Great news. The rest of the world has got to obstruct the progress of the US military/industrial monster. That won't happen within the US. That's Obama's biggest problem, countering the financial forces that feed on war. Talk about a national octopus...

Excellent Excellent Video !!! 75% of Afghanistan controled by Taliban !! MSM never says that. IF USA cared about women they would never have attacked Iraq ----- That criminal invasion made widowed beggars of 100,000's of the women of perhaps what was the most gender equal muslim country in the world. Write the big O now!

For more historical perspective and questions on why we are in Afghanistan, check this youtube (about 4 minutes) from the Brits:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bSzAuisI4I

after watching that al jazeera video, all you can say about u.s. news is....talk about your pieces of crap....

Jeevee

HURRAY! THANK GOD.

Getting laid off means never having to support this illegal war effort!

Why are we at war with Afghanistan? What did they ever do to us? If we don't like the Taliban, why are we creating more of them by attacking Afghanistan? Will somebody please tell me?

Obama "change we can believe in." Ha,ha,ha.

Fine article and argument that Cole presents. I don't know if the Obama administration will really back out of the war on Afghanistan, like ceasing to continue it, etc., but I posted a link to a relevant article in a comment for a piece on Afghanistan, to not escalate the war there, and by The Nation's editors posted at CD yesterday. The article I linked to provides very considerable information or details on the apparently serious strengthening of the Taliban in Pakistan and what I believe to have understood to be their allied militants or militias, but the piece also provides strong information regarding the international heroin trafficking business, a serious history of U.S., CIA covert involvement in this, and now the U.S. commander of NATO has given the order to coalition ally forces to kill any and all opium dealers. That's a very hypocritical order given the history of covert U.S. involvement in not drug war, really, but international drug trafficking and protecting the market for their criminal allies among drug traffickers. But the points that I had in mind, first of all, is that apparently many enough NATO commanders of European countries refuse U.S. Gen. John Craddock's order to kill opium dealers, perhaps particularly because the dealers don't need to be combatants or even armed at all.

There's actual proof of the U.S.-CIA criminal and covert involvement in the international drug trade, btw. The article I linked to says that this proof was declassified in 2008. But again to the point, maybe that refusal of European NATO commanders and U.S. Gen. Craddock's threat to remove all who refuse to carry out his order will definitely help to bring a quicker end to the war on Afghanistan; hopefully.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/07-1#comment-1133253

From an earlier post on CD:

"The Afghan Minister of Defence has 65,000 troops under his dubious command but says he needs 500,000 to control Afghanistan. The Soviets failed to contain the country even when they had 100,000 troops here with 150,000 Afghan soldiers in support. And as Barack Obama prepares to send another 7,000 US soldiers into the pit of Afghanistan, the Spanish and Italians are talking of leaving while the Norwegians may pull their 500 troops out of the area north of Heart. Repeatedly, Western leaders talk of the “key” – of training more and more Afghans to fight in the army. But that was the same “key” which the Russians tried – and it did not fit the lock.

"'We' are not winning in Afghanistan."

Robert Fisk
The Independent, Thursday, 27 November 2008
http://tinyurl.com/567ogy

Fisk has more than 30 years’ experience as war correspondent in some of the world’s hottest disaster zones. His home has been in Beirut since 1976; he speaks colloquial Arabic; he has had three face-to-face interviews with Osama bin Laden ...

This is from a report by Fisk present in Afghanistan a couple of months ago...

Obama needs not to escalate but to withdraw.

Fusion

"fusion February 8th, 2009 4:43 pm
...

Fisk has more than 30 years’ experience as war correspondent in some of the world’s hottest disaster zones. His home has been in Beirut since 1976; he speaks colloquial Arabic; he has had three face-to-face interviews with Osama bin Laden .."

