Never Fight a Land War in Asia

By George Friedman

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking at West Point, said last week that “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.” In saying this, Gates was repeating a dictum laid down by Douglas MacArthur after the Korean War, who urged the United States to avoid land wars in Asia. Given that the United States has fought four major land wars in Asia since World War II – Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq – none of which had ideal outcomes, it is useful to ask three questions: First, why is fighting a land war in Asia a bad idea? Second, why does the United States seem compelled to fight these wars? And third, what is the alternative that protects U.S. interests in Asia without large-scale military land wars?

The Hindrances of Overseas Wars

Let’s begin with the first question, the answer to which is rooted in demographics and space. The population of Iraq is currently about 32 million. Afghanistan has a population of less than 30 million. The U.S. military, all told, consists of about 1.5 million active-duty personnel (plus 980,000 in the reserves), of whom more than 550,000 belong to the Army and about 200,000 are part of the Marine Corps. Given this, it is important to note that the United States strains to deploy about 200,000 troops at any one time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that many of these troops are in support rather than combat roles. The same was true in Vietnam, where the United States was challenged to field a maximum of about 550,000 troops (in a country much more populous than Iraq or Afghanistan) despite conscription and a larger standing army. Indeed, the same problem existed in World War II.

When the United States fights in the Eastern Hemisphere, it fights at great distances, and the greater the distance, the greater the logistical cost. More ships are needed to deliver the same amount of material, for example. That absorbs many troops. The logistical cost of fighting at a distance is that it diverts numbers of troops (or requires numbers of civilian personnel) disproportionate to the size of the combat force.

Regardless of the number of troops deployed, the U.S. military is always vastly outnumbered by the populations of the countries to which it is deployed. If parts of these populations resist as light-infantry guerrilla forces or employ terrorist tactics, the enemy rapidly swells to a size that can outnumber U.S. forces, as in Vietnam and Korea. At the same time, the enemy adopts strategies to take advantage of the core weakness of the United States – tactical intelligence. The resistance is fighting at home. It understands the terrain and the culture. The United States is fighting in an alien environment. It is constantly at an intelligence disadvantage. That means that the effectiveness of the native forces is multiplied by excellent intelligence, while the effectiveness of U.S. forces is divided by lack of intelligence.

The United States compensates with technology, from space-based reconnaissance and air power to counter-battery systems and advanced communications. This can make up the deficit but only by massive diversions of manpower from ground-combat operations. Maintaining a helicopter requires dozens of ground-crew personnel. Where the enemy operates with minimal technology multiplied by intelligence, the United States compensates for lack of intelligence with massive technology that further reduces available combat personnel. Between logistics and technological force multipliers, the U.S. “point of the spear” shrinks. If you add the need to train, relieve, rest and recuperate the ground-combat forces, you are left with a small percentage available to fight.

The paradox of this is that American forces will win the engagements but may still lose the war. Having identified the enemy, the United States can overwhelm it with firepower. The problem the United States has is finding the enemy and distinguishing it from the general population. As a result, the United States is well-suited for the initial phases of combat, when the task is to defeat a conventional force. But after the conventional force has been defeated, the resistance can switch to methods difficult for American intelligence to deal with. The enemy can then control the tempo of operations by declining combat where it is at a disadvantage and initiating combat when it chooses.

The example of the capitulation of Germany and Japan in World War II is frequently cited as a model of U.S. forces defeating and pacifying an opposing nation. But the Germans were not defeated primarily by U.S. ground troops. The back of the Wehrmacht was broken by the Soviets on their own soil with the logistical advantages of short supply lines. And, of course, Britain and numerous other countries were involved. It is doubtful that the Germans would have capitulated to the Americans alone. The force the United States deployed was insufficient to defeat Germany. The Germans had no appetite for continuing a resistance against the Russians and saw surrendering to the Americans and British as sanctuary from the Russians. They weren’t going to resist them. As for Japan, it was not ground forces but air power, submarine warfare and atomic bombs that finished them – and the emperor’s willingness to order a surrender. It was not land power that prevented resistance but air and sea power, plus a political compromise by MacArthur in retaining and using the emperor. Had the Japanese emperor been removed, I suspect that the occupation of Japan would have been much more costly. Neither Germany nor Japan are examples in which U.S. land forces compelled capitulation and suppressed resistance.

The problem the United States has in the Eastern Hemisphere is that the size of the force needed to occupy a country initially is much smaller than the force needed to pacify the country. The force available for pacification is much smaller than needed because the force the United States can deploy demographically without committing to total war is simply too small to do the job – and the size needed to do the job is unknown.

U.S. Global Interests

The deeper problem is this: The United States has global interests. While the Soviet Union was the primary focus of the United States during the Cold War, no power threatens to dominate Eurasia now, and therefore no threat justifies the singular focus of the United States. In time of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States must still retain a strategic reserve for other unanticipated contingencies. This further reduces the available force for combat.

