By Steve Hynd
Imagine the epic fail for any population-centric counter-insurgency plan that installing a paranoid lunatic as local governor, one who hired his own thuggish and inexperienced friends as district leaders, would represent. That's exactly what the U.S. and its allies seem to have done in Helmand province, Afghanistan, as the sorry facts of the Governor's detention of three Italian aid workers come out.
It all began on Saturday, when it is alleged that 10 suicide vests and 9 hand grenades were found at a hospital in the Helmand capital, Lashkar Gah, run by an Italian charity, Emergency, which has been running hospitals in Afghanistan for ten years. Three Italian men; the hospital's logistics director, a surgeon and a nurse, were arrested, along with six Afghans who work at the hospital, by Afghan and NATO forces for involvement in a plot to assassinate the Helmand Governor when he next visited the hospital. I say NATO forces because, although as is by now standard operating procedure NATO at first denied being involved, a video quickly surfaced showing NATO troops involved in the arrests.
So far, the only certain thing is that the weapons were found. Who might have been involved is a far murkier affair. The Helmand Governor says the Italians were offered $500,000 each by the Quetta Shura Taliban to murder him. The Quetta Shura spokesman, in turn, has said that's rubbish - why would they need to pay Italians to do what they've dozens of suicide bombers lined up to try to do for free? He added: "The Taliban respects their work. Mullah Muhammad Omar also appreciates the work of the Red Cross. Does it mean that the Taliban has any collusion with the Red Cross?�
On Sunday, it was announced that the three Italians had confessed.
�All nine of those arrested have confessed�, revealed Daoud Ahmadi, the Helmand governor�s spokesman. �They were accused of having links with al-Qaeda and terrorists. They have confessed to their crimes and admitted there was a plan to carry out suicide attacks on crowded bazaars and the compound of the governor Gulab Mangal, whom they wanted to kill�.
However, as of today, Daoud Ahmadi is denying he ever said any such thing. It's clear that they haven't confessed a thing.
When they were arrested, the Helmand Governor also falsely accused the three Italians of involvement in another, older, crime.
The governor of Helmand province, Gulab Mangal, said they were part of a Pakistani Taliban-funded plot to kill him.
He also accused the Italians of being behind the death of Ajmal Naqshbandi, an Afghan interpreter who was seized by the Taliban with an Italian journalist in April 2007.
Emergency officials brokered the reporter's release but Naqshbandi was beheaded.
The charity, which has dismissed the plot claims, also rubbished suggestions that the men may have been involved in Naqshbandi's death.
It said it can prove that at that time Garatti was in Sierra Leone working as a surgeon and medical coordinator at its hospital there, while Dell'Aira was in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, working as a nurse at its cardiac centre.
Pagani was not in Afghanistan at the time of the allegations, the statement said.
It's difficult to be involved in a plot when you're not even in the country.
The three have been transferred to detention in Kabul, but the legality of their arrest and detention is highly questionable.
The Italian charity Emergency said the detention of its staff in the southern city of Lashkar Gah was unconstitutional because they had been denied the right to silence and legal aid and not been allowed to contact their families.
A police raid last weekend at the hospital where they worked was conducted "without any legal authority" as it had not been authorised by a court, the Milan-based non-government organisation said in a statement.
"None of the Afghan authorities or the representatives of the international (military) coalition has had any contact with Emergency to explain the reasons for this event," it said.
The group said Afghan police were required to complete their investigations within 72 hours of an arrest, but "after five days we do not know if they are accused or not and where they are".
The foreign ministry in Rome said the trio had been transferred to Kabul and could be visited on Friday by Italian officials.
The country's special envoy for Afghanistan, Attilio Iannucci, will be in Kabul to see Afghan President Hamid Karzai to convey messages from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, it added.
Berlusconi has demanded "concrete" proof of the men's involvement in the alleged plot.
Now, the UN special representative to Afghanistan is saying he hopes "that these arrests are due to some serious misunderstanding".
As to Emergency, the Italian aid group, they've got a simple explanation for what appears to be utter paranoia and over-reach on the part of the Helmand Governor:
"They want to get rid of a troublesome witness. Someone has organised this set-up because they want Emergency to leave Afghanistan," the head of Emergency, Gino Strada, told reporters.
..."Emergency shows the results of the so-called war on terrorism ... 40 percent of the wounded are children under the age of 14. We had asked for a humanitarian corridor to evacuate the wounded, but they put up a security cordon that does not let them reach hospitals," Strada said.
"Until recently we managed to treat the wounded because international conventions were respected ... Today this is no longer possible," he said.
However, mindful of the old adage that we should never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity, what if it's just that Gulab Mangal, the Helmand Governor, is a crazy paranoid who added the Italians to a plot entirely due to the voices in his own head? Mangal started his political career as a henchman of the Soviet occupation, then switched sides to become a warlord, and as Joshua Foust pointed out back in March, it's only the US and its foreign allies that have a good opinion of him - the locals certainly don't. Mangal's own hand-picked man to be Governor of the supposedly key district of Marjah is a former laundromat owner who stabbed his own stepson. What does that say about him, that he willingly hires such thugs, promising an investigation that then never happens? And if he's willing to make such wild accusations and have foreign nationals illegaly detained on the basis of them, what is he doing to his own countrymen?
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