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and Iranian rockets. Diehard Taliban and al-Qaida fighters are said to
still rove Paktia and its neighbouring provinces of Paktika and Khost,
where a US soldier was killed at the weekend. Qalaye Niazi's role seemed
clear to Commander Klee: "You have a known al-Qaida-Taliban leadership
compound." But survivors say they stored the ammunition six weeks ago on
the orders of retreating Taliban troops. When the regime fell they
notified authorities but no one came to collect the ammunition. "We left
it. What else were we supposed to do with it?" said Taj Mohammad, the
village elder. It was stored in two unfinished houses in a five-house
complex six miles north of the collection of mud-brick compounds which
passes for Qalaye Niazi's centre. The complex housed 10 families who grew
wheat, apples and grapes, said Mr Mohammad. About two dozen guests had
crammed into the three occupied houses for a wedding, raising the number
of occupants to more than 100, said the elder. The bombers came early in
the morning. Precision-guided bombs vapourised all five buildings and a
second wave an hour later hit people digging in the rubble and, judging
from hair and flesh on the edge of three 40ft holes some distance from the
complex, those trying to flee. Two days later villagers with shovels and
tractors extracted the remains. A hand, an ankle, a bit of skull,
sometimes an entire torso, and buried some in 11 graves, each said to
contain several people, and relatives from Khost took some for burial in
the mountains. Yesterday there were just human scraps and the carcasses of
sheep, dogs and a cow, circled overhead by two crows. One villager said 32
died. The United Nations said 52, including 10 women and 25 children. Mr
Mohammad said at least 80. Other villagers said 92. Staff at the hospital
in Gardez said 107. Innumeracy, rapid burial, damage to bodies,
propaganda, remoteness, they all conspire to shred certainty in this and
other bombings. It is no one's job to count the dead. The UN said its
envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, will discuss Qalaye Niazi with US
diplomats. The Pentagon has shifted slightly from its initial certitude
and promised to investigate a raid which Donald Anderson, chairman of the
House of Commons foreign affairs select committee, denounced as a massive
failure of intelligence. That civilians were present there can be little
doubt. Taliban and al-Qaida too? Survivors swear not. Yet there is little
venom for the US. "They were given bad information by bad Afghans," said
Hinzer Gul, echoing neighbours. Haji Saifullah, head of Paktia's shura, or
tribal council, said: "Our local enemies are delivering this information
to the Americans that Taliban or al-Qaida people are here and Americans
just bomb without any search." The finger was collectively pointed at Aghi
Badshah Khan Zadran, 58, an anti-Taliban commander who controls Khost
province and is lobbying the interim government to add Paktia and Paktika
provinces to his fief. Some tribal elders said he threatened to call in US
planes against them if they did not back him and that Qalaye Niazi was a
warning. Mr Zadran, also known as Pacha Khan Zadran, was also accused of
wiping out rivals by triggering the US blitz of a convoy of elders on
December 20, which killed up to 65 people. Mr Zadran's officials were
spotted with US special forces who relied on him because of his impeccable
anti-Taliban credentials, said aides of his rival, Mr Saifullah. By his
own account Mr Zadran is the most powerful commander in south-east
Afghanistan. He hails the bombing as accurate and necessary to purge
terrorists but says he has no idea where the Americans get their
intelligence. He hotly rejects the accusations of manipulating air
strikes. The allegations have rattled the prime minister, Hamid Karzai,
who last week summoned Mr Zardan to Kabul to discuss Qalaye Niazi. But
supporters were confident Mr Zadran would return home this week with his
fief expanded to include Paktia and Paktika. "These allegations against
him are nonsense. He is a democrat and pro-west. The government will
confirm his appointment by Tuesday or Wednesday," said Amanullah Zadran,
the minister for frontier and tribal affairs, and Mr Zadran's younger
brother. Tribal politics tend to confuse even Afghans and one US official
in Kabul admitted it was impenetrable to outsiders, no matter how well
briefed. "So sure, mistakes happen." [GUARDIAN]

