Good article except

The Taliban are at the negotiating table and their most recent position is they will negotiate with the invaders as long as the negotiations in and of themselves do not prolong the invaders occupation.

Secondly is it not a good thing that Karzai is critical of the USA's slaughter of civilians and endless corrupt occupation?

this withdrawal or no withdrawal in 2011 is a bunch of propaganda

I believe it was the British defense or Prime Minister who stated months ago that Britian was in Afghanistan until 2015.

I mean like Britian's not going to be there without the USA.

Did you ever wonder what the "government in a box" which is supposed to provide legitimacy and order to a military conquest looks like? I Imagine a C5 cargo plane flying overhead and dropping a telephone booth like structure which hits the ground and self inflates with the banner "Government for the people" attached to its side. A jeep comes up and a NATO liaison officer walks inside. Soon a platoon of soldiers are deployed outside the box and checkpoints are established. The day passes but none comes up to "the box." At the end of the day the liaison officer leaves and reports to his senior officer that all is going along well. That's what I imagine anyway. In fact we assume that since we are the liberators and that everyone knows we are the good guys, the forces of law and order will just sort of spontaneously self assemble under our benign protection and the area will be made secure under our control. After all the people in the area get a good dose of our overwhelming and withering firepower that is. It might not happen right away-- it might take up to a year to bring these stubborn ignorant tribal savages around to our way of thinking-- but they will come around. How could they not? We are the good guys and we have the big guns.

While I wholeheartedly support the Wikileaks agenda and equally disapprove of the continuing Af/Pak conflict: this whole charade is missing the real story. The real skinny is this b.s. has been going in our White House, Congress, Pentagon, Langley and State Dept. since Ozzie met Harriet. I'm so sick of reading and hearing about this " he said, she said " malarkey when it comes to our international relations. No country, not even the delusional North Koreans, is going to risk being obliterated by the U.S. military. The simple truth is we, as a country and an economic unit, cannot ween ourselves from the war teat. Our economy will collapse without this madness we call " defending and spreading democratic institutions " around the globe. We need a DOD for nat'l security reasons: but it should be the size that is appropriate for drowning in the bathtub when the time comes. That time is fast approaching. This weekend we have a wonderful oppurtunity to celebrate J. Garcia's birthday. We should not miss this historic event: equal in importance to the singing of our nation's anthems at sporting events and political meet-ups of any size. Happy birthday, Jerry!!! Hope life is good at the Mars Motel.

in the meantime, from nat hentoff:
…Also troubled, as Reuters' Entous reported, are certain American military officers who are very much aware that the most murderous of the drone planes are run by the CIA….
...But, Entous adds, other American intelligence officers "proudly tout the drone campaign as the most precise and possibly !!!humane!!! WHAT? targeted killing program in the history of warfare."

Last year, another vigilant reporter, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, described how enamored of the drones President Obama already was. Pincus reported (Aug. 11, 2009): "The Air Force will train more pilots to fly unmanned aerial systems from ground operations centers (thousands of miles away) than pilots to fly fighter or bomb

Siddiqui sez: "The Kandahar mission — no longer referred to as a military offensive but rather as an 'operation,' or 'the reshaping of the climate' — is being transformed into a civilian 'nation-building' project, to deliver a 'government in a box.'"

***
Then why are we calling it a "war?"

Patton must be spinning in his jeep.

On the cover of TIME magazine is a picture of a woman with her nose cut off by the Taliban. This is a war for women's liberation in Afghanistan. Sure, there were other reasons for going into the country. The Taliban had stopped the growing of opium poppies which are used to make heroin. Heroin production needed to be restarted because many people in the USA make large profits directly and indirectly from it. But women's liberation is a key objective, at least for some people, and so the Taliban must be prevented from regaining power.

As for the Afghan defence forces being corrupt, what type of recruit would one expect to sign up to serve and train with a military invader and occupier?

If China (let's say) had invaded the USA in the 60's to protect the Civil Rights movement in the American South, certainly a laudable goal, what sort of Americans would have joined forces with the Chinese?

