By Cora Currier, ProPublica

In his first year in office, President Barack Obama pledged to “collect the facts” on the death of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war at the hands of U.S.-allied Afghan forces in late 2001.

Almost four years later, there’s no sign of progress.

When asked by ProPublica about the state of the investigation, the White House says it is still “looking into” the apparent massacre. Yet no facts have been released and it’s far from clear what, if any, facts have been collected.

Human rights researchers who originally uncovered the case say they’ve seen no evidence of an active investigation.

The deaths happened as Taliban forces were collapsing in the wake of the American invasion of Afghanistan. Thousands of Taliban prisoners had surrendered to the forces of a U.S.-supported warlord named Abdul Rashid Dostum. The prisoners, say survivors and other witnesses, were stuffed into shipping containers without food or water. Many died of suffocation. Others were allegedly killed when Dostum’s men shot at the containers.

A few months later, a mass grave was found nearby in Dasht-i-Leili, a desert region of northern Afghanistan.

The New York Times reported in 2009 that the Bush administration, sensitive to criticism of a U.S. ally, had discouraged investigations into the incident. In response, Obama told CNN that “if it appears that our conduct in some way supported violations of the laws of war, I think that we have to know about that.”

A White House spokeswoman told ProPublica that there has indeed been some kind of review – and that it’s still ongoing: “At the direction of the President, his national security team is continuing its work looking into the Dasht-i-Leili massacre.” She declined to provide more details.

“This seems quite half-hearted and cynical,” said Susannah Sirkin, director of international policy at Physicians for Human Rights, the group that discovered the grave site in 2002 and since then has pushed for an investigation.

The group sent a letter to the president in December 2011, the tenth anniversary of the incident. In a follow-up meeting some months later, senior State Department officials told Physicians for Human Rights that there was nothing new to share.

“This has been a hot potato that no one wanted to deal with, and now it’s gone cold,” said Norah Niland, former director of human rights for the United Nations in Afghanistan.

Human rights advocates have long said the responsibility for a comprehensive investigation lies with the U.S., because American forces were allied with Dostum and his men at the time. Surviving prisoners have also claimed that Americans were present when the containers were loaded, though that’s never been corroborated.

A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that the Department of Defense “found no evidence of U.S. service member participation, knowledge, or presence. A broader review of the facts is beyond D.O.D.’s purview.” That initial review has never been made public.

At this point, say advocates, an investigation should address not just the question of U.S. involvement, but also what the U.S. did in the years that followed to foster accountability.

“I’m not saying Dostum ordered these people killed, and I’m not saying U.S. troops participated,” said Stefan Schmitt, a forensic specialist with Physicians for Human Rights. “All I’m saying is there are hundreds if not thousands of people that went missing. In a country that’s looking to have peace, to be under the rule of law, you need to answer these questions.”

Initially excited by Obama’s statement, researchers with Physicians for Human Rights peppered the administration with their findings. But the response was “murky at best,” said Sirkin.

“We were never very clear on who within the administration was delegated the task,” she said. Current and former administration officials interviewed by ProPublica couldn’t say which agency or department had the job.

Sirkin and others eventually resigned themselves to the fact that Obama, in his televised remarks, had not specifically called for a full investigation. With the U.S. now withdrawing from Afghanistan, many observers say it’s no surprise that investigating Dasht-i-Leili is no longer a priority.

Dostum still holds considerable sway in Northern Afghanistan, though he has fallen in and out of favor with the U.S. and with Afghan president Hamid Karzai. The Times recently reported Dostum is one of several former warlords to whom Karzai passes on thousands of dollars in cash he receives from the CIA each month. (We were unable to reach Dostum himself for this story.)

The Obama administration has been cool toward him in recent years, saying ahead of Afghanistan’s elections in 2009 that the U.S. “maintains concerns about any leadership role for Mr. Dostum in today’s Afghanistan.”

Back in 2001, Dostum was far more important to the U.S. He was a U.S. proxy, fighting the Taliban as part of the Northern Alliance. American Special Forces famously rode on horseback alongside Dostum’s men, advising and calling in airstrikes. The alliance took the city of Mazar-i-Sharif from the Taliban in one of the first major victories of the invasion in early November 2001.

The shipping container deaths occurred a few weeks later, when Taliban fighters who had surrendered to the Northern Alliance at the city of Kunduz were en route to a prison about 200 miles away.

That winter, Physicians for Human Rights discovered a mass grave at Dasht-i-Leili. A preliminary investigation exhumed several bodies that appeared to have died from suffocation. Stories began to circulate in the region and Newsweek and others published detailed accounts from surviving prisoners, truck drivers, and other witnesses.

The Times also reported that an FBI agent interviewing new Afghan arrivals to Guantanamo Bay prison in early 2002 heard consistent accounts of prisoners “stacked like cordwood,” and death by suffocation and shooting. When the agent pressed for an investigation, he was reportedly told it was not his responsibility.

Dostum has said that he would welcome an investigation. He said that some 200 prisoners had indeed died in transit, but that the deaths were unintentional, the result of battlefield wounds.

Other estimates put the toll much higher.

A widely cited State Department memo from fall 2002 said that “the actual number may approach 2,000.”

Around the same time, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell tasked his Ambassador for War Crimes, Pierre-Richard Prosper, with looking into Dasht-i-Leili. Prosper told ProPublica that due to the U.S. alliance with Dostum, Washington felt the U.S. should not take the lead in an investigation.

 ”We were in the middle of fighting, and we thought we should keep the lines clear, let someone else, the U.N. or Afghans, handle this,” said Prosper.

But the newly installed Afghan government had neither the will nor the resources for a thorough investigation, and U.N. officials said they could not guarantee security. Witnesses and others involved in Dasht-i-Leili had already been killed and harassed, according to State Department memos.

A declassified Defense Department memo from February 2003 indicates the U.S. was not providing security for an investigation. The memo’s author, Marshall Billingslea, told the Times in 2009, “I did get the sense that there was little appetite for this matter within parts of D.O.D.” (Billingslea did not respond to our requests for comment.)

