Anwaar
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Post by Anwaar on Oct 17, 2006 21:31:35 GMT 4
British troops pull out of Afghan districtHELMAND: British troops were Tuesday pulling out of a previously Taliban-infested district in southern Afghanistan at the request of officials and tribal elders, the NATO-led force said. The move in the once-volatile district of Musa Qala in the southern province of Helmand was a first for NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which is battling Taliban extremists waging an intense insurgency. Helmand province governor Mohammad Daud said there had been no deal with the Taliban and rejected a reported statement by the rebel group that the Afghan flag would no longer fly in the district. "The British military is pulling out of Musa Qala at the wish of governor Daud and with the agreement of tribal elders," a spokesman for the NATO-led force was quoted as saying. The move would involve about 120 British soldiers, he said. The governor said the district leadership had also been changed, at the request of the tribal elders. "They asked for good governors," he said. "The Afghan flag is there, our new district chief, our new police chief with police are there," Daud said while talking to international news agency. "There is not any kind of agreement (with the Taliban). This was the demand of tribal elders." British NATO forces struck a deal with the Musa Qala tribal elders in late September in which the elders said they would drive out Taliban in exchange for an end to military action that had caused heavy damage, ISAF said this month. The deal resulted in a sharp drop in clashes, it said. Musa Qala has this year seen months of intense fighting, with deadly attacks an almost daily occurence at one stage. ISAF officials have said the Musa Qala deal was different to one struck in Pakistan last month between the government and pro-Taliban militants in that all negotiations in Helmand were only with tribal authorities. The NATO force does not negotiate with the Taliban, it said. ISAF said the Musa Qala model may be effective in ending unrest in other areas. "The principle of going to tribal solutions is certainly something which we look favourably upon," said NATO civilian representative Mark Laity. "Tribal elders are important people in the community. If they can help bring a more peaceful atmosphere, then that is certainly the way we would like to go. But everywhere is different." Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf said last week that NATO approved of its peace deal in the unstable North Waziristan tribal area and wanted his help to do the same thing in Afghanistan. ISAF commander General David Richards said on a visit to Islamabad at the same time that Pakistan's arrangement could set an "example" for his force but stressed that there would be no deals with insurgents. The interior ministry said Musa Qala was among scores of districts where the understaffed police force would be supplemented by auxilliary police. "We recruit police from villages and localities, train them, equip them ... the tribal elders have promised the government they would maintain their own security by sending their sons to the police forces," spokesman Zemarai Bashary said. There have been concerns the auxilliary police plan, announced by President Hamid Karzai several months ago, could amount to rearming militias in contravention of a disarmament process that has been underway for years. But officials have insisted the force would be wholly under government authority. They "will show the central government has it authority there, and its forces and the law will be implemented there," Bashary said. Helmand, where most of the 5,000 British troops in Afghanistan are based, produces by far the most of Afghanistan's illegal opium -- which makes up the bulk of the world supply. It has seen some of the worst of the insurgency launched after the 1996-2001 Taliban regime was toppled. Source : www.thenews.com.pk/print.asp?id=11385
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Post by Anwaar on Oct 29, 2006 8:13:45 GMT 4
Afghanistan war is 'cuckoo', says Blair's favourite general Ned Temko and Mark Townsend, Sunday October 29, 2006, The Observer Tony Blair's most trusted military commander yesterday branded as 'cuckoo' the way Britain's overstretched army was sent into Afghanistan.The remarkable rebuke by General the Lord Guthrie came in an Observer interview, his first since quitting as Chief of the Defence Staff five years ago, in which he made an impassioned plea for more troops, new equipment and more funds for a 'very, very' over-committed army. The decision by Guthrie, an experienced Whitehall insider and Blair confidant, to go public is likely to alarm Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence more than the recent public criticism by the current army chief Sir Richard Dannatt. 'Anyone who thought this was going to be a picnic in Afghanistan - anyone who had read any history, anyone who knew the Afghans, or had seen the terrain, anyone who had thought about the Taliban resurgence, anyone who understood what was going on across the border in Baluchistan and Waziristan [should have known] - to launch the British army in with the numbers there are, while we're still going on in Iraq is cuckoo,' Guthrie said. ................. Read the rest here : tinyurl.com/ylowb7
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Post by Anwaar on Nov 18, 2006 9:01:18 GMT 4
UN chief: Nato cannot defeat Taliban by force Official says alliance failing in Afghanistan as Blair admits Iraq is a 'disaster'Saturday November 18, 2006, The Guardian Nato "cannot win" the fight against the Taliban alone and will have to train Afghan forces to do the job, the UN's top official in the country warned yesterday. "At the moment Nato has a very optimistic assessment. They think they can win the war," warned Tom Koenigs, the diplomat heading the UN mission in Afghanistan. "But there is no quick fix." In forthright comments which highlight divisions between international partners as Nato battles to quell insurgency, Mr Koenigs said that training the fledgling Afghan national army to defeat the Taliban was crucial. "They [the ANA] can win. But against an insurgency like that, international troops cannot win." He spoke to the Guardian as Tony Blair came the closest so far to admitting the invasion of Iraq had been disastrous. When Sir David Frost, interviewing the prime minister for al-Jazeera TV, suggested that western intervention in Iraq had "so far been pretty much of a disaster", Mr Blair responded: "It has. But, you see, what I say to people is, 'why is it difficult in Iraq?' It's not difficult because of some accident in planning, it's difficult because there's a deliberate strategy - al Qaida with Sunni insurgents on one hand, Iranian-backed elements with Shia militias on the other - to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war." Downing Street tried to play down the apparent slip last night. A spokesman said: "I think that's just the way in which he answers questions. His views on Iraq are documented in hundreds of places, and that [the belief that it is a disaster] is not one of them." However, Sir Menzies Campbell, leader of the Lib Dems, commented: "At long last, the enormity of the decision to take military action against Iraq is being accepted by the prime minister. Surely parliament and the British people who were given a flawed prospectus are entitled to an apology?" British commanders have argued that UK troops should be withdrawn from Iraq to allow the military to focus on Afghanistan. But Nato commanders on the ground have pleaded for 2,000 more troops, helicopters and armoured vehicles, to little effect. Last night Nato secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said countries should lift restrictions on what their troops could do."My plea to governments would be: 'Please help us in lifting those caveats as much as possible ... because in Afghanistan it is a problem." Des Browne, the defence secretary, made clear yesterday that the future of the alliance was now bound up with the future of Afghanistan. "The Afghan people, our own people and the Taliban are watching us. If we are indecisive or divided, the Taliban will be strengthened, just as all of the others despair," he said. Attacks have increased fourfold this year and 3,700 people have died, mostly in the south. The US has made 2,000 air strikes since June, against 88 in Iraq. Last week Acbar, an umbrella group of Afghan and international aid agencies, said the crisis highlighted the "urgent need" for a rethink of military, poverty-reduction and state-building policies. Nato commanders maintain the Taliban have been on the "back foot" since Operation Medusa, a battle which killed more than 1,000 insurgents in Kandahar in September, and talk of gaining "psycho logical ascendancy". However, Mr Koenigs said any claim of victory was premature. "You can't resolve it by killing the Taliban. You have to win people over. That is done with good governance, decent police, diplomacy with Pakistan, and development," he said. Otherwise the Taliban would regroup in Pakistani refugee camps and madrasas and return in greater numbers next spring. Source : tinyurl.com/yjy3yf
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Post by Anwaar on Nov 20, 2006 15:18:01 GMT 4
Kissinger: Iraq military win impossibleBy TARIQ PANJA, Associated Press W LONDON - Military victory is no longer possible in Iraq, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview broadcast Sunday. Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq, saying the U.S. government must enter into dialogue with Iraq's regional neighbors — including Iran — if progress is to be made in the region. "If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible," he told the British Broadcasting Corp. But Kissinger, an architect of the Vietnam war who has advised President Bush about Iraq, warned against a rapid withdrawal of coalition troops, saying it could destabilize Iraq's neighbors and cause a long-lasting conflict. "A dramatic collapse of Iraq — whatever we think about how the situation was created — would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region," he said. Kissinger, whose views have been sought by the Iraqi Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker III, called for an international conference bringing together the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Iraq's neighbors — including Iran — and regional powers like India and Pakistan to work out a way forward for the region. "I think we have to redefine the course, but I don't think that the alternative is between military victory, as defined previously, or total withdrawal," he said. Source : tinyurl.com/y6h88w
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Anwaar
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Post by Anwaar on Nov 21, 2006 10:40:43 GMT 4
The return of TalibanNato adopts Pakistan peace model
By Shaheen Sehbai WASHINGTON: Nato and the Afghan authorities have adopted the Pakistan model of peace agreements with the Taliban, the Washington Post reported on Monday. But it said the Taliban insurgency is on a fierce rebound five years after US and Afghan forces toppled the Islamic militia from power in Kabul. In a detailed report from Kabul by Pamela Constable, the paper said Nato and Afghan officials now confront a strategic question: whether to keep pressing to forcibly defeat the Taliban, or begin accepting its presence in areas where tribal elders promise to rein in the militia. The Post quoted a new report by a commission of Afghan and foreign officials saying insurgent and terrorist attacks had increased fourfold in the past year, reaching 600 incidents per month by September and causing 3,700 deaths since January. The report was issued by a group called the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board, set up in February under UN auspices to promote and measure Afghan government performance. It said the violence threatens to reverse recent economic and political gains across the nation, and has led to a partial or total withdrawal of foreign aid in some provinces. Months of aggressive ground combat and Nato air strikes have failed to halt continuous violence in the south, as well as some sporadic attacks in other parts of the country, it said. Much of the south is still at war, with attacks and armed clashes occurring daily in Kandahar, Zabol and Uruzgan provinces. But in Helmand’s Musa Qala district, Nato has cautiously agreed to test the tribal approach. Under a deal brokered in September by the provincial governor, Nato agreed to pull back British forces from Musa Qala, and local elders pledged that Taliban attacks would cease. So far, reports from the isolated region, which is also a major center of opium smuggling, are confusing and contradictory. Some residents and visitors say the district is effectively under Taliban control, and a recent BBC video report showed squads of armed insurgents patrolling Musa Qala in fast pickup trucks, much as they did during the era of repressive Taliban rule that ended in 2001. But both