Intelligence

February 26, 2007

BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Kelly death not suicide, says MP

 

An MP investigating the death of Dr David Kelly says he is convinced the weapons scientist did not kill himself. Norman Baker tells BBC Two's The Conspiracy Files he has reached the conclusion Dr Kelly's life was "deliberately taken by others". Mr Baker has also obtained letters suggesting the coroner had doubts about the 2003 Hutton inquiry's ability to establish the cause of death.

Source: BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Kelly death not suicide, says MP

Hutton reached a verdict of suicide but a public inquest was never completed.

Dr Kelly, whose body was found in July 2003, had been under intense pressure after being named as the suspected source of a BBC report claiming the government "sexed up" a dossier on the threat posed by Iraq.

Distress

Coroner Nicholas Gardiner opened an inquest into his death in Oxford just a few days after his body was found on Harrowdown Hill.

As you will know, a coroner has power to compel the attendance of witnesses. There are no such powers attached to a Public inquiry
Nicholas Gardiner, writing to Lord Falconer in August 2003

But he was ordered to adjourn it by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, as the Hutton inquiry would take over, and it was not resumed.

Lord Falconer said he wanted to minimise the distress caused to the Kelly family.

The official account given by the Hutton inquiry was that Dr Kelly committed suicide by cutting his left wrist, and taking an overdose of the painkiller Co-Proxamol.

In his report, Lord Hutton said: "There was no involvement by a third person in Dr Kelly's death."

Assassinated

Mr Baker, who has spent a year investigating the case, believes there is enough evidence to suggest that the scientist did not kill himself.

The Liberal Democrat MP said toxicology reports suggested there was not enough painkiller in Dr Kelly's system to kill him, and the method he had apparently chosen to commit suicide was not a recognised or effective one.

"I'm satisfied it was not suicide. And after that you're left with the conclusion that his life was deliberately taken by others," he tells The Conspiracy Files.

He tells the programme it has been suggested to him that the weapons scientist was assassinated.

Speaking last week on BBC Radio 5 Live, Mr Baker said he was not ready to reveal all the evidence he has unearthed, but would consider passing a file to the police in due course.

Witnesses

Mr Baker has obtained letters between Mr Gardiner and the Lord Chancellor's office from 2003, suggesting the coroner was not happy with the Hutton inquiry's ability to establish the cause of death.

The letters were given to the MP by Constitutional Affairs minister Harriet Harman and have not been revealed publicly before.

I believe that David was probably a victim of Iraqi Intelligence Service
Richard Spertzel, former colleague of Dr Kelly

On 6 August 2003 Mr Gardiner wrote to the Lord Chancellor expressing concern about Hutton's lack of legal powers compared with an inquest.

"As you will know, a coroner has power to compel the attendance of witnesses. There are no such powers attached to a public inquiry," Mr Gardiner wrote.

The Oxfordshire coroner also asked to be allowed to continue with the inquest because "the preliminary cause of death given at the opening of the inquest no longer represents the final view of the pathologist, and evidence from him would need to be given to correct and update the evidence already received".

Mr Gardiner met officials from the Department of Constitutional Affairs on 11 August 2003 "to discuss the mechanics of admitting evidence from the pathologist and analyst".

Death certificate

The Lord Chancellor then accepted the coroner's need to have one further hearing.

In a letter to Mr Gardiner, dated 12 August 2003, Sarah Albon, private secretary to the Lord Chancellor, said that "the cause of death of Dr David Kelly is likely to be adequately investigated by the judicial inquiry conducted by Lord Hutton".

It said Lord Falconer accepted Mr Gardiner may want to take fresh evidence from the pathologist and analyst.

But he was "most anxious to avoid any unnecessary distress to the family, and has asked that you keep the proceedings as short as possible and, so far as the Coroner's Rules allow, take the evidence in writing".

The coroner did just that in a hearing on 14 August 2003.

On 18 August 2003 a death certificate was registered setting out the causes of death.

'Hit list'

Yet the Hutton inquiry had only just started taking evidence and its report was published a full five months later.

In March 2004, a final hearing was held in Oxford at which Mr Gardiner said he was satisfied there were "no exceptional reasons," including concerns about the Hutton inquiry's powers, for the inquest to be resumed.

