Gen. David Petraeus, the overall commander of American forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, says that the situation in the latter is getting worse, not better. No one will disagree with that. Last week saw more than 400 attacks by militants. The level of insurgency is worse than at any point since the 2001 invasion — and expected to get worse in the run-up to presidential elections in two months’ time. Other Afghan statistics make equally grim reading. Deaths among coalition forces are up 55 percent compared to a year ago. Worst of all, more Afghan civilians are now being killed by coalition forces than by the Taleban. Last year, according to the UN, 829 people were killed by US, coalition and Afghan forces, 1,160 by militants. In the first two months of this year, coalition and Afghan forces killed 100 civilians compared to the militants’ 60 — and the situation has not improved.
There are those who say that the only answer is for the US-led coalition to quit. That may turn out to be an irresponsible response. Things would get even worse if the coalition forces cut and ran. There would be a power vacuum as tribal factions jostled for influence or tried to gain the best out of the situation. It would be full-scale civil war again. The government of President Hamid Karzai would almost certainly be swept aside. The final victor would be the Taleban, not because it has serious support — on the contrary, the overwhelming majority of Afghans never want to see it in government again — but because it is well armed and has support across the tribal divide.
No one who genuinely cares about the fate of the Afghani people could want such an outcome. Those with doubts about the sheer evil of Taleban should look to what has been happening in the past few days in Pakistan — Tuesday’s suicide bomb attack on the hotel in Peshawar, yesterday’s murder of a leading Pakistani cleric during Friday prayers in Lahore and the attack on a mosque in Nowshera near Islamabad. Murdering innocent people (both in Pakistan and Afghanistan); attacking mosques: That is what the Taleban do. With their twisted and corrupting ideas, they are the cancer within.
Sadly, soaring levels of civilian deaths in Afghanistan because of coalition incompetence have kept the focus away from the evil of the Taleban. They have been used by those who want the troops out and, most dangerous of all, risk alienating Afghans from the coalition and the government of President Karzai.
Finally, after months of Afghan pleas that coalition forces pay greater attention to civilian safety, it seems that its crucial importance has registered in Washington. The new coalition commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the rising civilian death toll is undermining the war effort.
His announcement that he is going to make protecting civilians a priority is a development of the greatest significance in this struggle. Without it, there is no hope of turning the tide. But will his words be put into effect?
CIA disclosure: Let a judge decide
LA Times yesterday commented on the torture and mistreatment by the Bush administration of suspected terrorists, saying in part:
Despite its repudiation of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the Obama administration continues to stifle public scrutiny of how the Bush Justice Department’s strained legal rationale for torture was translated into the mistreatment of suspected terrorists. The latest attempt to deflect disclosure was a statement by CIA Director Leon E. Panetta on Monday that not a single paragraph of 65 documents describing the agency’s interrogations could safely be made public. Most of the documents describe the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded at least 83 times. The federal judge to whom Panetta submitted his declaration shouldn’t take it at face value. As with the photographs of prisoner abuse that President Obama wrongly declined to make public, the documents sought by the American Civil Liberties Union shouldn’t be withheld to spare the United States additional embarrassment.
Nor is continued secrecy justified, as Panetta maintains, by the possibility that details about abandoned techniques would help Al-Qaeda prepare for future interrogations. Even less convincing is Panetta’s claim that national security would be endangered by the identification of countries that allowed the CIA to interrogate suspects on their soil. To be fair, these are only some of Panetta’s justifications for exempting so-called operational documents from the disclosure requirements of the Freedom of Information Act. He also told US District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein that their release would expose the identities of CIA employees who took part in interrogations and reveal what the CIA did and didn’t know about terrorist plots at particular points in time.
These arguments have a better claim to the exception in the FOIA for matters “specifically authorized under criteria established by an executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.” But the documents may contain information that doesn’t meet that test.
