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Hermit
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And the wheels kept falling off in all directions
« on: 2008-09-24 15:11:07 » |
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“Grim” NIE on Afghanistan to Remain Classified
Source: Antiwar.com
Authors: Jason Ditz
Dated: 2008-09-23
With the Bush Administration reportedly conducting a major review of Afghanistan policy, a soon-to-be-finished National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan will remain classified and unavailable to the general public. Officials say that a draft version of the report paints a “grim” picture as the war approaches the seven year mark.
The documents are by default classified but with the recent conflicts certain reports have been declassified either in whole or in part. This has sometimes caused embarrassment for the administration, such as last year’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iran which directly contradicted the allegations made by the government about an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program.
We’ve already seen some examples of America’s revised policy in Afghanistan, primarily the escalation of attacks on Pakistani soil and the report that the administration would seek sole control over NATO forces in Afghanistan. But support for the ongoing conflict is already waning in several key NATO nations, most recently France, and the attacks in Pakistan have alienated President Zardari’s administration and made the US increasingly unpopular with the Pakistani people.
With 2008 already the deadliest year for US troops in Afghanistan and the civilian toll soaring, Admiral Mullen has testified that he is “not convinced we’re winning in Afghanistan.” [ Hermit : Of course, our troll would no doubt tell him otherwise, but as our troll's source of disinformation appears to be Faux News & Neocon Talk Radio, perhaps Admiral Mullen is wise to ignore him. ] US commanders in Afghanistan are also predicting the Taliban will launch a winter offensive, making it unsurprising that the intelligence community would describe the situation as “grim.” The unanswered and indeed unanswerable question to those of us not privy to the classified NIE is exactly how grim the report is.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:And the wheels kept falling off in all directions
« Reply #1 on: 2008-09-26 09:12:30 » |
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[Blunderov] Bad news and trouble every day.
<snip>the 'war on terror' is going to strange and dangerous new places that may well cost more than $700bn</snip>
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/09/while-you-were-watching-your-money.html
Friday, September 26, 2008
While you were watching your money disappear...posted by lenin
As the Bush administration taps US taxpayers to keep refilling the vessels of the Danaides, largely with the connivance of congressional Democrats, something on the periphery of mainstream political vision is troubling. A frontier of the war on terror is expanding. Every day, it seems, there is a new report of an attack by US troops inside Pakistan. Then there are increasingly regular reports of engagements between said US troops and the Pakistani army, who are nominally US allies. One reads that Bush has authorised strikes in Pakistan without seeking the consent of the Pakistani government. Then said strikes take place, followed by astonished denunciations from the Pakistani government. Look, the government says, we are your friends: we are killing the evil-doers, and being killed by them. They say they've killed 1,000 'militants' in one operation alone. No matter: the US Secretary of Defense knows that the US can't expect Pakistani support for the strikes, but says they will carry on regardless.
Why, you might ask, would the United States persist in operations that clearly destabilise Pakistan and undermine the effectiveness of its government? Let there be no doubt that this is what is happening. The International Republican Institute (IRI) takes, as you might expect, a great interest in Pakistan. It's a strategically vital zone for preserving US hegemony in southern and central Asia. Their regular polls [pdf] show great dissatisfaction among Pakistanis both about the general direction of the country under administrations that are to a large extent subordinated to US interests, and overwhelming opposition to the 'war on terror'. Only 1% of Pakistanis regard 'Al Qaeda' as a serious threat, though the majority consider religious extremism of various kinds to be problematic. They much prefer negotiations and dialogue to military strategy adopted by the state. And I daresay the bombing of the Marriott hotel reinforced the widespread doubts that military operations can cope with the problem. Some reports suggest that Pakistan's future as a country is being put at risk.
