Following up the London Times report that Saudi Arabia had given Israel permission to fly through Saudi airspace to attack Iran, the Jerusalem Post, the Islam Times and the Iranian news agency Fars report that the Israeli air force has stockpiled equipment in the Saudi desert near Jordan.
According to the Post supplies were unloaded June 18 and 19 outside the Saudi city of Tabuk, and all civilian flights into the area were canceled during the two day period. The Post said that an “anonymous American defense official” claimed that Mossad chief Meir Dagan was the contact man with Saudi Arabia and had briefed Netanyahu on the plans.
The Gulf Daily News reported June 26 that Israel has moved warplanes to Georgia and Azerbaijan, which would greatly shorten the distance Israeli planes would have to fly to attack targets in northern Iran.
William R. Polk recently sent out the attached letter to his distribution list. It is a very comprehensive and I believe important review of Afghanistan. I urge you to take the time to read it. Appended to the end are a series of notes he used in the construction of his letter. Polk know of which he speaks: his book Violent Politics (Harper Collins, 2007) is one of the very best books on guerrilla warfare, insurrection, and terrorism I have ever read. You can learn more about Polk and his writings by visiting his website http://www.williampolk.com/
On June 24, the International Herald Tribune published an editorial from its parent, The New York Times, entitled “Obama’s Decision.” Both the attribution – printing in the two newspapers which ensures that the editorial will reach both directly and through subsidiary reprinting almost every “decision maker” in the world – and the date – just before the appointment of David Petraeus to succeed Stanley McChrystal – are significant. They could have suggested a momentary lull in which basic questions on the Afghan war might have been reconsidered.
That did not happen. The President made clear his belief that the strategy of the war was sound and his commitment to continue it even if the general responsible for it had to be changed.
The editorial sounded a different note arising from the events surrounding the fall of General McChrystal: Mr. Obama, said The Times, “must order all of his top advisers to stop their sniping and maneuvering” and come up with a coherent political and military plan for driving back the Taliban and building a minimally effective Afghan government.”
In short, Mr. Obama must get his team together and evolve a plan.
Unfortunately, the task he faces is not that simple.
Afghanistan: A report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported that the United States does not know the capability of the Afghanistan security forces at this time, Reuters reported 28 June, citing U.S. auditors.
According to the report, rankings used to grade Afghan forces varied greatly from one region to another, personnel numbers for the Afghan army were overstated and widespread corruption and drug abuse among Afghan security forces as well as logistics issues plagued the effort to develop independent Afghan forces.
Comment: Open source information on Afghan security force casualties in April and May tends to reinforce the IG report. As US and Western force casualties began to rise, Afghan Army and Police casualties declined, in open source reporting. The data suggested the Afghans were sitting back, letting US and Western forces engage and be engaged by the Taliban, even in joint operations.
Enlistment in the security forces is a jobs program, rather than a career in the Western sense. There is a strong military tradition in Afghanistan, but it resides primarily in the Pashtuns, who are the Taliban today. When Pashtuns enlist, they are infiltrators from the Taliban. The numbers of Afghan army and police personnel are fictitious, but that should not be news.
CounterPunch Diary Loose-Lip McChrystal Did Obama a Huge Favor By ALEXANDER COCKBURN, Counterpunch
Just when Barack Obama's presidency was drowning in BP's crude oil, a megalomaniacal US Army general called Stanley McChrystal, commander of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan, did him several huge favors
Phi Beta Iota: Absolutely worth the full read. Both the White House and the Departments of State and Defense are “out of control” while the rest of the government is simply “out to lunch.” In relation to the art of the possible and the science of the necessary, the US Government appears to have hit bottom.
Small Arms Survey 2010: Gangs, Groups, and Guns
The Small Arms Survey 2010 reviews a range of issues related to gangs and armed groups, focusing on their use of violence, as well as emerging efforts to prevent and curb the damage they inflict on society. The volume includes studies of prison gangs, girls in gangs, and pro-government groups; it also features case studies from Ecuador and Southern Sudan. Rounding out the book is original research on the global ammunition trade and on options for controlling illicit firearm transfers by air.
Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan and al Qaeda have teamed up with Punjabi militant and sectarian groups to destabilize Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province.
Although the militants have yet to assert the same control in southern Punjab that they did in Swat Valley or Waziristan, there are signs that such a scenario is possible.
Counterterrorism, intelligence, and police operations are more likely to make inroads than outright military operations.
See Also:Press Release RAND 21 June 2010, Failed Strategy to Half Pakistan-Based Militant Groups Has Helped Lead to Rising Number of US Terror Plots; and report, Counterinsurgency in Pakistan. Phi Beta Iota: Pakistan has displaced Saudi Arabia as the primary sponsor of international terrorism (along with the Israeli Mossad that fills in when needed). The US is deliberately blind to this reality.
The attached article was brought to my attention by a highly-educated, well-read medical doctor of Pashtun descent now living in the UK. It should be studied closely and ought to be mandatory reading in the White House, before the President gets stampeded by McChrystal debacle, the accession of General Petraeus, and his fellow travelers in the War Party (Democrats as well as Republicans) into backing away from President Obama's withdrawal deadline. CS
As Washington and London struggle to prop up a puppet government over which Hamid Karzai has no control, they risk repeating the blood-soaked 19th-century history of Britain’s imperial defeat.
In 1843, shortly after his return from Afghanistan, an army chaplain, Reverend G R Gleig, wrote a memoir about the First Anglo-Afghan War, of which he was one of the very few survivors. It was, he wrote, “a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has Britain acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated.”
