“I watched this interview on RT. Karzai was quite forthright & seemingly honest in his assessment of US hegemony. All he asked for was for Afghanistan to be left alone in peace to rebuild its natural economy without interference from the middle men in the CIA.”
The US is arming the Haqqani network, a group he said is proven to be an arm of ISIS.
According to Hamid Karzai, former President of Afghanistan, the United States has no intention or interest in winning the war on terror. He explains what he called the ‘American double policy’ that includes arming the Haqqani network, a group he said is proven to be an arm of ISIS. “it was this that caused… and other facts that were available to us, that we have heard from Americans time and again,” explained Karzai.
The former president went further to criticize the Americans because of their duplicitous role in his country in what he said was a counter-productive strategy. “You cannot be helping the victim and the perpetrator of an atrocity at the same time. If they are with us, fighting against terrorism, they should not be with those who are supporting terrorism.”
“The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.
Murray said part of the motive in hyping up the threat of Islamic terrorism in Uzbekistan through forced confessions was to ensure the country remained on-side in the war on terror, so that the pipeline could be built.
“There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, it’s about oil, it’s not about democracy.”
You’ve got to hand it to the brain surgeons running America’s foreign policy. They possess an uncanny ability to seamlessly forge alliances, break alliances and turn former allies into existential enemies, while simultaneously demonizing regimes, making amends with demonized regimes, and then quickly forming alliances with the same bitter enemies.
Friends become enemies and enemies become friends in the blink of an eye. This is what happens when a global empire possesses no real foreign policy other than the pursuit of economic opportunities for mega corporations and the military-industrial complex. The result is perpetual war, countless dead and injured young men and women, and billions of riches for a small and ruthless cadre of oligarchs. This is American foreign policy and those are its results.
Of course, I’m not the only one to notice the repercussions of America’s for profit foreign policy. Former U.S. darling and outgoing Afghan President Hamid Karzai slammed American foreign policy in his farewell speech earlier today. Here are excerpts from New York Times’ coverage:
The Afghan president refused to visit the Bagram military base when US President Barack Obama made a surprise visit there to meet troops on May 25. Similarly, the American president turned down a proposal for talks at Karzai’s palace in downtown Kabul.
Air Force One flew all night to bring Obama from Washington, DC, to the airstrip of Kabul’s international airport in Bagram.
Officially, the American president had come to the US largest military base in Afghanistan to address troops ahead of the end of Afghan campaign.
US Secretary of State John Kerry held talks with President Hamid Karzai in Kabul on Friday to try to advance troubled negotiations with Afghanistan on some US troops staying in the country after 2014.
Karzai said this week that he was prepared to walk away from the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) talks if Afghanistan was not happy with its conditions.
This article from the New York Times further solidifies the notion that we clearly have no idea what we are doing anywhere, whether it relates to the domestic economy or foreign policy. While the American citizenry remains unemployed and increasingly on food stamps, we are paying tens of millions of dollars to Afghan warlords and drug dealers so that they can build their “dream homes.” My favorite line is: “the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.” Makes sense. We are simply exporting our domestic economic model abroad.
KABUL, Afghanistan — For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”
Kind of like Corzine at MF Global!
Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks during a joint press conference with NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen at the presidential palace in Kabul on March 4, 2013.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai says the US fights in Afghanistan with the intention of gaining access to the country’s underground resources, adding that Washington’s so-called war on terror is not real, Press TV reports.
“Americans have asked Afghans to give them Afghanistan’s mining contracts, and I said ‘Bring your contracts’… Lots of mines are hidden in Helmand and from the start they have been doing their investigations and finishing their photography. But now they understand that we know about them,” Hamid Karzai said in a Tuesday speech during an official visit to southern Helmand province.
The president went on to say that the US-led foreign forces’ so-called anti-terror war in Afghanistan is not a real one and that the Americans fight for their own interests in the country.
Karzai once again slammed US double standards for holding secret talks with Taliban militants in certain Persian Gulf states and Europe.