However, one thing that the Bush administration and Obama's campaign agree on is the need for a renewed focus on winning the war in Afghanistan. That is to put it somewhat coyly: there is no immediate prospect of winning the war, and the chances of winning it in the distant future are vanishing. It would be nice to get a better insight into official thinking on this, but the National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan, reportedly "grim", is being kept classified. Avery significant report coming out of Afghanistan suggests the US client-state is isolated, and that the 'Taliban' - rather, a constellation of military rebels with limited coherence - is advancing on the capital. NATO forces are reportedly stuck in "stalemate". Taliban leaders boast, probably with some justice, that their success owes itself to being rooted in and supported by much of the civilian population. Previous reports by the pro-war Senlis Council have suggested that the level of support for the insurgency in southern Afghanistan is woefully underestimated by the occupiers. Nonetheless, a consensus in the US political class has clearly emerged: Iraq is less important, strategically, than Afghanistan. A managed 'withdrawal' from Iraq, leaving behind permanent bases protected by a status of forces agreement (in which the comprador elite may well have to pay the US for its 'protection') will enable a greater commitment to Afghanistan. The UK has already committed to sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan, having started the withdrawal from Iraq. Global allies of the US are being pressed to escalate their military role, while the US has engaged in a terrifying amplification of its bombing campaigns. Major General Charles Dunlap Jr. of the US air force has argued that the bombing raids should be intensified further, regardless of the impact on Afghanistan's civilian population, and that probably reflects the mainstream in US military thinking - it certainly reflects the conduct.
And so, expanding the war into areas of Pakistan where the 'Taliban' and sympathetic forces operate in and retreat to, knowing that the widower president could not conceivably approve of such actions if he wanted to avoid being assassinated, is a logical further step. "Logical," that is to say, from within the twisted purview of terror warriors. As Paul Rogers points out, even if Islamabad tacitly acquiesces with Zardari theatrically shaking his fist for public consumption, US military attacks inside Pakistan are likely to raise opposition both among the Pakistani public as a whole, and - crucially - in the army. It is insanity, plainly, and raises the prospect of an escalating engagement that becomes a war to subdue much of Pakistan. Those who want to "stay the course" vaunt the prospect of prolonged 'civil war' in Afghanistan, of rising politico-religious extremism, of regional states moving in to defend their interests, and of the country becoming a "narco-state" which incubates threats to global security. What staying the course actually means is prolonged, intensifying and spreading civil war, probably stimulating what are for the moment quietest, conservative bazaari layers into military insurgency, and a ramping up of the opium trade that at the moment funds US allies in Afghanistan more than it funds the 'Taliban'. As for threats to global security (to the extent that this term is not used as a synonym for the security of US geo-economic interests), one could hardly imagine a worse prospect than the breakdown of a nuclear state and an expanding civil war that interplays with deadly regional dynamics. Nor does one fancy the entirely probable escalation in the conflict in Kashmir with a further radicalisation of India's own 'war on terror', and potentially renewed hostilities between India and Pakistan. And, incidentally, as the recent crisis in Georgia has demonstrated, America's struggle for supremacy in the region produces the danger of major inter-imperial rivalry and a revivified global arms race. One could go on: it's just that while the financial system is tanking, the 'war on terror' is going to strange and dangerous new places that may well cost more than $700bn.
Labels: 'war on drugs', 'war on terror', afghanistan, islamism, pakistan, taliban, US imperialism
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Hermit
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Re:And the wheels kept falling off in all directions
« Reply #2 on: 2008-09-26 11:51:54 » |
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It is perhaps worth mentioning that Saudi Arabia is a friend of Pakistan, paid for its nuclear development program and holds several of Pakistan's cores. The US attacks on Pakistan are putting severe stress on the "very special" relationship between the draconian and corrupt Saudi ruling family and the even worse US government. The end result will almost certainly be a substantial increase in the cost of oil.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
Kindest Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Fritz
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Re:And the wheels kept falling off in all directions
« Reply #3 on: 2008-10-05 11:32:57 » |
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Not hard hitting news but a small town glimpse into what the Canada Election platforms are regurgitating.
Cheers
Fritz
PS: Our fuel prices are the lowest in a year ($1.04 cdn per litre), me thinks after election day Oct 14th they will zoom back up. They were $1.35 cdn per litre this summer
Source: Brockville Recorder & Times
Author: Michael Jiggins, Staff Writer
Date: 2008.09.10
NDP and Green candidates want end to combat mission in Afghanistan
They support the soldiers, but two of the three nominated federal candidates in Leeds-Grenville want Canada to end its combat mission in Afghanistan.
Both the NDP's Steve Armstrong and Jeanie Warnock of the Green Party said instead of getting more deeply embroiled in an increasingly deadly combat mission, Canada's military should return to its role as peacekeeper.
However, incumbent Conservative Gord Brown staunchly defended both the mission and its accomplishments.
The debate over Canada's role in Afghanistan comes as several members of the Brockville Rifles began six-month tours this month in Kandahar and Kabul.