Not that that's really relevant and there are plenty of excellent resource people on the topic of western and eastern countries warring in Afghanistan, much history involved, and Fisk is not God holy perfect. He's human and occasionally errs, as well as occasionally illustrating some biases in some of his articles. Fisk will tell readers what he knows or some of what he knows, but he's evidently not expert in every topic related to Afghanistan and foreign countries warring there starting long enough ago. Craig Murray, a former UK or British ambassador to Uzbekistan, is another resource person on the topic of Afghanistan, perhaps particularly with respect to the international heroin trade, which he's well written about. There are good resource people who have articles at GlobalResearch.ca, the website for the article for which I posted a link yesterday on this present war on Afghanistan, a Feb. 7th article, so a little more recent than Fisk's article, which evidently mentions the U.S. or Obama administration planning to send around 7,000 more U.S. troops when most or all other writers say 30,000 to 60,000, and while the lowest I've seen, besides this low number from Fisk, was around 15,000, but only for starters, not representing the total being planned.

A good and more recent resource article is the one linked via my prior post in this CD page, the above-mentioned GlobalResearch.ca piece of Feb. 7th. My first post in this page is to a post (of yesterday) containing the article link, and it's a rather important article, while also being that in more than only one respect.

Don't read only Fisk. There are others, and John Pilger is one. A number of these other people have articles posted at GlobalResearch.ca and visitors can find the articles by simply going to the appropriate GR sub-index linked in the homepage.

In addition to Fisk sometimes not being particularly recommendable, depending on the article, for he's sometimes also recommendable, The Independent, UK, isn't always particularly good. When it's good, then it's good, but it's not always good; sometimes being quite the contrary.

I'm glad Obama is taking time to develop a winning strategy rather than just continuing Bush's losing strategy. For years now, Bush has been neglected Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's time to do this the right way. Thank G*d we have Obama.

AlJazeera is a great news network; straightforward and comprehensive, without US corporate filters and egocentric commentators.

Stop the Escalation!
End the Occupation!

ezeflyer and locust,

locust did not mention who his post was in response to and I believe it was for ezeflyer's post.

ezeflyer wrote:

"ezeflyer February 8th, 2009 3:11 pm

Why are we at war with Afghanistan? What did they ever do to us? If we don't like the Taliban, why ..."

Then locust replied with the following.

"locust February 8th, 2009 5:41 pm

Have you never read my posts? I've put them here often enough.

Step 1. After 9/11, Congress enacted Public Law 107-40, authorizing the President to use military force against those (nations, groups, individuals) deemed responsible for 9/11. In other words, Congress sort-of declared war against enemies to be named later.
Worse than that nonsense is the war goal specified - 'preventing future terrorism' by those enemies.

Step 2. ...

Step 3. ..."

Etc.

That's only the stuff to fool people, and to try to garner public support, for the real answer is that the whole war "on" terrorism is all for PROFIT, corporatist govt in the U.S.A., this corporate fascist sort of reason, along with establishing "full spectrum dominance", to satisfy insane desires of or for power, and, again, corporate profiteering. Iow, it's like former USMC Major General Smedley Butler wrote with, "WAR IS A RACKET".

With Afghanistan there are two rackets and one is the energy resources industry, while the other is international heroin trafficking so a little more covertly conducted is this latter racket. However, there's also the encirclement of Russia and perhaps China, which is a topic and possibility to not be neglected in considering U.S. and NATO building up in this whole general area of planet Earth.

This is the real [reason]. The Step. 1, 2, 3, and so on information locust provided is or at least seems to be true, but those are not representative of the actual reasons for these GWoT wars the U.S. and its coalition military allies have been and continue to be waging on countries of Asia, and really the whole world or planet of us, i.e., all of humanity. "Full spectrum dominance" does involve all of humanity. And because those steps are not reflective of the actual reasons, they therefore do not answer ezeflyer's "why?" questions.

Anyway, this is why 9-11, the attacks, was either an inside job, or else the Bush et al administration made sure to let these attacks happen.

Interesting and short enough is some very good information well written up Wade Frazier on 9-11. See "World Trade Center Prostscript" in the following page of his. Or, actually, the following jumps directly to that section of the page.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#wtc

I certainly also recommend reading much of the rest of this above page by Wade Frazier, but won't suggest any particular order for reading it. Convenient jump links are at the top of the page.

If the M.I.C. doesn't get their promised war in Afghanistan they'll just choose another country.

Or they'll instruct Obama to make up some B.S. about why the combat troops must stay in Iraq.

The M.I.C. beast must be fed.

