Canadian soldiers walk through a poppy field west of Kandahar City on July 9, 2006. (Pierre Gazzola)

CTVNews.ca

A month after leading seaman Scott Murphy returned from Kandahar, he’s able to visit his local Wal-Mart without having to scan the crowd for suspected insurgents.

In his case, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress were mild, he says. After leaving Afghanistan, mental health experts with the military had warned him about signs of psychological stress.

“There were certain things that could happen and they did, but my symptoms are all but gone now,” he said in a phone interview from Lower Sackville, N.S. “I’m rather relaxed.”

Murphy, 34, is based on HMCS Athabaskan but volunteered to fight in the landlocked Asian country, where he spent six months doing intelligence work for the military convoys that snake their way across Afghanistan’s treacherous desert roads.

At Kandahar Airfield he faced sporadic rocket attacks, which picked up after Ramadan. On one September day, he said the base was struck 14 times.

Like many soldiers who have returned home after Canada ended its combat mission in Afghanistan, Murphy is now getting accustomed to life away from the intensity of that conflict.

“The hardest part would be coming down from the high of being in a war zone, where you’re always being shot at, you’re always cognizant of what’s going on around you,” he said in a phone interview.

“You have to come home and readjust yourself to being the husband and the dad, and you have to be much more patient and understanding with the way things work in civilian life. It’s a much slower pace.”

Since leaving the war, he has visited everyone from doctors to dentists to psychiatrists, part of the military’s drive to ensure its soldiers are healthy — physically and mentally — after they arrive home.

While Murphy is one of the lucky ones, at least 1,859 members of the Canadian Forces had been injured in Afghanistan by the end of 2010, according to the latest government numbers.

But Senator Romeo Dallaire, who was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after commanding the United Nations peacekeeping operation to Rwanda in the 1990s, said he believes the number of soldiers wounded in Afghanistan may be significantly higher.

In his opinion, the criteria used by the Department of National Defence and Veterans Affairs to diagnose “invisible” psychological injuries may be too stringent, and the actual casualty rate among Canadian forces could be as high as 20 per cent.

Part of the problem is the chaotic nature of the Afghan war, which it makes stress injuries more common.

“The enemy could be anyone, and coming from any angle and with no compunction about killing their own to achieve their aim,” Dallaire said by phone.

“So the impact on the psychology of the soldier is extensive — and there is an incredible proportion of those operational stress injuries compared to physical injuries.”

Since Canada sent troops to Afghanistan, the number of veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress has multiplied from 2,000 to at least 13,000, according to Veterans Affairs.

To help cope with the influx, the department now runs 10 clinics across the country to treat veterans with stress-related injuries. The Department of Defence operates another five such clinics.

According to a spokesperson for Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney, the department does “recognize the seriousness” of post-traumatic stress and offers medical services accordingly.

However, veterans’ rights advocates like Sean Bruyea say the federal government has been doing too little to help soldiers disabled by psychological wounds.

“They don’t have proper rehabilitation programs. They don’t employ enough research,” Bruyea said. “They haven’t built in wheelchair ramps to help them navigate the bureaucracy.”

He’s also angry that Veterans Affairs is facing a projected budget cut of $226 million over the next two years, “when we’re at the point of having a large influx of people using disability programs and rehabilitation programs.”

The growing popularity of Veterans Affairs’ 24-hour crisis line might hint at the demand for those programs. Calls to the line, which is manned by professional counselors, have increased by 50 per cent over the past four years.

The issue of stress injuries could even shape decisions about Canada’s military operations post-Afghanistan, according to security expert Mark Sedra.

“This war has inflicted different types of psychological trauma on veterans and I think that’s something to watch,” said Sedra, who’s a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ont.

“In the short- to medium-term, I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of enthusiasm to deploy again to a foreign war.”

Plain clothed police surround a vehicle that was damaged at the site of an explosion in the Dadar area of Mumbai on July 13, 2011. (Facebook)

CTV.ca

India has been reticent to point the finger at its western neighbour as investigators probe the deadly triple bombing that struck Mumbai earlier this week. But analysts say it may be difficult to rule out links to Pakistani militants in the terrorist attacks.

Wednesday’s bombings killed 17 people and injured 131 others, making them the deadliest on Indian soil since the November 2008 siege of Mumbai, in which 166 people died.

Investigators have descended on the three neighbourhoods where near simultaneous blasts erupted in the country’s financial capital Wednesday evening, reviewing video from surveillance cameras and searching for forensic evidence as monsoon rains washed down the city’s streets.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, and Indian officials have refused to speculate on who may be behind them.

“All angles will be examined without any predetermination,” Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said at a news conference in Mumbai on Thursday. “All groups hostile to India are on the radar.”

Terrorist bombings are nothing new in the world’s second most populous nation, where a number of radical groups — including Maoist rebels, Kashmiri separatists and Islamic militants — are active.

Speculation about who might have carried out the attacks has focused on “homegrown” Islamic militants in India. But that may not mean they were operating without assistance from groups based elsewhere on the subcontinent.

“From my point of view, any Islamist militant actor in India is likely to have some sort of relationship with Pakistan-based entities,” said Kamran Bokhari, an analyst with global intelligence firm Stratfor.

Bokhari said Pakistani militants have a particular interest in stoking tensions between India and Pakistan to divert attention from their activities, and to shift Islamabad’s focus away from the war in Afghanistan.

“The bottom line is, what will the Indians determine — is there a Pakistani link or not?” he told CTVNews.ca. “That’s the million-dollar question.”

Tensions rose between India and Pakistan after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which Islamabad eventually admitted had been planned partly on its territory.

But speculation about who carried out Wednesday’s bombings has focused on the Indian Mujahideen, which has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks in the country since 2007.

