Can the slide to war with Syria be stopped?

According to the public account the US and allies would very much like to take a more active role (i.e. start a war) against Syria and the only thing holding them back is the opposition of Russia and China in the UN security council. This has led Russia to put pressure on Syria which has in turn led the Syrian government to agree to a ceasefire which few people expect to last. Meanwhile Turkey is mobilizing its army in case the Syrian civil war spills further into their territory. There have already been shots fired across the border with Turkey and Lebanon and three people are dead as a result.

Now consider an alternative explanation of the same facts. Let us assume that the last thing Obama wants right now is to become involved in a new war at the start of a general election campaign. It was not Obama's idea to take action Libya, that was the work of Cameron and Sarkozy. Nor has the liberation of Libya been an unqualified strategic success for the US. It is certainly good for the war on terror, Gadaffi supplied bullets and bombs to terrorists while Bin Laden was still wearing diapers. But as with the fall of East Germany, the loss of a strategic enemy is always a disaster for the military-industrial complex: how can they justify their existence if peace were to accidentally break out?

The fall of Syria is certainly an unqualified lose-lose proposition for Iran, Israel and Russia. Iran would lose their principle regional ally and their post Iraq war claim to being the emerging regional super power. While this part would be good for Israel, the regime that replaces Assad is almost certain to be more hostile to Israel. Either it will be a democratic regime and the people will demand that it takes a hostile position or it will be a dictatorship and picking fights with Israel will be the likely method of distracting those discontented with the regime.

Russia would lose as the wave of governments being toppled by popular discontent spreads northwards towards the corrupt ex-Soviet satellites surrounding the Caspian Sea. Also the Russia faces the embarrassing position of having been on the losing side of every major international engagement they have been involved in since the defeat in Afghanistan. Since then they lost control of Western Europe, watched the breakup of the Soviet empire and picked the losing side in the Bosnian war and in Libya.

A war in Syria is the last thing any party would want right now. The outcome can only damage the interests of every party other than Turkey which is re-emerging as the real regional super power in the wake of the Arab Spring. But even in Turkey the civilian government cannot exactly be sure of the loyalty of the military which not so long ago was running the country as a dictatorship.

So another explanation of what we can observe is this: The Russian veto currently allows the US and allies to be vocal in their support of the Syrian opposition without the need to take any action against it. The government of Turkey is looking for excuses to avoid being dragged into the war and has agreed to overlook the insult to their territory in return for the current temporary ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid to be delivered into Homs.

The situation is a house of cards and there are numerous triggers that could bring it down. China is already disengaged and Russia is getting visibly tired of its role. The incursions into Turkey are becoming more frequent and at some point the Turkish government is going to find it hard to persuade the army to ignore the insult. If we get to that point, Turkey is almost certain to invoke the NATO charter under article 4 (consultation). But they may have the right to invoke article 5 (an attack on one is an attack on all) which would render the UN discussion moot.

We appear to be facing a long, slow slide into war against the will of almost every government concerned and it is very hard to see how it can be stopped. The one positive note is that it is highly unlikely that Russia would engage to protect the Assad regime but it will be yet another blow to their dignity.

CNN airs interviews with Afghan witnesses: "Were others involved in the killings?"

This is an excellent must-watch report, with witness interviews, of the Kandahar massacre story (h/t Steve Hynd via Twitter for the link).

I suspect this is CNN's international feed, the highly respected one you can't get at home. The British accent of the anchor suggests as much, as does the content.

From the CNN page describing this video:

Reporter Yalda Hakim of Australia’s SBS network has become the first western journalist to visit the villages where a U.S. soldier allegedly killed 17 people.

In a remarkable report she talks with some of the survivors and some Afghan guards on duty at the military camp from where Staff Sgt. Robert Bales left on his alleged killing spree. The video at the top of this story is Hakim’s account of her journey to the remote villages near Kandahar and what she was told.

A short rundown:

▪ Starting at 4:05, there's an excellent recreation of the events of that night, begnning with the layout — the relative locations of Camp Belambai and the two villages, Alkozai and Najiban. This provides an excellent sense of place, what those villages look like, what the houses feel like inside, how barren the countryside. An excellent job by this reporter and her team.

▪ The discussion of the number of shooters starts at 5:55. Note that it's the U.S. military that initially blocks interview (7:15). Interviews themselves start at 7:45.