“Both Taliban and Americans drink tea and eat chocolate together, but they come and attack civilians in Afghanistan,” Karzai noted.
Karzai had earlier accused Washington of holding unilateral talks with the Taliban militant group, saying that there are “ongoing daily talks between Taliban, American and foreigners in Europe and in the (Persian) Gulf states.”
Referring to two Taliban bombings in Kabul and Khost on March 9, the Afghan president said on Sunday, “Those bombs … were not a show of force to America. They were in service of America. It was in the service of the 2014 slogan to warn us if they (Americans) are not here then Taliban will come.”
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has criticized the U.S. military for violating an agreement and illegally continuing to hold Afghans as prisoners against the orders of the Afghan government and courts.
The deal, signed in March, gave the US six months to transfer the captured Afghans – an agreement the US has not upheld. Karzai released a statement Monday calling the failure to hand over detainees “a serious breach of the Memorandum of Understanding.” The Afghan president also ordered his forces to seize control of the Parwan detention facility, where US forces continue to hold prisoners in a closed-off section, many of which were recently captured.
Karzai spokesman Aimal Faizi told reporters that US troops are illegally holding more than 70 detainees whose release has been ordered by Afghan courts. Afghan courts have acquitted 57 of these prisoners, but the US has still refused to let them go, citing them as a danger to US national security.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has good reasons for trying to shut down US investigations into corruption in his government. The Afghan aristocracy has always run the nation’s heroin trade. But it was the CIA that created it.
(What follows is excerpted from Chapter 8: Project Frankenstein: Afghanistan:
In 1933 King Mohammed Zaher Shah took the throne in Afghanistan, ruling the country in feudalistic fashion until he was deposed by his cousin Mohammed Daoud in 1973. A handful of families including the Karzais and the Kalilzidads (Zalmay Kalilzidad is US Ambassador to Afghanistan) owned nearly all arable land, while most Afghans languished amidst some of the planet’s worst poverty. Finally, they’d had enough.
Americans and Northern Alliance “Friends”…False Flag Terror, Drugs, Staged “Taliban” Attacks
Everyone in the world knows America’s invasion of Iraq was a lie, an oil raid, from day one. Everyone who stood against Bush and Cheney is dead, in jail or in hiding.
Similarly, anyone who, from day one, knew 9/11 had a “smell” about it was eliminated, down to academics, diplomats, intelligence agents, anyone who spoke up and thousands did ON 9/11.
A STARTLING FACT TO EVERYONE BUT THOSE RUNNING THE WAR:
Not only is there no Al Qaeda, but what we know to be “the Taliban” is actually the Northern Alliance. The terror acts, persecution of women, the extremism, is all orchestrated and staged by CIA contractors with Blackwater and related companies, using Northern Alliance drug lords and their gangs pretending to be “Taliban.”
This, in itself, is only one of the Bush era scandals. Now we have had access to an intelligence dump from Afghanistan.
The facts are startling. That war, our “good war,” was even worse and is being continued by trickery.
We have startling reports of human trafficking, children being stolen around Afghanistan and sold into sexual slavery by the tens of thousands, stories of terror bombings and assassinations meant to prolong war, rig elections, end negotiations and compromise and control key regions to maximize drug profits.
With full access to “on the ground” intelligence in every province of Afghanistan, the truth about that war will make you sick. Not one word that hits the press is true.
We will start with the recent visit by General Dempsey. He had just left Tel Aviv after telling Netanyahu that America would never support an attack on Iran. NEVER. When Dempsey landed, his plane was rocketed and blamed on the Taliban.
President intervenes in case of 19-year-old woman who has spent two years in jail after reporting rape by a relative
An Afghan woman jailed for adultery after she was raped by a relative is set to be freed – but only after agreeing to marry the man who attacked her.
The case, which has highlighted the plight of Afghan women jailed for so-called moral crimes, was to be the subject of a documentary film funded by the European Union – until diplomats censored it out of fear for the woman’s welfare, and for their relations with the Afghan government.