Nato and senior Afghan officials say they are largely satisfied with the arrangement, which they said has brought fighting to a halt and allowed foreign troops to focus on creating a central zone for security and development around Helmand’s capital city, rather than manning scattered outposts and chasing after bands of insurgents. “Musa Qala has proved to be a very good deal,” said Maj Luke Knittig, a US Army officer and the chief Nato spokesman in Kabul. “After the agreement, there were 34 days of calm, which led us to believe the elders had made good on their word.” However, he added: “We have our eyes closely on Musa Qala. If we see it being used as a launching pad for attacks, we will go back and address that.” “Some people call it a Taliban agreement, but that is wrong,” the Washington Post quoted Mohammed Anwar, a member of parliament from Nau Zad who hosted the visiting elders in Kabul. “The foreign Taliban are terrorists, but the local Taliban are the sons of Afghanistan. They will speak with us and live under the flag with us. If the government cannot bring security and stop this terrible bombing, they should let the elders try.” Source : tinyurl.com/ym3c6s
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Post by Anwaar on Dec 5, 2006 20:06:52 GMT 4
Gates says U.S. is not winning Iraq warAP - 19 minutes ago WASHINGTON - Robert Gates, the White House choice to be the next defense secretary, conceded Tuesday that the United States is losing the war in Iraq and warned that if that country is not stabilized in the next year or two it could lead to a "regional conflagration." Source : tinyurl.com/axwxa
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Post by Anwaar on Dec 8, 2006 8:31:57 GMT 4
The Roman Empire is falling - so it turns to Iran and Syria By Robert Fisk12/07/06 "The Independent" -- -- The Roman Empire is falling. That, in a phrase, is what the Baker report says. The legions cannot impose their rule on Mesopotamia. Just as Crassus lost his legions' banners in the deserts of Syria-Iraq, so has George W Bush. There is no Mark Antony to retrieve the honour of the empire. The policy "is not working". "Collapse" and "catastrophe" - words heard in the Roman senate many a time - were embedded in the text of the Baker report. Et tu, James? Read the rest here : tinyurl.com/ua394
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Post by Anwaar on Dec 15, 2006 9:43:47 GMT 4
US Army may "break" unless reserves help: SchoomakerWASHINGTON: The U.S. Army must keep growing and needs easier access to reservists to avoid "breaking" the active-duty force, the top US Army general said. Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, said the force was already under significant strain due to high commitments levels in Iraq and Afghanistan. "At this pace, without recurrent access to the reserve components through remobilization, we will break the active component," he told a commission mandated by the U.S. Congress to look at issues related to the reserve forces. The Army has already been authorized to boost the number of active-duty soldiers temporarily from 482,000 to a maximum of 512,00, although it has yet to reach that limit. Some officials would like the increase made permanent but Schoomaker left open the possibility even that boost in levels may not be enough. The Army has more than half a million reserve soldiers in the National Guard and Army Reserve. "In my view, our nation should continue to grow the Army and fully use the reserve components as an integral part of the force," he told the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves. Gen. James Conway, the commander of the U.S. Marine Corps, has also expressed concerns about the strains being placed on his force and suggested last month it may need to grow. The Army's current practice is to call up reservists to active duty for not more than 24 months under the national emergency declared by President George W. Bush following the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. That restrictive practice is becoming an increasing problem, say Army officials, who want more flexibility to redeploy reservists who have already served in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Current policies restrict our ability to remobilize reserve component units and, in my view, the current policies are more restrictive than need be under the law and hamper our ability to remobilize the best trained, best led and best equipped units," Schoomaker said. The Army has around 246,000 soldiers overseas, including more than 100,000 in Iraq and some 17,000 in Afghanistan. Source : The News at www.thenews.com.pk/updates.asp#14583
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Anwaar
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Post by Anwaar on Dec 17, 2006 15:39:48 GMT 4
I couldn't have put it better myself.
Anwaar
America Loses Another War
Iraq: a shameful ass-whupping, or just a pathetic trouncing? Ugly disgrace? Choices, choices
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
12/15/06 "SF Gate" - -- - The good news is, we're all back in harmony. All back on the same page. No more divisiveness and no more silly bickering and no more nasty and indignant red state/blue state rock throwing because we're finally all back in cozy let's-hug-it-out agreement: The "war" in Iraq is over. And what's more, we lost. Very, very badly.
Sure, you already knew. Sure, you sort of sensed from the beginning that we couldn't possibly win a bogus war launched by a nasty slew of corrupt pseudo-cowboys against both a bitterly contorted Islamic nation and a vague and ill-defined concept that has no center and no boundaries and that feeds on the very thing that tries to destroy it. It was sort of obvious, even if half the nation was just terrifically blinded by Bush administration lies and false shrieks of impending terror.
But now it's official. Or rather, more official. Now it's pretty much agreed upon on both sides of the aisle and in every Iraq Study Group and by every top-ranking general and newly minted defense secretary and in every facet of American culture save some of the gun-totin' flag-lickin' South. We lost. And what's more, we have no real clue what to do about it.
After all, it's not easy to accept. It's the thing we do not, cannot easily hear, the thing most Americans, no matter what their political stripe, just can't quite fathom because we're so damned strong and righteous and handy with a gun and we are the superpower and the God among men and the bringer of light to the world and therefore we never lose. Except, you know, when we do.