Counterterrorism officers in Kolkata have been hunting for a suspected member of that group who disappeared days before the bombing, The Times of India reported early Saturday.

While the investigation goes on, reluctance on the part of Indian officials to level accusations suggests that “the government is especially concerned over jumping to any conclusion which is not evidence-based,” said Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, a senior fellow with the International Institute for Strategic Studies who has served on India’s National Security Council Secretariat.

Indian authorities need to consider “all options” including Pakistan-based groups, Roy-Chaudhury said by phone from London, England.

“But I tend to think we need to look inwards more,” he added.

New Delhi took a number of steps to shore up its counterterrorism apparatus in the wake of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, better equipping and training police, and creating institutions to more quickly respond to and investigate terrorist attacks.

But it hasn’t been enough, Roy-Chaudhury said. For instance, “there is no excuse” for India’s police, military and intelligence agencies failing to share information.

“What the heck has been going on for the past two-plus years here?” he asked. “I think there needs to be introspection really to see what went wrong.”

www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20110715/questions-over-pakistan-loom-in-mumbai-terror-probe-110716

A view of Gaza City from the harbour on Sept. 8, 2009. (Flickr / Olly Lambert)

CTV .ca

More than 30 Canadian activists are preparing to sail for the Gaza Strip as part of a controversial international flotilla protesting Israel’s blockade of the Palestinian territory, a year after nine people were killed in a similar undertaking.

A group called The Canada Boat to Gaza says it’s raised more than $300,000 and has purchased a ship — dubbed the Tahrir, after the uprising in Egypt — which is docked at an eastern Mediterranean port they will not disclose.

At least 10 such ships are planning to set sail for Gaza later this month, carrying aid supplies and around 1,500 protesters from dozens of countries, according to organizers.

Ehab Lotayef, a spokesman with the Canadian group, said that several protesters from Australia, Belgium and Denmark will also be onboard the Tahrir, along with between $30,000 and $50,000 worth of medical supplies they hope to deliver to Palestinian doctors.

“Our main objective is that Israel should not have jurisdiction over the waters of Gaza,” Lotayef said from Montreal. “This is the least we can do to try peacefully to break the blockade they’re living under.”

When six ships carrying pro-Palestinian activists, humanitarian aid and construction supplies attempted to travel to Gaza last year they were boarded by Israeli commandos in international waters. Clashes erupted onboard one vessel, the Mavi Marmara, in which eight Turkish nationals and a Turkish-American were killed.

The incident damaged relations between Israel and Turkey and deepened international pressure on Israel to lift its naval blockade.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his government hopes to head off the new flotilla through diplomatic means, but will resort to force again if protesters disobey orders from the Israeli navy and try to reach Gaza’s shore.

Border controls

At issue is an embargo that Israel imposed on Gaza after Hamas seized power in a 2007 gun battle. Hamas had unseated Fatah in elections there a year earlier, but a number of countries including Canada, the United States and members of the European Union consider Hamas a terrorist group.

Last year, the International Committee of the Red Cross said the blockade violated international law due to its impact on Gaza’s 1.5 million residents. Israel says the blockade is necessary because it prevents Hamas from obtaining weapons with which it could attack Israeli troops or civilians.

In the wake of the Mavi Marmara raid last year Israel eased its embargo on Gaza, allowing in things like biscuits and soft drinks. Last month Egypt announced it was reopening its border crossing with Gaza, further loosening the embargo.

Kevin Neish, a retired marine engineer from Victoria who has been fundraising across Canada for the Tahrir, said he doesn’t believe those developments go far enough toward improving living conditions in the Palestinian territory.

The protesters want the blockade lifted so that more aid can flow into Gaza and its dense population can trade freely with other countries, Neish said.

“If the people of Gaza have the blockade lifted then they won’t be firing rockets at Israel,” he said from Vancouver. “They’ll have a normal life.”

Neish, 54, was onboard the Mavi Marmara when Israeli troops boarded it in the last flotilla and he witnessed the deadly clashes that ensued. He was taken into Israeli custody and says he was subjected to “brutality” before being released a few days later.

Israel has banned Neish from visiting the country for a decade, but he intends to return to Gaza onboard the Mavi Marmara again this month.

Controversial strategy

The new flotilla has gained a number of high-profile supporters including three Nobel Peace Prize laureates, author Alice Walker, a former Israeli Air Force captain and a Holocaust survivor.

But the protesters have drawn criticism from officials in Canada and abroad. In a statement last month Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird called the flotilla “provocative” and “unhelpful.”

“I strongly urge those wishing to deliver humanitarian goods to the Gaza Strip to do so through established channels,” Baird said, citing “Israel’s legitimate security concerns.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has indicated he would like governments to discourage activists from staging flotillas bound for Gaza because they could “escalate into violent conflict.”

The Canadian group is also reportedly the focus of a million-dollar lawsuit, filed by a dual Canadian-Israeli citizen in an Ontario court, which claims that it is providing material support to Hamas.

Lotayef would not comment on the lawsuit. But he said medical supplies the Tahrir will transport, such as baby aspirin and blood pressure medicine, are intended for hospitals and clinics in Gaza that aren’t associated with Hamas.

Organizers will provide non-violence training to those who will sail on the Tahrir, he said, and are seeking an independent organization to inspect the boat before it leaves port to show that it’s carrying no weapons.

Emanuel Adler, an expert on Israel at the University of Toronto, said the protesters’ strategy is to court international support for Gazans on humanitarian grounds, by prompting Israel to confront the flotilla.

He believes the best way for Israel to respond is by inspecting the ships for weapons and allowing them to proceed to Gaza’s shore.

“If the other side wants a response, the logical thing is not to respond,” Adler said from Tel Aviv.

But he’s afraid that domestic pressures in Israel, including from the country’s formidable military, may lead to a different outcome.