Some people argue that the United States is insufficiently ruthless in prosecuting war, as if it would be more successful without political restraints at home. The Soviets and the Nazis, neither noted for gentleness, were unable to destroy the partisans behind German lines or the Yugoslav resistance, in spite of brutal tactics. The guerrilla has built-in advantages in warfare for which brutality cannot compensate.

Given all this, the question is why the United States has gotten involved in wars in Eurasia four times since World War II. In each case it is obvious: for political reasons. In Korea and Vietnam, it was to demonstrate to doubting allies that the United States had the will to resist the Soviets. In Afghanistan, it was to uproot al Qaeda. In Iraq, the reasons are murkier, more complex and less convincing, but the United States ultimately went in, in my opinion, to convince the Islamic world of American will.

The United States has tried to shape events in the Eastern Hemisphere by the direct application of land power. In Korea and Vietnam, it was trying to demonstrate resolve against Soviet and Chinese power. In Afghanistan and Iraq, it was trying to shape the politics of the Muslim world. The goal was understandable but the amount of ground force available was not. In Korea, it resulted in stalemate; in Vietnam, defeat. We await the outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan, but given Gates’ statement, the situation for the United States is not necessarily hopeful.

In each case, the military was given an ambiguous mission. This was because a clear outcome – defeating the enemy – was unattainable. At the same time, there were political interests in each. Having engaged, simply leaving did not seem an option. Therefore, Korea turned into an extended presence in a near-combat posture, Vietnam ended in defeat for the American side, and Iraq and Afghanistan have turned, for the time being, into an uncertain muddle that no reasonable person expects to end with the declared goals of a freed and democratic pair of countries.

Problems of Strategy

There are two problems with American strategy. The first is using the appropriate force for the political mission. This is not a question so much of the force as it is of the mission. The use of military force requires clarity of purpose; otherwise, a coherent strategy cannot emerge. Moreover, it requires an offensive mission. Defensive missions (such as Vietnam and Korea) by definition have no terminal point or any criteria for victory. Given the limited availability of ground combat forces, defensive missions allow the enemy’s level of effort to determine the size of the force inserted, and if the force is insufficient to achieve the mission, the result is indefinite deployment of scarce forces.

Then there are missions with clear goals initially but without an understanding of how to deal with Act II. Iraq suffered from an offensive intention ill suited to the enemy’s response. Having destroyed the conventional forces of Iraq, the United States was unprepared for the Iraqi response, which was guerrilla resistance on a wide scale. The same was true in Afghanistan. Counterinsurgency is occupation warfare. It is the need to render a population – rather than an army – unwilling and incapable of resisting. It requires vast resources and large numbers of troops that outstrip the interest. Low-cost counter-insurgency with insufficient forces will always fail. Since the United States uses limited forces because it has to, counterinsurgency is the most dangerous kind of war for the United States. The idea has always been that the people prefer the U.S. occupation to the threats posed by their fellow countrymen and that the United States can protect those who genuinely do prefer the former. That may be the idea, but there is never enough U.S. force available.

Another model for dealing with the problem of shaping political realities can be seen in the Iran-Iraq war. In that war, the United States allowed the mutual distrust of the two countries to eliminate the threats posed by both. When the Iraqis responded by invading Kuwait, the United States responded with a massive counter with very limited ends – the reconquest of Kuwait and the withdrawal of forces. It was a land war in Asia designed to defeat a known and finite enemy army without any attempt at occupation.

The problem with all four wars is that they were not wars in a conventional sense and did not use the military as militaries are supposed to be used. The purpose of a military is to defeat enemy conventional forces. As an army of occupation against a hostile population, military forces are relatively weak. The problem for the United States is that such an army must occupy a country for a long time, and the U.S. military simply lacks the ground forces needed to occupy countries and still be available to deal with other threats.

By having an unclear mission, you have an uncertain terminal point. When does it end? You then wind up with a political problem internationally – having engaged in the war, you have allies inside and outside of the country that have fought with you and taken risks with you. Withdrawal leaves them exposed, and potential allies will be cautious in joining with you in another war. The political costs spiral and the decision to disengage is postponed. The United States winds up in the worst of all worlds. It terminates not on its own but when its position becomes untenable, as in Vietnam. This pyramids the political costs dramatically.

Wars need to be fought with ends that can be achieved by the forces available. Donald Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding of war. You do not engage in war if the army you have is insufficient. When you understand the foundations of American military capability and its limits in Eurasia, Gates’ view on war in the Eastern Hemisphere is far more sound than Rumsfeld’s.

The Diplomatic Alternative

The alternative is diplomacy, not understood as an alternative to war but as another tool in statecraft alongside war. Diplomacy can find the common ground between nations. It can also be used to identify the hostility of nations and use that hostility to insulate the United States by diverting the attention of other nations from challenging the United States. That is what happened during the Iran-Iraq war. It wasn’t pretty, but neither was the alternative.