It's not like we were overpowered. We weren't outmanned or outgunned or outstrategized and hence we weren't defeated in any "traditional" kick-ass take-names sign-the-peace-accord way.
Nor was it because our beloved, undefeatable, can't-lose military doesn't have the latest and greatest killing tools of all time, the biggest budget, the most heroic of baffled and misled young soldiers sort of but not really willing to go off and fight and die for a cause no one could adequately explain or justify to them.
We still have the coolest, fastest planes. We still have the meanest billion-dollar technology. We still have the most imposing tanks and the most incredible weaponry and the badass night-vision goggles with the laser sights and the thermal heat-seeking readouts and the ability to track targets from two miles away in a dust storm. It doesn't matter.
What we don't have is, well, any idea what the hell we're doing, not anymore, not on the global stage. We lost this "war" and we lost it before we even began because we went in for all the wrong reasons and with all the wrong planning and with all the wrong leadership who had all the wrong motives based on all the wrong greedy self-serving insular faux-cowboy BS that your kids and your grandkids will be paying for until about the year 2056.
Maybe you don't agree. Maybe you say wait wait wait, it's not over at all, and we haven't lost yet. Isn't the fighting still raging? Can't we still "win" even though we're still losing soldiers by the truckload and thousands of innocent Iraqis are being brutally slaughtered every month and isn't Dubya still standing there, brow scrunched and confounded as a monkey clinging onto a shiny razor blade, refusing to let go and free us from the deadly trap, ignoring the Iraq Study Group and trying to figure out a way to stay the course and never give in and "mission accomplished" even as every single human around him, from the top generals to crusty old James Baker to the new and shockingly honest secretary of defense, says we are royally screwed and Iraq is now a vicious and chaotic civil war and it's officially one of the worst disasters in American history? Oh wait, you just answered your own question.
Yes, technically, the "war" is still on. The fighting is not over. And yes, you can even say we (brutally, tactlessly) installed ourselves with sufficient ego to give us a modicum of violent, volatile control over the Gulf region's remaining petroleum reserves -- which was, of course, much of the point in the first place.
But the nasty us-versus-them, good-versus-evil ideology is over. Ditto the numb sense of Bush's brutally simpleminded American "justice." Any lingering hint of anything resembling a truly valid and lucid and deeply patriotic reason for wasting a trillion dollars and thousands of lives and roughly an entire generation's worth of international respect? Gone.
What's left is one lingering, looming question: How do we accept defeat? How do we deal with the awkward, identity-mauling, ego-stomping idea that, once again, America didn't "win" a war it really had no right to launch in the first place? After all, isn't this the American slogan: "We may not always be right, but we are never wrong"?
It's still our most favorite idea, the thing our own childlike president loves to talk most about, burned into our national consciousness like a bad tattoo: We always win. We're the good guys. We're the chosen ones. We're the goddamn cavalry, flying the flag of truth, wrapped in strip malls and Ford pickups and McDonald's franchises. Right?
Wrong. If Vietnam's aftermath proved anything, it's that we are incredibly crappy losers. We deny, we reject, we evade and ignore and refuse responsibility until it becomes so silly and surreal even the staunchest warmonger has to cringe in embarrassment. At this point, it seems nearly impossible for America to accept defeat with anything resembling perspective and dignity and the understanding that maybe, just maybe, we ain't all that saintly and ain't all that perfect and maybe God really isn't necessarily on our side after all, because if God took sides she wouldn't actually be, you know, God.
But what happens to a country if they lose the thing that supposedly defines them most? If we don't have our bogus "victory," if we don't always win, if we don't have a sense of righteousness so strong and so inflated and so utterly impenetrable that even when it seems like we've lost, we still stumble through some sort of offensive end zone victory dance, well, what's left?
What, conscience? Humility? Humanitarianism? Or how about the realization that we could maybe, just maybe learn to be defined by something other than rogue aggressiveness and the vicious need to win? Something like, say, a mindful, flawed, difficult but oh-so-incredibly-essential move toward that most challenging and rewarding of human ideals, peace?
Yeah, right. Who the hell wants that?
