One hears again and again Afghans say that the Taliban may not be liked but that the US is distrusted, even hated
Patrick Cockburn – The Independent 18/12/10
During the mid-1960s, America's goal during a crucial stage in the Vietnam war was to defeat the enemy militarily. But it had no realistic political strategy to underpin the goal, and it was this which ultimately led to failure.
America's strategy in Afghanistan is now suffering from a similar weakness. Barack Obama made the edgy claim this week that the US army is stabilising the military situation, but neither he nor his national security advisers show any signs of understanding the speed at which, politically, the US is losing ground.
Again and again in Kabul one hears Afghans say that the Taliban may not be liked, but that the Afghan government and its US allies are increasingly distrusted, even hated, by the mass of the population.
It appears that the old Hillary Clinton, the one who ran for president of the United States has managed to travel forward in time and merge with the current Hillary Clinton, the one who is Secretary of State.
For those who don't remember, the old Clinton vowed to ban the use of private security contractors. As perennial PMC critic Jeremy Scahill of The Nation reported back in July, “”These private security contractors have been reckless and have compromised our mission in Iraq,” Clinton said in February 2008. “The time to show these contractors the door is long past due.” Clinton was one of only two senators to sponsor legislation to ban these companies.
Scahill was upset that Clinton had since moderated her views and that she was “presiding over what is shaping up to be a radical expansion of a private, US-funded paramilitary force that will operate in Iraq for the foreseeable future–the very type of force Clinton once claimed she opposed.”
But on Wednesday the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (AID) unveiled the much-awaited Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review entitled “Leading Through Civilian Power.”
The report seeks to put some distance between State and the private sector.
Mexico said Thursday that more than 30,000 people have been killed in drug violence since President Felipe Calderon launched a crackdown against cartels in late 2006.
The government said the violent La Familia cartel in western Mexico has been “systematically weakened” by recent arrests and deaths of leading members of the gang.
Forensic workers carry a body inside a body bag that was found at a clandestine grave in the town of Asencion, near the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Saturday Dec. 11, 2010. At least 5 bodies have been found in three separate clandestine graves found in the site. (AP Photo/Raymundo Ruiz)
Phi Beta Iota: Both Mexico and the USA are “unintelligent” countries lacking in strategic analytics able to clearly demonstrate “cause and effect.” If they were “smart nations” as we have been advocating since 1995, marijuana would have been legalized long ago, corruption among local officials squelched, pay and training for the police substantially increased….and so on. Everything is connected. For example, the weapons do not really come from US handgun stores–they come from the Guatemalan military that sells entire shipments of “old” weapons provided to the US, and then tells the US the weapons were destroyed. The serial numbers on the captured weapons tell the truth. Until nations learn to think honestly and holistically, any single flaw can be fatal, and multiple flaws will interact in unanticipated and increasingly costly ways. In the USA, crime runs from the border to Wall Street, where drug money laundering has long been known to be a major source of liquidity. Politicians in both countries are paid to be anemic in their thinking and ineffective in their duty to the public. Under these circumstances, neither law enforcement nor the military can be effective. Integrity is the missing factor.
In a recent opinion piece, “Kosovo and the Myth of Liberal Intervention,” Neil Clark in the Guardian on 15 December gave the reader a good summary of the some of the myths surrounding the Kosovo war, although he helped to perpetuate one myth, namely that the so-called genocide of Kosovar Albanians by the Serbs could be as high as 10,000. While Clark fudged the issue by using a range of 2,000-10,000, the fact remains that examination of mass burial sites by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) exhumed 2,788 bodies in Kosovo, some of whom were undoubtably Serbs; nor could the ICTY distinguish how many of these bodies were victims of war crimes or were the unintended detritus of NATO's “precision” bombing. The number of 10,000 was a face-saving, last-ditch, “statistical” estimate produced by the US State Department (its earlier estimates were far higher), which had a vested interest in proving the genocide it claimed Serbia had committed as a justification for NATO's “humanitarian” bombing campaign. The estimate of 10,000 was based on dubious (to put it charitably) statistical methods for estimating the number of bodies the State Department said existed but could not find — once illustrating government's propensity to confuse the a priori with the a posteriori
In this thoughtful piece, Bob Burnett uses the word progressive, with which
I don¹t disagree. But from another vantage, I see him articulating a
transpartisan message that Jim Turner and Lawry Chickering put forward in
their seminal book Voice of the People: the Transpartisan Imperative in
American Life and that Bruce Shuman describes in The Emerging Transpartisan
Politics
Not only progressives, but independents, moderate Republicans, third party
and third force members and those who don¹t vote for whatever reason will
resonate with Burnett's three pillars of a progressive message — a
significant majority of Americans. Robert Fuller might add that the three
pillars Burnett articulates are core elements in overcoming ranksim and
building a dignitarian society, which is also a transpartisan society.
Phi Beta Iota: There are 65 parties in America, and the ostensible front for the Independents, IndependentVoting.org, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Michael Bloomberg that sold out early to No Labels. For a hard-hitting piece on three things America needs that the White House (or any billionaire) could sponsor, seePersonal for Mike Bloomberg.
The overwhelming cultural consensus of the post-WWII generation was that if you are middle-class, then you simply must own your own home and your children must go to college. Out of that cultural consensus emerged a complex system of tax breaks and special lending deals designed to make sure that the number of Americans who bought houses and bachelor's degrees was as high as possible–or maybe more so.
Many people now understand that this system of tax-and-lend has created a multigenerational housing bubble. But only a few have noticed that a very similar tax-and-lend system has also created a multi-generational higher education bubble.
Read rest of article…. Phi Beta Iota: There is good news. The smartest of the smart have been dropping out of high school, not just college, and then learning what they need to learn online and through hands-on experience. Like most bubbles, including not just the housing mortgage bubble but also the DoD acquisition bubble, the DoD private military contractor bubble, and so on, this bubble rests on fraud being permitted–a lack of accountability for outcomes. In today's world, with transparency emergent and soon rampant, accountability is going to be a fact of life. That is a good thing.
The word ‘slavery' often conjures brutal images of a long since vanquished historic project, but its practice, more commonly and legally referred to as human trafficking, continues to thrive in every corner of the globe – making it the world's second largest criminal industry.
By Cassandra Clifford for ISN Insights
People are comparatively cheaper than they were in the 1600-1800s, when slaves were purchased for life. Now ownership tends to last only a few months to a few years, making slaves cheaper to purchase and more easily disposable. In 1850 the purchase price of a slave in the southern US averaged the equivalent of $40,000 today. According to Free the Slaves, a slave today costs an average of $90. People have become a disposable commodity, cheap and easy labor one can just toss out when no longer needed. Globalization and the post-World War II population boom have increased access to, and lowered the cost of, transportation, which has in turn contributed to the increased levels of global slavery. Victims are often driven into slavery by severe poverty or acute need for economic gain. Additionally, the ethnicity of today's slave is rarely important.
David Isenberg