The USA seems to live a Walter Mitty fantasy life in which everyone, everywhere, all around the world, sees the USA as the "City on the Hill," a beacon of light and freedom, and never mind the invasion of Mexico and the Phillipines, the takeover of the Hawaiian islands, the re-installation of the French in Indochina/Vietnam, and "banana republics" all through Central and South America.

The US Marine Corps still brags about the conquest of Mexico in the Marine Corps Hymn, "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli..." Texas still "Remembers the Alamo," where slaveholders bravely asserted their "natural right" to degrade and hold other human beings in captivity and involuntary servitude, as long as their skin colour was dark. You'd think they might be just a little embarrassed.

Contrary to what the article states, the offensive operation against Kandahar is underway.

Kill, baby, kill. That is how you win hearts and minds.

The US needs to admit that, like the communists in Vietnam, the next evolution in the government of Afghanistan will be (and was) the Taliban. Yes there will be a bloodbath, non-islamic monuments and art will be destroyed, and women may well remain subject to barbaric tribal customs.

Prior to 9-11 the Taliban government was negotiating internationally, had closed down the poppy trade, and post 9-11 showed some willingness to work with the US in capturing bin Laden. As in Iraq, nothing was good enough for the neocons. They had their excuse to get "boots on the ground".

The Taliban, a regional organization, had to know their friend bin-Laden had become an international terrorist, but he had helped them defeat the Russians. They probably wish they had reigned him in while they had a chance.

Obama needs to stop trying to clean up the neocon mess by "nation building" and "surges", negotiate some protection for our Afghan allies, and get us out. What a waste!

I originally posted this elsewhere but it seemed even more apropos here - excuse the double post:

Please read the latest from Gates as quoted from Christine Armanapour's TV show this morning.

Then ponder the question ' Why are we there?'

"We are not there to -- to take on a nationwide reconstruction or construction project in Afghanistan. What we have to do is focus our efforts on those civilian aspects and governance to help us accomplish our se -- our security objective. We are in Afghanistan because we were attacked from Afghanistan, not because we want to try and -- and build a better society in Afghanistan. But doing things to improve governance, to improve development in Afghanistan, to the degree it contributes to our security mission and to the effectiveness of the Afghan government in the security arena, that's what we're going to do."

http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/week-transcript-pelosi-gates/story?id=11298444&page=3

The importance of the Wikileaks is the simple fact that they happened. To have stuck a butcher knife up to the hilt into the throat of the U.S. government is an enormous accomplishment. Every time Obama or one of his designated stooges opens their mouths from now on to regurgitate one more of their lies re Af-ganef-stan they will sound like someone w/o a larynx talking through one of those little portable devices that make you sound like a robot talking in a nightmare.

The only hope is that the US will run out of money!

We can't leave until Israel gives us permission.

We need to broaden our discussion about US military occupations to include ALL international operations. The talk now is of Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

But what of Latin America? Africa? Asia?

Closing the School of the Americas seems like a distant thought. Colombia is in the process of planning an attack on Venezuela, potentially with assistance by the US government because our corporations don't like their autonomous economic policies.

We can't lose sight of the need to curtail military occupation as economic policy in all of these regions around the globe.

The Taliban are militant Pashtuns. Western propaganda should never be taken at face value. The war lords of the Northern Alliance were no supporters of women's rights either. It would have taken an evolution in a desperately poor country that had gone through CIA induced Soviet invasion and occupation followed by a dreadful civil war to come to terms with itself and its different tribal groupings. The Taliban sprang from refugees in Saudi funded the madrasses in Pakistan to overcome the Northern Alliance forces and eventually to capture Kabul and hold most of the country. The War Lords got their revenge and attained power with American military help and attained positions in Karzai's governments. The Taliban were out in the cold following the USA invasion and NATO occupation.

When the women's rights issue is mentioned what about during NATO war making activities? Would that children's rights too were mentioned? Blown to bits so often by NATO bombings both. So too were men of course. Civilians caught in the midst of such war? Women's rights?

The Taliban are Pashtun Afghans. That is the by far the biggest group of Afghans tribes. They largely occupy their Pashtun homelands straddling an artificial line across Af/Pak borders. They are really well separated from other areas of Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance of Tajiks, Uzbecks and so on have been their mortal enemies in recent conflict in that region during their brutal civil war.