The Conspiracy Files explores a number of alternatives as to how Dr Kelly might have met his end.

A former colleague of the weapons inspector, former UN weapons inspector Richard Spertzel, tells the programme he believes the scientist was murdered by the Iraqis.

Mr Spertzel, who was America's most senior biological weapons inspector and who worked alongside Dr Kelly for many years in Iraq, believes the Iraqi regime may have pursued a vendetta against Dr Kelly.

"I believe that David was probably a victim of Iraqi Intelligence Service because of long standing enmity of Iraq towards David," he says.

"A number of us were on an Iraqi hit list. I was number three, and my understanding, David was only a couple behind that.

"And none of the people on that hit list were welcome in Iraq. Immediately after David's death, a number of the other inspectors and I exchanged emails saying, 'Be careful.' "

February 26, 2007 at 01:03 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

February 19, 2007

SAS founder's life story to be made into a film | Uk News | News | Telegraph

 

By Richard Alleyne Last Updated: 1:16am GMT 19/02/2007 Most people who knew Sir David Stirling, the maverick aristocrat who founded the SAS, would agree that he was slightly mad.

Source: SAS founder's life story to be made into a film | Uk News | News | Telegraph

But as Field Marshal Montgomery, his superior, pointed out: "In war there is a place for mad people."

Now the extraordinary life of the man who coined and lived by the phrase "Who dares wins" is to be made into a film.

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Stirling, who had been thrown out of Cambridge for gambling and drinking, was 26 when he came up with the idea of "special forces" as he served with the Commandos in the Second World War.

Frustrated and bored with the lack of action he persuaded senior officers to let him assemble a small clandestine force to inflict terror and destruction on the German lines in North Africa.

Despite numerous setbacks, his rag-tag unit of around 60 misfits went on to destroy more than 400 aircraft, hundreds of vehicles and thousands of tons of fuel and munitions. Not only that but the nature of warfare was changed forever.

Since then the Special Air Service has taken part in operations in Afghanistan, Vietnam, and the Falklands. Its finest hour in recent history came during the Iranian Embassy siege in London in 1980, when 30 soldiers freed 24 hostages.

Antony Rufus Isaacs, the managing director of HandMade Films, said the budget would be around £50 million.

He said: "Everyone is familiar with the SAS, but few know of its origins. David Stirling was the driving force behind the clandestine group which set the standard for all special forces.

"Like Lawrence of Arabia, Stirling was a man of vision and a man of action. He was also a flawed hero."

The writer Rupert Walters is adapting Alan Hoe's book David Stirling: The Authorised Biography. It is believed that producers are looking for a young British actor such as Tom Hardy, 28, who played Robert Dudley in the BBC series The Virgin Queen.

Walters said he had been fascinated for many years by Stirling's exploits and achievements. "I am looking forward to bringing the man and his myth to the big screen," he said.

Stirling, the son of Brig-Gen Archibald Stirling of Keir, was born at his ancestral home, Keir House, in Stirlingshire, in 1915.

Educated at Ampleforth and Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he was sent down, the 6ft 5in Stirling, whose early ambition was to be a painter, was training for an attempt to climb Mount Everest when war broke out in 1939.

He joined the Scots Guards and in June 1940 volunteered for the new No 8 Commando.

The squad was disbanded but Stirling was convinced that a small team of highly trained soldiers with the advantage of surprise could be effective. He went straight to the top with his idea.

On crutches following a parachuting accident, he sneaked into Middle East headquarters in Cairo in an effort to see the Commander-in-Chief using his crutch as a ladder to get over the fence.

His audacity succeeded and in 1941 the SAS was formed. Stirling picked the men himself, many of whom were too troublesome to serve in other sections of the army. They included mavericks like Blair Mayne, an Irish rugby international and heavy drinker who had been imprisoned for beating up his commanding officer, and Jock Lewes, a former president of Oxford University Boat Club.