The village of Bonavash is slowly starving. Besieged by the Taliban and
crushed by years of drought, people on this remote mountain have resorted
to eating bread made from grass and trace amounts of barley flour. Babies
whose mothers' milk has dried up are fed grass porridge. The toothless
elderly crush grass into a near powder. Many have died. More are sick.
Nearly everyone has diarrhea or a hacking cough. Many are too weak to
stand. Others cannot leave their homes. Some children have soft bloated
bellies. When the pain becomes unbearable, their mothers tie rags around
their stomachs to try to alleviate the pressure. One man has grown so weak
he cannot move. Last week, he went blind. "We are waiting to die. If food
does not come, if the situation does not change, we will eat this ...
until we die," said Ghalam Raza, a 42-year-old man with a hacking cough,
pain in his stomach and bleeding bowels. Bonavash is the most accessible
village in the remote mountain region of Abdullah Gan, where about 10,000
people live. People in even more distant reaches, days away by donkey, are
worse off, according to aid workers and Bonavash residents who have been
there. They describe people who do not even have barley to mix with the
grass and who simply eat it straight from the ground. People whose
stomachs are rock hard from hunger. People dying in front of them." If we
cannot get aid within the month, we will be as bad as they are," said
Dawood, the commander in Bonavash, who like many Afghans uses one name.
Abdullah Gan is "a humanitarian crisis," said Ahmed Idrees Rahmani, the
International Rescue Committee's acting northern Afghanistan coordinator.
Hundreds of thousands of others are also living in desperate conditions in
the mountain regions along the former front lines between the Taliban and
the northern alliance, Rahmani said. Many share the same confluence of
natural and manmade disasters that make life worse than in other
devastated places. Cut off by war, they are completely dependent on rain
for irrigation, and too far from any road for aid to be delivered easily.
Thousands of bags of wheat flour meant to save the people of Abdullah Gan
sit stacked in a compound in the small town of Zari, four and a half hours
away by donkey along mountain trails. The World Food Program spent two
weeks trucking 1,000 tons of flour to Zari, the nearest outpost accessible
by road, but never told the aid organizations that would distribute it.
Aid workers found out only because residents told them and rushed to the
area to try to figure out the logistics of distribution. The wheat is
improperly stored. If it rains or snows, much will be damaged. U.N.
spokesman Fred Eckhard said in New York that the WFP has received reports
of starvation in remote villages. "The agencies have managed to get record
amounts of food into Afghanistan but then getting it from depots to remote
villages where it is most needed has not been easy," he said... [AP]

BLUNT US HINT LED TO OFFER OF TROOPS (NZ TAKES A CLUE). American officials
privately warned the Government that the way it responded to the September
11 terrorist attacks would be treated as a "touchstone" for future
relations between the two countries. The blunt advice from the State
Department is noted in a previously confidential report prepared by the
Prime Minister for the cabinet in the days immediately after the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon ... the cabinet accepted the
Prime Minister's recommendation and quickly indicated military support for
President George W. Bush's "war on terrorism" in the form of Special Air
Service troops, even though the US had not yet asked for New Zealand help.
The offer of SAS troops prompted a rapid warming in relations between the
Bush Administration and the Labour-Alliance Coalition, with US Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage recording his appreciation of New
Zealand's readiness to contribute military personnel when he met Foreign
Minister Phil Goff in late September ... in the immediate aftermath of
September 11 the Prime Minister was urging cabinet colleagues to
contemplate a role for the SAS, who are now believed to be in Afghanistan
carrying out covert operations ... New Zealand's three-month contribution
to the peacekeeping force in Afghanistan is still waiting for the call to
duty a week after the troops had expected to leave Auckland. Twenty-five
peacekeepers have been ready to go since they were booked on a flight to
London on December 30. They are to join a British force stationed with the
International Security Assistance Force in Kabul. [NEW ZEALAND HERALD]