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him at mmorford@sfgate.com <mmorford@sfgate.com>
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle ©2006 SF Gate
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Anwaar
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Post by Anwaar on Dec 20, 2006 7:32:38 GMT 4
The war is already lostIdeological zealotry has helped destroy Iraq, revive the Taliban and increase the terror threatTariq Ali, Wednesday December 20, 2006, The GuardianOnce a war goes badly wrong and its justifications are shown to be lies, to insist that a "democratic" Iraq is visible on the horizon and that "we must stay the course" becomes a total fantasy. What is to be done? In the US a group of Foggy Bottom elders was wheeled in to prepare a report. This admitted what the whole world (Downing Street excepted) already knew: the occupation is a disaster and the situation gets more hellish every day. After US citizens voted accordingly in the mid-term elections, the White House sacrificed the Pentagon warlord, Donald Rumsfeld. The warlord of Downing Street, however, is still at large, zombie-like in his denials that anything serious is wrong in Baghdad or Kabul. Everything, for him, can still be remedied by a dose of humanitarian medicine (a poison so powerful and audacious that no resistance is possible). His desperate attempts to play the statesman have made him a laughing stock in friendly Arab capitals and Baghdad's Green Zone. Iraq is the umbilical cord that ties him to his fate. Meanwhile the old men in Washington recognise the scale of the disaster. Their descriptions are strong, their prescriptions weak and pathetic: "We agree with the goal of US policy in Iraq, as stated by the president: an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself." Elsewhere they recommend a deal with Tehran and Damascus to preserve post-withdrawal stability, implying that Baghdad can never be independent again. It was left to a military realist, Lieutenant-General William Odom, to demand a complete withdrawal in the next few months, a view backed by Iraqis (Shia and Sunni) in successive polls. The occupation, Kofi Annan informs us, has created a much worse situation than under Saddam. How different it was in the heady days that followed the capture of Baghdad. Two lines of argument emerged in the victorious camp. The Pentagon wanted a quick deal with Saddam's generals to establish a new regime so that US and subsidiary troops could withdraw to bases in northern Iraq and Kuwait to police the outcome. The state department and its Downing Street auxiliary wanted the ruthless application of "hard power" and a long occupation to establish a new Iraq as a model of US "soft power" for the entire region. This was never a serious option. It is the unconditional US support for Israel that precludes any possibility of soft power in Iraq or elsewhere. Using Fatah to promote civil conflict in Palestine is unlikely to improve matters. Even the most pro-US Arab regimes in the region - Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states, which do Washington's bidding - permit virulent denunciations of western policies in the media to keep their own citizens at bay. None of the scenarios being canvassed in Washington, including by the Democrats, envisage a total US withdrawal. That is a defeat too unbearable to contemplate, but the war has already been lost, together with half a million Iraqi lives. Trying to delay the defeat (as in Vietnam) by sending in a "surge" of troops is unlikely to work. The British parliament, even more supine than its US equivalent, voted against any official inquiry (not even a Hutton) on British involvement in the war, when they knew that a majority in the country was opposed to a continuation of this conflict. Blair's ideological zealotry has helped destroy Iraq, revive the Taliban in Afghanistan, increase the threat of terror in Britain and introduce repressive laws that were not enforced even in the second world war. His own wretched party and the opposition have acquiesced in these repellent measures. Time for a regime change at home. Source : tinyurl.com/ycghwm
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Anwaar
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Post by Anwaar on Jan 29, 2007 11:33:42 GMT 4
Daffy Does Doom
By Maureen Dowd, WASHINGTON
01/27/07 "New York Times" -- -- Dick Durbin went to the floor of the Senate on Thursday night to denounce the vice president as “delusional.”
It was shocking, and Senator Durbin should be ashamed of himself.
Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney. Delusional doesn’t begin to capture the profound, transcendental one-flew-over daftness of the man.
Has anyone in the history of the United States ever been so singularly wrong and misguided about such phenomenally important events and continued to insist he’s right in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
It requires an exquisite kind of lunacy to spend hundreds of billions destroying America’s reputation in the world, exhausting the U.S. military, failing to catch Osama, enhancing Iran’s power in the Middle East and sending American kids to train and arm Iraqi forces so they can work against American interests.
Only someone with an inspired alienation from reality could, under the guise of exorcising the trauma of Vietnam, replicate the trauma of Vietnam.
You must have a real talent for derangement to stay wrong every step of the way, to remain in complete denial about Iraq’s civil war, to have a total misunderstanding of Arab culture, to be completely oblivious to the American mood and to be absolutely blind to how democracy works.
In a democracy, when you run a campaign that panders to homophobia by attacking gay marriage and then your lesbian daughter writes a book about politics and decides to have a baby with her partner, you cannot tell Wolf Blitzer he’s “out of line” when he gingerly raises the hypocrisy of your position.
Mr. Cheney acts more like a member of the James gang than the Jefferson gang. Asked by Wolf what would happen if the Senate passed a resolution critical of The Surge, Scary Cheney rumbled, “It won’t stop us.”
Such an exercise in democracy, he noted, would be “detrimental from the standpoint of the troops.”
Americans learned an important lesson from Vietnam about supporting the troops even when they did not support the war. From media organizations to Hollywood celebrities and lawmakers on both sides, everyone backs our troops.
It is W. and Vice who learned no lessons from Vietnam, probably because they worked so hard to avoid going. They rush into a war halfway around the world for no reason and with no foresight about the culture or the inevitable insurgency, and then assert that any criticism of their fumbling management of Iraq and Afghanistan is tantamount to criticizing the troops. Quel demagoguery.
“Bottom line,” Vice told Wolf, “is that we’ve had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes.” The biggest threat, he said, is that Americans may not “have the stomach for the fight.”
He should stop casting aspersions on the American stomach. We’ve had the stomach for more than 3,000 American deaths in a war sold as a cakewalk.
If W. were not so obsessed with being seen as tough, Mr. Cheney could not influence him with such tripe.
They are perpetually guided by the wrong part of the body. They are consumed by the fear of looking as if they don’t have guts, when they should be compelled by the desire to look as if they have brains.
After offering Congress an olive branch in the State of the Union, the president resumed mindless swaggering. Asked yesterday why he was ratcheting up despite the resolutions, W. replied, “In that I’m the decision maker, I had to come up with a way forward that precluded disaster.” (Or preordained it.)