Stirling equipped his force with supplies he borrowed or stole from other regiments. Emerging from the desert, the squad launched surprise attacks on airfields and depots before disappearing back into the dunes. The team was so effective and secretive that Field Marshal Rommel dubbed Stirling the "Phantom Major". Hitler proclaimed that allied servicemen captured on special operations should be shot rather than taken prisoner and a reward of 100,000 Reichmarks was put on Stirling's head. However, Stirling escaped that fate when captured by the Germans in 1943. He also escaped captivity four times before being sent to Colditz Castle, where he spent the rest of the war.

Stirling was knighted in 1990 and he died later that year aged 75. A statue in his former home, Doune, Perthshire, stands as his memorial.

February 19, 2007 at 12:34 AM in | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

February 18, 2007

U.S. has little data on Iranian unit under suspicion - International Herald Tribune

 

WASHINGTON: Like so much else about the Iranian state, the Quds Force, which conducts overseas operations for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, remains remarkably mysterious even to those who closely study the country. The Quds Force is under intense scrutiny by U.S. intelligence agencies because it is suspected of supplying sophisticated explosives to Shiite militants in Iraq. Among those detained in recent U.S. raids on Iranian offices in Iraq were several Iranians identified by the U.S. military as Quds operatives, including a diplomat said to be the No. 2 official in the Quds Force.

Source: U.S. has little data on Iranian unit under suspicion - International Herald Tribune

Questions about what exactly Quds Force officers have done and whether they acted at the direction of the Iranian leadership have taken on particular urgency as the Bush administration sends more troops to damp the violence in Baghdad and ratchets up its rhetoric against Iran.

Administration officials have made new claims that advanced improvised explosive devices are being provided by the Iranians. Even so, they have vehemently denied they have any plans to go to war against Iran.

Though the U.S. allegations about the Quds Force have received attention from administration officials and the media only in recent weeks, they are not new. On several occasions over the last year, senior Pentagon officials have spoken publicly about the Iranian role in Iraq.

But by all accounts, the imperfect nature of U.S. intelligence agencies' reporting on Iran makes certain conclusions difficult to reach. "I just don't think we have a very acute understanding of the internal workings of the regime in Iran," said Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The competing power centers inside the Iranian government, and the intense secrecy that obscures decision- making, make answers elusive.

"We know that the Quds Force is involved," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters on Thursday. "We know the Quds Force is a paramilitary arm of the IRGC," he added, using the abbreviation for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

"So we assume that the leadership of the IRGC knows about this," Gates said. "Whether or not more senior political leaders in Iran know about it, we don't know."

Most independent experts say it is only logical to assume that Iran deployed large numbers of operatives in Iraq as soon as Saddam Hussein was ousted in 2003. Many of Iraq's Shiite clerics, politicians and militia leaders have close ties to Iran, where some spent years in exile while Saddam and his Baath Party ruled Iraq.

And the past role of the Quds Force as the long arm of the Islamic revolution abroad, performing a mix of military, intelligence and training operations, has been widely reported in past conflicts like those in Lebanon and Bosnia. Its name, which is also the Arabic name given to Jerusalem, symbolizes the Iranian government's commitment to driving Israelis out of the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Quds Force "is the handpicked elite of an already elite ideological army," said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University.

As part of the Revolutionary Guard, the force officially answers to the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and not the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, though Ahmadinejad is believed to have personal ties to many senior Guard officials.

But the Quds Force is cloaked in secrecy inside Iran and the subject of considerable guesswork from scholars in the United States, who in interviews this week offered estimates of its size ranging from 3,000 to 50,000 men. The true number, along with details of the strength and budget of the entire Revolutionary Guard, is hidden even from Parliament, said Milani, according to legislators he has spoken with.

Some specialists even question whether the Quds Force exists as a formal unit clearly delineated from the rest of the Revolutionary Guard.

"It could be that anyone with an intelligence role in the Revolutionary Guard is just called 'Quds,'" said Vali R. Nasr, who studies Iran and political Islam at the Naval Postgraduate School.

Whether properly identified as part of the Quds Force or not, members of the Revolutionary Guard mobilized intelligence and paramilitary agents in Lebanon in the 1980s, where they trained the Shiite militia Hezbollah; in Afghanistan, during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s and episodically since then; in the former Yugoslavia, supporting the Bosnian Muslims against Serbian forces; and in other trouble spots.