Diplomacy for the United States is about maintaining the balance of power and using and diverting conflict to manage the international system. Force is the last resort, and when it is used, it must be devastating. The argument I have made, and which I think Gates is asserting, is that at a distance, the United States cannot be devastating in wars dependent on land power. That is the weakest aspect of American international power and the one the United States has resorted to all too often since World War II, with unacceptable results. Using U.S. land power as part of a combined arms strategy is occasionally effective in defeating conventional forces, as it was with North Korea (and not China) but is inadequate to the demands of occupation warfare. It makes too few troops available for success, and it does not know how many troops might be needed.

This is not a policy failure of any particular U.S. president. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have encountered precisely the same problem, which is that the forces that have existed in Eurasia, from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in Korea to the Taliban in Afghanistan, have either been too numerous or too agile (or both) for U.S. ground forces to deal with. In any war, the primary goal is not to be defeated. An elective war in which the criteria for success are unclear and for which the amount of land force is insufficient must be avoided. That is Gates’ message. It is the same one MacArthur delivered, and the one Dwight Eisenhower exercised when he refused to intervene in Vietnam on France’s behalf. As with the Monroe Doctrine, it should be elevated to a principle of U.S. foreign policy, not because it is a moral principle but because it is a very practical one.

How Pakistanis See US Afghan Strategy

By Stratfor

The White House on Thursday released an overview of the much awaited Afghanistan and Pakistan Annual Review ordered by U.S. President Barack Obama last year as a National Security Staff (NSS)-led assessment of the war effort. Perhaps the most significant (and expected) aspect of the report is the extent to which the success of the American strategy relies on cooperation from Pakistan. The report acknowledges recent improvement in U.S.-Pakistani coordination in the efforts to bring closure to the longest war in U.S. history, but also points out there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of Pakistani assistance.

Indeed, this is an issue that has been at the heart of the tensions between the two allies since the beginning of the war. However, the United States – now more than ever before – needs Pakistan to offer its best, given that Washington has deployed the maximum amount of human and material resources to the war effort that it can feasibly allocate. To what extent such assistance will be forthcoming is a function of how Islamabad is looking at the war.

From the Pakistani point of view, this war has been extremely disastrous. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 to deny al Qaeda its main sanctuary led to the spillover of the war into Pakistan. Al Qaedas relocation east of the Durand Line forced Islamabad to side with Washington against the Afghan Taliban and laid the foundation for the Talibanization of Pakistan.

Any Pakistani effort to effectively counter this threat is dependent upon the U.S. strategy on the other side of the border. Just as the United States is dealing with a very difficult situation where it has no good options, Pakistan is also caught in a dilemma. There are two broad and opposing views among the Pakistani stakeholders in regard to what the United States should do that, in turn, would also serve Pakistani interests.

On one hand are those who argue that the longer U.S. and NATO forces remain in Pakistan’s western neighbor the longer the wars will continue to rage on both sides of the border. The thinking is that since there is no military solution, Western forces should seek a negotiated settlement and exit as soon as possible. Once a settlement takes place in Afghanistan, Pakistan will be in a better position to neutralize its own Taliban rebellion and restore security on its side of the border.

Yet there are those who – while they accept that a continued presence of foreign occupation forces in Afghanistan will continue to fuel the jihadist fire – are more concerned about the ramifications of a premature withdrawal of Western forces. The fear is that a Taliban comeback in Afghanistan will only galvanize jihadists on the Pakistani side. At a time when it is struggling to re-establish its writ on its side of the border, Islamabad is certainly not in a position to exert the kind of influence in Afghanistan it once was able to in the pre-9/11 years.

In other words, an exit of foreign forces from Afghanistan will not restore the old arrangement. Islamabad is therefore in uncharted waters. What the Pakistanis hope for is some form of negotiated settlement that will help restore some semblance of security on their western periphery and allow for some measure of influence in a post-NATO Afghanistan. How to get from the current situation to that endgame state is quite opaque and what lies beyond is fraught with uncertainty, given the destabilization that has taken place in the last five years. What makes this situation even more problematic for the Pakistanis is that they feel that they are not the only ones who are without options. Their benefactor, the United States, is in the same boat.

JB Campbell: Anti-American

by J. Bruce Campbell

The leakers are being called “anti-American.”

What decent person, anywhere in the world today, is not anti-American? Is there anyone more dangerous than our typical ignorant, arrogant American “citizen,” who very likely couldn’t find America on a marked map of the world? Well, yes: the American military man, who is the most dangerous son of a bitch on the planet. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

I’m anti-American. I really wasn’t until I returned to Rhodesia in January, ’73 to join up and help in their struggle against Communist terrorists. I’d been down there in ’71 for discussions with the government on bringing Americans and others wanting to be part of a new country project based on a book by my boss, Michael Oliver, called A New Constitution for a New Country. The plan was to have a minimum of a hundred square miles with no taxes and no draft, replacing the former tax-haven in Freeport, Bahamas. Thousands of productive Americans and others were ready to relocate.