As the years went by, no one from the U.S., the U.N., or Afghanistan guarded the grave site. In 2008, reporters and researchers found empty pits where they had once found human remains. Satellite photos obtained later showed what appeared to be earth-moving equipment in the desert in 2006. Locals told McClatchy that Dostum’s men had dug up the graves.

After Obama pledged in 2009 to look into the case, a parallel inquiry was begun the next year in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by current Secretary of State John Kerry.

The fate of that investigation is also unclear. The lead investigator, John Kiriakou, was a former CIA officer who was caught up in a criminal leak prosecution and is now in prison. Other Senate staffers could not provide details on Kiriakou’s efforts. Physicians for Human Rights says contact from the committee fizzled out within a year.

New attention to Dasht-i-Leili had also been sparked within the U.N.’s mission in Afghanistan and the organization’s High Commission on Human Rights, former U.N. officials said.

However, Peter Galbraith, who was the U.N.’s deputy special representative for Afghanistan until the fall of 2009, told ProPublica that “an investigation would’ve required a push from the U.S. It required the cooperation of the coalition forces.” (Neither the U.N. mission in Afghanistan nor the office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights responded to our requests for comment.)

The mass grave at Dasht-i-Leili is one of many left unexamined in Afghanistan. In late 2011, the nation’s Independent Human Rights Commission concluded a massive report on decades of war crimes and human rights abuses, which reportedly documents 180 mass graves across the country. The region near Dasht-i-Leili is also believed to hold the remains of civilians massacred by the Taliban in 1998, in what Human Rights Watch called ”one of the single worst examples of killings of civilians in Afghanistan’s twenty-year war.” In all, the report named 500 individuals responsible for mass killings – some of whom hold prominent government positions.

American and Afghan officials reportedly discouraged publication of the report, and the commission has still not made it public. “It’s going to reopen all the old wounds,” an American Embassy official told the New York Times last year. Afghanistan also recently adopted an amnesty law offering blanket immunity for past war crimes.

Nader Nadery, the commissioner responsible for the report, told ProPublica: “I haven’t seen any political or even rhetorical support of investigations into Dasht-i-Leili or any other investigation into past atrocities, from either Bush or Obama.” 

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John McCain: Born for War. (mistydawnphoto / Shutterstock.com)

Amazingly, Sen. John McCain wasn’t always as gung ho about sending Americans off to fight in foreign lands as he is today. In September 1983, Senator McCain voted against President Reagan’s decision to put American troops in Lebanon as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. On the Senate floor, he spoke eloquently about the risks of interventionism. “The fundamental question is: What is the United States’ interest in Lebanon?” said McCain. “It is said we are there to keep the peace. I ask, what peace? It is said we are there to aid the government. I ask, what government? It is said we are there to stabilize the region. I ask, how can the U.S. presence stabilize the region?… The longer we stay in Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave. We will be trapped by the case we make for having our troops there in the first place.”

Fast forward two decades and there isn’t a war John McCain doesn’t want America to be involved in. If there’s a conflict going on, you can pretty safely bet that McCain wants in on it.

Consider the following:

1. McCain is trying to up American involvement in the civil war raging in Syria. One of the most vocal critics of the Obama administration’s Syria policy, McCain secretly made a trip across the Turkey-Syria border with Gen. Salem Idris, the leader of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). He stayed in the country for several hours before returning to Turkey. According to The Daily Beast, “Both in Syria and Turkey, McCain and Idris met with assembled leaders of Free Syrian Army units that traveled from around the country to see the U.S. senator. Inside those meetings, rebel leaders called on the United States to step up its support to the Syrian armed opposition and provide them with heavy weapons, a no-fly zone, and airstrikes on the Syrian regime and the forces of Hezbollah, which is increasingly active in Syria.” Apparently not bothered by the disasters of US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the raging anti Americanism in the Middle East, McCain thinks more involvement  will improve the situation. Or maybe he doesn’t care about that either, and just wants more war.

2. He helped the Bush Administration build a case for war in Iraq, despite any evidence of WMDs or Saddam’s links to Al-Qaeda. McCain was one of the most vocal supporters of the war in Iraq and helped Bush and Cheney build a fictitious case against Saddam that led to one of the greatest strategic disaster in US military history. McCain is the only veteran in the Senate who has not turned against the war and still maintains it was a great idea.

3. Unwilling to accept that America’s role in Iraq was increasingly pointless and counterproductive, McCain was a huge supporter of the ‘Surge’ in 2007. The Bush Administration deployed more than 20,000 soldiers into Iraq, five additional brigades, (the majority of them going to Baghdad), and extended the tour of most of the Army troops in country. If there are two options on the table – less war or more war, you can bet McCain will always opt for the latter.

4. McCain believes in America’s divine right to occupy a country for as long as it likes in order to achieve its objectives. During a at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire in 2008, McCain was asked about the Bush administration’s willingness to keep troops in Iraq for 50 years. McCain cut the questionner off and said “Make it a hundred.”

5. McCain has long been a proponent of attacking Iran. Despite Iran not threatening anyone, not having nuclear weapons and not building any, McCain has ratcheted up the rhetoric against them for years, threatening them with military action and hammering Obama for being ‘weak’ when dealing with them. Back in 2009, Joe Klein observed that: “For two years now, John McCain has been entirely consistent on Iran: every last statement he’s made–at least, those that I’ve seen–has been (a) fabulously uninformed and (b) dangerously bellicose.”

An example: During a campaign appearance in South Carolina in 2007,  McCain was asked by an audience member about potential U.S. military action in Iran. ”How many times do we have to prove that these people are blowing up people now, never mind if they get a nuclear weapon. When do we send them an airmail message to Tehran?” a man asked. McCain replied, “That old, eh, that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran — “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, anyway, ah ….”.

Hilarious.

6. Regardless of its illegality, McCain has advocated bombing the infrastructure of enemy countries. Under Article 54 of Protocol I of the 1977 Geneva Conventions, it states that:

It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive

And here was McCain on the bombing of  Serbia during the Balklans crisis in 1999:

No infrastructure targets should have been off limits. And while we all grieve over civilian casualties as well as our own losses, they are unavoidable.