Bush's controversial guidelines for trying terrorists by military
tribunals are being significantly softened - the inevitable outcome of
what some administration officials privately admit is one of Bush's few
foreign policy bobbles since Sept. 11. The tribunals uproar, which
officials close to the President downplay, is attributed to legal
sloppiness, inadequate White House consultation with Justice Department
and Pentagon lawyers, and hubris arising from stratospheric approval
ratings for the President's handling of the terror war. "They have shot
themselves in the foot several times," said David Scheffer, the Clinton
administration's ambassador at large for war-crimes issues. "They rolled
out [tribunals] as if they were the primary option instead of an
exceptional option. Then they didn't provide enough detail on how they
planned to deal with fundamental due-process protections." Another source,
closely allied with the White House, agreed with that assessment, saying
Bush's original order was so poorly drafted and received, "It's hard to
find anyone who says, 'I wrote it.'" The administration has moved quickly
to control damage from the self-inflicted wound. Some of the likely
changes to the tribunal regulations - outlined in a strategic leak from a
well-placed government official late last month - have defused much of the
criticism from human-rights groups, legal experts and congressional
watchdogs. The final regulations, which will require unanimous
death-penalty verdicts and mandatory appeals, are scheduled to be released
by the Pentagon this month. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is described
as a strong moderating influence inside the government. Over the Christmas
holidays he signed off on several key portions of the regulations
governing how Bush's "military commissions" will operate - but bounced
several others as needing more work. Though some critics still worry some
of the language is too vague, the makeover of Bush's rules has generally
been well-received. "It goes some of the distance toward alleviating
concerns," said attorney Eugene Fidell, director of the National Institute
of Military Justice, referring to details contained in the well-timed
leak. Two leading congressional critics, Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and
Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), already have said they're encouraged by such
reports. An official involved in the tribunals review said the
administration was "surprised by the depth and scope of the reaction" and
has scaled back some of Bush's harsher provisions to make the plan more
palatable to critics. Under Bush's initial order, non-U.S. citizens
charged with terrorism could have been convicted - and sentenced to death
- by a two-thirds vote of military tribunals. Evidentiary standards were
looser too - the "beyond a reasonable doubt" test for conviction was
reduced to evidence that has "probative value to a reasonable person." And
there was no provision for appealing a sentence. Leaked portions of the
draft regulations are more in keeping with federal court standards.
Terrorist defendants would be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond
a reasonable doubt, a unanimous verdict would be needed to impose the
death penalty and a three-judge panel, possibly including retired civilian
judges, would hear appeals of all convictions. [NY DAILY NEWS]

TUESDAY, JANUARY 08, 2002

A U.S. Army special-forces team code-named Tiger 03 "was credited
yesterday with the deaths of 1,300 Taliban and al-Qa'eda fighters and the
destruction of more than 50 tanks and other pieces of heavy weaponry" ...
"None of us expected to survive," says Kevin, "but it went just about as
perfectly as you could hope." [DAILY TELEGRAPH UK]

Peter Maass, who profiled Kandahar Governor Gul Agha for the New York
Times Magazine, estimated during a CNN interview that 90% of the power in
Afghanistan is in the hands of the warlords. [CNN]