“There’s always an aspect of deterrence, that if we don’t stop the flotilla this time, they’ll send one three times as large.”

www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20110611/canadians-sailing-in-gaza-flotilla-110611/

Lt. Cmdr. Abuhena Saifulislam, a Muslim chaplain in the U.S. Navy, leads prayer in the Washington Navy Yard Chapel, Washington, D.C., on Apr. 19, 2010. (U.S. Navy / Spec. 2nd Class Jhi L. Scott)

CTV.ca

Two soldiers stationed at sprawling military bases in the United States say they have faced persistent harassment due to their Muslim faith, renewing questions about the role of religion in the world’s largest armed forces.

Spec. Zachari Klawonn, 21, is set to file a lawsuit with a group called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, alleging that there is a “systemic issue” with Islamophobia at Fort Hood, Texas, where he is stationed, and throughout the U.S. army.

The second soldier, 20-year-old Pfc. Naser Abdo, is waiting to hear whether he will be granted conscientious objector status and be honourably discharged from the Army. If his application is denied, he says he will refuse deployment to Afghanistan and may face jail time.

Born in Texas to an American mother and a Palestinian father, Abdo adopted Islam at the age of 17. He enlisted two years later, in April 2009, after attending university in Dubai.

Abdo felt he would be “a great asset” to the Army because he could relate religiously and culturally to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, where more than 150,000 U.S. troops are deployed.

But during basic training at Fort Benning in Georgia, Abdo claims that he was persistently harassed by other soldiers.

He was asked to play the terrorist in training exercises. Soldiers accused him of wanting to kill a Jewish soldier on the base. Meanwhile they told his superiors that he was incapable of killing the enemy, in an effort to have him dismissed from the military, Abdo said.

“F–k you and your God that doesn’t exist. Your profit’s a pedophile. God can’t save you,” he recalls being told by one soldier following a disagreement about which way to trek through the woods on a land navigation drill.

Abdo reported the incident to his superiors and the soldier was disciplined, Abdo said. But the harassment didn’t stop.

“It was a constant thing,” he told CTV.ca.

After completing his training, Abdo was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky — the third-largest Army base in the U.S. with some 30,000 troops stationed there and another 17,000 deployed in Afghanistan — where he says the harassment continued.

Facing deployment to volatile northeastern Afghanistan, he applied for conscientious objector status in June, saying that he had embraced a pacifist interpretation of Islam. He also hired a civilian lawyer and sent his Canadian wife to live with family in Ontario in case he faced retribution.

“I started wanting to get on a good footing with God,” Abdo said in a phone interview. “Just making sure that I was ready to die, so that if something happened I wouldn’t burn in hell.”

Earlier this month, he submitted the final paperwork for his application, after an investigating officer recommended that it be approved.

The officer found that Abdo’s initial doubts about the military could be traced back to three things: that he had been unable to fast during Ramadan, that he was prevented from praying five times a day, and that he was harassed by other soldiers for being a Muslim.

A spokesperson at Fort Campbell, where Abdo is stationed, could not confirm details about his case due to federal privacy laws but said the base has received no other complaints of religious discrimination “in recent years.”

“The military doesn’t stand you up in a line and make you state your religious beliefs publicly,” Kelly Dewitt told CTV.ca, adding that a service member’s faith “typically isn’t an issue unless you make it an issue, sort of like in the civilian workplace.”

Similar account

But more than 1,200 kilometres southwest of Fort Campbell, Klawonn described enduring similar mistreatment at Fort Hood.

The largest military installation in the world with some 50,000 service members, Fort Hood was the site of a shooting rampage last November in which 13 people were killed and 30 others were wounded, allegedly by a Muslim soldier named Maj. Nidal Hasan.

Klawonn, whose mother is Moroccan, has experienced “ongoing and constant discrimination from an array of soldiers” at the base, he said by phone.

Like Abdo, he said he was prevented from praying and fasting. He had his Koran torn up. Soldiers hurled bottles at him. In the middle of the night someone banged on the door of his barracks and left a note behind that said, in big black letters, “F–k you raghead burn in hell.”

He reported the incidents to his commanding officers but he said the harassment persisted, and he was relocated to living quarters off-base for his own protection.

“It’s really left me at a crossroads between my faith, my country and my obligation to the United States army,” he said.

In response, Klawonn and the MRFF are set to file a lawsuit in federal court in the coming weeks that will outline complaints they would like addressed.

The goal is to have the U.S. military “use their equal opportunity policy,” Klawonn said, which he believes they are ignoring. Otherwise, he may follow in Abdo’s footsteps and apply to be honourably discharged from the military as a conscientious objector.

Legal campaign

The MRFF has launched several lawsuits in recent years, charging that lines between the secular and the religious are becoming blurred in the American armed forces.

A non-profit group, the MRFF bills itself as “the constitutional conscience of the United States military.” According to its website, more than 18,000 active service members have complained to the organization about what it calls “spiritual rape.”

Mikey Weinstein, the MRFF’s president, is a lawyer who has worked as a judge advocate in the U.S. military and as assistant counsel to President Ronald Reagan. Weinstein decided to establish the organization in 2004 after his son, who was an Air Force Academy cadet at the time, said he was facing harassment because he was Jewish.

In Klawonn’s case, the foundation alleges that “a pernicious pattern and practice of unconstitutional abuse” exists at Fort Hood and in the U.S. army more widely, Weinstein said in a phone interview.

The pending lawsuit follows a number of recent controversies concerning the role of religion in the U.S. military.

In late October, the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs released the results of a survey that said 41 per cent of non-Christian cadets had experienced unwanted evangelizing in the past year.

An official military video that was screened to U.S. troops in 2009, and featured NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw, suggested that faith in God would help soldiers afflicted by depression to cope, and avoid suicide.