7. McCain was vehemently anti the use of torture as an interrogation method by the military, then suddenly announced that the CIA shouldn’t be held to the same standards. In a statement submitted for the Congressional Record, McCain explained that the CIA had the right to use ‘alternative interrogation techniques’ that were ‘different’ from those used by the US military. In other words, McCain doesn’t believe in torture unless the CIA does it. Then it’s ok.

8. There is good evidence that John McCain’s thirst for war is almost entirely down to political ambition. In a devastating critique of his record on war in The American Conservative, Justin Raimondo argues that McCain’s extreme narcissism and relentless political ambition has lead to a complete evolution on American interventionism:

It is impossible to know what is in McCain’s heart. There may be a purely ideological explanation for his changing viewpoint. But what seems to account for his evolution from realism to hopped-up interventionism is nothing more than sheer ambition. This was the case in 1983, when he defied the Reagan administration over sending U.S. soldiers to die at the hands of a Beirut suicide bomber, and in 1999, when the cry went up to take on Slobodan Milosevic. He was positioning himself against his own party, while staking out a distinctive stance independent of the Democrats. It was, in short, an instance of a presidential candidate maneuvering himself to increase his appeal to the electorate—and, most importantly, the media.

In short, John McCain is pro or anti war depending on whether it benefits him politically. Given America’s economic decline, increasing wealth inequality and general political apathy, war is a useful tool to distract the public. And therefore, the more John McCain supports it.

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By Paul Kiel, ProPublica, and Mitchell Hartman, Marketplace

This story was co-produced with Marketplace. Listen to their coverage.

Seven years after Congress banned payday-loan companies from charging exorbitant interest rates to service members, many of the nation’s military bases are surrounded by storefront lenders who charge high annual percentage rates, sometimes exceeding 400 percent.

The Military Lending Act sought to protect service members and their families from predatory loans. But in practice, the law has defined the types of covered loans so narrowly that it’s been all too easy for lenders to circumvent it.

“We have to revisit this,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who chairs the defense appropriations subcommittee and is the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat. “If we’re serious about protecting military families from exploitation, this law has to be a lot tighter.”

Members of the military can lose their security clearances for falling into debt. As a result, experts say, service members often avoid taking financial problems to their superior officers and instead resort to high-cost loans they don’t fully understand.

The Department of Defense, which defines which loans the Military Lending Act covers, has begun a process to review the law, said Marcus Beauregard, chief of the Pentagon’s state liaison office.

The act mainly targets two products: payday loans, usually two-week loans with annual percentage rates often above 400 percent, and auto-title loans, typically one-month loans with rates above 100 percent and secured by the borrower’s vehicle. The law caps all covered loans at a 36 percent annual rate.

That limit “did do a great deal of good on the products that it covered,” Holly Petraeus, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s head of service member affairs, said in an interview. “But there are a lot of products that it doesn’t cover.”

Representatives from payday and other high-cost lenders said they follow the law. Some defended the proliferation of new products as helpful to consumers.

A 400 Percent Loan

In June 2011, when Levon Tyler, a 37-year-old staff sergeant in the Marines, walked into Smart Choice Title Loans in Columbia, S.C., it was the first time he’d ever gone to such a place, he said. But his bills were mounting. He needed cash right away.

Smart Choice agreed to lend him $1,600. In return, Tyler handed over the title to his 1998 Ford SUV and a copy of his keys. Tyler recalled the saleswoman telling him he’d probably be able to pay off the loan in a year. He said he did not scrutinize the contract he signed that day.

If he had, Tyler would have seen that in exchange for that $1,600, he’d agreed to pay a total of $17,228 over two and a half years. The loan’s annual percentage rate, which includes interest and fees, was 400 percent.

Tyler said he provided his military ID when he got the loan. But even with an annual rate as high as a typical payday loan, the Military Lending Act didn’t apply. The law limits the interest rate of title loans — but only those that have a term of six months or less.

In South Carolina, almost no loans fit that definition, said Sue Berkowitz, director of the nonprofit South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center. The reason? Ten years ago, the state legislature passed consumer protections for short-term auto-title loans. In response, lenders simply lengthened the duration of their loans.

Today, plenty of payday and auto-title lenders cluster near Fort Jackson, an army base in Columbia, legally peddling high-cost loans to the more than 36,000 soldiers who receive basic training there each year.

Tyler’s loan showcases other examples of lenders’ ingenuity. Attached to his contract was an addendum that offered a “Summer Fun Program Payoff.” While the loan’s official term was 32 months, putting it outside both South Carolina’s regulations and the Military Lending Act, the “Summer Fun” option allowed Tyler to pay off the loan in a single month. If he did so, he’d pay an annual rate of 110 percent, the addendum said.

Michael Agostinelli, the chief executive of Smart Choice’s parent company, American Life Enterprises, told ProPublica he wants his customers to pay off their loans early. “They’re meant to be short-term loans,” he said. He also said that customers who pay on time get “a big discount.” In Tyler’s case, he would have paid an annual rate of 192 percent if he had made all his payments on time.

But Tyler fell behind after only a couple of payments. Less than five months after he took out the loan, a repo company came in the middle of the night to take his car. Three weeks later, it was sold at auction.

“This was something new, and I will never do it again,” Tyler said. “I don’t care what type of spot I get in.”

American Life Enterprises companies operate nine title-lending branches in Nevada and South Carolina. Agostinelli said loans to members of the military are rare for his companies but that service members might go to a title lender for the same reason anybody else does: They need money immediately and discreetly.

Loans similar to the one Tyler took out are broadly and legally available from stores and over the Internet. QC Holdings, Advance America, Cash America and Ace Cash Express — all among the country’s largest payday lenders — offer loans that fall outside the definitions of the Military Lending Act, which defined a payday loan as lasting three months or less.