Brown, a two-term Tory, said he expects to hear from both rival candidates and voters who oppose the mission during the run-up to the Oct. 14 federal election.
"I'm sure that there are people who don't support Canada being there, but we cannot have security there without a military presence," insisted Brown.
He said he's met the families of Corporal Randy Payne and Private Blake Williamson, two soldiers from the riding who are among the 97 Canadian troops to die serving in Afghanistan.
Brown said their lives and the fact others from the riding are now part of the mission is something he thinks about whenever there's been a vote on the issue.
"I don't take that responsibility lightly," he said.
Even as Brown was speaking, Canadians were receiving news of the latest soldier killed.
Sergeant Scott Shipway, an infantryman with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry based in Manitoba, was killed Sunday by a roadside bomb.
Armstrong said the problem with the mission is it appears to be accomplishing little in the big picture since it began six years ago.
"We're just there (and) year after year nothing changes," he said.
Asked then why returning soldiers have told this newspaper they feel their presence is making a difference, Armstrong conceded there have been some improvements.
"But is it going to change anything for the long run?" he asked.
Armstrong pointed to recent evidence that the Taliban insurgents are gaining strength.
"Nobody wants to be occupied, that's human history," he said.
"Obviously we support our troops and their efforts," stressed Warnock when asked about the mission.
"I'm sure that there are people who don't support Canada being there, but we cannot have security there without a military presence."
- Gord Brown
She, too, said she understands the personal side of the conflict, noting her niece is in an officer training program and could one day be deployed to the combat zone.
"But is this the best way we can be using them? The Green Party more supports a peacekeeping function as opposed to a combat situation," said Warnock.
Neither Warnock nor Armstrong demanded an immediate withdrawal, but said Canada should be out within a year.
Canada's current mission in Afghanistan is slated to end in 2011.
"We're a peacekeeping country. All the stats show that's what Canadians want," said Armstrong.
Brown, however, reiterated the combat role is what's needed now to build the security that's necessary before long-term improvements can be made to Afghan society.
Already, though, he said, "Canada is doing good work in Afghanistan."
He noted he's met women who have been able to return to school and even sit in the country's parliament since the Taliban regime was ousted in 2002.
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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Hermit
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Re:And the wheels kept falling off in all directions
« Reply #4 on: 2008-10-09 09:45:22 » |
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Draft NIE Warns of “Downward Spiral” in Afghanistan
Source: Antiwar.com
Authors: Jason Ditz
Dated: 2008-10-08
Refer Also:
- Church of Virus BBS, General, Serious Business, Still here troll? I thought you would be hiding in embarrassment, Hermit
- Church of Virus BBS, General, Serious Business, Afghanistan, like Iraq and the Republicans, more broken than ever, Hermit
- Prewar Afghan Proposal, Hermit
- Petraeus: US Should Talk With Talk With Taliban, Other Enemies
- US Inquiry Revises Herat Civilian Toll, Still Disputes UN, Afghan Accounts
- Gen. Craddock Tired of Explaining Need for Aggressive Afghan Drug War
- Gates Cautions Brits Against “Defeatism” in Afghanistan
The National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan is nearing completion, and while as reported before the document will be classified, the New York Times has spoken with officials privy to the contents of a draft version of the report, and offers some new insights on it.
A previous report described the draft only as "grim," the New York Times reports that the draft concludes that Afghanistan is in a "downward spiral" and warns that the rampant corruption of the Afghan government is putting their ability to curb the Taliban’s growing influence in doubt.
Former CIA and State Department official Henry Crumpton said the situation in Afghanistan was "bad and getting worse" and said it had taken a "long time" for officials to realize it. White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe also said "everyone understands that the current situation in Afghanistan is a tough one. That’s why the president ordered additional troops there." The president approved a Pentagon recommendation/ul] last month which put off planned Iraqi troop cuts until sometime in early 2009, at which time 4,500 troops might be sent to Afghanistan.
Besides the NIE, the [url=http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008%5C09%5C27%5Cstory_27-9-2008_pg7_17]United Nations Special Envoy and multiple British officials have expressed similarly pessimistic assessments of the situation in the seven year long war. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has cautioned against what he termed a “defeatist” outlook. President Bush has also downplayed the violence and touted the "progress" he sees being made.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:And the wheels kept falling off in all directions
« Reply #5 on: 2008-10-10 07:22:10 » |
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French army chief agrees Afghanistan 'cannot be won'
France's military chief, General Jean-Louis Georgelin, has echoed suggestions by a senior British military officer that the war in Afghanistan cannot be won.