But the decision not to broadcast the film, unintentionally led to a storm of publicity that has resulted in the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, intervening in the case of the 19-year-old woman, named Gulnaz.
Karzai, who will soon head to an international conference on Afghanistan in Bonn to seek financial support from foreign donors, ordered Gulnaz to be released on condition that she and her attacker agree to mediation.
In a statement released on Thursday night, the presidential palace said Gulnaz would be released after she agreed to become the second wife of her rapist – a prospect that supporters say she had dreaded.
In Afghan culture, marrying the father of a child born out of wedlock is seen as a way of “legitimising” the child, even in cases involving rape.
The documentary’s British director, Clementine Malpas, said Gulnaz’s decision would have been made under duress. “She has told me that the rapist had destroyed her life because no one else would marry her after what happened to her,” Malpas said. “She feels like she has no other option than to marry him and it’s the only way to bring peace between her and his family.
“I know she wants honour but I also know she doesn’t want to marry this man. And of course I am worried about what the future holds for her because of this decision.”
A top U.S. general in Afghanistan was fired Friday for making disparaging remarks about Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his government.
Maj. Gen. Peter Fuller, deputy commander of the NATO training mission in Afghanistan, made the remarks in an interview with Politico that was published Thursday.
Fuller told Politico that major players in the Afghan government are “isolated from reality.” Fuller reacted angrily to claims from Karzai that Afghanistan would side with Pakistan if it were to go to war with the United States.
Fuller called Karzai’s statements “erratic,” adding, “Why don’t you just poke me in the eye with a needle! You’ve got to be kidding me … I’m sorry, we just gave you $11.6 billion and now you’re telling me, ‘I don’t really care’?”
Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), released a statement Friday saying Fuller was to be relieved of his duties, “effective immediately.”
America and Afghanistan are close to signing a strategic pact which would allow thousands of United States troops to remain in the country until at least 2024, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
The agreement would allow not only military trainers to stay to build up the Afghan army and police, but also American special forces soldiers and air power to remain.
The prospect of such a deal has already been met with anger among Afghanistan’s neighbours including, publicly, Iran and, privately, Pakistan.
It also risks being rejected by the Taliban and derailing any attempt to coax them to the negotiating table, according to one senior member of Hamid Karzai’s peace council.
A withdrawal of American troops has already begun following an agreement to hand over security for the country to Kabul by the end of 2014.
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — With three rounds of pistol fire, President Hamid Karzai’s half brother was assassinated Tuesday morning in the city he dominated for years, opening a power vacuum that could destabilize Afghan politics in a region at the heart of the American war against the Taliban.
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan, was meeting with tribal elders and politicians in his heavily fortified home when longtime confidant Sardar Mohammad arrived with two weapons, one of them concealed, according to an account by a U.S. official.
Mohammad, a police commander, turned over one gun to a guard to appear unarmed, then told Karzai he had important information to share. As they entered a private room, he handed Karzai a piece of paper, the U.S. official said, and as he read it, Mohammad opened fire with the second pistol. Mohammad was then gunned down by Karzai’s guards.
An Afghan soldier talks on the radio as they conduct a joint patrol with French soldiers in Helmand province
KABUL (Reuters) – Afghan security forces are freeing captured senior Taliban for payment or political motives, with President Hamid Karzai and his powerful brother among those authorising and requesting releases.
The practice is so systemic that the Taliban have a committee focused on getting their fighters out of jail. It undermines the deterrent effect of arrest and the potential of the prisoner population as a card to play in peace talks, analysts say.
The releases, which were confirmed to Reuters by several sources familiar with a range of cases, also raise questions about the capacity and political will of Afghan security forces meant to be taking over from foreign troops starting next year.
U.S. forces will begin drawing down numbers from next July and NATO hopes to meet Karzai’s 2014 target for all security to be provided by Afghan police and military.