The Guard has also been accused of supporting terrorist attacks outside Iran, notably the 1996 truck bomb attack on the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. In December, a federal judge ruled that the government of Iran bore responsibility for the Khobar Towers attack and ordered Tehran to pay survivors of those killed more than $253 million.

The Revolutionary Guard was created after the Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah in 1979. The government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini did not trust the existing Iranian military, where support for the monarchy remained strong. The new rulers established the Guard as a parallel military force, recruited from among the revolution's most devout religious supporters.

In the past 25 years, the Revolutionary Guard, whose strength is estimated by Western specialists at 125,000 to 300,000, has gradually evolved into more of a conventional military and has become deeply involved in lucrative business enterprises inside and outside Iran. But all along, it has conducted overseas operations, both covert and overt, often under the Quds Force name.

The actions of the Quds Force are not necessarily ordered by Khamenei, and the supreme leader may not even get reports of all its actions, said Hooshang Amirahmadi, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University. "The Iranian government is a very loose grouping of power centers," blurring lines of control and authority, he said.

There have been past instances of actions by rogue intelligence officers that the Iranian government has disavowed. In 1999, for example, Iran's Intelligence Ministry blamed rogue officers for the killings of five prominent critics of the government's conservative wing.

But Amirahmadi said he did not think the Iranian leadership should be allowed to sidestep responsibility for actions by its operatives in Iraq. "The Bush administration can't say, 'We have a CIA but we don't control it,"' he said, adding that the same rules should apply to Tehran.

February 18, 2007 at 12:37 AM in Iran | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

February 17, 2007

Obama and Cameron are test runs for a new world-Comment-Columnists-Andrew Sullivan-TimesOnline

Andrew Sullivan

Elections are about policies. They are about character. They are about parties and their evolving philosophies. But elections can also be expressive events. They don't just determine prime ministers or presidents; they express culture. They can be a reflection of the public mood, refracted through an individual. They can be a cultural statement about where a society is and where it wants to go. That was true of the emergence of Reagan and Thatcher in the 1970s - both represented a cultural shift from all that dreadful decade conjured up. It was true of Bill Clinton's promise in 1992 and Tony Blair's in 1997 as well: two men who promised to marry the market economy with a new social diversity.

Source: Obama and Cameron are test runs for a new world-Comment-Columnists-Andrew Sullivan-TimesOnline

David Cameron and Barack Obama now occupy strangely parallel places in the political culture of Britain and America. They are both young, dynamic, loquacious and extremely well-packaged politicians. They are creatures of their respective parties, and yet distinguishable from them. Obama has done his time in the precincts of Chicago politics; Cameron has worked his way patiently up the Tory machinery.

But Obama’s reasoned tone and serene religious faith set him apart from the vices of the American left, just as Cameron’s easy-going empathy distances him from the detritus of the “nasty party” on the right.

The appeal of both, however, lies, I think, in the expressive nature of their candidacies for high office. By their very backgrounds they each represent to their respective countries the latest answer to an old question. In America, the oldest and densest issue is race; in Britain, the oldest and once insurmountable issue is class. Obama is the postracial candidate for America; Cameron, in turn, represents a candidacy that is, at root, postclass.

Obama’s postracial appeal leaps out from his polling demographics. His support is not primarily from black voters. African-Americans actually favour Hillary Clinton over the son of a Kenyan immigrant and his Kansas sweetheart. Obama is racially half-black but he is not culturally African-American. His lineage does not come from America’s segregated or enslaved history. Unlike Condi Rice or Clarence Thomas, the inheritance of deeply American racism does not directly mark him.

Yes, as Obama has rightly pointed out, he is black when he is trying to catch a cab on an urban street. Bigots don’t distinguish between a black son of an immigrant and the attenuated progeny of slaves.

But he is also canny enough not to appropriate a past that isn’t his. In the famous speech he gave at the 2004 Democratic convention, he spoke the following words: “In no other country on earth is my story even possible.” But that story is one of immigration and opportunity, not slavery, segregation and survival.

Black Americans are keenly aware of these cultural distinctions. Some have been bold enough to say so. If Obama were Republican, the clamour would be much louder. But most African-Americans will surely not let Obama’s difference from many derail a chance for the first American president of African ancestry.