The annual rates can be sky high, such as those offered by Ace Cash Express in Texas, where a five-month loan for $400 comes with an annual rate of 585 percent, according to the company’s website.

Ace Cash is among a number of payday lenders just outside the gates of Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, and it has four stores within three miles of Fort Hood in Texas.

A 2012 report on the Military Lending Act by the Consumer Federation of America found there had been no drop in the number of payday lenders around Fort Hood since the 2006 law went into effect.

Amy Cantu of the Community Financial Services Association of America, which represents the payday industry, said payday lenders are careful to screen out service members for their short-term products. But she acknowledged that payday companies may provide soldiers and their families with other types of loans. “We welcome more products in the market,” she said of the trend of payday lenders increasingly offering longer-term loans. “Options are good for consumers.”

Earned a Purple Heart, Lost a Car

Some lenders apparently haven’t bothered to change their loan products in response to the law.

A 2011 federal class-action suit filed in Georgia’s Middle District alleges that one of the largest auto-title lenders in the country, Community Loans of America, has been flouting the law. The suit names among its plaintiffs three soldiers who took out what appeared to be classic title loans. All agreed to pay an annual rate of around 150 percent for a 30-day loan. All had trouble repaying, according to the suit. One, an Army staff sergeant and Purple Heart recipient, lost his car. The other two managed to pay interest but almost none of the principal on their loans for several months.

The company was fully aware that its customers were soldiers, because they presented their military identifications, said Roy Barnes, a former governor of Georgia who is representing the plaintiffs.

Community Loans, which boasts more than 900 locations nationwide, argued in court that the transactions were not covered by the Military Lending Act because they weren’t loans but sales. Here’s how Community Loans said the transaction worked: The soldiers sold their vehicles to the company while retaining the option to buy back the cars — for a higher price. In early 2012, the judge rejected that argument. The case is ongoing.

Community Loans, which did not respond to numerous calls and emails, has been making loans to service members through businesses with various names.

Leading up to the gates of Fort Benning in Columbus, Ga., Victory Drive is crowded with lenders. Among them is Georgia Auto Pawn, a Community Loans of America storefront where one of the plaintiffs in the class action, an Army master sergeant, took out his loan.

Just another half-mile down the road is a lender advertising “Signature Loans for the Military.” The lender goes by the name of Title Credit Finance, but the parent company is Community Finance and Loans, which shares the same corporate address as Community Loans of America.

A billboard for Title Credit Finance promises to rescue borrowers: Showing a picture of a hamster on a wheel, it says, “Avoid the title pawn treadmill,” referring to customers who get caught paying only interest month after month.

Title Credit Finance offers installment loans, a product which, as the company advertises, does seem to provide “CASH NOW The Smart Way” — at least when compared to a title loan. Interest rates tend to be lower — though still typically well above 36 percent. And instead of simply paying interest month upon month, the borrower pays down the loan’s principal over time.

But the product comes with traps of its own. Installment lenders often load the loans with insurance products that can double the cost, and the companies thrive by persuading borrowers to use the product like a credit card. Customers can refinance the loan after only a few payments and borrow a little more. But those extra dollars typically come at a far higher cost than the annual rate listed on the contract.

At TitleMax, a title-lender with more than 700 stores in 12 states, soldiers who inquire about a title loan are directed to InstaLoan, TitleMax’s sister company, which provides installment loans, said Suzanne Donovan of the nonprofit Step Up Savannah. A $2,475 installment loan made to a soldier at Fort Stewart near Savannah, Ga., in 2011 and reviewed by ProPublica, for example, carried a 43 percent annual rate over 14 months — but that rate effectively soared to 80 percent when the insurance products were included. To get the loan, the soldier surrendered the title to his car. TMX Finance, the parent company of both TitleMax and InstaLoan, did not respond to multiple calls and emails seeking comment.

Another lender on Victory Drive is the publicly traded World Finance, one of the country’s largest installment lenders, with a market capitalization of about $1 billion and more than 1,000 stores around the country. World was the subject of an investigation by ProPublica and Marketplace earlier this week. Of World’s loans, about 5 percent, approximately 40,000 loans, are made to service members or their families, according to the company. Active-duty military personnel and their dependents comprise less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Defense Department.

Bill Himpler, the executive vice president of the American Financial Services Association, which represents installment lenders, said the industry’s products had been rightfully excluded from the Military Lending Act. The Pentagon had done a good job preserving soldiers’ access to affordable credit, he said, and only “tweaking the regulations here or there to tighten them up” was necessary.

The Commander and the Collectors

It’s not known how many service members have high-priced loans. The Pentagon says it intends to conduct a survey on the matter soon and issue a report by the end of the year.

But some commanders, such as Capt. Brandon Archuleta, say that dealing with soldiers’ financial problems is simply part of being an officer. Archuleta, who has commanded soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, recalled fielding numerous calls from lenders trying to track down soldiers who were delinquent on debts.

“In the last 12 years we’ve seen military officers as war fighters, we’ve seen them as diplomats, we’ve seen them as scholars,” Archuleta said. “But what we don’t see is the officer as social worker, financial adviser and personal caregiver.”

While some soldiers seek help from their superior officers, many don’t. That’s because debt troubles can result in soldiers losing their security clearance.

“Instead of trying to negotiate this with their command structure, the service member will typically end up refinancing,” said Michael Hayden, director of government relations for the Military Officers Association of America and a retired Air Force colonel. “It’ll typically start out with some type of small crisis. And then the real crisis is just how you get that loan paid off.”

Soldiers who hide their debt often forego the military’s special aid options. Army Emergency Relief and the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society offer zero-interest loans. But in seeking that help, a soldier risks alerting the commanding officer to his or her troubles, particularly if the sum needed is a large one.

Russell Putnam, a legal-assistance attorney at Fort Stewart, says he often finds himself making a simple argument to soldiers: “A zero percent loan sure as heck beats a 36 percent plus or a 25 percent plus loan.”