On Tuesday, a Pentagon spokesman said American forces were going to stop
"chasing the shadows" of Bin Laden and Omar. Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem
declared that American-led forces were focusing more on finding and
attacking remaining Taliban and al-Qaida members. The bombing continues
long after "enemy forces", by Blair and Bush's own admission, have been
routed. Bombing will not bring anyone to account, or to justice - the
words used by Bush and Blair - nor will it provide them with more
intelligence about any threat still posed by al-Qaida. As Donald Anderson,
chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee has said, now that the
main battle is over, continuing air strikes seem very much like revenge
tactics ... Now the bombing has become so routine that it is relegated to
the inside pages of newspapers or not recorded at all, in much the same
way as the continued bombing of Iraq by American and British pilots over
the southern and northern "no-fly" zones. But is the world a safer place?
Is the outcome of the military campaign in Afghanistan a victory for
civilization, as Bush-Blair rhetoric maintains? The American military have
been given a huge boost, and the promise of a large budgetary increase to
procure new and more powerful bombs, including bunker-busters whose
performance in Afghanistan has disappointed the Pentagon ... Meanwhile,
actual Middle East states are growing economically at two-thirds the rate
of other developing countries, even more slowly than sub-Saharan Africa.
In 1980, Muslims accounted for 18% of the world's population. If present
trends continue, they will constitute 30% by 2025 ... One thing is certain
- as Britain's top military figures appreciate even if their counterparts
in the Pentagon do not - there is no military solution to the fight
against terrorism, and no military deterrent to prevent it. This is the
context in which the military action in Afghanistan praised by Blair must
be seen. [GUARDIAN UK "security editor"]

TONY JUDT. According to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, the
second intifada that began in September 2000 has so far resulted in 172
Israeli civilian deaths, 89 of them in Israel proper. In the same period
592 Palestinian civilians have been killed. According to B'Tselem, 2,194
Israelis have been injured (soldiers and policemen included); according to
the Red Crescent, injured Palestinians number nearly 17,000. (These
numbers were announced as of December 16.) It is the disproportions that
are striking in these figures. Even if Israelis were somehow winning their
"war against terrorism" -they are not-the scale of death and injury that
they are inflicting on civilians is fast undermining their case. They are
losing the moral high ground and, despite the appalling efforts of
Palestinian suicide bombers, they have lost the war of image and
propaganda. Sooner or later those conflicts merge and Israel's tactics
become a "fact" in themselves and an impediment to future solutions. More
facts: the assassination of Rehavem Zeevi, the occasion for the latest
Israeli exercise in collective punishment and extra-judicial execution (30
"suspects" killed during the recent occupation of six Palestinian towns)
was what it was: murder. But Zeevi was by his own admission an
enthusiastic practitioner of ethnic cleansing and cheerleader for a
racially "pure" Greater Israel. Had he been born Serb or Hutu we in
America might have a better understanding of why he inspired such hatred.
His presence in the government of Israel said much about the current state
of affairs there. [NY REV OF BOOKS 1/17]

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 09, 2002

"United States is preparing a military presence in Central Asia that could
last for years." American soldiers are building an airbase in Kyrgyzstan
and improving ones elsewhere in the region. Each service of the military
is also preparing to rotate troops in and out of the region
indefinitely... Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, said the
purpose of maintaining U.S. bases in Central Asia "may be more political
than actually military." He added that the bases would "send a message
that we have a capacity to come back in and will come back in -- we're not
just going to forget about" the region. [NY TIMES]

Stratfor reports that inexperienced agents are being fed bad intelligence
by wily warlords, causing a CIA/Pentagon rift: "The CIA has dozens of
30-something, earnest field agents running around Afghanistan, keeping one
hand on a satellite phone and the other on a case full of hundred dollar
bills." 

The administration of President George W. Bush told Congress many of the
warheads, bombs and missiles involved in the president's promised
two-thirds reduction of strategic nuclear forces would be kept in reserve
rather than be destroyed. Assistant Secretary of Defense J.D. Crouch told
lawmakers in a top-secret briefing Tuesday that the administration had not
yet determined how many of the roughly 4,000 nuclear warheads and bombs
slated for decommissioning under Bush's plan would be destroyed and how
many would be stored and available for redeployment, The Washington Post
reported Wednesday, citing congressional sources. Last month, Bush
announced the United States would reduce its nuclear arsenal from about
6,000 warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next 10 years ... Daryl
Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said that
based on what he had heard from the briefing, "if the reduced nuclear
weapons are kept intact and available for redeployment, it makes a mockery
of the reductions."

[continued in part two]