Afghanistan Correction: US Military "Marjah NOT a Bleeding Ulcer"

Yesterday we featured Gregg Carlstrom's incisive comment that, months after the loudly-trumpeted US "offensive" in Helmand Province, the Taliban might be re-establishing influence in Marjah. Part of Carlstrom's analysis was based on an article by Dion Nissenbaum of McClatchy News Service, including this comment from the US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal (pictured), as he toured Marjah, "This is a bleeding ulcer right now."

Afghanistan Analysis: The Taliban Return to Marjah (Carlstrom)

Well, there has been an illuminating sequel, with the US military taking McClatchy to task for misleading reporting:

Dear Mr. [Mark] Seibel [McClatchy managing editor],

I am writing to you today so that we might come to some agreement about what this command views as a mischaracterization in Dion Nissenbaum's article entitled "McChrystal calls Marjah a 'bleeding ulcer' in Afghan campaign" and other variations on that theme.

The key part of that dialogue that Dion witnessed was "You don't feel it here, but I'll tell you, it's a bleeding ulcer outside." That would have been further clarified by the quote Dion asked to use (which did not appear in the final edited copy) about Gen. McChrystal being asked in Europe and the U.S. whether we are failing. The essence of the comment is not that Marjah itself is going badly: as he said to Dion in a follow on interview on the plane ride back to Kabul — it's largely on track. It's that it's misperceived to be going badly. It's a distinction, but one I'm sure you grasp and one that could have been better conveyed, even accounting for the motive of wanting to generate interest in the story using the sensational quote: "McChrystal calls for action against perceptions of 'bleeding ulcer' in Marjah," etc....

Based on the exchange between Dion and Gen. McChrystal's personal PAO, Lt Col Tadd Sholtis, we had every reason to expect a story about mixed progress throughout Central Helmand and an effort to keep operations moving at as rapid a pace as possible against the various challenges. Instead, post-editing, one must read some 14 paragraphs into the story in order to get anything that suggests the picture is mixed, and you need to go 40 paragraphs into the story in order to get anything that explains Gen. McChrystal's actual intent in the dialogues quoted. The elements of a balanced story are there, but with the way it's organized we didn't get one....

Respectfully,

Gregory J. Smith, Rear Admiral, USN
DCOS Communication
NATO International Security Assistance Force Afghanistan

Note the rather strained effort by the military's PR staff to put up even a "mixed" situation --- a sharp contrast to the declarations of victory last autumn. Roy Gutman, McClatchy's foreign editor, strips away the rhetoric in his reply to Smith:

In the context of the [article's] opening anecdote, which suggested that outside pressures are intense and political leaders have limited patience, the further exchange Gen. McChrystal had about force levels and the facts on the ground, Marjah is a very problematic place in the short term. It adds up to being a "bleeding ulcer."

Thailand Latest: Curfew Extended, Violence Spreads Across Country (Al Jazeera)

UPDATE 0900 GMT: Richard Barrow, who works for a local newspaper, is posting pictures and video of the scene in Bangkok.

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Al Jazeera English carries the latest news from Thailand:

A curfew enforced in Bangkok and 23 other provinces following the country's worst political violence in 20 years has been extended for the next three days, the Thai army has said.

The extension comes a day after troops stormed an anti-government protest site in central Bangkok, resulting in the deaths of at least seven people that provoked angry protesters to set alight several buildings across the capital.

Thailand Eyewitness: Under Fire in Bangkok (Buncombe)
Thailand Latest: Fires and Curfew in Bangkok

Abhisit Vejjajiva, Thailand's prime minister, has pledged to restore peace in the country following the unrest.


"May I assure you fellow citizens that I, my government and security forces, are confident and determined to end the problems," he said in a televised address on Wednesday night." "We will overcome this."

Officials warned that security forces had been authorised to shoot looters and arsonists breaking the curfew after many red shirt protesters failed to surrender to the military following the incursion into the camp.

Arson attacks

On Thursday, fires were still burning in buildings set ablaze in Bangkok the previous day amid sporadic bursts of gunfire.

A special police unit entered a temple inside the former protest site where several hundred Red Shirt supporters, most of them women, old men and children, had sought shelter in recent days. Asssociated Press photographers said there was no resistance at the temple as police took away the group to a nearby police station.

Six key red shirt leaders handed themselves after the military offensive on Wednesday, but many of their followers launched arson attacks across the Bangkok in protest at their treatment by the military.

Among the buildings set on fire as the red shirts retreated from their protest camp were the Bangkok stock exchange building and the Central World mall, the second-largest shopping centre in Southeast Asia.

The offices of state-run Channel 3 television were also set ablaze, forcing the evacuation of its executives by helicopter. Police rescued the rest of the staff.

The English-language Nation and Bangkok Post newspapers evacuated their staff after threats from the red shirts while a large office building down the street from the Bangkok Post office was set alight.

Unrest also spread to Thailand's rural north and northeast, areas that are seen as strongholds of red shirt support.

Local media reported protesters set fire to government offices in Udon Thani and vandalised a city hall in Khon Kaen.

Udon Thani's governor asked the military to intervene. TV images showed troops retreating after being attacked by mobs in Ubon Ratchathani.