Mike’s real name was Olitsky and he was a Lithuanian Jew who’d fled into Germany to escape Stalin’s Red Army. He wound up in Dachau for four years. He introduced me to Holocaust Revisionism when I ventured to ask him about his experience. He shrugged and said, “It was a factory. We worked during the day and stayed in a dormitory at night.”

“But what about the, uh, the-”
“The what?”
“You know, the killings.”
“I never saw any of that.”

Four years in Dachau, never saw any of that. Okay. He did see the US Army “liberate” the camp in April, ’45. The SS and Alpine troops recuperating there had negotiated a surrender to the Americans, who entered the camp and started shooting the guys who thought they were surrendering. Then the Americans marched the surviving soldiers (all the prison guards had fled days earlier) up to a wall near the hospital and set up a machine gun. Three hundred forty-six German soldiers on R&R were slaughtered in a few minutes, five hundred twenty in all that morning. George Patton handled the cover-up and protected the war criminals. The army doctor on the scene, Col. Howard Buechner, described it in his book, Dachau: Hour of the Avenger. Of the 32,000 inmates freed, about 1,200 were Jews, including Mike.

My new country project discussions were with the Rhodesian minister of internal affairs, Jack Howman. He rather indignantly turned us down. Nevertheless, I did return and take part in their war against Communist terror. I suppose it was during those two years that I became reluctantly anti-American. Our country, the good old USA, supported the Communist war of terror against the Rhodesian people, black and white. Our country put Robert Mugabe in power, just as it put Nelson Mandela in power a few years later. Mandela was Member Number One of the South African Communist Party. America put every Communist party in power in every single Communist country since 1917. That includes Lenin & Trotsky, Mao Tse Tung, Kim Il-sung, Ho Chi Minh, Tito, Pol Pot and Fidel Castro. Our government kept Stalin in power from 1924 until his death in ’53. It went to war in ’41 to rescue Stalin from well-deserved German destruction. Billions (trillions in today’s worthless money) were given by America to save Soviet Communism.

An itinerant writer named Robert K. Brown came to Salisbury, Rhodesia in 1974 to interview me. He said he was freelancing for Esquire Magazine and Guns Magazine. He wanted to know what would make a Californian such as I come over to this little country in southern Africa and fight terrorism? The interview eventually appeared in the first issue (Summer ’75) of a strange magazine called “Soldier of Fortune.” I took Brown up to Mt. Darwin and introduced him to my farmer friends who were on the front lines of terrorism every day and night of their lives. I asked him not to quote me because I could be prosecuted for “mercenary activities” by the State Department. He quoted the hell out of me but changed my name to “Mitchell McNair.” But the point of this is that he told me what he did for the CIA back in the ’50s… Brown was in the CIA’s Special Forces and was part of the assassination team that murdered Rafael Trujillo in ’61. But in ’58 and ’59, Brown ran guns to Fidel Castro to assist in his coup against Fulgencio Batista. Once Castro came to power, the CIA pretended to be against Castro to justify its gigantic power-grab of the government. But Castro, along with every other Communist leader in the world, was put in power by the US government. Then our government exploited the “threat” presented by Communism to justify “defense spending” and lucrative no-win wars. Today, the Chicoms, those ultimate Communists, are our business partners and we have arranged for the anti-Communist Moslems to be our new worst enemies.

Brown’s magazine was funded by the CIA and was immediately put to use in recruiting mercenaries for their ludicrous operation in Angola. I called Brown in Boulder at one point to ask why the hell he was recruiting for the foul Angolan terrorist, Holden Roberto? He said lamely, “Well, the CIA likes him.” Any questions so far?

The more I studied US history over the next few years, the more I came to hate everything this country stands for, or pretends to stand for. American history turns out to be one gigantic lie, as phony as a Hollywood movie. In fact, all we have come to believe about ourselves has pretty much come from Hollywood. This is no exaggeration. The American myth was created by a few Russian Jews who ripped off Tom Edison’s film process in New Jersey and split for the coast to avoid prosecution. Neal Gabler wrote a book entitled An Empire of Their Own, How the Jews Invented Hollywood. The inescapable fact is that not only did they invent Hollywood, but the entire myth of America as the promised land.

For Russian Jews, it was. America was the land of milk, honey and suckers by the millions. Our self-image as Americans is a Jewish image. The slaughter and rip-off and exile of American Indians to Bantustans we call “reservations” was glamorized (authorized) by Hollywood Jews. The reality of this genocide makes American condemnation of Zionist genocide of Palestinians meaningless. That is, it would be meaningless if any American politician condemned Israel, which hasn’t happened yet. If we had some bacon we could have bacon and eggs, if we had some eggs.

The whole American experience is based on mass murder and land-grabs and lies (broken treaties). Not one treaty made by the US Army with the Indians was left unbroken. Maybe the one with the Yakimas, but I’m not sure about that. Up in this country where we live, you see the slogan once in a while, “Custer Had It Coming.” When you investigate what all he did to the Lakota, Cheyenne and others, such as mass murdering women and children, for no reason other than ethnic cleansing, you have to conclude that he and his war criminals definitely had it coming.