And last January, the MRFF complained that U.S. troops at home and in Iraq were using so called “Jesus rifles” equipped with sights inscribed with coded references to the New Testament.

But at Fort Hood, Klawonn said he is optimistic his situation will improve.

Although authorities at the base declined to comment on his case, Klawonn said they began informing him of steps being taken to address his concerns after the MRFF announced in May that it would be filing the lawsuit.

Cultural and anti-terrorism training at the base — which had previously conflated Islam with terrorism, according to Klawonn — was overhauled, and an imam was hired to lead Muslim prayers.

“This is even before the lawsuit has been filed,” Klawonn said. “My impression is that things are going to start to change around here.”

“All it takes is a couple of people to stand up and say: ‘You know what? This isn’t right.’”

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/World/20101120/conscientious-objectors-war-101120/

An image from video of the February 2003 CSIS interrogation of Omar Khadr, six months after he was captured by U.S. troops in Afghanistan at age 15.

CTV.ca

When a pair of federal intelligence agents visited Guantanamo Bay seven years ago, they met Omar Khadr in a small neon-lit interrogation room and said, “I guess we’re the first Canadians you’ve seen in a while.”

“Canadians? Yeah, finally!” replied Khadr, who had been captured and detained by U.S. troops six months earlier, at the age of 15.

One of the interrogators then offered the teenager a Subway sandwich and a Coke, and asked Khadr to describe his life beginning with his earliest memory.

So begins “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo,” a documentary film built around seven hours of grainy surveillance footage depicting Khadr’s February 2003 interrogation by a Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent and another federal intelligence official.

The Supreme Court ordered the video released to Khadr’s lawyers in 2008, but the public has only seen about 10 minutes of the footage until now.

In the full video, the interrogations begin cordially but take an unfriendly turn after Khadr apparently realizes the Canadians have come to gather information rather than help repatriate him. At one point Khadr breaks down in sobs, saying “nobody cares about me.”

The next day, interrogators continue pressing their subject about everything from his relationship with his father, to what he knows about Osama bin Laden, to how he wound up in an Afghan compound on July 27, 2002, as Taliban-linked militants fought to the death against American troops.

“I didn’t do anything,” Khadr says of the battle, in which he was badly injured. “I was in the house when the fighting started, then I didn’t have any choice.”

The U.S. government has accused Khadr of killing an American medic named Sgt. Christopher Speer by throwing a grenade in that firefight, and of supporting terrorism.

Khadr’s lawyers argue that their client’s father, a suspected al Qaeda financier who had ties to bin Laden, indoctrinated his son to take up violent jihad.

‘Bigger picture’

The 99-minute documentary paints a sympathetic portrait of Khadr as a child soldier who has lived in a legal black hole, and has allegedly endured torture by U.S. authorities since his capture in the Afghan mountains eight years ago.

Khadr, now 24, remains the youngest inmate at Guantanamo Bay and the last Western citizen imprisoned there. He is also the first to face trial by U.S. military tribunal since President Barack Obama was elected — and the first person in more than half a century to face war crimes charges for alleged acts committed as a juvenile.

As such, his saga has received ample media attention. But Canadian filmmakers Luc Cote and Patricio Henriquez wanted to pull together different aspects of Khadr’s case in the hopes of generating awareness about what they call a miscarriage of justice.

“Everybody knows a little bit of information here and there,” Cote said in a phone interview. “But when you look at it all together and you have the bigger picture, I think you understand a little bit better what’s going on.”

“We’re just trying to say, ‘Open your mind, open your heart to another point of view and perhaps you’ll learn something here.’”

To do that the film presents evidence, including a photograph of Khadr immediately after the 2002 firefight, which suggests he may have been too badly injured to lob the grenade that killed Speer.

It also scrutinizes international law regarding the case, noting that Canada has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, under whose terms Khadr would be designated a child soldier because of his age when the gunfight occurred.

Several unexpected characters plead for Khadr’s repatriation to Canada in the film. They include a retired psychiatrist with the U.S. military who assessed Khadr at Guantanamo, and a former American interrogator named Damien Corsetti who was stationed at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan while Khadr was held there.

Former detainees also make appearances, such as Moazzam Begg, who met Khadr while he was imprisoned at Bagram.

“He’s spent his entire adolescence in Guantanamo and clearly knows nothing other than that,” Begg, who now works for a human rights group in Britain, said by phone. “That’s a big stain on the United States of America, but an even bigger one on Canada.”

Political reaction

The film premiered in Montreal earlier this month, and got a strong reaction Wednesday on Parliament Hill when it was screened for MPs from the Bloc Quebecois, the Liberal party and the NDP.

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe said the federal government “should be ashamed” for not requesting Khadr’s repatriation, while New Democrat MP Wayne Marsten called Ottawa’s treatment of Khadr “appalling.”

“This is one of the most shameful events that we’ve had in this country,” Marsten said later in an interview with CTV.ca. “The government should have been shouting from the rooftops to end this.”

The film will premiere in Toronto this week and will debut internationally next month at the world’s largest documentary film festival in Amsterdam. Amnesty International also hopes to hold screenings as far away as Hong Kong.

But the documentary’s most important audience may take in the film at Guantanamo.

According to reports, Khadr could accept a plea deal with the Pentagon as early as Monday, which would see him serve a year in a U.S. prison and seven more in Canada.

Regardless of whether a deal is struck, his lawyers say they intend to play “You Don’t Like the Truth” at trial or during his sentencing.

They have also shown Khadr the film twice. He was “initially sad at revisiting the painful experience,” Dennis Edney, one of his Canadian lawyers, wrote in an email.

Edney played the film for Khadr a second time this week and wrote that, “he was pleased to hear that people cared for him.”