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Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel meets with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, Afghanistan, on March 10, 2013. (Defense Department photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo)

By Gareth Porter

Two weeks after Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanded the withdrawal of all U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) from Wardak province by now, the issue remains suspended in negotiations between U.S. and Afghan governments. U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel planned to discuss the matter with Karzai on Sunday, but the meeting was postponed after a security incident in Kabul.

Negotiations between the U.S. military command in Kabul and the Afghan government over Karzai’s demand were going on last week as an investigation by a joint team of Afghan and U.S. Special Forces officers into human rights abuses by forces said to be linked to the SOF unit in the province continues.

“I can tell you that ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] and Afghan leaders are meeting,” ISAF spokesman Air Force Lt. Col. Lester T. Carroll told IPS on Friday, and that Karzai’s demand for SOF’s withdrawal from Wardak “is being discussed”.

Attaullah Khogiani, spokesman for the governor of Wardak province, told IPS on Saturday that the U.S. SOF unit is still in its base in Maidan Shar district, and that a joint U.S. SOF-Afghan government investigating team looking into complaints by Wardak’s population about Afghan armed men linked to the SOF unit has demanded more time.

The Karzai government has given the team three days to complete its investigation, but the team is saying it needs more time than that, according to Khogiani. The joint team is meeting with the families of victims of the crimes by the mysterious armed force in the province that has been blamed on the SOF, he told IPS in an interview.

The identity of the Afghan forces that have imposed a reign of terror in Wardak that prompted President Karzai to demand the withdrawal of the SOF from the province remains a mystery to Afghan officials and residents there.

Khogiani and other officials and residents of Wardawk interviewed by IPS in recent days say the Afghans are certain that the armed Afghans who have carried out murder, torture and extrajudicial detention of civilians in Wardak have been working for the SOF unit stationed there. But they still don’t know who they are or where they came from.

U.S. SOF units have been responsible for recruiting, training, arming and monitoring Afghan Local Police (ALP), which have committed abuses in the past. But many people in Wardak believe the armed Afghans terrorizing the villages could not be ALP, because they are not from the villages themselves and in fact appear not to be from Wardak province at all.

Abdul Rahman, who commands a police checkpoint and is a village elder and district development council member in Maidan Shar district, told IPS that the armed men behind the abuses in that district are believed to be from an Afghan task force organized and supported by SOF in Kandahar and Helmand provinces.

Mohammad Jan Sarwary, a tall young man working for a mobile phone
company who lives in Narkh district, told IPS the armed force that entered his village in mid-February are not local police recruited by the SOF but Afghan task forces who are staying with SOF in the base.

“The people say they are Afghans who had been trained by the Special Operations Forces,” said Sarwary. “From their dialect we believe they are from Kandahar or Helmand provinces.”

Sarwary said a relative in his village told him that the militiamen had forced one of the residents to sit on an improvised explosive device with a gun pointed at his head. They threatened that if any of the members of the force were attacked by anyone in the village, they would blow up that individual.

Another possibility, which has not been raised by Afghans, is that the “counterterrorism pursuit teams” trained by the CIA and acting outside any Afghan chain of command have been carrying out operations in Wardak.

Afghan presidential spokesman Aimal Faizi announced Feb. 24 that Karzai had ordered his ministry of defense to “kick out US special forces from Wardak…within two weeks.”

The spokesman said it had become “clear that armed individuals named as U.S. special force[s] stationed in Wardak province engage in harassing, annoying, torturing and even murdering innocent people.”

Faizi mentioned the disappearance of nine people in “an operation by this suspicious force” and a separate incident in which “a student was taken away at night from his home, whose tortured body with throat cut was found two days later under a bridge.”

The spokesman later clarified that he was referring to “[t]hose Afghans in these armed groups who are working with the U.S. special forces….”

ISAF spokesman Brigadier General Gunter Katz immediately claimed that a review had already confirmed that “no coalition forces have been involved in the alleged misconduct.” But the Los Angeles Times reported a U.S. official as confirming that four of the nine had been seized in joint U.S.-Afghan raids last November and December.

SOF commanders have reportedly brushed off the charges of abuse. Coalition officials told the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 25 that the accusations were part of a Taliban propaganda campaign. “The fact is,” one official was quoted as saying, “we are badly beating the Taliban there.”

Hazrat Mohammad Jan, deputy provincial council chief in Wardak, told IPS, “We have gotten many complaints from people across Wardak, especially from Narkh and Maidan Shar districts, over the last five months.”

The complaints have involved both the unidentified Afghan forces and the SOF units. The Afghan intelligence agency, police and governor’s office were all aware that the SOF were conducting raids and detaining people, but were powerless to stop them, according to Jan.

The inability of the government to respond to people’s complaints has created distrust of the government, Jan said.

Jan said Afghan commanders in Wardak and Kabul brought in elders from the areas terrorized by the men allegedly associated with the SOF to meet with the SOF commander in Maidan Shar and tell him about the abuses they have been suffering. When that did not bring any improvement, Jan said, they went to Kabul to plead with the SOF commander in Kabul. That didn’t help either, according to Jan.

Finally a delegation of Wardak people went to Kabul and complained to Karzai himself. Karzai then sent a representative to Wardak to get detailed accounts of misconduct by SOF personnel in Narkh and Maidan Shar, Jan said. After an official of the attorney general’s office also visited the province and heard similar accounts, Karzai made the decision to order the SOF out of the province.

The perception that U.S.-sponsored militias from outside the province are committing widespread abuses has spawned conspiratorial explanations in Wardak. Police officer and village elder Rahman said he believes the SOF units are deliberately allowing the people they trained to carry out actions to “make people in the province insecure,” so that “the people will react strongly.”

The scheduled departure of U.S. combat forces in “2014 is near and the SOF is going to leave,” Rahman said, “and that’s why they are turning people against government, and also disrupting the transitional process and bargaining to get permanent bases and immunity” – a reference to two issues still under negotiation.

Karzai’s comment on Sunday that the U.S. and the Taliban were colluding to create insecurity reflected a similar conspiracy theory.

In the background of the controversy, meanwhile, are negotiations between U.S. and Afghan officials on U.S. Special Forces operations after the 2014 transition begins.