Custer worked for Phil Sheridan and Bill Sherman, both of whom are in the War Crimes Hall of Fame. Their crimes against the Southern people and the Indian people will turn your hair white with shock. American (Yankee) war of aggression and genocide are the bases of all modern total war. The buffalo were exterminated just to cripple the Plains Indians. To punish the Nez Perce for resisting another broken treaty, the army slaughtered thousands of their Appaloosa horses. The army put the Nez Perce in boxcars in the winter of ’77 and shipped them to Ft. Leavenworth. This is the actual American way.

I’ll skip over our genocidal adventures in the Philippines and our Jewish-engineered role in the Great War and go right to the World War, or rather its aftermath in Europe. Our mopping-up method is described above with the Dachau massacre of surrendered troops. Such sadistic butchery was encouraged by a 1941 book “highly recommended” to the troops by Franklin Roosevelt, a book by an obscure Jew in advertising named Theodore Kaufman, entitled “Germany Must Perish!” It was the basis for what became known as the Morgenthau Plan for Germany, which called for the extermination of a large percentage of Germans, the forced sterilization of the rest and the destruction of all industry or its removal to the Soviet Union, flooding all mines and turning Germany into a goat pasture. Henry Morgenthau was FDR’s Jewish treasury secretary. George Patton writes in his memoirs that Eisenhower gave Morgenthau his plan, which was eventually drafted by another Jew named Weiss (Harry Dexter “White”). Upon war’s end, Eisenhower put the plan into effect with his order to starve to death all captured German PoWs. This is documented in James Bacque’s Other Losses. Over a million German prisoners died eating grass and bugs out in open fields in the American starvation program from May to December, 1945.

Then, Ike starved millions more German civilians throughout that period ’til 1947, when the Cold War started and America needed Germany to pretend to fight our erstwhile ally, Stalin. This merciless starvation program is documented also by Bacque in his Crimes & Mercies. Naïve people have doubted this crime against humanity and asked, “Why didn’t the Germans complain, if what you say is true?” Answer: For one thing, the Germans are not a complaining people, the way Jews are. This is not a good thing, but it’s the way they are. They shut up and take it. But the real point is, to whom could they complain if they were complaining people? The Americans? The British, the Soviets, the French, all of whom were participants in the American genocide program? Bacque estimates that between nine and thirteen million Germans were slaughtered in Eisenhower’s starvation and forced exposure operation in two years.

Then there was the Eisenhower program officially called by the army, Operation Keelhaul. If you still think that being an American is a good thing, consider this one… During the war, millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks and others escaped from Soviet slave-terror into Italy, Austria, Yugoslavia and other countries. Many of them were Red Army soldiers captured by the German army at Stalingrad, Leningrad, Kursk and countless other battles and sent to PoW camps in Germany and Poland and Italy. The hysterical beast, Josef Stalin, who fled Moscow at the approach of the German army, gave the order that any Red Army soldier who surrendered was to be shot when the war was over. This was well-known. Nevertheless, Dwight Eisenhower broke all international laws regarding treatment of captured enemy forces and ordered the rounding up and handing over of these men and their families. Approximately five million of them were forced into boxcars by US Army soldiers at bayonet point and sent east to Hungary, where they were taken off the trains and either shot by the tracks or sent to the Gulag Archipelago to be worked to death over the next year. This was documented also by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his monumental record of Soviet/American bestiality. I have interviewed veterans who participated in this unimaginable betrayal of humanity.

Reportedly, the only photo on Ike’s Oval Office desk was one of Josef Stalin-autographed.

In 1956, our President Eisenhower encouraged the Hungarians to rise up and kick the Soviets out of Budapest, promising them American help if they showed they deserved it. So the Hungarians rose up and seized all the Jews that Khrushchev and Stalin had installed over them, hanging and shooting many hundreds, and forced the Soviets out of Budapest. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that he waited a couple of weeks for Eisenhower to follow through on his promise of aid, but it never came. So he ordered the tanks back in and the wiping out of the freedom fighters.

This is the actual American way, administered by respectable political pukes such as Dwight David Eisenhower, nicknamed in the 1915 West Point yearbook as “The Terrible Swedish Jew.”

We are just now learning what the army and air force did to the Koreans during the Korean War. Millions were slaughtered. We Americans wonder why the crazy North Koreans are so paranoid and ready to fight? We wonder because we don’t know what the hell our government did to those people in the 1950s. We have no idea that our government approved the Soviet occupation of North Korea in 1945, making it Communist in ’48. Then we drew an arbitrary line across the 38th parallel and created “South Korea” and prepared to go to war against “North Korea” when everyone was ready in 1950. War made to order with unbelievable profits to the bankers and “defense contractors.” 34,000 Americans killed – for what?