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20101023/omar-khadr-documentary-101024/

U.S. President Barack Obama with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari during a meeting at the White House on May 6, 2009. (Pete Souza)

CTV.ca

The imminent reopening of a crucial border crossing in the Khyber Pass has laid bare one of the vulnerabilities NATO forces are grappling with in prosecuting the war in Afghanistan — the uneasy, love-hate relationship between Pakistan and the United States.

After nearly two weeks, the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad issued a statement Saturday stating that it will soon reopen the Torkham border post, which lies on a busy supply route to Kabul.

The Pakistani government shuttered the border crossing on Sept. 30, after three of its soldiers were mistakenly killed in an attack by a U.S. helicopter.

The American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, apologized for the incident. But the closure has sparked fresh tensions between Washington and Islamabad, partly due to the indispensable role Pakistan plays in supplying the 142,000 coalition troops stationed in Afghanistan, most of whom are American.

The bulk of NATO’s fuel and other non-lethal material crosses Pakistan overland from the port of Karachi. Three-quarters of those goods enter Afghanistan via the Khyber Pass, making the Torkham border crossing logistically vital.

“Afghanistan is a very hard place to fight a war because of its physical geographic location,” said Sunil Ram, a security expert and professor of land warfare at American Military University. “This is one of the strategic bottlenecks.”

Taliban attacks

Aggravating the situation, groups of armed men have attacked tankers laden with NATO fuel on Pakistani soil. The militants are believed to have torched more than 100 tankers in a string of assaults since Oct. 1.

They have targeted fuel trucks that were backed up waiting to cross the Khyber Pass, as well as those making their way to Pakistan’s second border crossing to Afghanistan, near the city of Quetta farther south.

The Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for at least two of the assaults. A spokesperson for the group, Azam Tariq, told CNN the fuel trucks were “logistic support for the NATO forces who killed our innocent sisters and brothers in Afghanistan.”

However, Ram said private contractors, who are tasked with transporting the fuel, may have spurred the attacks by failing to keep up on payments to the Taliban after the Torkham border post closed.

“The bottom line is, it’s about the payoffs,” he said, citing sources in military intelligence on both sides of the border. “In the background, the Taliban are saying, ‘Let’s get our payoffs back in place and we’ll stop blowing your stuff up.’”

The issue of private contractors paying militants has been well documented in Afghanistan. In the latest reported instance, private security forces linked to the Taliban were hired to guard a U.S. base, according to an investigation by the U.S. Senate.

Kamran Bokhari, South Asia director with the global intelligence firm STRATFOR, described the fuel tankers as “a target of opportunity.”

“The supply line is just so long, and it runs through several areas where militants are active, that it’s not hard for them to hit these trucks,” he said. “All you need is a bunch of guys and the ability to torch stuff.”

Uneasy allies

The wayward helicopter attack, the subsequent border-crossing closure and fuel tanker attacks have strained already troubled relations between Islamabad and Washington.

Pakistan’s high commissioner to Britain, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, said Friday that U.S. authorities were acting on “internal political dynamics” relating to the upcoming midterm elections when they issued a travel alert about militants in Pakistan planning to attack European cities.

On Thursday, the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad criticized the U.S. for what it believes is an increase in the frequency of drone attacks. The Pakistani government has also forbidden cross-border raids by foreign forces, seeing them as violations of the country’s sovereignty.

For its part, Washington has accused Islamabad of failing to take action against elements of the Taliban who are keen to fight in Afghanistan but are not hostile to the Pakistani state.

Earlier in the week, a White House report to the Congress warned that Pakistan’s military had made a “political choice” to “avoid military engagements that would put it in direct conflict with Afghan Taliban or al Qaeda forces in North Waziristan,” according to an unclassified version of the report obtained by Agence France-Presse.

Some officials in Washington suspect the recent fuel tanker attacks were encouraged by elements within Pakistan’s intelligence service “to put pressure on the United States not to make incursions into Pakistan,” Bokhari said.

He called the current state of U.S.-Pakistan relations “the most tense period between the two sides since this war began.”

“But that doesn’t mean there will be a breach,” he added. “It’s kind of like a love-hate relationship.”

Pakistan depends on the $2 billion in aid money that flows into its economy from Washington every year. The U.S., in addition to relying on ground supply routes in Pakistan to fuel the NATO war effort, has become increasingly focused on crushing Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

At the heart of the problem, the two governments have failed to agree on “which Taliban groups can be accommodated and which have to be militarily dealt with,” Bokhari said.

“That’s the clash,” he added. “They need to find a middle path, but so far that’s not happening.”

An official from Sudan's National Elections Commission (left) helps a voter at a polling station in Juba, Sudan, Apr. 12, 2010. (UN Photo / Tim McKulka)

CTV.ca

In less than six months, Sudan will hold a referendum that experts say could produce a new country or spark a regional war. And as they prepare for the crucial vote, politicians from Africa’s largest country are seeking lessons from Canada.

Eight members of President Omar al Bashir’s ruling National Congress Party and three members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which governs the country’s semi-autonomous south, visited Canada this week to learn how Ottawa conducts plebiscites.

Those two parties represent opposing sides of a now quiet civil war, which was fought mainly in the south of the country and claimed more than two million lives. (Another war in the western Darfur region has killed several hundred thousand more.)

Southern Sudan sits atop the country’s vital oil resources, and followers of Christianity and traditional African faiths there have resisted attempts to impose Islamic customs and beliefs on them by the Muslim north.

A 2005 peace agreement helped quell decades of fighting between the two sides. Under its terms, Sudanese authorities must hold a referendum by Jan. 9, 2011, to determine whether the south will secede.

Ottawa hosted the Sudanese delegation as part of an offer of “technical support” for the referendum, Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lisa Monette told CTV.ca in an email.