White Americans, in contrast, are all but falling over each other to elect a black man to the highest office. He is an opportunity for them to prove their lack of racism. After all Obama is, as one of his rivals indelicately put it, “clean and articulate”. He is, in the eyes of some whites, black but not too black.

But whatever the voters’ motives, Obama’s becoming a nominee or even president would be a historic moment of emotionally unpredictable consequence. He declared his candidacy last weekend where Lincoln began his law career, in Springfield, Illinois. His arrival in the White House a century and a half after Lincoln’s victory in the blood-soaked battle against slavery would and should cause all Americans to stop and take stock.

A country long contaminated by the legacy of slavery would take a moment to see how far it has come. Yes, it would be an alloyed victory. Obama the immigrant would not be the great-great-great grandson of American slaves. History is not that neat. But he would represent what the South once feared and despised. And the colour of his skin would change the character of the presidency.

Cameron represents nothing so profound. But he does signify something relatively new. Cameron’s broad-based appeal has a remarkable aspect to it — remarkable, perhaps, because it no longer seems remarkable. Voters do not view Cameron primarily through the lens of class. He isa product of Eton and Oxford; he is also a dope-smoking former member of the Bullingdon club, as we have recently discovered. These affiliations are shot through with class-consciousness. In the relatively recent past they would have rendered a Tory toff with Cameron’s past too politically toxic for primetime.

I confess to a little of this myself looking at that now-infamous photograph of him in his Bullingdon white tie and Spandau Ballet pose. I admit I felt an involuntary spasm of class-loathing. I remember the effortless sense of total privilege that some of the Bullingdon members had at Oxford — and their upper-class chaviness. (The underclass has always had its echo in the overclass, as far as binge drinking and antisocial behaviour goes.) The behaviour repelled me then. It repels me now.

But then the spasm relents and I realise what a waste of energy it is to take these old and not too pretty feelings and plaster them on someone who has obviously outgrown them. We all have pasts; we all have backgrounds. They shape us but they do not determine us. It seems to me that there are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticise Cameron (and plenty of reasons to admire him too) but his past life isn’t one of them. Yes, Etonians have human rights too. Give the man a break.

Some still harbour these resentments, of course. Roy Hattersley had a predictable splutter on Question Time last week. But the splutter dates him, as well as demeans him. Most Brits have gone beyond this kind of thing, just as most Americans are eager to get past race.

As a commenter on a Guardian blog last week opined: “Didn’t this type of class envy go out some time in the 1970s? This really is feeble stuff.”

Yes it is, in many ways. But this “feeble stuff” once defined much of British culture, just as race defined America’s. If a Tory leader with Cameron’s pedigree emerges as a classless symbol of Britain, it will indeed be a cultural moment of sorts.

Maybe a Labour prime minister could get away easily with such a privileged pedigree, just as a black Republican could win over white America more easily than a Kenyan-Kansan Democrat. But Obama and Cameron are trying for something subtler and harder. They are fallibly trying to move past these categories, while representing new and complicated forms of them.

Will either succeed? I don’t know. Race and class have mined the field with booby traps in both countries. Both men may falter; and both have something of the inauthentic about them. But more inauthentic than the rest of us? I doubt it. Life is messy in these complicated times; and getting beyond categories that limit our horizons is never easy.

One gets the sense that in Britain and America voters are seriously looking at a new century and a new paradigm. The candidacies of Obama and Cameron are test runs for a future all of us secretly want.

February 17, 2007 at 10:50 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

February 04, 2007

Al-Qaeda tells British cells to carry out wave of beheadings

 

David Leppard

ISLAMIC terror cells in Britain have been instructed to carry out a series of kidnappings and beheadings of the kind allegedly planned by the nine terrorist suspects arrested in Birmingham last week.

The “strategic” assassination instruction was issued by Al-Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan and Iraq to dozens of their followers in this country. It was uncovered by MI5 last autumn, senior security sources say.

As a result police are on standby for multiple attempts by terrorists to kidnap and then behead people across Britain. MI5 is conducting a counter-terrorism surveillance operation to prevent such an attack.