The reality of Iraq, as The Times’s brilliant John Burns described it to Charlie Rose this week, is that a messy endgame could be far worse than Vietnam, leading to “a civil war on a scale with bloodshed that will absolutely dwarf what we’re seeing now,” and a “wider conflagration, with all kinds of implications for the world’s flow of oil, for the state of Israel. What happens to King Abdullah in Jordan if there’s complete chaos in the region?”
Mr. Cheney has turned his perversity into foreign policy.
He assumes that the more people think he’s crazy, the saner he must be. In Dr. No’s nutty world-view, anti-Americanism is a compliment. The proof that America is right is that everyone thinks it isn’t.
He sees himself as a prophet in the wilderness because he thinks anyone in the wilderness must be a prophet.
To borrow one of his many dismissive words, it’s hogwash.
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Anwaar
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Post by Anwaar on Feb 5, 2007 4:36:00 GMT 4
General calls for more troopsBritish commander in Afghanistan reveals how close hard-pressed forces came to defeat in critical five-day firefight last year. by Jason Burke, Sunday February 4, 2007, The Observer
More here : tinyurl.com/26txkn
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Feb 18, 2007 6:57:27 GMT 4
Pakistani official: Taliban insurgency becoming 'liberation war' Posted 2/16/2007 12:58 PM ET PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — Taliban-led insurgents are winning ever-greater public support in Afghanistan for a struggle that is taking on the character of a "liberation war" against foreign troops, a senior Pakistani official claimed Friday. The remark by the governor of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province could inflame further a war of words between Kabul and Islamabad about who is responsible for the resurgence of militant activity in Afghanistan. It could also dismay U.S. and NATO commanders who say their beefed-up military operation is designed to pave the way for badly needed reconstruction aid. Ali Mohammed Jan Aurakzai, whose province includes areas where many Taliban and al-Qaeda militants fled after a U.S.-led military coalition drove them from Afghanistan five years ago, said cross-border attacks accounted for only a fraction of the insurgency in Afghanistan. The main reason for the Taliban's return was the frustration of ethnic Pashtuns seeking more political say in Kabul and resentment of ongoing military operations and the lack of ecnomic aid in the south and east of Afghanistan, he said. "Today, they've reached the stage that a lot of the local population has started supporting the militant operations and it is developing into some sort of a nationalist movement, a resistance movement, sort of a liberation war against coalition forces," Aurakzai told reporters at a news conference. Afghan President Hamid Karzai and some U.S. military officials have suggested that Pakistani security forces are secretly aiding militants crossing into Afghanistan to mount attacks. Pakistani Pervez Musharraf has rejected the charge as "preposterous," pointing to the deaths of hundreds of Pakistani soldiers in operations against militants on its side of the mountainous frontier. In recent days, U.S. officials including President Bush — who calls both countries vital allies in America's war on terror — have praised Pakistan's contribution and sought to ease the row. However, U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan are also forecasting fierce fighting this spring once warmer weather allows militants to move more easily through the mountains and resume efforts to bring down Karzai's government. Aurakzai, a former general, defended a September peace deal with pro-Taliban militants in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal agency and disputed suggestions that it had led to a surge in crossborder attacks. Pakistan-based militants may cause, at most, "20 percent of the problem in Afghanistan," he said. He also forecast that the militants will take years to defeat, and forecast that the Kabul government and its foreign backers will one day have to negotiate with the Taliban, who draw their support mainly from ethnic Pashtuns living on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, to secure peace. "Eventually, all issues will have to be resolved through dialogue on the negotiating table," he said. Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Source:www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-02-16-pakistan-afghanistan_x.htm
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Anwaar
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Post by Anwaar on Feb 28, 2007 17:01:38 GMT 4
Pakistan makes a deal with the TalibanBy Syed Saleem Shahzad KARACHI - The Pakistani establishment has made a deal with the Taliban through a leading Taliban commander that will extend Islamabad's influence into southwestern Afghanistan and significantly strengthen the resistance in its push to capture Kabul. One-legged Mullah Dadullah will be Pakistan's strongman in a corridor running from the Afghan provinces of Zabul, Urzgan, Kandahar and Helmand across the border into Pakistan's Balochistan province, according to both Taliban and al-Qaeda contacts Asia Times Online spoke to. Using Pakistani territory and with Islamabad's support, the Taliban will be able safely to move men, weapons and supplies into southwestern Afghanistan. The deal with Mullah Dadullah will serve Pakistan's interests in re- establishing a strong foothold in Afghanistan (the government in Kabul leans much more toward India), and it has resulted in a cooling of the Taliban's relations with al-Qaeda. Despite their most successful spring offensive last year since being ousted in 2001, the Taliban realize they need the assistance of a state actor if they are to achieve "total victory". Al-Qaeda will have nothing to do with the Islamabad government, though, so the Taliban had to go it alone. The move also comes as the US is putting growing pressure on Pakistan to do more about the Taliban and al-Qaeda ahead of a much-anticipated spring offensive in Afghanistan. US Vice President Dick Cheney paid an unexpected visit to Pakistan on Monday to meet with President General Pervez Musharraf. The White House refused to say what message Cheney gave Musharraf, but it did not deny reports that it included a tough warning that US aid to Pakistan could be in jeopardy. A parting of the