[ Hermit : Of course Iran is spitting snakes at this. Interestingly they may yet be drawn into the process of attempting to eliminate the Taliban, but I doubt that even they will succeed. ]
Source: The Telegraph
Authors: Henry Samuel
Dated: 2008-10-09
Dateline : Paris
Mr Georgelin said that he interpreted British Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith's comments over the weekend as "saying that one cannot win this war militarily, that there is no military solution to the Afghan crisis and I totally share this feeling".
"The strategy of Nato, as it has been redefined in Bucharest (at the start of April) does not say anything else," said Mr Georgelin in a French television interview.
His remarks follow those by Mr Carleton-Smith, Britain's top military officer in Afghanistan, who said that people should "lower their expectations" about how the conflict would end.
"We're not going to win this war. It's about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that's not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army," he said.
Mr Carleton-Smith said his forces had "taken the sting out of the Taliban for 2008" but said it would be "unrealistic and probably incredible" to think that the multinational forces in Afghanistan could rid the country of armed bands.
"We may well leave with there still being a low but steady ebb of rural insurgency... I don't think we should expect that when we go there won't be roaming bands of armed men in this part of the world," he said.
Mr Georgelin said that all initiatives "aimed at encouraging reconciliation among Afghans are good and should be encouraged".
But regarding Afghan President Hamid Karzai's willingness to hold talks with the Taliban, he said it would be difficult to find reliable contacts among them.
Earlier this week British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said that Mr Carleton-Smith's remarks had been misconstrued. Success in Afghanistan did not mean "killing every Taliban", but ensuring the Afghan government was in control, he wrote in his official blog.
Yesterday France began transporting around 100 extra troops and three more helicopters to join its forces in Afghanistan.
France announced it would increase its military presence in Afghanistan earlier this month, weeks after 10 of its soldiers were killed in a Taliban ambush east of Kabul.
Following the August 18 attack, the military was criticised for being ill-equipped and ill-prepared for the harsh conflict.
The patrol was said to have been outgunned, while France had only two helicopters in theatre for rescue missions and no reconnaissance drones.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:And the wheels kept falling off in all directions
« Reply #6 on: 2008-10-10 08:47:31 » |
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Afghanistan: The Surge That Failed
Source: Antiwar.com
Authors: Anand Gopal and Tom Engelhardt (TomDispatch)
Dated: 2008-10-10
Anand Gopal writes frequently about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the "War on Terror." He is a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, based in Afghanistan. For more of his information and dispatches from the region, visit anandgopal.com.
In a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, spoke proudly of how, in July 1979, he had "signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul" and so helped draw a Russian interventionary force into Afghanistan. "On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border," Brzezinski added, "I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.'" And so they did – with the help of the CIA, Saudi money, the Pakistani intelligence services, and an influx of Arab jihadis, including Osama bin Laden. In fact, their Afghan War would prove far more disastrous for the Soviet Union than defeat in Vietnam had been for the United States. By the time the Soviets withdrew their last troops in February 1989, the economy of the Cold War's weaker superpower was tottering on the brink. Less than three years later, the Soviet Union itself was no more, even as Washington, at first unbelieving, then celebratory, declared eternal victory.
It is far clearer now, as American economic power visibly crumbles, that rather than a victor and a vanquished there were two great power losers in the Cold War. The weaker, the Soviet Union, simply imploded first, while the U.S., enwreathed in a rhetoric of triumphalism and self-congratulation, was far more slowly making its way toward the exit. Seldom mentioned here, however, is a grotesque irony: as the U.S. seems to be experiencing the beginning stages of its imperial implosion, it is also – as the Soviet Union was in the 1980s – enmired in a war without end in Afghanistan against a ragtag army of Afghan insurgents supported by foreign jihadist volunteers.