The alleged attempt to kidnap and behead a Muslim soldier or soldiers in Birmingham was just the first of a series of planned attacks, security sources say.

The revelation explains the recent deployment of a permanent SAS unit to London. The unit has been placed on 24-hour standby to respond to a terrorist attack in the capital. It would aim to carry out a hostage rescue mission within minutes of being alerted.

Muslim police officers serving in London may also be given extra protection. The Association of Muslim Police is in talks with the Met, which is expected to carry out a risk assessment of the dangers.

One well placed source said: “Cells in the UK have been alerted to carry out this type of attack as opposed to the more sophisticated type of bombing in which you place a large number of volunteers at risk. All you need for a beheading is a bit of courage and a sharp knife.”

The order to encourage “low-tech” assassinations is said to follow a review by senior Al-Qaeda planners after an alleged plot to smuggle bombs onto airlines was foiled by police last August.

The order encouraged followers to adopt the tactics used by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, who was behind the abduction, torture and beheading of Ken Bigley, a British engineer, in Iraq in 2004.

Bigley, 62, was kidnapped and filmed on video begging for Tony Blair to end the war before being beheaded. Footage of his “execution” was later posted on the internet.

After learning of the alleged Birmingham plot to behead a British Muslim soldier returning from Iraq or Afghanistan last autumn, the Ministry of Defence spent several months trying to establish how many soldiers fitted into this category.

After focusing on soldiers in the regular army, the Royal Marines and the Territorial Army, officials whittled the list of potential targets down to fewer than 10.

These soldiers were warned about the potential threat and advised on protection measures, or given the means to protect themselves. Sources said several of the suspects were personally acquainted with the Muslim soldier who was said to have been lined up as their first victim. The soldier, a corporal in military intelligence, is said to be under close protection.

The surveillance operation in Birmingham was stepped up at the beginning of last month when scores of detectives were seconded from the Greater Manchester police to join their colleagues in the West Midlands anti-terrorism unit.

The decision to arrest the nine suspects is said to have been made after one of them was seen buying a video camera in an electronics shop last weekend.

According to another source close to the investigation, those involved in the plot were supplying equipment and computer hardware to Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. One of the suspects had recently returned from a trip to Pakistan.

There were also claims this weekend that several of the arrested men attended the Hamza mosque in the Sparkhill area of Birmingham.

An official at the mosque, who refused to be named, said it was a centre for a group called Tablighi Jamaat, described by western security services as a “conveyor belt to Al-Qaeda”. The group’s British headquarters is in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, where two of the London bombers regularly attended. In a statement, mosque officials said they could not confirm the claims.

Despite intelligence about the new UK strategy security sources say that Al-Qaeda has not entirely dropped more traditional terrorism tactics.

At least two cells are believed to be preparing attacks using cars packed with fertiliser explosives to cause mass casualties.

Armed guards were last month deployed outside the Bacton gas terminal in Norfolk following intelligence that it had been “scouted” by known terrorist suspects. Intelligence suggested the suspects were discussing how to carry out a car bomb attack.

A Whitehall official said MI5 was now monitoring about 280 terror suspects.

Each was suspected of serious intent to carry out an attack. Cells are being closely observed in at least four British towns and cities.

February 4, 2007 at 12:14 PM in Current Terrorism, MI5, UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Job done: Taliban ‘are on the run’

Christina Lamb Kabul

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2583182_1,00.html

British Nato commander claims military victory even as insurgents come back fighting

“MY aim today is to convince you that we actually won the first and second Anglo-Afghan wars, contrary to popular belief,” said Colonel Dudley Giles as he showed a group of officers and diplomats inside Kabul’s Bala Hissar fort last week.

The fort is in ruins, destroyed by British troops in 1879 in retaliation for the murder of the British envoy. Giles is an accredited battlefield guide and in between heading Britain’s military police in Kabul for the past nine months, he has led a series of tours emphasising British military prowess on Afghan soil.

Down below in Kabul’s Nato headquarters, the most recent British general to attempt to tame the Afghans is engaged in a similar exercise of persuasion.