▪ At 8:50, there is a clear eyewitness who saw more than one soldier performing the killings, in what an Afghan official said earlier looked like a helicopter-supported operation.

▪ Near the end of the CNN wrapper to the SBS segment, you'll see an interview with John Henry Browne, the accused lone gunman's attorney. That's a name to remember and watch for.

This is a terrific watch. Please do if you have the time. Ms. Hakim, the reporter, is the one in the green hijab, or headscarf.

(To see this report larger and in a new tab, click here.)



One final note: When Ms. Hakim describes Sgt. Bales' movements, she's taking the American view of events ("lone shooter") since she has no witnesses to his movements in or near the base to the contrary. (In other words, no one is saying "A group of men left the base at this or that time that night.")

When she describes the events in the villages, she lets the witnesses speak for themselves. Thus the apparent discrepancy.

In our three-legged stool on the Afghan massacre story, this is the first break in the media side of the story — some acknowledgement that the U.S. military's explanation is not the only one with credibility.

And on the U.S. side of the story, this attorney's public appearance means the pre-trial dance has begun.

It's interesting, by the way, how closely this comports with Marcy Wheeler's smart speculation. More as it develops.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)

U.S. pays families of Afghan massacre victims $50,000 for each slain relative

I offer this to square the circle on the Kandahar massacre story. With this information, you're up to date.

The other news recently — other than radio silence from both the British and American press on the multiple eyewitness accounts opposed to the "lone gunman" thesis — is the weekend payments by the U.S. military to the victims of the slaughter and their families.

The Boston Globe puts it this way (my emphasis):

The families of 16 [sic] Afghan villagers killed this month in a massacre blamed on a US soldier [sic] were given $50,000 by the United States for each of their slain relatives, Afghan and US officials said.

The payments were made Saturday by US military officers at the office of the governor of Kandahar Province, where the killings took place. Those wounded in the violence were each given $11,000, said Haji Agha Lalai, a member of the Kandahar provincial council.

Haji Jan Agha, who lost cousins in the killings, said he and other relatives of the deceased were invited to the governor’s office by foreign and Afghan officials, according to the Reuters news agency. “They said this money is an assistance from Obama,’’ Agha was quoted as saying.

Lalai also described the payments as “assistance’’ to the wounded and the families of the dead, not as any kind of traditional compensation that would absolve the accused of responsibility for the crimes.

Interesting parsing. This Guardian story, which covers the payments near the end of the article, characterizes the U.S. as seeking "to appease Afghans by providing assistance".

About the number of victims, the Globe adds in the same piece:

Bales, who was flown out of Afghanistan soon after the killings, was formally charged on Friday with 17 [sic] counts of murder and six counts of assault and attempted murder. He is being held at a military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

According to Afghan and US officials, Bales walked off his small combat outpost in a rural area of Kandahar in the early hours of March 11 and shot and stabbed at least 16 [sic] people to death. ... Neither Afghan nor US officials have explained the discrepancy between the official Afghan government death toll of 16 and the 17 counts of murder that Bales was charged with by the US military.

Two things to note: First, that story syncs up with Marcy Wheeler's work, which we discussed here. Second, the Globe has both U.S. and Afghan "officials" holding to the "lone gunman" story, which we first discussed here.

Let's see if it sticks — not the "lone gunman" story; the media's failure to report the eyewitness accounts. So far, the silence makes my ears hurt.

UPDATES:

1. Even Al-Jazeera is walking the "alleged lone gunman" line with no report of the Afghan commission finding that I could locate. Here's their latest — note the parsing. Not a whitewash exactly, but no offsetting reporting either. Try a search of their site yourself; see if you get different results. Silence is all I hear.

2. And then there's this.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
 

Kandahar massacre update—Global Post interviews Afghan witnesses

As you know, we've been following the Afghan shooter spree story (also here) — and recently wrote:

1. Will it get near-term media traction? Let's see if the British independent press picks it up, or some prime American source. These are critical hours for the story in the U.S.; the fruit is still unripe, still vulnerable to the frosty stare of the next missing news-blonde.

2. In the U.S. what will be the response? At some point there will be a trial. That in itself could rekindle awareness. After all, if one or more people had gone on a midnight killing spree of 16 women and children in Kansas, we'd be inundated with it, drowning in it.

3. In Afghanistan, this could change the political equation. Yes, we're talking about maybe exiting the war. But there's now more on the table for honor-focused tribal leaders than just our leaving.