Over five days, the group stopped in Quebec City, Montreal and Ottawa. They heard presentations from a number of organizations including Elections Canada.

Nelson Wiseman, a politics professor at the University of Toronto, said Elections Canada is often asked to provide advice on democratic processes abroad. Canada is seen as having “a lot of expertise in electoral administration,” he said, and has participated in several hundred electoral missions overseas.

In the case of south Sudan, Ottawa hopes the delegation’s visit will make the outcome of the pending referendum “more likely to be accepted by all parties involved, to produce legitimate outcomes, and thus avoid unnecessary violence,” Monette said.

EJ Hogendoorn, the International Crisis Group’s project director for the Horn of Africa, applauded Ottawa’s offer to share its expertise on secession referendums (Quebec has held two votes on sovereignty).

“Any attempt to try to make this vote as transparent as possible — meaning that the people believe the results are in fact the will of the voters — the better it will be for stability in the country,” Hogendoorn said by phone from Nairobi, Kenya.

Sudan was the largest recipient of Canada’s humanitarian aid in 2008-2009. Ottawa has spent at least $760 million there over the past four years. That represents a “significant” financial footprint in the East African country, Hogendoorn said.

A few dozen members of the Canadian military are stationed across the south, the western region of Darfur and the northern capital of Khartoum as part of United Nations and African Union peacekeeping missions. Eighteen Canadian police officers are training local authorities, and troops deployed from nearby African states drive 105 armoured vehicles borrowed from the Canadian military.

About 60 countries are involved in humanitarian and security work in Sudan, under the auspices of the UN and the African Union. But Hogendoorn said the international community is still doing too little to help the country avoid another war.

“This is the largest threat to regional stability in Africa at the present time,” Hogendoorn said. “And if you were to compare the assistance going to Sudan to the assistance that’s gone to other war-torn countries, such as Bosnia and Cambodia, it’s not nearly as much.”

A months-old national election may hold clues about what to expect from the referendum. Bashir’s National Congress Party won the April vote — a process that election monitors from the Carter Center deemed “chaotic, non-transparent and vulnerable to electoral manipulation.”

More recently, a July report by rights group Global Witness warned that Sudan remains “alarmingly unprepared” for the referendum. Government authorities have yet to pinpoint where the new country’s borders would lie if the south opts for independence. No agreements have been reached on how to divide Sudan’s debt or share its natural resources. Meanwhile the Sudanese armed forces and the Southern People’s Liberation Army are said to be rearming.

www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20100806/sudan-comes-to-canada-100808

The sign outside Google China headquarters in Beijing, adorned with flowers and notes from local Internet users. (Mike Dong)

CTV.ca

For nearly two months, Internet users in China have been waiting anxiously to find out whether the world’s largest online search engine will close in their country.

As ecologist Xiong Zhenqin told the journal Nature recently: “Research without Google would be like life without electricity.”

The Internet giant announced in January it was reassessing whether to continue its operations in China, where 384 million people surf the Web under tight government controls.

Google discovered that hackers had broken into its popular Gmail application. The attacks appeared to originate from mainland China. The culprits were looking for information about Chinese human rights activists and that suggested government involvement, Google alleged.

Citing concerns over security, human rights and freedom of speech, the California-based Internet giant said it would either find a way to stop censoring its search results in China or leave.

Whether Google and Beijing are in negotiations is unclear, but the company has made no public decision on the matter. Meanwhile the cyber attacks, which Google said hit at least 20 other firms, have reverberated through Washington.

The U.S. National Security Agency probed where the hackers were based, tracing the attacks to servers in Taiwan, then reportedly to a pair of Chinese schools. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also demanded that Chinese authorities conduct a thorough and transparent investigation.

“The Google attacks were taken extremely seriously — more than just an incident of potential industrial espionage but a major body blow to the American political system,” said Ronald Deibert, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Toronto.

Deibert is one of the people Google has been soliciting advice from in its dealings with China. He delivered a presentation about the rise of cyberspace control at Google’s headquarters a week before the company uncovered the hack. And officials informed him of their discovery before they went public.

Deibert told CTV.ca the hackers went one step further than was widely reported, ostensibly trying to access directories of data that Google collects, as required by U.S. national security laws.

The company tapped Deibert’s expertise after he co-wrote a 2009 study into cyber attacks against the office of the Dalai Lama. Researchers uncovered an extensive online spy network dubbed GhostNet that they traced back to China. It had compromised 1,295 computers across 103 countries — including some in Canada.

Domestic appeal

Deibert says Canada needs to confront the issues of censorship and government intrigue on the Web that incidents like the Google hack raise.

In a paper published on Feb. 22 by the Canadian International Council think-tank, he called on Ottawa to develop a cyberspace strategy that includes:

• Fixing Canadian laws that foreign governments could use to justify controlling the Web, such as with content filtering or online surveillance
• Scrutinizing whether Canadian technology exports are being used by foreign governments to restrict Internet access
• Encouraging “arms control in cyberspace” by, for example, proposing a UN treaty to make the Web more open and peaceful

The idea of “arms control” may seem extreme, but governments have started using the Internet to help them wage war.

During the 2008 conflict in Georgia, hackers took down key government websites in the capital of Tbilisi while Russian tanks rolled across the border. Military powers including France, Israel and the U.S. have adopted such cyberwar tactics as part of their defence policies.

The Internet is “entering a dangerous and chaotic phase, essentially a cyber-arms race,” Deibert said, and that’s led to spiralling computer espionage and computer network attacks.

“We need at least some government to stand up and say ‘how are we going to restrain this?’”

Policy ‘vacuum’

Stephen Harper’s Conservative government pledged, in this week’s throne speech, to create a cybersecurity strategy that would protect Canada’s “digital infrastructure.”