As General David Richards hands over control of all 31,000 Nato troops in Afghanistan to his American successor, General Dan McNeil, this morning, the message is very much “mission accomplished”. It is a message somewhat tarnished by the loss of the key southern town of Musa Qala to the Taliban.

Recent visitors to Richards’s office have been given a presentation entitled “2006 Achievements” that claims Nato “has gained the psychological ascendancy”. It goes on to cite statistics ranging from 6m children in school to 22m calls a month being made on the Afghan mobile phone system.

“In many respects I think we’ve been more successful than I anticipated,” Richards said last week. “At the start of the summer there was huge scepticism about Nato — could we fight, would we even still be here by now? Not only has Nato unequivocally proved it can fight but actually, militarily, it has defeated the Taliban.”

The fall of Musa Qala, where British troops had withdrawn after a much criticised peace deal with local elders, has nevertheless cast a pall over Richards’s farewells.

The attack was prompted by an airstrike near Musa Qala 10 days ago that was aimed at a Taliban commander named Mullah Ghafour but killed his family instead. He retaliated last weekend by invading the town centre but was driven out by local elders. On Friday he returned with more than 200 men and captured the town.

At Nato headquarters in Kabul yesterday, they were putting a rather desperate spin on events, saying the incursion proved to critics such as the Americans that the Musa Qala agreement had not been a peace deal with the Taliban. “We will take it back but in a manner and timing of our choosing,” said Mark Laity, a spokesman. “It’s a question of if, not when.”

Whoever ends up with their flag flying over Musa Qala, the general will not be returning home as “Richards of Afghanistan” as he clearly hoped when he arrived last April. But he has acquired widespread respect from both Afghans and diplomats as well as a nasty bout of whooping cough topped with viral pneumonia.

“General Richards has done a good job,” said President Hamid Karzai yesterday. “He’s tried hard and the situation is much better. But I don’t think we can declare victory.”

In fact he has overseen Afghanistan’s most violent year since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, with more than 4,000 Afghans and 191 coalition soldiers killed. The general, who before taking command had criticised the American forces for being “too kinetic”, ordered more than 650 airstrikes in September.

The number of strikes has now fallen to one or two a day, though this is partly because of the traditional winter lull in fighting by the Taliban.

“I am very unhappy about all this bombing and have told Nato this repeatedly,” Karzai said. “As we speak, there is a little girl of four being operated on in Germany because of Nato bombing in which 22 innocent people were killed. Rather than going in Afghan villages and sometimes bombing without really checking, making mistakes, we should go to the sources of terrorism, the places where they are trained and financed.”

Many of the casualties, including the girl, were sustained in Operation Medusa, when Nato forces battled for two weeks in September to stop Taliban forces taking the key city of Kandahar. Richards describes the battle, which left more than 500 dead, as “the turning point of the whole campaign” and insists Nato has won Kandahar. “There is very little Taliban activity there now,” he said.

Furthermore, Richards claims that had he had the extra troops he pleaded for but which are only now are being sent by Britain and the US, he could have won the war.

“I don’t really feel bitter because I’m a professional soldier,” he says with a laugh. “But I would love to have had them. During Operation Medusa if I’d had that reserve I would have prevented the Taliban getting out of the neck of the bottle (back to Pakistan) and swung them into Helmand and done the things already we’re about to do in Helmand.

“If I’d had that reserve I could have made it a more conclusive victory. I could have defeated them and accelerated progress in Helmand.”

Although Richards insists that he always expected to have to fight hard in Afghanistan, he concedes that he was surprised by the intensity. However, General Abdul Rahim Wardak, Afghanistan’s portly and genial defence minister, insists last summer’s heavy fighting could have been avoided.

“What people now call last year’s resurgence of the Taliban was the result of three or four years of preparation,” he said. “The Taliban believed the international community were not firmly committed to Afghanistan and would disengage. So from day one when the West started arming our army and police with those old weapons of the Soviet era that we’d fought with for 30 years with their barrels malfunctioning, etc, it did not give a very good message.

“The Taliban also chose a critical time to emerge — both militarily, just when there was a handover of command, and politically, when there was a lot of questioning in European capitals about the wisdom of deploying their forces here.”