� The U.S.–DoD side of the story (point 2 above) is being ably followed by Marcy Wheeler — including the difference in the number of victims claimed, and the implications of that discrepancy. Do check that out, especially her speculations near the end of the post. (And see also this, then this to get her long-range projections for this story's arc. I'm guessing she's right.)

The rest of this looks at the media side (point 1) — including differences between the villagers accounts of the number of shooters and the U.S. military's account — and also at the Afghan side (point 3).

� The media side of the story is fairly quiet. However, there's this fascinating article from the Global Post, headquartered in Boston, which casts doubt on the stories of the Afghan witnesses.

But read on; they did a lot of original reporting, including their own interviews with eyewitnesses, and turned up some great results (my emphases and some reparagraphing):

Conflicting reports from eyewitnesses, US officials and local leaders show, if anything, how little is known for certain about what happened in the early morning hours of March 11, when Staff Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly massacred 16 Afghan civilians [amended by the U.S. to 17], including nine women and children. ...

“ISAF is looking into all the witnesses accounts who are deemed credible and we will investigate that,” Lt. Brian Badura said. Credible is the key word. Most of the “witnesses” so far interviewed are from the villages, or are family or friends of the victims. But very few actually saw the shooting unfold.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who summoned several villagers to Kabul to get their side of the story, has ardently supported their claims. GlobalPost, however, interviewed the same people in Kandahar before they flew to meet Karzai, and found that either they didn’t see the shooting or that they couldn’t recall key details.

[For example,] Habibullah, a 28-year-old farmer who saw parts of the massacre unfold, was one of those who met Karzai. He told GlobalPost he saw several soldiers in his compound when his father was shot. But he also admits he can’t remember everything that happened. “My mind is too confused,” he said. ...

Note that the article's disclaimer ("they didn’t see the shooting or ... couldn’t recall key details") is belied by this direct testimony from later in the same article:

After the soldier with the walkie-talkie killed her husband, [Massouma] said he lingered in the doorway of her home. “While he stood there, I secretly looked through the curtains and saw at least 20 Americans, with heavy weapons, searching all the rooms in our compound, as well as my bathroom,” she said. ... An Afghan journalist who went to Massouma’s home in the days after the shooting and spoke with one of her sons, aged seven, said the boy told him he looked through the curtains and saw a number of soldiers — although he couldn’t say how many.

Massouma's husband is Mohammad Dawood according to Wheeler, who is attempting to coordinate all these names, lists, and versions.

Do read the rest. It would be easy to dismiss this as a U.S.-based media outlet doing DoD laundry. But the detail is credible, even though (or because) it doesn't support the lede.

So shame, I suppose, for bending (if that's what they did), and kudos for going, asking, and reporting what they heard.

� On the Afghan side we feared retribution. Well, it's happening. First The Guardian, reporting on an Afghan-on-British forces shooting:

Two British soldiers were killed on Monday when an Afghan soldier turned his gun on them at the gates of a UK military base. The attacker was also killed during an exchange of fire which may have started after security guards stopped a truck as it tried to enter the heavily fortified compound in Helmand's capital Lashkar Gah. ...

Massoud Khan Nourzai, an MP from Helmand, said: "These kinds of attacks have increased lately and maybe they will continue to increase in the future.

"They have increased because of the incidents like the one in Kandahar. If an incident like Kandahar happens, people are not sitting quietly. In every Afghan family they are talking about it and saying they committed a cruel action."

The AP ups that number to three killed in two attacks:

Afghan security forces shot and killed three international troops Monday, one of them an American, in two attacks. They were the latest in a rising number of attacks in which Afghan forces have turned their weapons on their foreign partners.

Causes are given in both papers as the Kandahar massacre, the "burning of Muslim holy books at a U.S. base, and uncertainty about Afghanistan's fate."

Note this from the Guardian article:

Tensions have been running high in Afghanistan because of the burning of Qur'ans by US forces inside an international base, and then the shooting dead of 17 [sic] Afghan civilians in Kandahar province by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales.

So the independent British press is following the DoD line, at least for now — no mention in this story of offsetting witness accounts. The Guardian article closes with a quote supporting Cameron's decision to remain in Afghanistan, so the media "lone gunman" story is a joint trans-Atlantic op, at least in appearance.

There you have it, a three-legged update on the three-legged stool of this story. More as it develops. In the meantime, keep an eye on emptywheel.net for more of her coverage — Wheeler is following aspects not found elsewhere.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)