In an exclusive interview with Foreign Policy Journal, retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul responds to charges that he supports terrorism, discusses 9/11 and ulterior motives for the war on Afghanistan, claims that the U.S., Israel, and India are behind efforts to destabilize Pakistan, and charges the U.S. and its allies with responsibility for the lucrative Afghan drug trade.
Ex-ISI Chief Says Purpose of New Afghan Intelligence Agency RAMA Is ‘to destabilize Pakistan’
With a tip of the hat to John Steiner and Janice Hall, here are some highlights from the recent Clinton Global Initiative that struck us as truly righteous.
“I think we can say with some certainty that this mode actually does work,” President Clinton said. “People don't have to have the same politics, the same religion, or speak the same language to work togethr and to have an impact. We all have things to learn from each other. What weneed is a shared mechanism to achieve common goals.”
In 2009, members made284 Commitments valued at $9.4 billion dollars 1,700 commitments hae been made since 2005 valued at more than $57 billion.
Speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative Conference, Matt Damon announced:
Water.org commits to bringing safe dinking water and sanitation to a minimum of 50,000 people in Haiti overthe next three years. It will enhance awareness of good hygiene practices among local communities, and focus on integrating sustainable water resources management into community practices. Water.org co-founders Matt Damon and Gary White joined Presdent Clinton on-stage to announce the commitment.
Water.org
View their website by clicking on the photograph of a well being dug in Ethiopia.
Core point, very much simplified: most borders are artificial and underlying realities such as infrastructure (pipelines, access to the sea) and demogrpahics are better indicators of where we could be going. Artificial borders are a major cause of conflict and a major perpetuator of the arms industry.
Eastern Russia today has 6 million Russians, has become, with global warming, a potential breadbasket, and has attracted a huge influx of Chinese migrating north and north east.
China is the anchor for the Eastern Hemisphere, which also has more “global hubs” than the West.
The author's solution for both Kurdistan and Palestine is infrastructure, respecting the Kurds need for independence by acknowledging their grip on the pipelines, and giving the Palestinians the secure route between Gaza and the West Bank.
In the author's words, pipelines equal silk roads and counter the Great Game efforts to control and compete for control.
This summer the U.S. government has faced a deteriorating crisis in Afghanistan. Such crises tend to force policymakers to face up to the facile assumptions they have previously made. Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s report to his civilian masters on the faltering counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan has caused President Barack Obama and his advisers to face up to their basic assumptions about U.S. objectives and strategies for perhaps the first time. Obama and his team seem very likely to conclude from this long overdue examination of first principles that it will be impractical for the U.S. to successfully implement a counterinsurgency campaign plan in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s assessment has unwittingly tossed the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency field manual into the shredder. McChrystal’s report is brutally honest about the troubles in Afghanistan.
Click on title above for complete article, below for Phi Beta Iota comment and links to three “fix” pieces.
Why Do We Want To Be Famous? Fame promises an escape from ghettos, both real and imagined.
Like liberty, we're often unaware of dignity until we lose it. A hint of disrespect may be a test of our resistance to subservience, or a reminder of our place in the hierarchy. A slight is often a precursor to pigeon-holing us as a nobody.
Rankism and its counterpart–the miasma of malrecognition–lie at the source of much of the social dysfunction that now vexes human societies worldwide. Effective policies to overcome school failure, poverty, chronic disease, criminality, discrimination against women, terrorism, and war require a redistribution of recognition and the de-legitimization of rankism.
Charity Navigator has been on our list of Righteous Sites from the beginning. Today we want to highlight their listing and ratings of 129 “think tanks” or Research and Public Policy Institutes ostensibly committed to the Public Benefit.
Of course we all know that most of these are driven by either ideology or corporate funding to achieve pre-conceived ends, but that does not lessen their value. What lessens the value of the whole is that there is no public intelligence capability for aggreagating all that these “think tanks” produce, so that citizens can “make sense” out of the aggregate, have an appreciative inquiry and deliberative dialog, and then reach a sustainable (i.e. affordable) consensus on the entire spectrum of issues affectiing the public.