Tony Birtley, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Bangkok, confirmed that violence had spread.

"A contact of mine phoned me from Chiang Mai [in the north] saying that fire engines were set alight, property was destroyed and barricades were set up there, so the violence is spreading."

Civil war

Against this backdrop, Thaksin Shinawatra, the country's ousted prime minister whom many of the red shirts support, said he feared a military crackdown could lead to guerrilla warfare across the country.
 
"There is a theory saying a military crackdown can spread resentment and these resentful people will become guerrillas," he told the Reuters news agency by telephone.

Thaksin, who is accused by the government of bankrolling the protests and inciting unrest, denied he had undermined peace talks, saying he was not the "mastermind of the terrorists".

Larry Jagan, a Southeast Asia analyst based in Bangkok, told Al Jazeera that violence could spread as a result of the crackdown.

"The depth of mistrust and hatred [between red shirts and the government] has been escalated by the military reaction yesterday, so it's going to be very hard for any kind of reconciliation."

"I think what we are going to see is this kind of violence escalate, but not in Bangkok, throughout the north and northeast. Already, red shirt leaders had warned beforehand that if they were dispersed forcibly, they would bring the country to civil war."

"I think, although civil war might be too strong a word, we are going to see that kind of violence, that kind of distrust and that kind of division."

Wednesday's crackdown began with about 100 soldiers armed with automatic rifles and shotguns, along with several machinegun-mounted armoured personnel carriers, breaching the red shirts' barricade at the southern end of their protest site in Bangkok's Rachaprasong neighbourhood.

The armoured vehicles repeatedly rammed the barricade, made up largely of tyres, sharpened bamboo poles and razor wire, before breaking through the flattened structure.

The Latest from Iran (7 May): The Original Post-Election Muddle

1415 GMT: Hunger Strike. Students at Azad University in Shahrekord in western Iran have entered the third day without food to protest limitations imposed by authorities on student activists.

1400 GMT: We Will Punch You in the Mouth (without Irony). Your Tehran Friday Prayers update....

One of our favourites, tough-talking Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami laying down the religious law today, especially to other nations: A senior Iranian cleric on Friday warned the world powers that if their threats continued, "If you threaten or attack our nation and religion, we will reply and you will get yourself a punch in your mouth and jeopardize all your world."

Khatami spun his clerical six-shooters and continued, "These people of ours are not afraid of sanctions and threats and the language of force against such people is irrational and futile. Whether you like it or not, Iran is already in the nuclear club and it would be better to acknowledge it."

Having calKhatami called on the world powers to adopt a "polite and logical dialogue" with Iran rather than using threats and intimidation.

1215 GMT: Nuclear Deal or Just Posture? After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's flutter earlier this week about Brazil mediating a deal on uranium enrichment --- denied by the Brazilians --- Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has said he will pay a surprise visit (which I guess is no longer a surprise) to Istanbul to discuss an arrangement for a uranium swap with his Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoglu.

0850 GMT: Banning Books. We reported earlier this week that the stall with the works of the late Ayatollah Beheshti, a key figure in the Islamic Revolution, had not been allowed at the Tehran Book Fair because of the views of his son, Mir Hossein Mousavi's advisor Alireza Beheshti.

Now Rah-e-Sabz claims that the works of Grand Ayatollah Sane'i and the late Grand Ayatollah Montazeri were also barred.

NEW Iran: Ahmadinejad’s Chief Aide “Not Too Many People in the Prisons”
Mahmoud’s Iran Wonderland: Ahmadinejad Says “I’m in Favour of Protestors”
Iran Snap Analysis: Ahmadinejad’s Nuclear Roadtrip
The Latest from Iran (6 May): Rattling the Cage

0845 GMT: A New Website and New Information. The "Center to Defend Families of Those Slain and Detained in Iran" has established an on-line presence.

Rah-e-Sabz has posted a list of names of 32 students detained in Evin Prison.



0840 GMT: A Hospital Visit. Former President Mohammad Khatami has seen Ahmad Motamedi, a Minister in Khatami's Government and now professor at Amir Kabir University. Motamedi was stabbed earlier this week in his office.

0830 GMT: A Clerical Jibe. Ayatollah Javadi Amoli has declared that, if bribery is eliminated from Iran's judiciary, the country will prosper. He added, in a reference to an Ali Khamenei, "a certain cleric was Hojatoleslam, but became an Ayatollah when he got an office".

0745 GMT: After a night covering the British General Election and writing the assessment that it's all a big mess, it's kind of a relief to get back to the relative clarity of post-election Iran.

We open this morning, however, not with clarity but with fantasy. We've posted extracts from an extraordinary interview with Ahmadinejad right-hand man Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai, who declares, "There are not too many people in the prisons."

The International Front: "Have Some Food"

To put forward Iran's case on its nuclear programme, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has hosted diplomats of other countries at a dinner in New York, amidst the United Nations conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

And, yes, an American official showed up.

Fighting for the University

Rooz Online has an interesting article about manoeuvres for control of Iran's private system of universities, Islamic Azad, reading them as  "a coming battleground [for the 'hardliners'] against [former President Hashemi] Rafsanjani".