Seymour Hersh reported recently from Afghanistan like this.

US Special forces would capture some unknown Pashtun and question him on information he might have about the dreaded Taliban. When finished they would hand him over to their supporting Afghan army troops. The prisoner would then be shot by these government troops and they'd all move on in search of other unfortunate persons.

Women's rights can only come from encouragement, inducements and Afghan women themselves. Education is the most important ingredient. Pashtuns are not The Taliban.

The Taliban were created to fight the civil war and were ignorantly steeped in The Wahabi sects Saudi sponsored religious sectarianism. They were popular among large sections of the Afghan population for bringing order back and security following the civil war. Despite their strict form of Islamic interpretation and cruelty with other group they had conquered in revenge attacks, they staved off any national rebellions because they managed to bring security back to the land. After they appeared reluctant to oblige the USA with Osama Bin Laden's head on a plate, they were deemed the worst of the worst with Al Queda.

Most Afghans would have disagreed with that assessment. They would have said that the War lords of The Northern Alliance were worse than the Taliban. That included the women across Afghanistan. Its on record that the overwhelming view from these women at that time was that life under the Taliban with all its restrictions, was better than life under the War Lords had been. That at least they could walk the streets without being raped an robbed or worse? Crime fell dramatically and security for travel was established for many.

The subsequent denial of education for females and so on was suited to ridiculously ignorant fundamentalist interpretations that masses of otherwise illiterate uneducated foot soldiers had imbibed in Pakistan's madrass'.

Victory went to the new evolving Taliban leaderships head as did the defeat of the Communist Russian invader. But their extremism became much more obviously entrenched and pronounced as its leadership fought off the remnants of The Northern Alliance resistance in the Northern sector of the country as it came under cruise missile attacks from Clinton's USA. That really pissed then off! From then on they became much more extreme about their policies on women.

While the Leaders such as Karzi, Obama, Joe Biden, Hilary Clinton, Roberts Gates, who live in comfort and luxury and Taliban War lords, Generals, argue over surges, nation building, women's rights, how to defeat each other, drone assassination and civilian deaths in Pakistan ect... U.S. troops , their families and Afghanistan civilians are being mutilated, blinded , made deaf, orphaned, widowed, starved, homeless, refugees,suffering and dying.They are forced to wait for leaders living in safety, comfort and luxury to wake up out of there dream world, smell the blood, guts, dead bodies, and wasted money, and realize that neither side can win. Get U.S. troops, contractors,CIA, mercenaries, and drones out of Afghanistan and Pakistan now.

As one of the boots on the ground activists during the Bush pandemic I am not optomistic. Protesting govt. lies and folly has become a spectator sport. I marched with a crowd of 40,000 through the streets of Seattle protesting the Iraq war. That's about how many attend a Seahawks football game.
Even after the obviously fraudulent Bin Laden confession tape, we waved the flags and sent our troops off to kill and be killed. It was, remember, Bush who sounded the charge. Why would he lie? Such an honest fellow. A Yale man. Good stock. We are hopelessly, sadly, beyond redemption. As a nation we can not distinguish between truth and lies.

Under what circumstances should we go to war? World war 2 was a war of necessity. We were attacked by the Japanese. Defense was necessary. But our more recent wars have been PREEMPTIVE. The Vietnam war was based on a lie,viz. Tonkin Gulf. Iraq war 2 was based on a lie, viz. weapons of mass destruction. The Aghanistan war was based on a presumption, viz. the terrorists would otherwise use Afghanistan as their MAIN launching pad.

Haroon Siddiqui may be right in characterizing as "overplayed" while talking about "Pakistan’s con game: taking arms and money from the U.S. to take on the Taliban but, in fact, nurturing them as its proxy." But that is only in the present context, and that too can only be an "exaggeration", but NOT false. But I'm not sure he can invoke the name of "The Guardian" newspaper to assert that "the documents do not conclusively prove one way or the other what Pakistan is up to".

