When was the last time the US found itself losing two
wars under one administration? There's always the
possibility of invading Iran or Venezuela (by way of
Colombia) and making it a 3-fer. But I'm going out
on a limb here and guess that before that happens, some
tiny island teeming with poor brown people is going
to get it's butt kicked real hard to help restore our
national pride. They'll have drug runners and a
dictator who thinks Barbara Bush is ugly, so they'll
certainly deserve it.

A quote from this Article: "...it is incumbent upon the international community to implement a new strategic paradigm..."
I agree, Get the Fuck Out !!!
The Afghans have been defending those Mountains for millenia. They have beat Everybody - Mongols, Brits, Russians, U.S. - mostly because of the remoteness and ruggedness of the terrain, and the fact that they are bad-assed guerilla fighters on their home turf.
If they want to be dumb and poor, let them.
If they want to be an Islam-ocracy, let them.
If they want to be isolated from the International Community, Let them.
After all, it is THEIR Right to do so.
It is THEIR Country.
Westeners, with your 'holyier than thou' attitudes (Oxfam, et a.l.) Get Out !!!

normvincent:

I sympathize with our position, and in principle agree with you, but the matter is not so simple. The "it's their culture" argument is of limited value when one asks what is meant by "they." As long as "they" is limited to the people in power, you are correct. But if "they" includes ll members of the society in question, we have a bit of a problem. Is it women's culture to be deprived of education, employment, etc.? Do they consent to this deprivation, or is it simply inflicted upon them by those in power? If the latter, then by pulling out and abandoning the place to the Taliban, we (as a Canadian I must count myself as part of "we") may actually be abandoning people who have a reasonable claim on us to help them institute a system in which their basic human rights wil be respected. This is not to say that the status quo is good: it is clearly not. In Canada, the amount spent on military operations in Afghanistan is approximately tem times the amount spent on reconstruction. Those proportions need to be reversed. But at this point, simply getting out and letting "they" mean nothing but the men with the most guns would be, at best, a morally questionable decision.

"In Canada, the amount spent on military operations in Afghanistan is approximately tem times the amount spent on reconstruction. Those proportions need to be reversed. But at this point, simply getting out and letting "they" mean nothing but the men with the most guns would be, at best, a morally questionable decision."

Hmmm, frustrating. How is this not a variation on "trust the Democrats, 'cause they're all we've got?" There's a lot of dependencies riding on that change - how do you propose going about having them happen, especially in the case of the US?

Restive:

Tough question, especially as whatever Democratic candidate you get stuck with is likely to be morally bankrupt, at least judging from recent poles. I guess the problem is with that word "trust." I certainly don't "trust" most of my own country's politicians (I hesitate to call them "leaders" as we have very few of those, and most of them don't strive to be anything more than managers). To be honest and perhaps a little too personal, I know there is a lot riding on the 2008 election, both for Americans and for the rest of the world, but I am also reasonably sure, given the behaviour of the current congress, that meaningful change is unlikely even in the event of a Democratic victory. And I am not advocating the sort of desparing acceptance of the lesser of two evils as the best possible choice. What I do know, from reading the history of your country, is that meaningful change has rarely been initiated by those in power. Republican, Democrat, or whomever else, has generally been forced to accept change that the people themselves demanded, and demanded in sufficient number and with sufficient determination and moral conviction to make not changing a politically untennable or unattractive option. Remember that the politicians of both of our countries are basically whores, but that it is in our power--our collective power, I mean--to set the price. Terms such as "civil disobedience" come to mind, and there have been some excellent examples of late (for example in front of the School of the Americas). But the scale is still too small to be effective. Ghandi had to bring India to a virtual standstill to get the English out. And the strength of Ghandi';s movement was grassroots. It is at this level that I have hope for your country, as I have long believed and continue to believe that the american people as a whole are both decent and generous. but they have been hookwinked into not seeing the power that they actually do possess, and of which their current rulers (note again the absence of the word "leaders") are very afraid.

Peace, friend.

R

george w. bush -

You mentioned a war count. Here's how I call it::

The war against Iraq is over. We now occupy a nation at the request of the occupied. Most of our troops in Iraq are supporting this occupation, except for those fighting...
The war against the guys who supported the suicide attackers on 9/11. It's only been 6 years so it's naive to think that we'd even know who we were after. We seem to fight a whole lot more people than could have been involved with 9/11. Eventually we'll be fighting people who hadn't been born yet.
This war morphed into...
The war against terror, which was announced by our President after 9/11 and never constitutionally declared by Congress. Half of our troops in Afghanistan fight this war, but not those supporting the Afghan government under UN mandate to stabilize the country against enemies such as the Taliban.

so I call it:

War against Iraq - won, but we're having trouble with the occupation.
War against those responsible for 9/11 - who knows?
Unconstitutional war against terror - active
UN mandated action supporting Afghan government - poorly, according to article.