A Memorandum of Understanding signed May 12, 2012, between the U.S. military and the Afghan Defense Ministry was trumpeted by the Obama administration as giving the Afghan government control over such operations.

But a little-noticed provision of the agreement defined the “special operations” covered by the agreement as those operations that are “approved by the Afghan Operational Coordination Group (OCG) and conducted by Afghan Forces with support from U.S. Forces in accordance with Afghan laws.”

That meant that the SOF was still free to carry out other raids without consultation with the Afghan government, leaving the issue of their future still to be determined.

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specializing in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. [This story was originally posted by Inter Press Service.]

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The sex scandal that felled CIA Director David Petraeus widened Tuesday to ensnare the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, in a suddenly public drama involving a Tampa socialite, a jealous rival, a twin sister in a messy custody dispute and flirty emails.

The improbable story — by turns tragic and silly — could have major consequences, unfolding at a critical time in the Afghan war effort and just as President Barack Obama was hoping for a smooth transition in his national security team.

Obama put a hold on the nomination of Afghan war chief Allen to become the next commander of U.S. European Command as well as the NATO supreme allied commander in Europe after investigators uncovered 20,000-plus pages of documents and emails that involved Allen and Tampa socialite Jill Kelley. Some of the material was characterized as “flirtatious.”

Allen, 58, insisted he’d done nothing wrong and worked to save his imperiled career.

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A supply helicopter approaches Forward Operating Base Salerno in Afghanistan’s Khowst province on Nov. 5, 2012. (Photo credit: U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Abram Pinnington)

By Paul R. Pillar: After a campaign and election in which, at least as much as in most other election years, foreign policy took a back seat to domestic concerns, we — and the newly re-elected president — should take stock of the foreign policy significance of the electoral decision the American people just made.

Possibly the most significant implication is that the nation has dodged a bullet in the form of what would have been, given a different election outcome, a likely return of neoconservatives to positions of power and influence.

Perhaps a President-elect Romney would have surprised us with his appointments, but the ideological pattern in his party and the identities of his advisers suggest otherwise. They suggest that future historians would be scratching their heads to explain how, so soon after the Iraq War, promoters of that enormously costly blunder would be back in position to inflict still more damage.

Lowering the risk of ideologically-driven disasters should be only part of the stock-taking. There are broader implications, having mostly to do with the incumbent president entering his second and final term.

Although Barack Obama is still young enough for us to expect from him vigorous leadership right up until January 2017, he will never be running for office again. That should lift much of the weight of the political millstone that drags down policy-making on foreign as well as domestic affairs.

It does not remove the millstone completely; domestic political opposition, sometimes of a puerile sort, is a factor even for second-term presidents as they try to strike deals and build coalitions. But a second term opens up distance from the kind of reductionism in the discussion of foreign policy that is part of any effort to win election or re-election.

The extra intrusion of domestic politics whenever hoped-for re-election is a factor impairs the making of sound foreign policy in at least three respects. First, it amplifies the influence of small but nonetheless assertive interests that are different from the U.S. national interest.

Second, it requires an oversimplification or dumbing-down of policy questions and thus leaves little room for care and precision in crafting strategies well-suited for a complicated world. Third, it encourages politicians to adhere to low-risk positions unlikely to generate political vulnerabilities before the next election. Such low-risk positions tend to lead to policies that are uncreative and offer little potential for positive breakthroughs.

What are some of the themes and directions that our second-term president should adopt to take advantage of having been relieved from the burdens of his last round of electoral politics?

One is suggested by an unfortunate tendency that the just-completed campaign season exhibited regarding foreign as well as domestic policy: the tendency to treat a vote for or against the incumbent president as if it were just an expression of approval or disapproval of whatever is going well or going poorly in the country or in the world.

Such an attitude mistakenly disregards the causes of the good news or bad news, disregards whether the alternative candidate would have done anything different or better, and disregards whether whatever we are happy or dissatisfied with is something any U.S. president can do much about.

The countervailing theme that the re-elected president ought to start emphasizing is that there are many unpleasant things going on in the world that neither he nor the United States as a whole can reshape to our satisfaction, that it is not the responsibility of the United States to correct all such situations around the world, and that attempts to assume such responsibility will often result in costly frustration and failure.

Making such observations while seeking re-election invites charges of wimpiness or of trying to avoid responsibility. But the observations are true.

A related theme is that the United States needs to pay more attention to the damage it inflicts, the anger it incurs and the resistance it engenders through many of its own actions — even well-intentioned ones — around the world and to how the effects redound negatively to U.S. national interests. This refers especially to the use of force in other countries.

Voicing any such theme amid an election campaign is political poison; it invites attacks from opponents for straying from the exceptionalist orthodoxy that America is never anything other than good and great. Now that Mr. Obama is no longer running against an opponent who conjures up mythical “apology tours,” he should not have to worry as much about such attacks.

In fact, the President can educate the public about the realities behind this theme without compromising at all the concept of America’s greatness, which involves stature and influence that does not require using a hammer to pound at every gnat that flies by.

As for more specific issues, recall how the presidential candidates responded when they were asked in the last debate to name the biggest foreign or security threat facing the United States (always a flawed question, in its requirement to single out one topic to the exclusion of others).

President Obama replied, “terrorism.” A safe answer, but now the President should foster a public discussion about the actual extent of terrorist threats to U.S. interests and about the costs and consequences of measures and policies aimed at countering those threats. The discussion should include material costs amid larger budgetary stringency, and it should include the broader consequences of killing individual suspected terrorists.

Governor Romney’s reply to the same question was “Iran.” The substantively appropriate response by his opponent would have been to ask how a second-rate power thousands of miles away could be considered the greatest threat facing the world’s sole superpower.

But any such questioning would have been politically risky, and so neither candidate rose above the demonization and alarmism in which public discussion in the United States about Iran has been mired. With the election over (and especially before Iran gets preoccupied with its own presidential election in the spring), the administration needs to get away from the demonization and alarmism.