There have been a few articles in The Guardian that refer to some fabricated evidence or exaggerated claims of Pakistani involvement, but I could find NONE that questions the continuing relationship of the Pakistani establishment with the Afghan Taliban. In fact, all the stories acknowledge that it is continuing, and some even refer to the Taliban clearly as Pakistan's creation.
Example:
"WikiLeaks and the ISI-Taliban nexus" - Peter Galbraith
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/26/wikileaks-isi-taliban-nexus
>>Pakistan's intelligence leaders should ask whether their support of the Taliban is worth the price the country may have to pay.

Even the one Guardian article that directly questions the validity of parts of the Wikileaks documents and the inferences from them regarding Pakistan's involvement acknowledges Pakistan's role in creating the Taliban and its continuing relationship and calculations:
"Afghanistan war logs: Clandestine aid for Taliban bears Pakistan's fingerprints" - Declan Walsh
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/pakistan-isi-accused-taliban-afghanistan

>>"The shaky intelligence does not mean the US does not believe the ISI is supporting the Taliban. The spy agency nurtured the Taliban in the 1990s and, although it purported to sever its ties after 9/11, is believed to maintain the relationship.

>>The British and US governments have repeatedly urged Pakistan to root out the Taliban from their sanctuary inside the border, with little effect. In July 2008 the deputy head of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, flew to Islamabad to reportedly confront the ISI with evidence that the agency orchestrated a suicide attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul that month which killed 54 people including the Indian defence attache. The CIA claimed to have intercepted phone conversations between ISI officers and the militants who carried out the attack.

>>Pakistani strategists see the Taliban as a useful proxy to marginalise the influence of arch-rival India. Indeed plots to attack Indian facilities in Afghanistan provide some of the most plausible allegations in the files. One report from November 2007 said the ISI was plotting an attack on the Indian consulate in Jalalabad; another, titled "ISI order murder and kidnappings", has the agency offering between $15,000 and $30,000 for the assassination of Indian road workers."

Haroon Siddiqui also seems to clearly go easy on Pakistan when he seems to explain away that country "looking out for its own long-term interests, especially given that it has suffered the spillover of two wars (Soviet: 1980-88 and NATO: 2001 to date)."

There is a BIG difference between these two wars. During the Soviet occupation, Pakistan was a willing participant, and their military/intelligence establishment benefited enormously, in more ways than one. First of all, they were a conduit for the weapons to the Mujahideen. They were able to use their close ties with the USA back then to make some grandiose plans for the post-Soviet days in Afghanistan. India was seen as pro-Soviet and Pakistan played this factor to the hilt. The Pakistani establishment needs a "friendly" government in Kabul to provide them a "strategic depth" on their western border, allowing them to focus on the east, with India. They HAVE used various sundry militant groups as a low-cost option of waging war and they are not going to give up that option that easily.

From curmudgeon's post quoting Defense Secretary Gates on ABC news over the weekend:

"We are not there to -- to take on a nationwide reconstruction or construction project in Afghanistan. What we have to do is focus our efforts on those civilian aspects and governance to help us accomplish our se -- our security objective. We are in Afghanistan because we were attacked from Afghanistan, not because we want to try and -- and build a better society in Afghanistan. But doing things to improve governance, to improve development in Afghanistan, to the degree it contributes to our security mission and to the effectiveness of the Afghan government in the security arena, that's what we're going to do."

The United States was NOT "attacked from Afghanistan." The United States was attacked by the United States from within the United States.

Discussions between Dubya and Taliban representatives at Crawford, Texas in early 2001 had not gone very well on the pipeline deal sought by Dubya and the energy cartels reorganized in secret by Cheney.

Something had to give. Today we have a "puppet regime" in Afghanistan headed by a slightly charismatic former oilman who grows increasingly distant from his puppeteers while his close relative helps organize the international opium/heroin trade.

Meanwhile there is no evidence that the U.S. is "winning" in Afghanistan. With relatively minor sociological differences between now and the Soviet occupation, the same basic forces that brought the Taliban to prominence back then exist today.

Most people want some degree of stability and predictability in their lives. (That is a major reason why so many of us put up with crappy jobs...) The Afghans are no different from most people in this regard while outside forces impinge on their own internal efforts at reconciliation.

None of the recent major players seems to have read Robert Frost.

Reagan: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

Gorbachev: "Okay."

Frost to Netanyahu: "Tear down this wall. Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

Netanyahu to Frost: "Who gives a damn about fences, or neighbors. We have the Bomb and the Old Testament right to use it."