One difference, of course: The Soviets were, in part, brought to the edge of bankruptcy and collapse by a war supported to the hilt, and to the tune of billions of dollars as well as massive infusions of weaponry, by the other superpower. [ Hermit : Not to mention a concerted and deliberate economic and technological war against the USSR which, had it been deployed against the USA under the Bush National Strategic Plan would almost have lead to a "nuculear" war. ] The U.S. is heading for its analogous moment without an enemy superpower in sight. If anything, a single man – Osama bin Laden – might be said to have filled the former superpower role, which, were the results less grim, would be little short of farcical. That this has come to pass is, of course, partly the result of the Bush administration's many imperial blunders, including its invasion of Iraq and its urge to garrison the oil lands of the planet from the Middle East to Central Asia. Like all historical analogies, the Afghan one may be less than exact, but it does stare us in the face and, eerie as it is, it's hard to account for its absence from discussion here in the U.S.
If you want to grasp just how deeply the United States is now entangled in its own catastrophic Afghan War, you need only read the following report. For obvious reasons, it's rare for TomDispatch to have on-the-spot reporting. So consider this an exceptional exception. Anand Gopal is a superb young journalist who writes regularly for the Christian Science Monitor. Here, he considers the failed U.S. surge in Afghanistan – yes, there was one back in 2007 – as well as the costs for Afghan civilians and the increasingly powerful Taliban insurgency that has emerged from it. His report could not be more vivid or more sobering for a country readying itself, under a new president, to pour yet more troops into Afghanistan. Tom
The Surge That Failed
Afghanistan under the Bombs
Authors: Anand Gopal
A bit past midnight on a balmy night in late August, Hedayatullah awoke to a deafening blast. He stumbled out of bed and heard angry voices drawing closer. Suddenly, his bedroom doors banged open and dozens of silhouetted figures burst in, some shouting in a strange language.
The intruders blindfolded Hedayatullah and, screaming with fury, forced him to the ground. An Afghan voice told him not to move or speak, or he would be killed. He listened for sounds from the next room, where his brother Noorullah slept with his family. He could hear his nephew, eight months old, crying hysterically. Then came the sound of an automatic rifle, after which his nephew fell silent.
The rest of the family – 18 people in all, including aunts, uncles, and cousins – was herded outside into the darkness. The Afghan voice explained to Hedayatullah's terrified mother, "We are the Afghan National Army, here to accompany the American military. The Americans have killed one of your sons and his two children. They also shot his wife and they're taking her to the hospital."
"Why?" Hedayatullah's mother stammered.
"There is no why," the soldier replied. When she heard this, she started screaming, slamming her fists into her chest in anguish. The Afghan soldiers left her and loaded Hedayatullah and his cousin into the back of a military van, after which they drove off with an American convoy into the black of night.
The next day, the Afghan forces released Hedayatullah and his cousin, calling the whole raid a mistake. However, Noorullah's wife, months pregnant, never came home: She died on the way to the hospital.
Surging in Afghanistan
When, decades from now, historians compile the record of this Afghan war, they will date the Afghan version of the surge – the now trendy injection of large numbers of troops to resuscitate a flagging war effort – to sometime in early 2007. Then, a growing insurgency was causing visible problems for U.S. and NATO forces in certain pockets in the southern parts of the country, long a Taliban stronghold. In response, military planners dramatically beefed up the international presence, raising the number of troops over the following 18 months by 20,000, a 45% jump.
During this period, however, the violence also jumped – by 50%. This shouldn't be surprising. More troops meant more targets for Taliban fighters and suicide bombers. In response, the international forces retaliated with massive aerial bombing campaigns and large-scale house raids. The number of civilians killed in the process skyrocketed. In the fifteen months of this surge, more civilians have been killed than in the previous four years combined.
During the same period, the country descended into a state of utter dereliction – no jobs, very little reconstruction, and ever less security. In turn, the rising civilian death toll and the decaying economy proved a profitable recipe for the Taliban, who recruited significant numbers of new fighters. They also won the sympathy of Afghans who saw them as the lesser of two evils. Once confined to the deep Afghan south, today the insurgents operate openly right at the doorstep of Kabul, the capital.
This last surge, little noted by the media, failed miserably, but Washington is now planning another one, even as Afghanistan slips away. More boots on the ground, though, will do little to address the real causes of this country's unfolding tragedy.
Revenge and the Taliban
One day, as Zubair was walking home, he noticed that the carpet factory near his house in the southern province of Ghazni was silent. That's strange, he thought, because he could usually hear the din of spinning looms as he approached. As he rounded the corner, he saw a crowd of people, villagers and factory workers, gathered around his destroyed house. An American bomb had flattened it into a pancake of cement blocks and pulverized bricks. He ran toward the scene. It was only when he shoved his way through the crowd and up to the wreckage that he actually saw it – his mother's severed head lying amid mangled furniture.