ways The Taliban saw that after five years working with al-Qaeda, the resistance appeared to have reached a stage where it could not go much further. Certainly it has grown in strength, and last year's spring offensive was a classic example of guerrilla warfare with the help of indigenous support. The application of improvised explosive devices and techniques of urban warfare, which the Taliban learned from the Iraqi resistance, did make a difference and inflicted major casualties against coalition troops. However, the Taliban were unable to achieve important goals, such as the fall of Kandahar and laying siege to Kabul from the southern Musayab Valley on the one side to the Tagab Valley on the northern side. Taliban commanders planning this year's spring uprising acknowledged that as an independent organization or militia, they could not fight a sustained battle against state resources. They believed they could mobilize the masses, but this would likely bring a rain of death from the skies and the massacre of Taliban sympathizers. Their answer was to find their own state resources, and inevitably they looked toward their former patron, Pakistan. Al-Qaeda does not fit into any plans involving Pakistan, but mutual respect between the al-Qaeda leadership and the Taliban still exists. All the same, there is tension over their ideological differences, and al-Qaeda sources believe it is just a matter of time before the sides part physically as well. Pakistan only too happy to help Ever since signing on for the US-led "war on terror" after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, Pakistan has been coerced by Washington to distance itself from the Taliban. The Taliban were, after all, enemy No 1 for harboring Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda's training camps. So when the opportunity arose, Islamabad was quick to tap up Mullah Dadullah. This was the perfect way in which Pakistan could revive its contacts in the Taliban and give the spring uprising some real muscle, so the argument went among the strategic planners in Rawalpindi - in fact, so much muscle that forces led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would be forced into a position to talk peace - and who better than Pakistan to step in as peacemaker and bail out its Western allies? The next logical step would be the establishment of a pro-Islamabad government in Kabul - delivering a kick in the strategic teeth of India at the same time. After all, Pakistan invested a lot in Afghanistan after the Soviet occupation in the 1980s yet it received little in return. Whether it was former Afghan premier Gulbuddin Hekmatyar or Taliban leader Mullah Omar, they refused to be totally Pakistan's men. A man for all seasons Mullah Dadullah, 41, comes from southwestern Afghanistan, so he is "original Taliban", and has a record of being a natural leader in times of crisis. Mullah Dadullah made a name for himself during the Soviet occupation, during which he lost a leg. And with victories against the Northern Alliance after the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996, he pushed the alliance into the tail end of Afghanistan. This made him Pakistan's darling from Day 1. He was Mullah Omar's emissary in the two Waziristan tribal areas before the spring offensive of last year. Here he brokered a major deal between the Pakistani armed forces and the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan had lost more than 800 soldiers in operations against the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda and it needed a face-saving way to extricate itself from the mess. Mullah Dadullah's peace deal provided this, and the army made an "honorable" withdrawal from the volatile semi-independent region. Whenever the ceasefire was violated, Mullah Dadullah would settle things down. The 2006 spring offensive was veteran mujahideen fighter Jalaluddin Haqqani's show. Nevertheless, the main areas of success were not Haqqani's traditional areas of influence, such as southeastern Afghanistan's Khost, Paktia and Paktika. The Taliban secured major victories in their heartland of the southwest, Helmand, Zabul, Urzgan and Kandahar. And their leader was Mullah Dadullah, whose men seized control of more than 12 districts - and held on to them. Pakistani strategic circles are convinced that as a proven military commander, Mullah Dadullah will be able to work wonders this spring and finally give the Taliban the edge over the Kabul administration and its NATO allies. This, ultimately, is Pakistan's objective - to revive its role in Kabul - and Islamabad is optimistic that Dadullah's considerable diplomatic skills will enable him to negotiate a power-sharing formula for pro-Pakistan Afghan warlords. Even if Mullah Omar disagrees about any major compromise, Islamabad believes that Dadullah would by then have made such a name for himself in the battle against NATO that Omar would have little option but to accept whatever terms were agreed on. A new string in the Taliban bow A notable addition to what can only be described as a limited Taliban arsenal this year is surface-to-air missiles, notably the SAM-7, which was the first generation of Soviet man-portable SAMs. The Taliban acquired these missiles in 2005, but they had little idea about how to use them effectively. Arab al-Qaeda members conducted extensive training programs and brought the Taliban up to speed. Nevertheless, the SAM-7s, while useful against helicopters, were no use against the fighter and bomber aircraft that were doing so much damage. What the Taliban desperately needed were sensors for their missiles. These detect aircraft emissions designed to misdirect the missiles. And it so happened that Pakistan had such devices, having acquired them from the Americans, though indirectly. The Pakistanis retrieved them from unexploded cruise missiles fired into Afghanistan in 1998, targeting bin Laden. They copied and adapted them to fit other missiles, including the SAMs. Now that the Taliban and Pakistan have a deal, these missiles will be made available to the Taliban. Much like the Stingers that changed the dynamics of the Afghan resistance against the Soviets, the SAMs could help turn things Mullah Dadullah's, the Taliban's and Pakistan's way. Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.Source : www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IC01Df03.html
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Anwaar
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Post by Anwaar on Mar 7, 2007 16:56:43 GMT 4