Viet Nam. Did you know that Ho Chi Minh was a US intelligence agent during World War II? He made his reports to the OSS at the Texaco office in Hanoi. Did you know that the American OSS installed Ho Chi Minh in power in the northern half of Indochina in 1945? An arbitrary line was drawn across the 17th parallel in ’54 and our northern puppet started the war against our southern puppet in ’59, which we of course lost in ’75. Another war made to order with unbelievable profits to the bankers and “defense contractors.” Millions of Vietnamese slaughtered by our wonderful boys, 58,000 of whom were also slaughtered – for what?

The United Nations is a US front. It was devised by American traitors in the Council on Foreign Relations in 1945 and has always been housed in New York. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. donated the sixteen acres in Manhattan and built the edifice in 1951. Its first crime against humanity was the creation of the Israeli nation of parasites in 1948, while the UN was still headquartered on Long Island. The UN waged war against Rhodesia and South Africa throughout the ’60s and ’70s, always subsidized by American taxpayers. Most Americans don’t know or remember that the Korean War was fought by American soldiers under the blue and white flag of the United Nations.

And now, our wonderful boys are fighting for Israel against Moslems in Iraq and Afghanistan and secretly killing thousands in Pakistan and Yemen. These wars are based on Israeli lies stemming from their massacre of 9/11. Even though the American FBI director, Mueller, admitted there was no evidence of Moslem hijackers, we invaded Afghanistan. Americans don’t know that the Taliban were our guys until they objected to a Unocal pipeline being constructed across their country. Richard Armitage told them they could either have a carpet of gold (if they went along with the pipeline) or a carpet of bombs if they didn’t cooperate. They didn’t cooperate and virtually overnight, the Americans categorized them as the enemy, showering our gold on a rival group, the Northern Alliance. Our former friends, the Taliban, are kicking our butts, which is only fair. You invade someone’s country based on your own lies, you deserve to have your butt kicked.

Football star and millionaire Pat Tillman fell for the 9/11 legend and joined the Army Rangers to hunt down Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. But then he and his brother were sent to Iraq, which puzzled them both. Why Iraq? Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 (but neither did Osama or Afghanistan). Pat Tillman signed his own death warrant with his questions and complaints about invading Iraq. So he was sent back to Afghanistan to be silenced. In one of the dumbest excuses for a skirmish I’ve ever heard of, he was sent forward to engage with some non-existent enemy fighters. Then he was shot at by his own guys behind him. The odd thing is that his forehead had three .22 caliber bullet holes in it. The M-4 rifle shoots a .22, of course, but it’s a high-power, high-velocity .223 that does serious damage. The fact that his forehead had three .22 holes and wasn’t obliterated means he was executed with three low-powered. 22LR bullets from a pistol. The general in charge of the official heroic lies about enemy action and then “friendly fire” was Stanley McChrystal, an infamous black ops leader of The Secret Team and organizer of many, many assassinations.

And so, I’m anti-American. I suspect that if Pat Tillman were alive he’d be just as anti-American. Real patriots can get that way quickly when they realize they’ve been hustled.

Don’t start about the Constitution. Don’t tell me that if we just stuck to the Constitution we’d be in good shape. I’ve found that people who go on about the Constitution have never read it. They don’t understand that it’s just a seven-part plan for running the government. They don’t understand that it was crafted by Freemasons using Masonic lodge rules of order as a template. They don’t know or forgot that the founders sneaked the Constitution on us when they were supposed to modify the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union between the States.

The Bill of Rights was our friend and it was added by Patrick Henry and truly patriotic friends to protect us from the Constitutional government. But George Bush and his PATRIOT Act destroyed the Bill of Rights. Obama is a foreign-born CIA asset so he has no understanding of the Bill of Rights. Apparently both he and his strange wife lost their law licenses several years ago anyway and I suspect they missed Bill of Rights day in law school.

I’m not sure what it is about America that we’re expected to love. The government? The Federal Reserve? The IRS? Our banking system? Wall Street? How about our schools? The way we conduct our foreign policy? How about the CIA and sanctioned kidnapping, torture and false imprisonment and killing Israel’s enemies with our cowardly Predator flying death machines? Maybe the FBI, America’s number one terrorist organization?

Tell me, what is there to love? Our farms and Monsanto suicide seeds and all our fake food? Our labor unions that don’t try to protect American jobs? How about NAFTA that was jammed down our throats by Bill Clinton and Rush Limbaugh? You don’t remember that 1994 tag-team?

Maybe we should love Wal-Mart and all the Chinese junk inside. How about our great industries? Wait a minute-we don’t have any industries. They’re all in China.

Should we love our cities? How about the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. We really need a War on Warmongers and Profiteers. I won’t even ask if we’re supposed to love our politicians, our judges and our news media. Our ranches are nice, except the cattle are full of growth hormones and antibiotics.