Thousands of people will join on the 6th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq to March on the Pentagon in opposition to the occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. Visit http://www.PentagonMarch.org for details on the March 21 March on the Pentagon, and to get involved.

Paul Siemering
when bush decided to attack Iraq, he was forced to concoct fairy tales, and have his stooge read them out at the U.N. But when he decided he wanted to blast Afghanistan to avenge 9/11, too many people shut up and rolled over and said ok. and are still doing so. In truth there was never any reason for the u.s. to bomb Afghanistan. It was then and is now a war crime. If Obama is really stupid enough to continue this madness he will also be a war criminal.

i'm sure some one from his stable of advisers has told him to do this. that's not an acceptable excuse.we elected him to be president. he needs to start acting like one.

maybe he can call a press conference, and explain that he screwed up when he bought bush's stupid war on terror, and so now he will call it off and get the troops out of Afghanistan.
bombers too

a really simple way of asking is:

Look at the map of the world..look at the map of Central Asia..which are the countries and cultures there...etc...

in that portion of the globe's map.....what is a country that is NOT in THAT map DOING in the centre of a region it doesn't belong to?

the USA? wellll....the answers are simple:

Resources, cheap labor, "opening markets" to Capitalism.

then go back to General Smedley Butler:

"OUR FOREIGN POLICY HAS ALWAYS BEEN GEARED TOWARDS GATHERING AS MUCH OF THE WORLD'S RESOURCES UNTO OURSELVES...AT THE EXPENSE OF WEAKER NATIONS...THE TRUE PURPOSE OF OUR MILITARY IS TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR OUR BIG BOSS: CAPITALISM, AND OUR ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL ASSAULT".

and you get it about right.

translation -- all the way back from Socrates:

"all foreign wars are waged for profit and power,,they are nothing but plunder , rape, pillage and theft of other countries' riches".

translation:

the USA is a RAPIST nation. PERIOD.

"Magarulian February 8th, 2009 10:06 pm

Yes, we can thank our fantasy-man in the heavens that we have B.O.

"President Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security Council, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set strategy across a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues.""

THAT sounds like a fit with the "full spectrum dominance" agenda of the U.S. and its really ruling elites. I'll excerpt from the following article about this FSD matter.

"Remembering Pinter: Is Our Conscience Dead?", by Ann Wright, Dec 26 2008

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/12/26

QUOTE:

On the news today of the death of Harold Pinter, the winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, I remembered hearing his Nobel Laureate lecture/acceptable speech. I was in London in December, 2005 speaking at the annual Stop the War conference when Pinter delivered his speech -- not in Oslo, as Pinter was very sick and could not travel, but in London via TV link.

...

Following is the part of Pinter's lecture that speaks to invasion of Iraq, torture and Guantanamo -- and our collective and individual conscience:

"Art, Truth and Politics"
Noble Lecture by Harold Pinter
December 7, 2005:

... The United States no longer... sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant.

It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

...

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

END QUOTE

Following is a roughly 46-min. video of Harold Pinter's Nobel lecture.

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=GY2Z27Y-HJE

Following is a video I haven't yet viewed, but which should be good and is on the FSD topic, specifically. I haven't viewed this yet, but Pepe Escobar's very good, so I trust this should be good too.

"Full spectrum dominance
Pepe Escobar: Welcome to the new Cold War", April 21 2008

http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=2091

Another reference for the FSD topic of the U.S. govt is the following piece.

"Comments on John Pilger's New Book Freedom Next Time",
by Stephen Lendman, Jun 15 2006

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_stephen__060615_comments_on_john_pil.htm

I'll quote the immediately relevant paragraph from Lendman's article.

QUOTE:

John explains how fraudulent and dangerous Bush's priorities are based on its policy papers and one conceived a few years before it came to power. It began with a 1997 "messianic conspiracy theory" called The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) written by many of the far right neoconservative ideologues now in power. This document is an imperial plan for US global dominance to extend well into the future and be enforced with unchallengeable military power. It was a blueprint for the current "war on terror" (which John calls a "war of terror') and "preventive war" that began after 9/11 and is now ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan with further conflicts likely ahead. The Pentagon goes even further in its Vision 2020 that lays out a goal that calls for "full spectrum dominance." By this is meant the total, unchallengeable control of all land, sea, air and space and the self-given right to enforce it with the use of nuclear or any other kinds of weapons.