But cases uncovered by Reuters including that of Ghulam Haidar, a top insurgent in the southern Taliban heartland of Kandahar, suggest that a web of complex loyalties and widespread corruption are undermining the fight against the insurgency.
Ghulam Haidar, meaning “servant of God”, is a common name in Afghanistan so when Canadian forces turned one of the most dangerous men in Kandahar city over to their Afghan counterparts in March, they may not have realised who he was.
Days later he was walking free again, according to three sources who have investigated prisoner releases or have seen documents about Haidar’s capture. They asked not to be named because they are not authorised to release information.
“They took this guy into custody in mid-March, but he was out again in a few days. This is a classic example of what has been happening,” one former Western official told Reuters.
The White House said on Monday the world has “every reason to be concerned” about Iranian influence in Afghanistan, after President Hamid Karzai admitted receiving bags of money from Tehran.
Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan’s natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.
“The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.
“There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, it’s about oil, it’s not about democracy.”
Karzai: Blackwater behind terrorism
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said US private security firms, including Xe Services LLC, formerly known as Blackwater, are being behind terrorism in the country.
At a press conference in Kabul, Karzai said that US security companies have been behind explosions that have claimed the lives of women and children.
The Afghan president added that they have caused “blasts and terrorism” in different parts of Afghanistan over the past months.
The Afghan president said his administration cannot even distinguish between the bomb blasts carried out by US security firms and those of the Taliban militants.
“In fact we don’t yet know how many of these blasts are by Taliban and how many are carried out by them (US security companies).”
Blackwater has been involved in the murder of several Afghan citizens over the past years. The company has also been struggling with a trail of legal cases and civil lawsuits, including one for killing 17 Iraqi civilians during a Baghdad shootout in 2007.
Earlier in June, the CIA reportedly admitted that Blackwater had been loading bombs on US drones that target suspected militants in neighboring Pakistan.
President Barack Obama and Commander of U.S. Central Command Gen. David Petraeus depart the White House Oval Office
The US Central Intelligence Agency is running and paying for a secret 3,000-strong army of Afghan paramilitaries whose main aim is assassinating Taliban and al-Qa’ida operatives not just in Afghanistan but across the border in neighbouring Pakistan’s tribal areas, according to Bob Woodward’s explosive book.
Although the CIA has long been known to run clandestine militias in Afghanistan, including one from a base it rents from the Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s half-brother in the southern province of Kandahar, the sheer number of militiamen directly under its control have never been publicly revealed.
Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars, describes these forces as elite, well-trained units that conduct highly sensitive covert operations into Pakistan as part of a stepped-up campaign against al-Qa’ida and Afghan Taliban havens there. Two US newspapers published the claims after receiving copies of the manuscript.
The secret army is split into “Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams”, and is thought to be responsible for the deaths of many Pakistani Taliban fighters who have crossed the border into Afghanistan to fight Nato and Afghan government forces there.
There are ever-increasing numbers of “kill-or-capture” missions undertaken by US Special Forces against Afghan Taliban and foreign fighters, who hope to drive rank-and-file Taliban towards the Afghan government’s peace process by eliminating their leaders. The suspicion is that the secret army is working in close tandem with them.
A bleak Ghazni Province seems to offer little, but a Pentagon study says it may have among the world’s largest deposits of lithium. (The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits – including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium – are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.
While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.
KABUL — A blizzard of bank notes is flying out of Afghanistan — often in full view of customs officers at the Kabul airport — as part of a cash exodus that is confounding U.S. officials and raising concerns about the money’s origin.
The cash, estimated to total well over $1 billion a year, flows mostly to the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, where many wealthy Afghans now park their families and funds, according to U.S. and Afghan officials. So long as departing cash is declared at the airport here, its transfer is legal.
But at a time when the United States and its allies are spending billions of dollars to prop up the fragile government of President Hamid Karzai, the volume of the outflow has stirred concerns that funds have been diverted from aid. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, for its part, is trying to figure out whether some of the money comes from Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade. And officials in neighboring Pakistan think that at least some of the cash leaving Kabul has been smuggled overland from Pakistan.