The analogy here is by no means perfect, but Netanyahu is essentially mimicking the role of Great Britain during its days of conquest (which were more auspicious).

Ultimately, the Brits failed in their conquest of the Indian subcontinent, including Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan (and do not forget the Punjab or Kashmir. In retreating from an agregious military defeat in Afghanistan, the Brits drew up the so-called "DURAND LINE," which essentially split the Afghan Pashtuns from today's Pakistani Pashtuns living in districts that many journalists today describe as something like "ungoverned." Others now also describe this as the "AfPak War."

The drawing up of national borders has been iffy since Romulus and Remos (sp?) argued over which wolf tit to suck on. (Or was that later than Carthage or Troy?)

Note that as a senator, current VP Biden seriously proposed (while running for President) dividing Iraq the way Caesar sought to divide Gaul---into three parts, based essentially on ethnic and religious lines, as opposed to the current national lines defined by Western Imperial Powers now centuries ago.

It is legitimate to ask the extent to which 18th and 19th-century Imperialist borders contributed to exterminations. For example, of Armenians and Kurds. And Palestinians. (In this context, that Mexican Chiapis Commandante Zero makes sense! (My apology for taking so long to begin to acknowledge your Wisdom, especially as goes to Monsanto CORN.I have no objection to also calling it maize, but I was raised with CORN.)

Gorbachev recently redrew the nature of the USSR. Perhaps the most nearly bloodless revolution in history. (I suspect he was a Beatles fan!)

*****

Perhaps it is actually time to redraw Nationalist Borders. (North Korea/South Korea, CHAING KAI CHECK!

But of course Hillary is no Eleanor Roosevelt.

And I am no FDR! Please, will someone else put a flower in the mouth of the cannon?

Is there any way to tell the young that not all the elders are IDIOTS? I suspect that MOST OF US TRIED. That we seem to have failed says a hell of a lot about Capitalist Society.

A small note to China...

You redrew Tibet and isolated the Dalai Lama at a time when China could have used the Spiritual as much as Chairman Mao.

Who has shown how many nuclear weapons the U.S. had by the time General Corncob MacArthur challenged Truman to bomb China during the Korean, er, War? (Sometimes I think MacArthur may have been right, a view not welcomed in Academia.)

(This it NOT a small issue. How come the U.S. can claim to have around 10,000 nuclear weapons while it is so hard for Iran to build even one, while starved North Korea represents a nuclear threat?)

Perhaps it is intentional that the lies are beyond any reckoning. But then, who is in charge of the lies? Let alone the truth.

I expect our resident SW AmerIndian to respond at will, while I would like to point out that several other cultures existed in North America for centuries and long before those white kids with the guns showed up. Also, those horses...

I am so tired of the lies.

Call me Upper Missouri Mandan. Not that I am but I share their vision. Call me Wisconsin Menomininee. Not that I am, but I have fished trout with them.

There never was One Indian. They remain many.

I wish most of you all well.

-30-

Obama may begin a limited pull out next year but because of the stated mission, the military will be there strong as long as the USA can keep borrowing enough money to pay for the puppets we set up and when the money gets tight, the corrupt puppets will join with the resistance and they will kick Obama and the next president out.

--"The New York Times. But the British paper The Guardian concluded, rightly, that the documents do not conclusively prove one way or the other what Pakistan is up to. We can be sure that it is up to what everyone else is up to: looking out for its own long-term interests, especially given that it has suffered the spillover of two wars (Soviet: 1980-88 and NATO: 2001 to date)."

This is a mindbendingly pathetic apology for Pakistans travesties. Pakistan is clearly involved in destabilizing Afghanistan so it can control it through its Talib proxies. Please read Tariq Ali's excellent analysis, before waffling.

"Looking out for its own interests" essentially means Pakistan is willing to put the Taliban in power in Afghanistan at the risk of sending Afghanistan's long-suffering population to the gallows. If Pakistan genuinely desires peace in the region it can pull the plug to its support of the Taliban. American liberals of course are too busy cussing out their own Military and studiously avoiding the baleful glare of the elephant in the room.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5EmiEYj0L4

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