END QUOTE

Magarulian:

"Although Jones (national security adviser James L. Jones) said he strongly supports increased resources for the State Department, which is increasingly dwarfed by the size and expanding missions of the Defense Department, he has long been an outspoken proponent of a "pro-active military" in noncombat regions. He has advocated military collaboration with the oil and gas industry and with nongovernmental organizations abroad.

...

Let me repeat a key phrase from the Washington Post: "he (national security adviser James L. Jones) has long been an outspoken proponent of a "pro-active military" in noncombat regions. He has advocated military collaboration with the oil and gas industry and with nongovernmental organizations abroad.""

Certainly worth repeating and it's the purpose of the war on Afghanistan to begin with; oil industry, western oil industry. The heroin production that has skyrocketed also won't be left without much profiteering, but the oil industry of the west is surely the key area of interest.

Besides, who does the U.S. military [really] function for (while it's unknown by U.S. soldiers and their families)? Big Industry(ies), corporate fascists, is or are who the U.S. military really works for! It's definitely [not] for the sake or benefit of The People of the USA or of peoples of any other countries; absolutely not for any of us!

Magarulian:

"... Why do so many of you still support your figurehead - Emperor Obama ..."

Fitting question.

I am proud of the achievements of our men and women in the armed services, who have saved us from existential threats to our freedom. I strongly support our military effort in Afghanistan and all our troops overseas.

The Afghanistan war was a war of self defense, and it did break up a network of al-Qaeda training camps from which terrorists would have gone on striking at the United States. But Bush left the job half done in Afghanistan and ran off to Iraq.

Unlike Iraq, the first Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan were done right. International consensus was achieved, and collective security was invoked.

The war against Iraq was not done right. If the Security Council and the European Union had approved it, then maybe things would have gone differently. After all, I knew of few intelligent people who would have liked to see the Saddam Hussein regime remain in power.

"joehope February 9th, 2009 12:53 am

I am proud of the achievements of our men and women in the armed services, who have saved us from existential threats to our freedom. I strongly support our military effort in Afghanistan and all our troops overseas.

The Afghanistan war was a war of self defense, ..."

THAT'S TOTAL BS! It's another U.S. corporate-fascist war of aggression and for natural resources, and 'FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE'. It has nothing to do with [defence] as far as the real purpose of the U.S. and its coalition allies being there goes.

After 911, Afghanistan offered to turn Osama bin Laden over to an impatial country for trial. For some unknown reason, that offer was not accepted by Bush and Cheney.

Evidently, there is no comprehensive strategy, as of now, regarding the criteria regarding the goals for a successful "win" in the war/occupation of Afghanistan, in President Obama's opinion - according to top USA military personnel. This is why it is not too high on his list...for now.

I believe this is a wise decision on President Obama's part. While it seems to be a popular idea among many Americans for Barack Obama to send as many military personnel as possible to Afghanistan; it is good to know that he is taking the time necessary in that regard. After all, why are USA military personnel in Afghanistan anyhow? Because USA society supposedly has a thirst for revenge for what happened on 9/11 so they desire a military excursion in Afghanistan - THE Third World of the Third World?! Ok...

A poll should be taken as to how many USA citizens TRULY show empathy and compassion toward the welfare of Afghan civilians. Seriously...How many USA citizens want its military to leave the people who call Afghanistan home alone?

It is good to stop and think carefully before using the tactic of mass murder to achieve something undefined.

I am gratified by Obama's willingness to behave in a responsible manner in this instance. It takes honesty and courage to publicly change ones mind as the result of having an opportunity to examine the facts up close.

I strongly suggest he get on TV and radio and lay out the reasons for his decision to the American public. The public will need an immunization against the inevitable rabid ravings of O'Reilly, Hannity and such.

The public needs a chance to grow intellectually to think about things in complex and mature ways. Can we do it? Many of us can if given the chance.

Joe

It seems as though Obamas approach to the Afghanistan problem is to provide the 'Generals' on the ground enough rope to hang themselves in ! If indeed thats his strategy, it is brilliant. The 'Generals' will probably find the supply-issue insurmountable and Obama will use that as an excuse to pull out.