Failure seeks scapegoats Humayun Gauhar, The Nation “If you keep dangling the aid stick before us, we will find it difficult to do business with you any longer.” President Musharraf is reported to have used words to this effect with US Vice President Dick Cheney last week in Islamabad. Cheney came here ‘suddenly’ – unsurprisingly in hiding, for that is the pattern of a beaten bully. He neither wanted to confront the media nor suffer the handiwork of the followers of Osama and Omar. Cheney rattled off what we were all expecting after reading inspired US press reports – that the new Democrat-controlled Congress would cut off the puny military aid to Pakistan if it doesn’t do more against the Taliban and Al Qaeda – visions of the infamous Pakistan-specific Pressler amendment, which was slapped on us after we had won the Afghan Jihad against the Soviet Union. Who says history doesn’t repeat itself? At least with the US it always does – exploit allies and then not only dump them but also damage them when the deed is done. Rich! Musharraf told Cheney to go take a hike. Dick Cheney’s hike took him to Baghram Airbase in Afghanistan, where he was greeted with exactly what he had been trying to avoid: by a powerful human bomb that killed 19 at the first check post. There was no danger to Cheney from the bomb, for he was ensconced safely inside. The danger was that this sick old man might die of fright from a heart attack. The US changed tack immediately, something a bully invariably does when his bluff is called. We have no plans to bomb North Waziristan, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters are allegedly hiding, said its secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. We never said that Pakistan is helping them to regroup; we only said that it should do more to contain them, because the peace agreement it has struck with the tribes is not working. What would they have us do? Bomb our own people just because the US has proved to be incapable to finishing off the Taliban and Al Qaeda? If the peace deal is working even to the extent of 25 percent say, give it a chance. For if we (or the US) start bombing them, it will only get worse. The Taliban have already morphed into a Pushtoon liberation struggle, for which the US will pay dearly. They didn’t listen to us, our good American friends. They didn’t heed the lessons of history either. No man born of woman has ever been able to successfully conquer and occupy Afghanistan. Ask the British and the Russians. The US certainly cannot. All they have managed is regime change there. The bulk of the Taliban escaped with their arms. Why would they come to Pakistan of their own free will when they can stay in their own land which they know like the back of their hands and enjoy the total support of the local population? They would be mad to come to Pakistan, where the government is looking for them, unless US ineptness pushed them across the border. This is not Pakistan’s failure. It is totally and completely the usual US failure born of arrogance and incorrect assumptions. When we agreed to join the war on terror, we did so in our national interest, because we don’t want extremism to spread in our land. We gave the US a narrow air corridor and two bases for rest and recovery, apart from agreeing to share intelligence with them. We did not ever say that we would fight America’s war for it. We did not even do that during the Soviet occupation; how could we agree to such a mad enterprise against the indigenous Afghan population on behalf of a failed United States of America? The same goes for Iraq. They have lost the war because they never gained control beyond Baghdad’s Green Zone. All they managed to do was topple Saddam’s government and hang him. The country is divided, Shias and Sunnis are killing one another, the US has little control over Iraq’s oil, and there is civil war. If either Afghanistan or Iraq ends up being partitioned, one dreads to imagine the sort of hell that would break loose. But they don’t learn, do they? Now there are US plans to attack Iran, which is quite another level of madness. Last week we talked of human nature as the most powerful determinant of human behaviour, as it is virtually unchangeable regardless of constraints like the law of the land, religion and even customs, which is the second most powerful. It is rightly said that failure is an orphan. So what does failure do? It seeks scapegoats – always. If a marriage fails, each spouse usually blames the other. If a business fails, the management looks for extraneous reasons to blame the failure on. If elections are lost, they are always rigged as far as the loser is concerned. If a government fails, like the ones in Pakistan did with sickening regularity in the last decade, failure is blamed on interference by an overbearing President or meddling by the army, not on poor governance, corruption and cronyism. If a former ruler loses a corruption case the court is invariably ridiculed as a kangaroo court. It is human nature not to accept blame but try and deflect it elsewhere. Thus it is with the US. Failure in Iraq has found a scapegoat in Iran and failure in Afghanistan has found a scapegoat in Pakistan. To keep this myth going, the US persistently comes up with statements and stories that were it not for Iranian interference and support of the Iraqi Shias, the country would be stable. As to Afghanistan, the US won’t admit that its strategy and tactics in the war were so poor that the Taliban and Al Qaeda got away with minimal damage. Even their top leaders have not been caught or killed. So it is claimed that were it not for Pakistan’s failure to curb them in its regions bordering Afghanistan, there would be no problems. What is conveniently forgotten is that Pakistan entered into no covenant to fight America’s dirty war for it when it fails. It is even shamelessly being insinuated that President Musharraf is two-faced and only scores enough successes to keep the US quiet, while he is secretly allowing the Taliban to regroup for a spring offensive. If the US looks carefully, it will discover that the vast majority of Taliban or Pushtoon freedom fighters – call them what you will – are actually in southern Afghanistan with the wholehearted support of the local population. They hardly need Pakistan’s support to regroup and launch a spring offensive. Source : www.nation.com.pk/daily/mar-2007/4/columns1.php
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