In all, 1 constitutional war, 1 unconstitutional war, 1 post-war occupation and 1 UN mandated government-supporting failure-to-be.

Well, that's just the Middle East but time is short.

A cynic might argue that government intentionally tries to confuse things, in order to hide crimes and hinder justice.

We've been there before, so for those who forgot, were misinformed, in denial or too young, here's a long synopsis of our Afghanistan adventure.

Reagan's Osama Connection
How he turned a jihadist into a terrorist kingpin.
By Fred Kaplan, June 10, 2004, at 7:34 PM ET

Earlier this week, I cited recently declassified documents to show that Ronald Reagan did indeed play a major role in ending the Cold War.

Now it's time to note that a similar set of documents shows that Reagan also played a major role in bringing on the terrorist war that followed—specifically, in abetting the rise of Osama Bin Laden.
Once again, the story concerns the fascinating relationship between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev took the helm as the reform-minded general-secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985. Within months, he had decided privately to pull Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. One of his predecessors, Leonid Brezhnev,* had invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and the move was proving a disaster.

Tens of thousands of Soviet troops had died; military morale was crumbling; popular protest—unheard of, till then, in Communist Russia—was rising. Part of the Soviet failure in Afghanistan was due to the fact that the Reagan administration was feeding billions of dollars in arms to Afghanistan's Islamic resistance. Reagan and, even more, his intensely ideological CIA director, William Casey, saw the battle for Afghanistan as a titanic struggle in the war between Eastern tyranny and Western freedom. (Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had started assisting the resistance, but with not nearly the same largess or ambition.)

At a Politburo meeting of Nov. 13, 1986, Gorbachev laid his position on the table: The war wasn't working; it had to be stopped:
People ask: "What are we doing there?" Will we be there endlessly? Or should we end this war? ... The strategic objective is to finish the war in one, maximum two years, and withdraw the troops. We have set a clear goal: Help speed up the process, so we have a friendly neutral country, and get out of there.

In early December, Gorbachev summoned President Najibullah, the puppet leader of Afghanistan, to give him the news: The Soviet troops would be leaving within 18 months; after that, he was on his own.
Two months later, on Feb. 23, 1987, Gorbachev assured the Politburo that the troops wouldn't leave right away. He first had to foster a stable environment for the reigning government and to maintain a credible image with India, the Soviet Union's main ally in the region. The exit strategy, he said, would be a negotiated deal with Washington: The Soviets pull out troops; the Americans stop their arms shipments to the rebels.

However, within days, Gorbachev learned to his surprise that Reagan had no interest in such a deal. In a conversation on Feb. 27 with Italy's foreign minister, Giulio Andreotti, Gorbachev said, "We have information from very reliable sources … that the United States has set itself the goal of obstructing a settlement by any means," in order "to present the Soviet Union in a bad light." If this information is true, Gorbachev continued, the matter of a withdrawal "takes on a different light."

Without U.S. cooperation, Gorbachev couldn't proceed with his plans to withdraw. Instead, he allowed his military commanders to escalate the conflict. In April, Soviet troops, supported by bombers and helicopters, attacked a new compound of Islamic fighters along the mountain passes of Jaji, near the Pakistani border. The leader of those fighters, many of them Arab volunteers, was Osama Bin Laden.

In his magisterial book, Ghost Wars (possibly the best diplomatic history written in the past decade), Steve Coll recounts the fateful consequences:
The battle lasted for about a week. Bin Laden and 50 Arab volunteers faced 200 Russian troops. … The Arab volunteers took casualties but held out under intense fire for several days. More than a dozen of bin Laden's comrades were killed, and bin Laden himself apparently suffered a foot wound. … Chronicled daily at the time by several Arab journalists … the battle of Jaji marked the birth of Osama bin Laden's public reputation as a warrior among Arab jihadists. … After Jaji he began a media campaign designed to publicize the brave fight waged by Arab volunteers who stood their ground against a superpower.

In interviews and speeches … bin Laden sought to recruit new fighters to his cause and to chronicle his own role as a military leader. He also began to expound on expansive new goals for the jihad.