Nope. Sorry. Nothing here to love, if we’re honest. Maybe if we brought our occupation forces home from the 120 countries they’re occupying, this country wouldn’t be so hateful. But there’s a gene in us that makes us extremely dangerous and destructive. We have been conditioned to view ourselves as exceptional-better than other people-and deserving of whatever other people have, such as land, gold, oil, water, whatever. You can see this gene metastasizing in the leaked videos of Americans slaughtering Iraqi civilians from our multi-million dollar attack helicopters. I say they’re ours because we’re on the hook for them.

Somebody is going to say, Well partner, you better love your right to shoot your mouth off and you can thank a veteran for that right. Uh, huh. You mean the guy over in Iraq, blowing away a family that misunderstood orders in a foreign language to stop at this goddamned roadblock (that wasn’t here yesterday)? You think I owe my free-speech right to a guy who spent the war spraying Agent Orange on foreign civilians? Do you think any of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights was reinforced by the crew of the Enola Gay? My old man was a marine in the first World War. I said to him, Man, you made the world safe for Democracy! He just looked at me, like, very funny.

It is not safe to shoot your mouth off these days and hasn’t been for a long time. The military is not making it any safer, in fact, just the opposite. The US military is breaking the law wholesale by acting as “law enforcement,” in complete violation of the law (Posse Comitatus). But shut my mouth, because there is no law anymore. We’re under the law of the gun, or Deuteronomy, which is the same thing.

Most people today are afraid even to READ my material, let alone comment on it. Let alone write something along these lines. Why do you suppose there’s so much fear in this country since 9/11? Is the military relieving this fear or reinforcing it? What about the reports that the military will be rounding up dissidents? Don’t believe them? They’re already illegally working as cops. The military does not protect ANYONE’s rights. The military kills people and destroys property. No American is safer because our military is killing Moslems in Iraq or Afghanistan-just the opposite. Not only is the military killing the world with depleted uranium munitions, but it is causing a blinding hatred of us. Just imagine armed thugs breaking into your house or your relative’s house and what it would do to your mind, assuming they didn’t blow you away because of the look of resentment on your face.

I discovered myself, years ago, that the FEMA camps are staffed by the 300th Military Police POW Command headquartered in Inkster, Michigan.

An honest American has to admit that he hates this country, not just the government. The government is a reflection of the people who pay for it. This country isn’t what you thought it was and it never has been. We’ve been conditioned to pledge allegiance to the flag and to the nation for which it stands, but what it stands for isn’t what Hollywood has had us believing since we were little kids.

All leaks are good, as long as they’re the real deal, not redacted or altered to make us support Israel. The only way we can survive is to know the truth about what government and the corporations have been secretly doing to us and others. The truth may be anti-American, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Taliban Exposed by Embedded Journalist in Riveting CNN Documentary

By Michael Hughes

CNN provided me with an advance copy of the film and helped arrange a discussion with the steel-nerved filmmaker, Norwegian journalist Paul Refsdal, who risked his life embedding himself in a Taliban fighting unit in Kunar province – a move supposedly blessed by Taliban leadership.

However, as Refsdal described to CNN’s Anderson Cooper in the video, his heart-rending experience of going from invited guest to kidnap victim certainly forced him to question his decision.

Although Refsdal did escape, it was not before converting to Islam in an effort to save his own life after an Al Qaeda member informed him he would be executed as a spy. But it is interesting to note that, to this day, Paul still considers himself a Muslim.

Refsdal is no stranger to combat zones, spending the last 26 years reporting from the frontlines of intense conflicts the world over, including a trip to Afghanistan in 1984 when he covered the Mujahideen during their U.S.-funded jihad against the Soviets.

I asked Paul if he saw many differences between the Mujahideen of the 1980s and today’s Taliban holy warriors. Refsdal explained that while the Mujahideen had more advanced weaponry (as a result of U.S. funding via Pakistan’s intelligence service) – including RPGs and portable heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles called Stingers – they were less serious and less devout than the Taliban.

The Taliban seem more mature and take the conflict more seriously but, then again, they have no choice considering they’re fighting against the world’s most advanced combined military forces.

The Mujahideen, on the other hand, were fighting against a waning Soviet empire that used old tanks, refused to fight at night and bombed the countryside indiscriminately as opposed to employing more sophisticated guerilla tactics.

Refsdal was struck by how his hosts defied the popular depiction of the Taliban as narrow-minded fanatics. The Taliban commander was actually bound by Pashtunwali, the Pashtun moral code, to protect and treat his guest well because hospitality is a key virtue in Afghan tribal society (of course, the sub-commander broke these laws when he later kidnapped Paul for ransom – watch the documentary for the details).

Refsdal was able to capture their humanity on film during long hours of downtime between ambushes, showing the Taliban singing, praying and playing games to kill time, such as seeing who could throw a large stone the farthest.

Paul constantly asked them not to modify their behavior or routines in the least, because Refsdal was less interested in filming action scenes and more focused on capturing images such as the Taliban playing with their children – images that portrayed the realities of everyday life (which they didn’t quite understand).