“All this money magically appears from nowhere,” said a U.S. official who monitors Afghanistan’s growing role as a hub for cash transfers to Dubai, which has six flights a day to and from Kabul.
Meanwhile, the United States is stepping up efforts to stop money flow in the other direction — into Afghanistan and Pakistan in support of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Senior Treasury Department officials visited Kabul this month to discuss the cash flows and other issues relating to this country’s infant, often chaotic financial sector.
This is “winning the hearts and minds of people” in action. This is how the US creates real terrorists.
Soldiers wake up! You die for nothing in Afghanistan except corporate profit benefiting only the elite.
The following videos were posted to YouTube by the Real News Network on Oct. 26 and Nov. 4, 2009.
The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.
Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.
“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”
Former UK ambassador Craig Murray
Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is “endemic” to the country’s justice system.
Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a “totalitarian” state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.
Suspects in Uzbekistan’s gulags “were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they’d been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes.”
“I was absolutely stunned — it changed my whole world view in an instant — to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn’t do the torture ourselves,” Murray said.
IT’S THE PIPELINE, STUPID
Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.
Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan’s natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.
“The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.
Robert Fisk, The Independent’s award-winning Middle East correspondent:
“US forces were participating in a civil war in Vietnam while claiming they were supporting democracy and the sovereignty of the country. In Lebanon in 1982, they claimed to be supporting the “democratically” elected President Amin Gemayel and took the Christian Maronite side in the civil war. And now, after Disneyworld elections, they are on the Karzai-government side against the Pashtun villagers of southern Afghanistan among whom the Taliban live. Where is the next My Lai? Journalists should avoid predictions. In this case I will not. Our Western mission in Afghanistan is going to end in utter disaster.”
Change you can believe in!
Why Karzai?
The man who spotted Karzai’s leadership potential and recruited him to “the fold” was then RAND (the Santa Monica, California think tank, mostly conducting contract research for the Pentagon) program director, now US National Security Council member and special Bush envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad. Like Karzai, Khalilzad is an ethnic Pashtun (born Mazar-i-Sharif, PhD University of Chicago). He headed Bush’s defense department transition team, and served under present US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the Reagan State and Bush I Defense Departments. Also like Karzai (whom Mullah Omar once asked to represent the Taliban at the UN), Khalilzad early on supported and urged engagement of the Taliban regime, only to drop such notions when the true nature of the regime became patently obvious by 1998. And one further thing both men have in common is that in 1996/97 they advised American oil company Unocal on the US$2 billion project of a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline. In 2000, Khalilzad invited Karzai to address a RAND seminar on Afghanistan; the same year, Karzai also testified before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and met periodically with Christina Rocca, then a Senate aide (to Kansas Republican Sen Sam Brownback), now the assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs. “To us, he is still Hamid, a man we’ve dealt with for some time,” said a state department official. Such close connections to the US foreign policy, security and intelligence community lay Karzai open to the charge of being an American puppet.
Source: Asia Times
The head of the UN mission in Afghanistan has been accused by his former deputy of ordering a systematic cover-up to conceal the extent of electoral fraud by President Karzai.
As in Vietnam, Karzai is going to rule over an equally tiny island of corruption
US puppet Karzai
Could there be a more accurate description of the Obama-Brown message of congratulations to the fraudulently elected Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan? First the Palestinians held fair elections in 2006, voted for Hamas and were brutally punished for it – they still are – and then the Iranians held fraudulent elections in June which put back the weird Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whom everyone outside Iran (and a lot inside) regard as a dictator. But now we have the venal, corrupt, sectarian Karzai in power after a poll far more ambitiously rigged than the Iranian version, and – yup, we love him dearly and accept his totally fraudulent election.