Had Gorbachev thought that Reagan was willing to strike a deal, the battle of Jaji would not have taken place—and the legend of Bin Laden might never have taken off.

Reagan can't be blamed for ignoring the threat of Osama Bin Laden. Not for another few years would any analyst see Bin Laden as a significant player in global terrorism; not till the mid-1990s would his organization, al-Qaida, emerge as a significant force.

However, Reagan—and those around him—can be blamed for ignoring the rise of Islamic militancy in Afghanistan and for failing to see Gorbachev's offer to withdraw as an opportunity to clamp the danger. Certainly, the danger was, or should have been, clear. Only a few years had passed since the Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power in Iran—the shah toppled, the U.S. Embassy employees held hostage, the country turned over to the mullahs, the region suddenly destabilized. Reagan beat Jimmy Carter so decisively in the 1980 election in part because of the hostage crisis.

Gorbachev had accepted that Afghanistan would become an Islamic country. But he assumed that Reagan, of all people, would have an interest in keeping it from becoming militantly, hostilely, Islamist.

In September 1987, after the previous spring's escalation failed to produce results, Soviet Foreign Minister Edvard Shevardnadze met with Secretary of State George Shultz to tell him that Gorbachev planned to pull out of Afghanistan soon. He asked Shultz for help in containing the spread of "Islamic fundamentalism." Shultz had nothing to say.

Most Reagan officials doubted Gorbachev would really withdraw, and they interpreted the warnings about Muslim radicals as a cover story for the Soviet Union's military failure.
By this time, Reagan and Gorbachev had gone some distance toward ending the Cold War. The dramatic moment would come the following spring, during the summit in Moscow, when Reagan declared that the U.S.S.R. was no longer an "evil empire."

At the same time, though, the U.S. national-security bureaucracy—and, in many ways, Reagan himself—continued to view the world through Cold War glasses.

After the last Soviet troops departed, Afghanistan fell off the American radar screen. Over the next few years, Shevardnadze's worst nightmares came true. The Taliban rose to power and in 1996 gave refuge to the—by then—much-hunted Bin Laden.

Ten years earlier, had Reagan taken Gorbachev's deal, Afghanistan probably still wouldn't have emerged as the "friendly, neutral country" of Gorby's dreams. Yet it might have been a neutral enough country to preclude a Taliban takeover. And if the Russian-Afghan war had ended earlier—if Reagan had embraced Gorbachev on the withdrawal, as he did that same autumn on the massive cutback of nuclear weapons—Osama Bin Laden today might not even be a footnote in history.

Correction, June 11: Leonid Brezhnev was general-secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the time of the Afghanistan invasion, not Yuri Andropov as the article originally stated. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He was the Boston Globe's military reporter from 1982-91 and its Moscow bureau chief from 1992-95.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2102243/

Maybe Reagan was short sighted, but after 40 years of brutal Soviet behavior and cold war, Gorby's "us white folk gotta stick together" plea probably sounded ludicrous.

If Ronnie could have done it on nukes he certainly had ways of giving it a try and verifying results with the USSR. Don't try and tell me the USA was in Afghanistan to free the people any more than they went to Iraq to bring freedom. If you want a list of US brutality starting with or before the million or so Cambodians secretly slaughtered I'd be happy to oblige. Americas "well intentioned" atrocities both large and small are generally know outside the Homeland. But as the US is a free country in many ways, there are available for those with interest and time many unclassified document readily available to support my opinion. In the meantime lets not mess with Iran.

I never gave a hoot that the "Taliban" ran "Afghanistan", and I still don't. Sure, they were, accoring to the press, a bunch of shitheels, but that ain't so unusual in the world. They blew up some ugly statues related to the Buddhist superstition, but, you know, more statues can be carved.
As for the inevitable claim that because the "Taliban" harbored "Al Queada" and had to be destroyed, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't most of the 9/11 murderers come from our bosom buddy Saudi Arabia (the largest family-owned oil company in the world)?
We have no business in "Afghanistan", no business destroying their poppy fields (blaming farmers for what consumers do with the crops).
If the people in the general vicinity the world wants to call a nation ("Afghanistan") don't want to pull together and have a workable society, what's that to me?

To me it's about what girls and women are treated like by Taliban. No education, beaten openly in public, forced into 'marriage' at the ages of 10 and such, must wear burqa, shot in the back of their heads in an open, what used to be, a futbol field, also outlawed.
Sorry, no agreement on my part about allowing Taliban to keep on keeping on. They are the worst of the worst involving Human rights.
I am sure you might disagree if it was your daughter being shot for no reason at all.