He didn't scream. Instead, the sight induced a sort of catatonia; he picked up the head, cradled it in his arms, and started walking aimlessly. He carried on like this for days, until tribal elders pried the head from his hands and convinced him to deal with his loss more constructively. He decided he would get revenge by becoming a suicide bomber and inflicting a loss on some American family as painful as the one he had just suffered.
When one decides to become a suicide bomber, it is pretty easy to find the Taliban. In Zubair's case he just asked a relative to direct him to the nearest Talib; every village in the country's south and east has at least a few. He found them and he trained – yes, suicide bombing requires training – for some time and then he was fitted with the latest model suicide vest. One morning, he made his way, as directed, towards an office building where Americans advisors were training their Afghan counterparts, but before he could detonate his vest, a pair of sharp-eyed intelligence officers spotted him and wrestled him to the ground. Zubair now spends his days in an Afghan prison.
A poll of 42 Taliban fighters by the Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper earlier this year revealed that 12 had seen family members killed in air strikes, and six joined the insurgency after such attacks. Far more who don't join offer their support.
Under the Bombs
In the muddied outskirts of Kabul, an impromptu neighborhood has been sprouting, full of civilians fleeing the regular Allied aerial bombardments in the Afghan countryside. Sherafadeen Sadozay, a poor farmer from the south, spoke for many there when he told me that he had once had no opinion of the United States. Then, one day, a payload from an American sortie split his house in two, eviscerating his wife and three children. Now, he says, he'd rather have the Taliban back in power than nervously eye the skies every day.
Even when the bombs don't fall, it's quite dangerous to be an Afghan. Journalist Jawed Ahmad was on assignment for Canadian Television in the southern city of Kandahar when American troops stopped him. In his possession, they found contact numbers to the cell phones of various Taliban fighters – something every good journalist in the country has – and threw him into prison, not to be heard from for almost a year. During interrogation, Ahmad says that American jailors kicked him, smashed his head into a table, and at one point prevented him from sleeping for nine days. They kept him standing on a snowy runway for six hours without shoes. Twice he fainted and twice the soldiers forced him to stand up again. After 11 months of detention, military authorities gave him a letter stating that he was not a threat to the U.S. and released him.
Starving in Kabul
If you're walking his street, there isn't a single day when you won't see Zayainullah. For as long as he can remember, the 11 year-old has perched on the sidewalk at one of Kabul's busiest intersections. Zayainullah has only one arm; the Taliban blew the other one away when he was a child. He uses this arm to beg for handouts, quietly in the mornings, more desperately as the day goes on. Both his parents are dead so he lives with his aunt, a widow. Given the mores of modern-day Afghanistan, she can't work because a woman needs a man's sanction to leave the house. So she puts young Zayainullah on the street as her sole breadwinner. If he comes home empty-handed she beats him, sometimes until he can no longer move.
He sits there, shirtless, with a heaving, rounded belly – distended from severe malnutrition – as scores of other beggars and pedestrians stream by him. No one really notices him though, because poverty has become endemic in this country.
Afghanistan is now one of the poorest countries on the planet. It takes its place among desperate, destitute nations like Burkina Faso and Somalia whenever any international organization bothers to measure. The official unemployment rate, last calculated in 2005, was 40% percent. According to recent estimates, it may today reach as high as 80% in some parts of the country.
Approximately 45% of the population is now unable to purchase enough food to guarantee bare minimum health levels, according to the Brookings Institution. This winter, Afghan officials claim that hunger may kill up to 80% of the population in some northern provinces caught in a vicious drought. Reports are emerging of parents selling their children simply to make ends meet. In one district of the southern province of Ghazni last spring things got so bad that villagers started eating grass. Locals say that after a harsh winter and almost no food, they had no choice.
Kabul itself lies in tatters. Roads have gone unpaved since 2001. Massive craters from decades of war blot the capital city. Poor Afghans live in crumbling warrens with no electricity and often without safe drinking water. Kabul, a city designed for about 800,000 people, now holds more than four million, mostly squeezed into informal settlements and squatters' shacks.
Washington spends about $100 million a day on this war – close to $36 billion a year – but only five cents of every dollar actually goes towards aid. From this paltry sum, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief found that "a staggering 40 percent has returned to donor countries in corporate profits and salaries." The economy is so underdeveloped that opium production accounts for more than half of the country's gross domestic product.
