Observer: Top British commander says West must see job through in Afghanistan

The Observer today broadcasts the opinion of the ranking UK commander of British armed forces working with ISAF regarding the West's Afghan encounter:

The most senior British commander in Afghanistan says the Taliban cannot "assassinate their way to power" and too many lives have been lost over the last 10 years for the west to flinch in its campaign against the insurgents.

In an interview with the Guardian, Lieutenant General James Bucknall said the UK had made "an investment in blood" and that now was not the time for western nations to turn their back on the country.

He claimed that the Taliban had been pushed back everywhere and that relentless special forces operations are killing 130 to140 insurgent leaders every month. He conceded that too often over the last decade the military had "over-promised and under-delivered". Bucknall said he understood why politicians, the public and the armed forces themselves felt war-weary. Mistakes, he admitted, had been made.

"We almost owe it to those who have gone before to see the job through," he said. "Having made this investment in blood, I am more determined. If I didn't think we could do this I would take a very different view but I am confident we can do it."

Bucknall's comments come on the eve of an international conference in Bonn to discuss the future of Afghanistan. There is mounting concern about the amount of aid that Afghanistan will receive and a growing political clamour in the US and UK for western forces to speed up their withdrawal. But Bucknall said critics of the military campaign should ask whether the Taliban leader Mullah Omar had been able to achieve any of his goals over the last two years.

"Let's mark [his] work. If he was serious about overthrowing the government and grabbing a portion of Afghanistan for his own, you have to do three things. You have to secure your own heartland in Kandahar and central Helmand. Is he doing that? No. They lost their safe havens around Kandahar in 2010 and they didn't take them back in 2011. They are not holding their own heartland.

"Secondly, you have to spread your influence around other areas. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere in Afghanistan that they are doing that. Thirdly, you have got to affect the seat of government. There have been lots of headlines, but Kabul has about 20% of the population and less than 1% of total violence in the country. Not only is the seat of government unaffected, but Kabul is a flourishing capital city that is much safer than Karachi."

The Taliban had been reduced to a terrorist group, adopting terrorist tactics, said Bucknall.

"I have not seen any insurgents who have assassinated their way to power. One hundred and forty [Afghans] have been assassinated this year. In the press that is painted as the government cannot survive this. But we are taking out 130-140 mid-level Taliban leaders every month. Sometimes it is worth turning the egg-timer on its head. They have been driven to this much vaunted tactic of assassinations."

He said that the idea the Taliban would sit and wait until western forces had left suited Nato well because it would allow Afghan police and army more time to get up to strength.

Bucknall has just finished an 18-month tour in Kabul, during which he was in charge of all British forces, and second in command of the International Security and Assistance Force – the military coalition now commanded by the American general, John Allen. Bucknall oversaw the "surge" last year in which an extra 30,000 American troops began an offensive to push back the insurgency – a tactic that reduced attacks in some areas, but raised questions about whether progress could be sustained by Afghan police and army when NATO forces began to pull out.

The West has said none of its forces will be fighting after 2014.Bucknall admitted that Afghanistan's security was still fragile and expressed frustration that certain factors that would determine Afghanistan's future – such as diplomatic efforts to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table – were out of the military's control.

The western coalition had to stick together over the next two years during the pull-out – a coded warning to countries that might want to "run for the exit door". Pakistan had to be "part of the solution in one way or another", said Bucknall.

"These are the two top ingredients. We have to stick together. We went in together, and we go out together. Managing a coalition in a draw down requires an awful lot more work than managing a coalition during a surge."

Groomed for suicide: how Taliban recruits children for mass murder

The Guardian has today published an overview of one particular shocking aspect Taliban terrorism tactics—the recruitment and the employment of children:

Young Afghans being coerced into joining jihad with threats of violence and promises of martyrdom

The Taliban gave Noor Mohammad a simple choice – either they would cut off his hand for stealing or he could redeem himself and bring glory on his family by becoming a suicide bomber.

Held in Taliban custody in a different village from his parents, after allegedly stealing mobile phones during a wedding party in his village, the 14-year-old boy went for the second option. He was soon being given basic lessons in how to use a handgun, which he would use to shoot the guards at a nearby US military base in Ghazni, a province in south-east Afghanistan which is considered the most violent in the country.

He was also fitted with a suicide vest that covered his torso with explosives. He was told that when inside the base he should touch two trailing wires together, killing himself and as many US and Afghan soldiers as possible. Having kitted the soon-to-be martyr out in his jihadi outfit, the insurgents took photos and sent him on his way. Such is one method by which the Taliban recruit a growing number of children used for suicide missions.

A tactic pioneered by al-Qaida but almost unheard of in Afghanistan until 2005, suicide bombing is becoming more popular with insurgents attempting to meet the massively intensified Nato campaign with their own surge of violence. In one recent case a 12-year-old boy in Barmal district in Pakitika province, which borders Pakistan, killed four civilians and wounded many more when he detonated a vest full of explosives in a bazaar.

"They are relying more and more on children," said Nader Nadery, from the country's Independent Human Rights Commission, who thought the Taliban were struggling to recruit enough adults. "When somebody runs out of one tool they go to use the second one."