So far, however, there has been a “surprising vacuum in Canadian policy around cyberspace generally,” Deibert says.

Ottawa has been considering legislation on the issue. “The Investigative Powers of the 21st Century Act” was tabled last June. It proposed that Internet service providers be required to hand over data and personal information about their customers to police. But the bill hadn’t become law by the time Parliament was prorogued.

The federal government’s existing cybersecurity efforts are organized around Public Safety Canada. For example, CSIS and the RCMP’s technological crime unit probe Web-based threats or attacks and report to Public Safety.

The department is also “leading cross-government efforts to produce a cybersecurity strategy,” David Charbonneau, a spokesperson for Public Safety Canada, told CTV.ca by email.

The strategy will incorporate input from private companies and foreign governments, Charbonneau wrote, “and will build on significant efforts that have been underway.”

Meanwhile south of the border, U.S. President Barack Obama appointed a White House cybersecurity co-ordinator in January. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security created a similar position in 2005, and Washington unveiled a national cybersecurity plan in 2008.

As governments in North America and elsewhere develop policies on cyberspace, they’re influencing how the Internet will evolve.

“The dominant trend right now is the growing militarization of cyberspace,” Deibert said. “That leads down a path towards islands of territorialized Internet that are not connected to each other.”

“Another path I’d prefer to see is one where there’s perhaps a treaty articulated by countries of the world that lays out basic principles for how cyberspace should be governed,” he added. “Hopefully that would be in an open, public way.”

For the time being, efforts to keep the World Wide Web peaceful and open are centring on China, which passed a new round of Internet controls last week.

Without an international cyberspace treaty, the U.S. government is considering whether to lodge a complaint about China’s online censorship with the World Trade Organization.

But China isn’t alone. The list of countries where Internet censorship has become a hot-button issue has grown to include democracies like Germany, France and Australia.

Saudi Arabia's Assistant Minister of Defense and Aviation arrives at the Pentagon for talks on Yemen, Nov. 17, 2009. (DoD / R. D. Ward)

CTV.ca

It’s a pattern that governments fighting Islamic extremism don’t want to see repeated — success cracking down on militants in one country boosts terrorism elsewhere.

In Afghanistan, for example, the U.S. invasion prompted al Qaeda’s leadership to seek shelter in the tribal areas of Pakistan, beyond the reach of the central government in Islamabad.

Similarly, experts say al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, the group that claimed responsibility for the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound flight on Dec. 25, was formed in Yemen partly because of Saudi Arabia’s success at abolishing militant groups next door.

Saudi authorities have been waging a campaign to rehabilitate, imprison or kill suspected extremists since a wave of terrorist attacks wracked the country in 2003 and 2004. But some militants fled south to Yemen, where AQAP was created last January.

“There was a balloon effect,” said Letta Tayler, a terrorism and counterterrorism researcher with Human Rights Watch. “It’s a much more hospitable environment for al Qaeda than Saudi Arabia was following the crackdown.”

The American military had been helping Yemen combat al Qaeda before Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian who had taken Arabic classes in Yemen, allegedly tried to detonate a bomb on board Flight 253.

Earlier in December, the U.S. military assisted with two air strikes on Yemeni territory. They were reportedly aimed at suspected al Qaeda leaders and killed several dozen civilians. The second strike took place a day before Abdulmutallab boarded a flight to Detroit.

The U.S. also provided nearly US$70 million in military aid to Yemen in 2009. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, has said the Department of Defense will double that amount this year.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that his government, along with the U.S., will help Yemen fund a new counterterorrism force.

Later this month, the British capital will also host two simultaneous international conferences, one on Afghanistan and the other on Yemen.

Tayler said that countries seeking to combat radicalization in Yemen would do well to learn from U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, NATO’s top commander in Afghanistan.

To defeat the Taliban and keep al Qaeda from returning to Kabul, McChrystal has recommended that U.S. troops use “courageous restraint.”

“At the end of the day, the success of this operation will be determined in the minds of the Afghan people,” McChrystal said last month. “It’s not the number of people you kill. It’s the number of people you convince. It’s the number of people that don’t get killed. It’s the number of houses that aren’t destroyed.”

As with Afghanistan, experts say there’s no easy solution to countering al Qaeda in Yemen.

Joost Hiltermann, deputy program director with International Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa arm, warned that military intervention could weaken the central government, allowing al Qaeda more free rein there.

“In a situation as fragile as in Yemen, to put a major external military force could be fatal,” Hiltermann told CTV.ca. “The country may not be able to sustain it.”

Complex problems

Yemen is a semi-mountainous country on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula with a fast-growing population of some 22 million people.

One of the least developed countries outside sub-Saharan Africa, the UN Human Development Index estimates that 35 per cent of Yemenis live in poverty. Malnourishment is a common affliction for children and nearly half the population is illiterate.

Oil, which brings in three-quarters of the national income, is running out. Tourism was touted as a possible alternative revenue generator (Yemen houses four UNESCO heritage sites). But visitor numbers have dropped due to attacks on foreigners, and political instability.

About 150,000 people have been displaced by a civil war that has been raging intermittently near Saada, in the north of the country, since 2004. The Yemeni government has been accused of indiscriminate bombing in the conflict, which Hiltermann says “is clearly escalating.”

In the south, a secessionist movement flared up last spring, bringing hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets.

A female Yemeni SWAT team on a training exercise. (BBC World Service)

“The bottom line is, the country’s in chaos,” Tayler said. “There are no prospects for youth and most citizens are concerned about how to get the next meal.”

As Yemen’s troubles mount, President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government is losing more control. His reach, which doesn’t extend to many parts of the country, is weakening further.