What little money does go for reconstruction is handed over to U.S. multinationals who then subcontract out to Afghan partners and cut corners every step of the way. As a result, the U.N. ranks the country as the fifth least-developed in the world – a one-position drop from 2004.
The government and coalition forces may not bring jobs to Afghanistan, but the Taliban does. The insurgents pay for fighters – in some cases, up to $200 a month, a windfall in a country where 42% of the population earns less than $14 a month. When a textile factory in Kandahar laid off 2,000 workers in September, most of them joined the Taliban. And that district in Ghazni where locals were reduced to eating grass? It is now a Taliban stronghold.
Biking in Kabul
A spate of suicide bombings and high-profile attacks in recent years have turned Kabul into a sort of garrison state, with roadblocks and checkpoints clogging many of the city's main arteries. The traffic is, at times, unbearable, so I bought a new motorbike, an Iranian import that can adroitly weave through traffic. I was puttering along one day recently when a police commander stopped me.
"That's a nice bike," he said.
"Thank you," I replied.
"Is it new?"
"Yes."
"I'd like to have it. Get off."
I stared at him in disbelief, not quite grasping at first that he was deadly serious. Then I began threatening him, saying I'd call a certain influential friend if he laid a finger on the bike. That finally hit home and he stepped back, waving me on.
Journalists may have influential friends, but ordinary Afghans are usually not so lucky. Locals tend to fear the neighborhood police as much as the many criminals who prowl Kabul's streets. The notoriously corrupt police force is just one face of a government that much of the population has come to loathe.
Police are known to rob passengers at checkpoints. Many of the country's leading members of parliament and cabinet officials sport long, bloody records of human rights abuses. Rapists and serious criminals regularly bribe their way out of prison. Warlords and militia commanders run wild in the north, regularly raping young girls and snatching the land of villagers with impunity. Earlier this year newspapers revealed that President Hamid Karzai pardoned a pair of such militiamen accused of bayonet-raping a young woman.
What Karzai does hardly matters, though. After all, his government barely functions. Most of the country is carved up into fiefdoms run by small-time commanders. A U.S. intelligence report in the spring of 2008 estimated that the central government then controlled just 30% of the country, and many say even that is now an optimistic assessment.
Drive a few miles outside Kabul and the roads are controlled by bandits, off-duty cops, or anyone else with a gun and an eye for a quick buck. The Karzai government's popularity has plummeted to such levels that, believe it or not, many Afghans in Kabul wax nostalgic for the days of Dr. Mohammad Najibullah, the country's last Communist dictator. "That government was cruel and indifferent, but at least they gave us something," an Afghan friend typically told me. The Karzai government provides almost no social services, expending all its efforts just trying to keep itself together.
Shadow Government
Power abhors a vacuum, and so, in those areas where central government rule has crumbled, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan – the Taliban government – is rising in its place. In Wardak, a province bordering Kabul Province, the Taliban has a stable foothold, complete with a shadow government of mayors and police chiefs. In Logar, another of Kabul's neighboring provinces, some "government-controlled" areas consist of the home of the district head, the NATO installation down the road – and nothing else.
With the rise of the Taliban in these areas comes their notorious brand of justice. Shadow courts now dispense Taliban-style draconian judgments and punishments in many districts and ever more locals are turning to them to settle disputes, either out of fear or because they are far more efficient than the corrupt government courts. The Taliban recently chopped off the ears of a schoolteacher in Zabul province for working for the government. They gunned down a popular drummer in Ghazni simply for playing music in public. Even the infamous public executions are back. The Taliban recently invited journalists to watch the execution of a pair of women on prostitution charges.
The Taliban are as uninterested in social services and human rights as the Karzai government or the international forces, but they know how to turn a world of poverty, insecurity, and death from laser-guided missiles to their advantage. This is how the Islamic Emirate spreads, like so many weeds at first, poking out of areas where the government has failed. As the central government spins towards irrelevancy, the whole south and east of Afghanistan is becoming a thicket of Taliban before our very eyes.
A War to be Lost
One night the Taliban raided a police check post near my Kabul home, killing three policemen. The following morning, when a police contingent arrived on the scene to investigate, a bomb that the rebels had cleverly hidden at the site exploded and killed two more of them. I arrived shortly afterwards to find pieces of charred flesh littering the ground and a mangled, burnt out police van sitting overturned on a pile of rubble.