Mohammad, who talked to the Guardian on Tuesday at a children's prison in Kabul, is awaiting trial after surrendering to the Americans rather than going through with the attack. He says he was left by his Taliban handlers to walk the last few miles to the base in Andar district two weeks ago. Instead he sat down and thought about his predicament. "It is a sin to kill yourself and to kill others," he decided. "So I took off the vest and threw it away."

Surrendering proved tricky as the guards he had been supposed to kill were slow to raise the alert and he was questioned only after sleeping outside the camp for a night. He later led the Americans to the village where the Taliban members lived, identifying a house where the Americans recovered weapons and homemade explosives.

Two Taliban from the village were also killed during a shootout after he identified them, Mohammad said. He knows that because he will never be able to go back to his village and will probably never see his family again.

Not all bombers are coerced. Some are tricked, like a group of four children who were recently arrested after travelling alone across the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan.

Lutfullah Mashal, the spokesman for the National Directorate of Security (NDS), said his spy agency's informants in Peshawar had raised the alarm that the four were on their way.

The boys had confessed during questioning, telling the security forces they believed only American soldiers would die when they detonated their bombs and that they would escape unscathed. But, speaking on Tuesday, they claimed they were forced into making a confession after being beaten and threatened with rape by police. Their new account is hard to believe, however, and at times contradictory.

According to Fazal Rahman, a tearful nine-year-old made all the more distressed by the loss of two teeth at the dentist, the idea to travel to Afghanistan came from Maulavi Marouf, the mullah in charge of the Spin Jumad madrasa in the town of Khairabad. They say an "uncle" in Kabul phoned Marouf asking him to send some physically weak children for a couple of days of manual labour, unloading a delivery of car batteries from lorries. None of the boys, who are Afghans but have lived in Pakistan all their lives, has an address or phone number for the man. Nor did they think it necessary to tell their parents they were going to Kabul.

"Our family is very poor," said Niaz Mohammad, a nine-year-old who said he used to help his father beg. "When I was promised 50,000 rupees [£360] to go to Afghanistan, I went immediately."

But they all describe the madrasa as an institution that cultivated in them a hatred for American soldiers in Afghanistan. "All the time in Friday prayers the maulavi talked about the Americans in Afghanistan and he told us that we should do jihad, especially on Fridays," he said.

It is feared that hundreds of children may have been radicalised and turned into bombers in what Haneef Atmar, Afghanistan's former interior minister, describes as "hate madrasas".

Suicide bombing has also developed a sinister glamour among the youth of the Pakistan's tribal areas. A video in which a group of children enact a suicide bombing has circulated widely in Pakistan in February, sparking public alarm at how jihad appears to have reached the playground.

It also seems to have reached the Kabul juvenile detention centre where staff are trying to give the mix of criminals and would-be jihadists a proper education. "When I told my cellmates I refused to do a suicide attack, none of them could understand why I didn't do it," said Mohammad.

Read it and weep.

War games: conflict becomes child's play for young Pashtuns

The Guardian has today published an article linking to, and analysing, a highly worrying amateur video that has surfaced in recent weeks... The newspaper fears that the video of Pashtun children enacting suicide bombing shows the psychological impact of Taliban violence on a generation:

The unsettling 84-second clip has divided opinions, with some amused by the smiling child actors and fake explosions; others appalled by evidence that suicide bombers have become playground heroes of sorts.

"It's horrifying and alarming. These children have become fascinated by bombers rather than condemning them," said Salma Jafar of Save the Children UK in Pakistan. "If they glamorise violence now, they can become part of it later in life."

The origins of the homemade video, which first surfaced about a week ago, are unknown. Ahsan Masood, a Pashtun from Waziristan who posted it on Facebook, said he believed it had been filmed in Khost, Afghanistan. Masood, who works as a truck driver in the UAE, said he received the video from a friend's mobile phone. "I thought it was funny," he said.

But a sobering reality lies behind the playful drama. Children are both perpetrators and victims in the decade-old Taliban-led conflict that has destabilised both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

An article worth reading full, especiaklly as we try to understand the motivations lying behind terrorism as an expression of political violence.

News Flash: The Taliban Violate Human Rights (Hitchens)

The human rights community finally notices the Taliban's war crimes.

Christopher Hitchens gets stuck into the Taliban—and also into the 'human rights community' that appease them—in a wide-ranging and acerbic article published today in Slate magazine:

Even in a week that concentrated all eyes on the magnificent courage and maturity of the people of Cairo, a report from Kabul began with what must surely be the most jaw-dropping opening paragraph of the year. Under the byline of the excellent Rod Nordland, the New York Times reported:

International and local human rights groups working in Afghanistan have shifted their focus toward condemning abuses committed by the Taliban insurgents, rather than those attributed to the American military and its allies.

The story went on to point out that the Taliban was culpable for "more than three-fourths of all civilian casualties" and informed us that some human-rights groups are now so concerned that they are thinking of indicting the Taliban for war crimes. "The activists' concern," Nordland went on, "would have been unheard-of a year ago," when all the outcry was directed at casualties inflicted by NATO contingents.

The story became more mind-boggling as it unfolded. One had to ask oneself what had taken the human-rights "community" so long. ....

Hitchens then proceeds to expose the rights abuses of the Taliban (once again), before contrasting the aims and actions of NATO operatives in the region. He may have a point. Read the whole thing.