Marisa L. Porges, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who advises on counterterrorism for the U.S. Department of Defense, travelled to Yemen in the fall.

“There are so many domestic problems that al Qaeda isn’t a top priority,” Porges said by phone from Washington.

“In private conversations, many officials say ‘we’re already there — the state has failed.’” she added. “This is the pervading sense now.”

Confronting al Qaeda

AQAP launched several attacks last year, including an attempt to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism chief, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, and two attacks against South Korean tourists and dignitaries — all using suicide bombers.

But the attempted Dec. 25 airliner attack seems to represent the group’s first plot against a target outside the region.

While that incident focused the international community’s attention on AQAP, experts say it will be hard if not impossible to keep such groups off Yemeni territory without addressing the country’s other problems.

Jane Novak, an American analyst and expert on Yemen, warned that President Saleh may simply use military aid from the U.S. to oppress his opponents, while the country goes down.

“It’s such a complex situation,” she said. “It’s very difficult in Yemen to find anyone there to work with.”

Convincing Saleh, who has ruled the country for three decades, to implement political reforms could help make the country less hospitable for terrorist groups by boosting loyalty to the government, Novak said.

“Basically in Yemen they consider (the Saleh regime) a tyranny, and an incompetent one as well,” she said. “To reduce the instability, the ungoverned regions, they need to somehow force power-sharing and the respect for civil rights.”

Tayler echoed that view, saying policies that reduce oppression and boost faith in the government are needed to fight al Qaeda there effectively.

“You need a holistic approach,” Tayler said. “Otherwise, the counterterrorism policy will simply backfire — whether it’s Pakistan, whether it’s Yemen, whether it’s Afghanistan.”

A boy sits on a piece of rubble somewhere in or near Gaza City, February 2009. (Andreas H. Lunde)

CTV.ca

After flying to Cairo and bussing a few hundred kilometers eastward, Montreal engineer Ehab Lotayef will try to enter the Gaza Strip from a border crossing at Rafah, Egypt, on Dec. 28.

For months, the 52-year-old Canadian-Egyptian has been helping to organize a massive trip to the Palestinian territory that will include some 1,300 people from 42 countries.

The trip, which is the brainchild of American peace group Code Pink, has won celebrity endorsements from the likes of Alice Walker, Oliver Stone, Gore Vidal, Naomi Klein and Alexandre Trudeau.

Organizers hope to hold a demonstration in Gaza City on Dec. 31, alongside thousands of local residents, to commemorate the war last year and to demand Israel lift a blockade against the movement of goods in and out of the territory.

“It’s an accumulated problem,” Lotayef said by phone. “No one is really supporting the Palestinians’ rights as they should be, to guarantee peace for both sides.”

Lotayef’s concern has been echoed by a number of rights groups and United Nations agencies over the past year, which have called attention to worsening living conditions inside the 10-by-40-kilometre strip.

In September, the UN Environment Programme issued a report warning that the aquifer that 1.5 million Gazans drink from, and grow crops with, is failing. Overuse is making the water supply saltier, it said, and pollution from sewage and fertilizers is high enough to put young children in jeopardy of nitrate poisoning.

Last year’s fighting — in addition to killing 1,300, injuring 5,300 and creating 600,000 tons of rubble – “exacerbated environmental degradation that has been years in the making,” the report stated. Repairing the water system will require US$1.5 billion over two decades, the agency estimates.

According to Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch for Middle East and North Africa, such difficulties are made worse by the Israeli blockade because it keeps vital goods such as cooking oil and diesel fuel from reaching Gazans.

Stork said the blockade represents a violation of international law because it punishes Palestinian civilians as well as militants.

“There’s been next to no allowance for construction materials to get in,” he added. “So you have people in some cases still living out in the open, in the sense of not being in any kind of permanent shelter.”

The Red Cross has been equally critical of Israel keeping humanitarian and reconstruction supplies out. In a June report, it said neighbourhoods in Gaza that were badly damaged in the war, “will continue to look like the epicenter of a massive earthquake unless vast quantities of cement, steel and other building materials are allowed into the territory.”

Canada’s role

Last January, Ottawa pledged $4 million to help rebuild Gaza, and issued several statements expressing concern about the war’s effect on people living there.

But New Democrat MP Libby Davies, who travelled to Gaza in August as part of a Parliamentary delegation, told CTV.ca that many people she spoke to during the trip were worried Canada would cut aid to the Palestinians this year.

Women and children in a Gaza Strip refugee camp named Karama (Dignity), February, 2009. (ISM)

“When we spoke to various representatives in the West Bank, they were very concerned that Canada is going to in effect default on its spending commitment to UNRWA,” Davies said, referring to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which assists refugees in the territories.

An official at the Canadian International Development Agency told CTV.ca in an email that, as of Dec. 14, the agency had approved $20 million for UNRWA in 2009. That’s 28 per cent less compared to the 2008 total of $28 million.

Critics charge that, because the blockade is contributing to harsh living conditions, cutting aid to Gaza would leave Ottawa’s record on human rights open to criticism.

Tom Woodley, who heads a national non-profit group that’s been lobbying Ottawa to change its policies on various Middle East countries, said protecting that record in Gaza and elsewhere is key to protecting Canada’s international influence.

“Diplomatically, Canada needs to firmly support international law,” Woodley said. “It’s not just because we’re nice guys. It’s also because it’s in our best interest. On the world stage we’re a little guy. If someone tries to infringe on Canadian rights in the far north some day, we’re not going to be able to oppose them militarily. We’re going to have to call on international law.”

Similarly, Lotayef sees the trip to Gaza this month as an opportunity to press Ottawa to change its position on the conflict.

“Our government should take a more objective, more balanced position,” Lotayef said. “At this point in time we should increase our funding and at least contribute what we committed to contribute, to the Palestinian people.”