The raid didn't make much news at the time, but it was actually the deepest the insurgents had penetrated the capital since they were overthrown seven years ago. They have dispatched many individual suicide bombers into the capital and rocketed it as well from time to time, but never had they marched in as an attacking force on foot. When I told an Afghan colleague that I couldn't believe the Taliban were coming into Kabul this way, he responded: "Coming? They've been here. They were just waiting for the government and the U.S. to fail."
Failure is a notion now preoccupying the Western leadership of this war, which is why they are scrambling for yet another "surge" solution.
Of course, the Taliban won't be capturing Kabul anytime soon; the international forces are much too powerful to topple militarily. But the Americans can't defeat the Taliban either; the guerrillas are too deeply rooted in a country scarred by no jobs, no security, and no hope. The result is a war of attrition, with the Americans planning to pour yet more fuel on the flames by throwing in more soldiers next year.
This is a war to be won by constructing roads, creating jobs, cleaning up the government, and giving Afghans something they've had preciously little of in the last 30 years: hope. However, hope is fading fast here, and that's a fact Washington can ill afford to ignore; for once the Afghans lose all hope, the Americans will have lost this war.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:And the wheels kept falling off in all directions
« Reply #7 on: 2010-04-29 03:33:20 » |
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[Blunderov] Fear not my cherubs. While you were sleeping powerful minds were making Power Point productions for the populace.
Why is America losing the war?
[Bl.] The trick is to look for the double strokes which indicate "significant delay". (Everybody who doesn't get it: please leave the room now.)
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MoEnzyme
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infidel lab animal
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Re:And the wheels kept falling off in all directions
« Reply #8 on: 2010-04-29 19:37:56 » |
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I think my position on Afghanistan has always been a bit more complicated than Iraq, which never should have happened in the first place. While I tend to think we wouldn't have invaded Iraq, I think even if Al Gore was president and 9-11 still happened but under his watch, I think the US would have still invaded Afghanistan. I'm not sure it would have been the any better that way, but given 9-11 the political pressure would have been fairly overwhelming, immediate, and automatic. Indeed it was at the time. While we have our principled peace activists and some almost perfunctory opposition ensued, the general population obviously felt it was time to attack and the Taliban seemed like an appropriate target for hosting Al Qeda at the time of the 9-11 attack. It wasn't until the decision to invade Iraq that any significant war opposition materialized in this country.
All that given, I think whatever we invaded Afghanistan for so many years ago has either been dealt with, or has completely escaped us by now due to our distractions in Iraq. As one who didn't actively oppose invading Afghanistan at first I share in some feelings of responsibility to make sure that we don't leave them in a state of disaster, but I fail to see how any further occupation would otherwise benefit US interests. Certainly we shouldn't seek or expect any western style democracy, mostly I think we should ensure some stability. I would also advocate that even after we leave in a military sense, we should seek to maintain some financial, humanitarian, and educational aid and connections with whatever regime endures for at least a decade or so depending on how well everyone conducts themselves. We made a real mistake back in the cold war days by effectively abandoning them when an effective helpful connection would have been relatively quite cheap to maintain. Even Charlie Wilson knew that and told everyone who would listen and many who wouldn't - sadly not enough people did.
-Mo
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Afghanistan; And the wheels kept falling off in all directions
« Reply #9 on: 2010-07-27 23:13:42 » |
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Not really any news to me. The only interesting thing to me was confirmation of how much Pakistan is actively playing both sides of the conflict (Taliban v. US). I've suspected as much and heard some suggestions in the media about it.
-Mo
Obama dismisses Afghan report leak after Hill leader meeting
By the CNN Wire Staff
July 27, 2010 -- Updated 1819 GMT (0219 HKT)
intro:
Quote:Washington (CNN) -- President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he is "concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information" about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.
But the documents included in the disclosure don't shed much new light on the war, he asserted.
The administration has been critical of the decision by WikiLeaks to publish what it said are about 76,000 U.S. military and diplomatic reports about Afghanistan filed from 2004 to January 2010.
"While I'm concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations, the fact is these documents don't reveal any issues that haven't already informed our public debate on Afghanistan," Obama told reporters at the White House. "Indeed, they point to the same challenges that led me to conduct an extensive review of our policy last fall." |
full story: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/07/27/obama.wikileaks/#fbid=MZWo5VgnpU4
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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