Unfortunately, as Jacob Heilbrunn points out, Mr. Obama has boxed himself in somewhat with his categorical statements, matching those of Romney, that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be unacceptable. The good news is that there is definitely an opportunity for negotiating an agreement with Tehran that keeps Iran short of even deciding to build a nuclear weapon.

The administration needs to seize that opportunity, with all of the flexibility in negotiations that seizing it requires. The biggest impediment to doing so is likely to be resistance in Congress over the relaxing of sanctions.

The agitation over Iran has primarily been a project of the Israeli government, and this involves an area where the outcome of the election potentially makes a major difference. If Romney had won we would have a president who would outsource a major chunk of U.S. foreign policy to Benjamin Netanyahu, has already written off giving any attention to the defining conflict in the Middle East, and in hoping for re-election would have to keep thinking about what Sheldon Adelson will say the next time he sees him.

Mr. Obama has an opportunity to set another course, one far more attuned to the interests of the United States than to those of a foreign government. The opportunity stems not only from his status as a second-termer but also from encouraging signs in recent years (including the voice vote on Jerusalem at this year’s Democratic Party convention) that increasing numbers of people are coming to see the political force that has enforced unquestioning support to the policies of the Israeli government as being something of a naked emperor.

President Obama can claim a mandate of sorts for setting a new course in this regard. In addition to winning the votes of a large majority of American Jews, election-night polling showed that four-fifths of that segment of the electorate believe that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be negotiated, that the United States should take an active role accomplishing this, and that resolution of that conflict is an important U.S. national security interest.

The lobby that has impeded progress on this subject is, though weakened, still very much around. Opposing it will generate a lot of political ugliness. But the ugliness is not a good excuse for drifting along the old course. What comes closer to a legitimate excuse is the amount of presidential attention required amid fiscal cliffs and all the other demands on that attention.

Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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By Bob Cesca: Anyone who believed Mitt Romney’s shape-shifting performance as “Peacenik Mitt” on Monday night is an amnesic, naive doofus. As we all know by now, Romney will do and say whatever is necessary to make it through the day. This is his strategy. By now, the Republicans, like the monochromatic lockstep Borg hive they are, will vote for Romney no matter what he says. This liberates Romney to take the form of Sergeant Slaughter one day, then [insert the Transformers switcheroo sound effect here] to the left Code Pink the next day.

However, in reviewing the debate it’s clear that he wasn’t entirely Peacenik Mitt throughout. If you look closely, Romney’s real motives for war made a few subtle appearances.

First, during the debate, we heard statements like this about fighting extremism in the Middle East: “But we can’t kill our way out of this mess.” Peacenik Mitt. Has anyone seen Dennis Kucinich and Mitt Romney in the same room together? Hmm.

Then there was the following about-face minutes later: “Well, my strategy’s pretty straightforward, which is to go after the bad guys, to make sure we do our very best to interrupt them, to — to kill them, to take them out of the picture.”

I’m sure Romney meant to say disrupt them and not “interrupt them,” which is what Romney typically does to debate moderators. So to what extent will Romney go in his effort to get “the bad guys?” What will he do to interrupt and kill them? And by “them,” is he talking about Palestinians who, in the 47 Percent video, Romney said aren’t willing to negotiate a peaceful solution with Israel? What about Assaad and the Syrian military? Is he talking about Iran? North Korea (which wasn’t mentioned at all last night for some reason)? If it’s any of these flashpoint states, such action would require more than drones and a few sorties. We’re talking about ground wars not unlike Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps far worse if Russia drops in on the side of Syria and China drops in on the side of Iran.

Yet, seconds later, Romney said, “We don’t want another Iraq. We don’t want another Afghanistan.”

That’s peculiar because while Romney has, in fact, supported the 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, he has always pledged to leave American soldiers behind as a “residual force,” while reserving the prerogative to entirely change his mind. Knowing how Romney changes his mind more often than he changes his Dad jeans, I think we can expect the worst on that front.

As for Iraq, the president was exactly right during the third debate. Romney, in his major foreign policy speech just over two weeks ago, Mitt Romney said, “In Iraq, the costly gains made by our troops are being eroded by rising violence, a resurgent Al-Qaeda, the weakening of democracy in Baghdad, and the rising influence of Iran. And yet, America’s ability to influence events for the better in Iraq has been undermined by the abrupt withdrawal of our entire troop presence.”

It’s difficult to be more explicit than that. He supports maintaining our influence in Iraq with the use of American footsoldiers. In Iraq. Even though he said he didn’t want another Iraq.

The president reminded Romney about the Iraq section of his speech, “This is just a few weeks ago that you indicated that we should still have troops in Iraq.”

Romney snapped back, “No, I didn’t.” Lie.

Reading remarks like his Iraq statement would be shocking were it not for the fact that 15 of Romney’s 22 foreign policy advisers are ex-Bush administration neoconservative war hawks. Six of those advisers are former members of the defunct Project for a New American Century (PNAC): the thinktank that had lobbied for another incursion into Iraq since the early 1990s. You might recognize some names from the rogues gallery: former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden, Cofer Black, Dan Senor and former U.N. ambassador John Bolton. Knowing he didn’t want to repeat his father’s mistake of running for re-election without the advantage of being a war president, the neocons had a receptive and ready partner in the Oval Office. And because Bush had little experience in this arena, he deferred to these hawks on just about everything. Just the way they wanted it. And so they puppeteered Bush into two concurrent wars, costing trillions of dollars in deficit spending, thousands of American lives and scores of Iraqi and Afghan lives.

Much like Richard Nixon, who ran on a peace agenda and a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam then subsequently bombed Cambodia and Laos into the stone age, it’s worth noting that Bush ran as a peace-loving compassionate conservative as well. Later, in a televised prime time address to the nation, Bush, as president, said about the Middle East, “The United States with other countries will work to advance liberty and peace in that region.” In this same address, he used the word “peace” or a variation of “peace,” such as “peaceful,” 12 times. This speech was deliverd on March 17, 2003, two days before Bush ordered the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Another foreign policy neophyte has surrounded himself with the same cabal of master manipulators driven by a singular goal: to commit the world’s most powerful and sophisticated arsenal to tame the Muslim world. And, like Bush, he’s couching it in the cuddly fuzzy terms of “peace.” During Monday’s debate, Romney said something very similar Bush’s pre-Iraq line, “Let me — let me step back and talk about what I think our mission has to be in the Middle East, and even more broadly, because our purpose is to make sure the world is more — is peaceful. We want a peaceful planet.” Again, this line popped up within minutes of talking about killing “the bad guys” and taking them “out of the picture.”

