calling it a “provocative action.” Yeah, I’d say sinking a Navy ship and killing 46 sailors is pretty f*cking provocative alright, but let’s be clear — it was an act of war.

Now, Hillary Clinton is acting all blustery at the UN demanding that the world “send a clear message to North Korea that provocative actions have consequences.” I’m sure Kim Jong-iL is beside himself with worry.

What this means is that we’ll see the usual dog and pony show at the UN and out of that we’ll get a “strongly worded statement” of condemnation to add to the pile of other strongly worded statements to North Korea and that will be that.

It’s pretty clear that Kim Jong-iL is constantly testing the US and its allies. He’s constantly testing to see how far he can go before we hit back. So far, he’s been able to do whatever he wants.

What’s important to realize is that every so-called “provocative action” by the North is a little more extreme and little more dangerous than the previous one. They’ve gotten away with detonating nukes and firing ballistic missiles and sinking ships. Maybe next time they’ll try firing a ballistic missile into Seoul. Maybe they’ll see what happens if they detonate a dirty bomb close to the DMZ. Who knows? Kim Jong-iL is a despicable mass murdering dictator — calm and rational thought is not exactly his strong suit.

North Korea is probably the most pathetic broken down country on the planet. I can’t believe the South are such pussies that they’re going to let the DPRK get away with this. The South has an awesome military that’s practically a mirror image of our own with top of the line fighter aircraft, etc.

The South should have immediately launched air strikes against the naval base the North Korean submarine launched from. They should have destroyed the entire base and every submarine and surface ship docked there.

That would have been a very clear message to the thugs in the North. For the first time in decades someone would have sent the North Koreans a message they could understand.

-Chris Jones

Georgia’s president is reporting that more than 100 tanks are heading towards Georgia’s second largest city.

Mikhail Saakashvili says the convoy is about halfway between the cities of Senaki and Kutaisi. He spoke to foreign reporters Thursday and appealed for international help.

It’s pretty obvious that Russia has no intentions of honoring the cease-fire. This doesn’t have anything to do with Georgia and has everything to do with seizing Georgia’s oil pipeline to turkey.