And now we are still trying to persuade his opponent to join a national unity government, an administration led by the man whose vote-stuffing was the very reason that same leader of the opposition – the good pseudo-Pashtun Abdullah Abdullah – refused to run in a second round of elections. And Karzai got his fawning congrats from the Obama-Brown twins. So that’s OK then. Wagons Ho. For Westmoreland, read McChrystal. Send in the brave 40,000 to join the rest of the US cavalry as it fights its way west – or rather south-west – to the Khe Sanh of Afghanistan in Year Eight of the War on Terror.
The March of Folly was Barbara Tuchman’s title for her book on governments – from Troy to Vietnam-era America – that followed policies contrary to their own interests. And well may we remember the Vietnam bit. As Patrick Bury, a veteran British soldier of our current Afghan adventure, pointed out yesterday, Vietnam is all too relevant.
Back in 1967, the Americans oversaw a “democratic” election in Vietnam which gave the presidency to the corrupt ex-General Nguyen Van Thieuman. In a fraudulent election which the Americans declared to be “generally fair” – he got 38 per cent of the vote – Thieu’s opponents wouldn’t run against him because the election was a farce.
Yes we can … escalate the war in Afghanistan and sell it to the people as a mission “to try to win the hearts and minds of the Afghanistan population.” (War is Peace.)
Move is separate from Nato commander General Stanley McChrystal’s request to increase troop levels
A US counter-intelligence Marine and his translator meet with local villagers in Kirta, Afghanistan Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images
President Barack Obama is quietly deploying an extra 13,000 troops to Afghanistan, an unannounced move that is separate from a request by the US commander in the country for even more reinforcements.
The extra 13,000 is part of a gradual shift in priority since Obama became president away from Iraq to Afghanistan.
The White House and the Pentagon both announced earlier this year that the number of US troops in Afghanistan was to be raised by 21,000, bringing the total at present to 62,000, with the aim of 68,000 by the end of the year.
But the Washington Post, based on conversations with Pentagon officials, said that on top of those an extra 13,000 “enablers” are also being deployed. They are mainly engineers, medical staff, intelligence officers and military police. About 3,000 of them are specialists in explosives, being sent to try to combat the growing fatality rate from roadside bombs.
The deployment of such non-combat troops is in line with the professed aim of the new US commander, General Stanley McChrystal, to try to win the hearts and minds of the Afghanistan population.
In addition to the deployments under way, McChrystal has also requested an extra 40,000 troops he says are necessary to prevent the country falling into the hands of the Taliban. That request has provoked an intense debate within Washington, with some political advisers in the White House opposed to any further escalation of a war that is already proving unpopular at home.
The Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai, today expressed support for McChrystal’s request. “I’m fully behind him for what he’s seeking in this report,” Karzai told ABC’s Good Morning America.
The U.S. economy is about to experience a total collapse, because now the financial crisis is hitting the real economy.
The retailers will collapse, which will be much, much worse that the subprime mortgage crisis. The bond bubble will burst. The dollar will be destroyed. The U.S. will default on its debt. The Greatest Depression is coming.
The ‘surge’, with the extra US forces in Afghanistan expected to rise to 30,000, was required to ‘stabilise a deteriorating situation’ said Barack Obama
A grim picture of spiralling violence and a disintegrating society has emerged in Afghanistan in a confidential Nato report, just as Barack Obama vowed to send 17,000 extra American troops to the country in an attempt to stem a tide of insurgency.
Direct attacks on the increasingly precarious Afghan government more than doubled last year, while there was a 50 per cent increase in kidnappings and assassinations. Fatalities among Western forces, including British, went up by 35 per cent while the civilian death toll climbed by 46 per cent, more than the UN had estimated. Violent attacks were up by a third and roadside bombings, the most lethal source of Western casualties, by a quarter. There was also a 67 per cent rise in attacks on aircraft from the ground, a source of concern to Nato which depends hugely on air power in the conflict.
The document, prepared by the Pentagon on behalf of the US-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan and seen by The Independent, also reveal how swathes of the country have slipped out of the control of President Hamid Karzai’s government. According to a poll taken towards the end of last year, a third of the population stated that the Taliban had more influence in their locality.
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