To heck with allowing the taliban anything. The US should have finished what it started. We crippled the country enough to give rise to the taliban. We helped them out, gave them the power of their own people and destroyed the real government. The US truely failed. We even gave them a year almost to regain strength! The leaders of my own country SUCK!

Normvincent, neither your country nor your "people?" have been ordained by us or GOD as you may want to think or believe, to save us poor, uneducated, cruel people. Perhaps you should look back into your history to find similarities.
Only the people from that country can free themselves. They have to want it and then go and get it, as the Taliban are doing wresting afghanistan from the people who brought free-market, globalization, TORTURE, RACISM, and many other isms to us backward THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES.

O roe
"To me it's about what girls and women are treated like by Taliban."

I agree its barbaric and that's the main MSM message with a little good news story every so now and then. Malalai Joya the leading Afghan activist was in North America recently suggesting we were making the situation worse. Some of her remarks may be found at
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/59/59_38-39.pdf

Thank you, orphan for the link. My post was in response to what tooblueday said. I offered absoulutey no support of US being in Afghanistan.
Most assuredly, the persons of their own country are inevitably responsible for the policeing and governing of said country.
I was talking about the Taliban itself. Spending 1/3 of the year in Turkey, in a seaside town near Izmir where I have a summer 'home', which in every country aside from the US, is actually an apartment, I am used to women treated as people, at least on the Euro side of Turkey. I find the atrocities committed towards women by Taliban revolting. The words of Malalai Joya are brave and are due respect, from where will that respect come with 54% Taliban control?
Taliban, as is the case with al-Qaeda and bin Laden, are not Muslim. They may say it, they may call themselves that, in my Qur'an they are unbelievers and Masters of Deceit. The things they are responsible for are NOT those of true Muslims. What Muslim kills another Muslim, not only that but bombs camis(Turce c = j), in other words Mosques during Ramazan (Arabic, Ramadan), who?
She is just in her cause and I certainly hope she may be able to find able bodied men to align themselves with her, but Taliban, like PKK are cave dwellers, they move through tunnels within tunnels in mountainous areas and are difficult to find.
Yes, we armed bin Laden, Saudi ex-patriot, Supreme Mujahideen of Afghanistan, to fight against the evil Russians. I suppose we showed those Russky's, yeah?
In the time being, I have yet to see one Islamic country come to help these women and elderly to take their country back. I forgot whom it was that casually commented "so, they blew up a few statues." WTF, Buddhist shrines from forever ago, irreplaceable, like the way we have destroyed an entire culture and many very important archeological sites in Iraq.
Please be realistic, who is going to allow the true citizens of Afghanistan to be realized, once again?
As I stated, I never said it was the US that should be the ones to restore their culture and give them back all that has been stolen from the true identity of what an Afghani is.
I pray to all that is good, that these dreams are realized, the world is in an entire upheaval, I know this will not come to pass, in my time.
Thanks, orphan.

orphan, again, thanks for link. Please do me a favour, my name and MSM, are not allowed by myself to be placed in the same sentence.
Again,
Thanks
Peace

The Taliban are not supported by the majority of Afghan people the Taliban were always supported and funded by the Pakistanis. Afghans suffered and died under the Taliban. The Taliban do not represent Afghan culture or Afghans.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB227/index.htm

International Herald Tribune

Just when things were looking up
By Barnett R. Rubin
Friday, November 23, 2007

STOCKHOLM:

The terrorist bombing in Afghanistan' s northern province of Baghlan on
Nov. 6, which killed more than 70 people, including 59 school
children,
reflects where Afghanistan stands today: The real progress the
country
has made over the past few years is under serious threat from
deteriorating security.

It happened when a parliamentary commission came from Kabul to mark
the
restructuring of a state-owned sugar mill. The mill is the type of
enterprise the government has identified as essential to escape from
poverty, insecurity, unemployment and drug trafficking.

Germany had provided technical assistance. The UN Food and
Agricultural
Organization had helped organize farmers to assure a steady supply of
sugar beet. A USAID-funded program helped the Afghan government
restructure the enterprise for privatization. The Afghan private
sector raised
€ ¦¤8 million of investment.

The delegation from Kabul included some of the brightest leaders of
the
Parliament, elected in the fall of 2005 after more than three decades
during which the country had no nationally elected bodies.