First on the hit list will invariably be Iran, of course, where the neocons left off with Bush. Romney has repeatedly accused Iran of not responding to sanctions or other peaceful means of coercion, so the only alternative left would be an invasion and he’s hired the perfect architects for the job of manufacturing yet another endless war on that continent.

To Bush’s credit, he refused to capitulate to arm-twisting, full-court pressure from Dick Cheney and the neocons to attack Iran. They’ll definitely have a better shot with Romney. Hopefully they’ll never get that shot.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From The Guardian:

The retreat of western forces from Afghanistan could come sooner than expected, the head of Nato has said as he conceded that the recent Taliban strategy of “green on blue” killings had been successful in sapping morale.

In an interview with the Guardian Nato’s secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, responded to pressure for a faster withdrawal from Afghanistan by stating that the options were being studied and should be clear within three months.

“From now until the end of 2014 you may see adaptation of our presence. Our troops can redeploy, take on other tasks, or even withdraw, or we can reduce the number of foreign troops,” he said. “From now until the end of 2014 we will see announcements of redeployments, withdrawals or drawdown … If the security situation allows, I would not exclude the possibility that in certain areas you could accelerate the process.”

Rasmussen admitted that the killings of almost 50 allied troops this year in “green on blue” attacks – Afghan security forces turning on their trainers and mentors – had damaged the relationship between the international forces and the Afghan police and military.

“There’s no doubt insider attacks have undermined trust and confidence, absolutely,” he said.

Nato aims to have an Afghan security force of 352,000 taking over responsibility for the country in just over two years when the US-led combat operations are scheduled to end.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From The AP:

AUCKLAND, New Zealand (AP) — Nearly two years after President Barack Obama ordered 33,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to tamp down the escalating Taliban violence, the last of those surge troops have left the country, U.S. officials said Thursday.

The withdrawal, which leaves 68,000 American forces in the warzone, comes as the security transition to Afghan forces is in trouble, threatened by a spike in so-called insider attacks in which Afghan Army and police troops, or insurgents dressed in their uniforms, have been attacking and killing U.S. and NATO forces.

And it’s called into question the core strategy that relies on NATO troops working shoulder to shoulder with Afghans, training them to take over the security of their own country so the U.S. and its allies can leave at the end of 2014 as planned.

The number of U.S. forces there peaked at about 101,000 last year, and they have been coming out slowly over the past several months.

The surge was aimed at beating back the Taliban to give the Afghan government and its security forces the time and space to take hold. The key goal was to ensure that the Taliban did not regain a foothold in the country that could allow it once again to become a safe haven for terror groups. And there was hope that Taliban members would be willing to come to the peace table.

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United Airlines Flight 175 crashes into the south tower of the World Trade Center complex in New York City during the September 11 attacks (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: I was taking a driving lesson in the UK when I first heard the news about the planes crashing into the twin towers. The lesson finished early and I went home to a stunned family sitting glued to the television. Like the rest of the world, I spent the next few days thinking we were on the verge of a new global war, and as the scale of the crime settled in, I knew the world – at least the one I lived in – would never really be the same again.

The attacks on 9/11 were one of the most abhorrent crimes committed in history – a shocking mass slaughter of innocents with no real precedent. Thousands of people going to work with no part of any war were killed, a great city was severely damaged and the grave psychological effects an unknown quantity. The image two passenger jets slamming into the World Trade Center serve as a reminder of human cruelty and the callous disregard for life.

But today should serve not only as a reminder of the crime, but the enormous spirit of collaboration, kindness and humanity that came after it. The world watched in amazement as Americans came together to help each other, citizens risking their lives to pull strangers out of the rubble, money flooding in from rich and poor alike to help victims, monuments, vigils, charities, support groups and a limitless well of empathy. It was an amazing spectacle and a testament to the strength of human decency in the face of brutality.

Shamefully though, the Bush Administration used the tragedy to fulfill its own grotesque ambitions – the conquering of Afghanistan and Iraq for oil that left a disaster that exceeded anything the terrorists on 9/11 could have ever wished for. Bush and Cheney’s disastrous expedition into the Middle East was built on lies and the flippant disregard for the public whom they deceived over and over again. 9/11 was used to commit more murder, more blood shed and more disaster all in the supposed name of revenge. Bush admitted that he regarded the mastermind of the attacks, Osama Bin Laden as ‘not that important’ and ‘not our priority’ as he focused his attentions on Iraq, a defenseless country that had nothing to do with the attacks.

It would take too long to get into the shameful abuses of power committed by the Bush Administration, but it is suffice to say that they added massively to the misery caused on 9/11 and today we should remember their victims – the hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan killed unnecessarily and the destruction caused to their countries that will take decades to recover from.

We will never know what Bush or Cheney’s intentions were post 9/11. Maybe they honestly believed in what they were doing and thought their actions would have a positive outcome. But they didn’t and the rest of the world now lives with the consequences.

9/11 was a tragedy and we should remember not only the Americans who died, but the Afghanis and Iraqis who suffered too. Because if we don’t, we risk repeating the same mistakes again – the belief that the outside world doesn’t matter with people whose lives are unimportant. We found out on 9/11 that our interference in the outside world has consequences, that they will fight back and use violence to achieve their ends, just as we will. Because violence begets violence, and once you start it is almost impossible to stop.

Perhaps we could remember the victims of 9/11 and pay homage to their unwitting sacrifice by stopping the cycle. And that starts with the understanding that our lives are not more important than theirs and remembering their suffering in equal part to our own.

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