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.
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
Iran-Pakistan: Iranian officials on 16 December accused Pakistan of being linked to a 15 December suicide bombing in southeastern Iran. Iran's deputy minister and chief of security at the Interior Ministry, Ali Abdollahi, said Pakistani officials had ignored Iranian warnings about bases in Pakistan for anti-Iranian elements and had allowed the terrorists to cross into Iran.
Iranian lawmaker Kazem Jalali said initial reports and confessions from arrested Jundallah leader Abdolmalek Rigi showed that the bombers had been trained in Pakistan. Pakistan must clarify its position on the terrorists and on the Iranian government, Jalali said.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: On the 15th two bombers detonated themselves at a mosque in Chabahar, killing 41 people and injuring at least 50 on the eve of the Shiite holy day Ashura, which honors the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the grandson of Mohammed.
The results of Iran's custodial interrogation and Iranian accusations against Pakistan are virtually identical in substance to Indian interrogation of the surviving Mumbai terrorist and Indian accusations about Pakistan and terrorists.
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Phi Beta Iota: Iran, Turkey, and India are now seeing common cause with respect to the threat from both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. We anticipate new forms of multinational information-sharing and sense-making emerging in the region.
Shaffer’s book rips the lid off several stories the bureaucrats wanted to suppress: the role of a program named Able Danger in yielding information that could have uncovered the 9/11 plot; Operation Dark Heart, which could have nabbed Al Qaeda’s number two leader; and early indications that Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, actively supported the Taliban. These are the incendiary bombs the censors tried to defuse. And this is the real story of Tony Shaffer’s book.
Phi Beta Iota: The Playboy folks did not do their homework–the destruction of an entire first edition is not unprecendented, it was done by CIA to the first printing (1972) of Col L. Fletcher Prouty's The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (Skyhorse, 2008). While the title is hyped and the good Colonel was not aware of the over-arching financial crime families that the US Government has secretly supported and in some instances actually spawned from scratch, his general point to the public was clear: what is done in our name under the guise of secrecy is often criminal, generally unconstitutional, and almost always very costly in long-term blood, treasure, and spirit over both the short and the long term. What is at issue here is straight-forward: either we have a government that works in the public interest and displays integrity at every level, or we do not. It is not only the political “leaders” who have lost their integrity, but the professional “leaders” as well. Until the truth of this is understood by the majority of the American people, nothing will change.
President Barack Obama's Afghanistan war plans took two major hits this week: First, his longtime adviser and chief diplomat in the region, Richard Holbrooke, passed away unexpectedly. Now, two classified intelligence reports, one each on Afghanistan and Pakistan and intended for congressional committees, had their contents leaked to The New York Times and their findings are not good.
In the first treatise written on the art of war, sometime around 450 BC [1], Sun Tzu explained why “the wise general sees to it that his troops feed on the enemy,”
EXTRACT: The militarization of development aid is a central pillar of General Petaeus's counterinsurgency strategy to buy the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, ninety per cent of whom are spread out in remote rural areas. So it should not be surprising that the military is controlling the bulk of the billions of dollars in aid money flowing into (and being smuggled out of) Afghanistan.
In the very important CounterPunch report on 13 December, Patrick Cockburn, certainly one of the most informed observers of insurgencies in the Middle East and Central Asia, described how the militarization of development aid in Afghanistan is riven with corruption.