The chairman of the commission, Sayed Mustafa Kazemi, a former
minister
of commerce, was a political leader from the country's Shiite
minority
who had participated in the UN-sponsored Bonn talks in 2001. Those
talks resulted in the election which sent Kazemi to the Parliament,
enabling a member of a long-repressed minority to become a leading
opposition
spokesman. Kazemi was accompanied to Baghlan by parliamentarians from
all regions and ethnic groups.

In Baghlan, an ethnically mixed province, the delegation was greeted
by
officials and elders from all communities. Schoolchildren in national
dress assembled to welcome the delegation with songs.

The expansion of the school system was another proud achievement. Over
six million children were enrolled this year; for the first time in
Afghan history, half of the school-age population was in school.

As the children were about to start singing, an explosion, possibly
from a suicide bomber, tore through the gathering, killing Kazemi,
five
other parliamentarians, 59 schoolchildren, and several others,
including
teachers. It was the largest terrorist attack since the establishment
of Afghanistan' s new government in 2001.

The first suspicions fell on the Taliban, the ousted rulers of the
country, who have established secure base areas in Pakistan.
According to a
recent UN report, some elements of the Taliban have established
training bases for suicide bombers in Pakistan's tribal agencies,
where they
receive aid from Al Qaeda.

The Taliban has taken advantage of Washington's inattention and
Islamabad's collusion to reestablish much of the logistical base it
formerly
had in Afghanistan.

Taliban fighters are now less than an hour's drive from Kabul, the
capital. To erect new cellphone towers for the country's rapidly
growing
mobile telephone industry, companies have had to make deals with
Taliban
commanders throughout the south, east and much of the west of the
country.

Cellphone payoffs are not the only source of Taliban funding. Opium
production in Afghanistan has expanded by 40 percent this year and
has
become increasingly concentrated in areas under Taliban control.

U.S. pressure to introduce a Colombia-style program of aerial spraying
in insurgent controlled areas has been resisted by the Afghan
government - and by U.S. allies. The British in particular argue
that spraying
would do little to hinder the Taliban while driving farmers away from
the government and toward the insurgency.

In any case, a Taliban spokesman denied that the organization carried
out the Baghlan massacre. Indeed, the Taliban has avoided attacking
large gatherings of civilians, and has used suicide bombers largely
against
army and police recruits as well as NATO military contingents. The
bombing was more reminiscent of the tactics used by Sunni extremists
affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq.

But the tactics of some of the Taliban may be changing. A year ago, an
Iranian official warned me that Arabs were coming from Iraq to
Pakistan
and Afghanistan to train Afghans and Pakistanis.

He wanted to share information with the U.S. government, but because
of
the growing conflict between Washington and Tehran, he could speak
only to me, a private citizen. The purpose of such attacks, he said,
would
be to spark ethnic and sectarian conflict in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, that could work. In the aftermath of the bombing, some
supporters of Kazemi charged that he was the main target and that
those
responsible were members of another group fighting the government -
the
Hizb-i-Islami (Islamic Party) of Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, a long-time
client of Pakistan, once strongly supported by the CIA and now
allied to Al
Qaeda.

Other Kazemi's supporters charged that his assassination was part of a
larger plot. Government talks with the Taliban, they claimed, were
part
of a secret plan to form a Pashtun alliance backed by Pakistan and
the
United States to displace the largely non-Pashtun Northern Alliance,
which had received backing from Iran. Kazemi was regarded as one of
the
Afghan parliamentarians closest to Iran.

While these charges are probably false, they demonstrate how such
attacks can indeed provoke factional distrust and conflict.

The growing confrontation between the United States and Iran further
destabilizes Afghanistan. The United States and Iran jointly
supported
the Northern Alliance's coalition with President Hamid Karzai and
other
Pashtun elites in 2001. As Washington and Tehran have locked horns
over
Iran's nuclear program and Iraq, each has been working to solidify
its
alliances in Afghanistan.

The commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard has warned that if
attacked
by the United States, Iran would unleash devastating attacks in both
Iraq and Afghanistan. "Afghanistan is a friend," said one Iranian
official. "But when survival is at stake, you may have to sacrifice
even your
friends."

Increasingly, Afghans fear that their country's survival, too, is at
stake. In 2001, it seemed that all regional and world powers had
agreed
on a new political arrangement to stabilize Afghanistan, which
involved
supporting a broad Afghan coalition.

Now that coalition is close to the breaking point, both inside
Afghanistan and internationally. If it breaks further, all the sugar
mills and
mobile phones in the world will not save Afghanistan.

Barnett R. Rubin is director of studies and senior fellow at the
Center
on International Cooperation at New York University.