This, the minister said, was what gave them the confidence to try to take Kandahar. “Militarily, it made no sense to send irregular troops against sophisticated conventional forces and compel them to engage in conventional battles. It was a big military gamble and they lost. But it stretched us to our limit.”

Not only is Nato beefing up its forces with an additional 1,000 Polish troops and 800 more British, but the US has extended the stay of 3,200 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Brigade.

There is renewed focus on doubling the Afghan National Army (ANA) to 70,000.

Just as Afghanistan started unravelling because attention had switched to Iraq, it is Iraq that is prompting a realisation in Washington that Afghanistan could go the same way. The past two weeks have seen visits to Kabul from Senator Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House. President George Bush has asked for an extra $10.6 billion (£5.3 billion) in assistance.

On Thursday a beaming Wardak took delivery of 230 Humvee armoured vehicles and 800 army trucks, part of a massive new military consignment from the US.

“Building up the ANA is far cheaper than deploying international forces,” he said. “It was a mistake not to have invested more in the ANA before.”

The big question now is whether the Taliban were dealt a mortal blow by Operation Medusa, as Richards believes, and will not be able to muster their threatened spring offensive.

A Taliban spokesman claimed last month that they have 2,000 suicide bombers. Reports from across the border in Pakistan are of active recruitment. In Quetta, where the Taliban leadership is based, posters exhort: “Come and fight the British.” In Peshawar, prayers in mosques have been followed by impassioned speeches about the infidels in Afghanistan and requests for contributions to buy explosives.

Once again, the focus is on the southern province of Helmand, the Taliban heartland. It is also the centre of the opium trade, whose profits are thought to fund terrorism. Last year Afghanistan was responsible for 92% of world opium production and a quarter of this came from Helmand. Officials believe this year’s output will be higher.

Richards admits that his biggest disappointment has been the lack of progress in Helmand, where 5,000 British troops continue to be engaged in heavy fighting. He long ago stopped talking of the “ink spots”, or areas of development, that he once planned enthusiastically. According to the recently ousted governor of Helmand, Engineer Mohammad Daoud: “Since the British arrived the province has seen far more destruction than reconstruction.”

Many locals see British forces as threatening their livelihood.

Norine MacDonald, of the Senlis Council, a European think tank, has spent the past two weeks interviewing villagers in Helmand while handing out blankets and food aid, and is convinced that Nato has lost the battle for hearts and minds.

“If you’re a 26-year-old man and you see your house destroyed or your daughter killed, you’d turn against the British,” she said. “It’s not about global jihad.”

It was the fear of further alienating the population against the troops that prompted Britain’s refusal to allow ground spraying of the poppy fields in Helmand that was due to start this week.

US officials were furious, believing this to be why Karzai changed his mind about allowing spraying, particularly as the Dutch then insisted it could not take place in Uruzgan either, where their troops are based.

“The Brits really put a spanner in the works,” said one US counter-narcotics official. “How could it go ahead if they wouldn’t allow it in the biggest poppy-growing province?” British officials argue that 10 of Karzai’s ministers spoke out against spraying. Whatever the reason, few expect manual eradication to result in more than a 5% cut. British counter-narcotics officials are reduced to talking of projects such as growing mint.

The eradication force of Afghans and their international advisers, DynCorp, drove into Helmand’s main city of Lashkar Gah on Tuesday, protected by helicopter gunships. They have come under attack every night since and have yet to leave their compound.

In Kabul, many Afghans feel there is too much focus on the south. Although the capital feels far more secure than a few months ago and has seen no suicide bombs for five months, United Nations security officials point out that much of the neighbouring provinces of Wardak and Loghar are no-go areas.

Just last week, as Richards was talking up Nato, a school was burnt down in Loghar.

From today as the British flag goes down and the US flag goes up, this is no longer his problem, though he is thought to covet a role as regional envoy for Tony Blair. Many of his officers believe they will be back soon. Britain is in discussions to take command again next year. Colonel Dudley Giles is one of many who would like to return and perhaps add another chapter to his battlefield tours. He may not convince many Afghans that Britain really did defeat them in the past but most would agree with his message. “We won the war but we lost the peace,” he said.

Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.

February 4, 2007 at 12:10 PM in Middle East, Terror groups, UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home