The film also shows the Taliban readying for battle, and in one clip their commander gives a pep talk that is actually profound in light of the current debate in Washington surrounding the war’s rationale and validity. The commander posed a series of rhetorical questions to his troops:

“We [the Taliban] are fighting for our religion, our freedom, our honor and our land. What are their [NATO's] goals? For what purpose are they fighting us? Are they oppressed? Have they been treated unfairly? Are they living in a dictatorship?”

According to Refsdal, most Taliban are motivated to fight because of foreign occupation rather than jihadist ideology. Although Islam is important to them – it is but one aspect of their national identity.

The Taliban Paul met seem nationalistic – religion has nothing to do with why most of them joined the Taliban in the first place. As Paul told me:

“They are not fighting because of Islam or jihad – they are fighting against occupation. If they were all Hindus, the Afghans would still be trying to drive out the outsiders.”

During the film a Taliban commander mentioned that his funding came from Pakistan – which touches upon a very controversial issue between U.S. and Pakistani leaders. Paul said, from what he gathered, many of these contributions flowed in from Salafi Taliban spiritual leaders and businessmen based out of Peshawar, but he was unsure of (and they would never tell him) if Pakistani intelligence or military were involved.

Finally, I asked Paul when he looked around at the 30-year old weapons, dirt floors, and clay outposts, combined with the fact the Taliban never really train during downtime – was it hard to believe NATO hasn’t achieved its objectives?

He answered my question with a question – a good one at that: “What are NATO’s objectives?” And not unlike the type of questions posed by the Taliban commander cited earlier, I assumed Paul’s also was rhetorical in nature.

Michael Hughes writes similar articles as the Afghanistan Headlines Examiner and theGeopolitics Examiner for Examiner.com.

U.S. Aids Taliban to Attend Talks on Making Peace

By THOM SHANKER, DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT

BRUSSELS – United States-led forces are permitting the movement of senior Taliban leaders to attend initial peace talks in Kabul, the clearest indication of American support for high-level discussions aimed at ending the war in Afghanistan, senior NATO and Obama administration officials said.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates spoke to members of the news media on Wednesday while flying to a NATO meeting in Brussels.

While the talks involve senior members of the Taliban, officials emphasized that they were preliminary, and that they could not tell how serious the insurgents – or the weak government of President Hamid Karzai – were about reaching an accord.

But comments by administration officials in Washington and a senior NATO official in Brussels on Wednesday indicated that the United States was doing more to encourage a peaceful settlement in Afghanistan than officials had previously disclosed, and might reflect growing pessimism that the buildup of American forces there will produce decisive gains against the Taliban insurgency.

The NATO official confirmed that “there has been outreach by very senior members of the Taliban to the highest levels of the Afghan government.” Though the talks are preliminary, he said, the prospect of negotiating a settlement of the war effort, now nine years old, is alluring enough that personnel from NATO nations in Afghanistan “have indeed facilitated to various degrees the contacts” by allowing Taliban leaders to travel to the Afghan capital.

Mr. Karzai has been trying for many months to persuade Taliban leaders to join his government, and the efforts intensified late last year after President Obama said that he intended to begin scaling back American troop levels in Afghanistan by the summer of 2011. American officials had earlier insisted that such talks were a sideshow to the main war effort and that they were unlikely to produce results until the Taliban felt weakened by the intensified NATO assault.

Now, some officials appear eager to show that they are pursuing a new approach in Afghanistan that explores a possible political settlement even as the military tries to step up pressure on the Taliban.

The top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, told reporters in Afghanistan recently that high-level Taliban leaders were reaching out to senior Afghan officials to start discussions. General Petraeus seems determined to show progress on achieving American goals in Afghanistan – both military and political – ahead of a December review of the war effort ordered by Mr. Obama.

Support for talks also comes as American officials have expressed a growing frustration with the complex role played by Pakistan, which provides safe haven for many insurgents and has ambitions of dictating the postwar political situation in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has insisted that any lasting solution in Afghanistan must involve reconciliation with the Taliban, and has urged the United States to participate in peace talks. At the same time, Pakistan has disrupted some efforts by Mr. Karzai to reach out to Taliban leaders hiding in Pakistan, presumably because he made those overtures without Pakistan’s approval.

It is not clear which Taliban leaders have been allowed to travel to Kabul to conduct talks with Mr. Karzai’s government. The NATO official also did not disclose what members of NATO’s Afghanistan force, the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, have done to support the talks beyond offering safe passage to insurgents participating in the discussions.

“It would be extremely difficult for a senior Taliban member to get to Kabul without being killed or captured if ISAF were not witting,” the official said. “And ISAF is witting.”

In Washington, officials have been more cautious about prospects for a peaceful settlement. One senior American official noted recently that the Taliban, while war-weary, had little incentive to make concessions because they still had the sense that they could outlast the American presence in the country. Mr. Karzai, others noted, can be an erratic negotiator, and part of the mystery in Kabul is whether he is keeping American and NATO allies abreast of his conversations.

Mr. Obama signed off on a policy early this year that talks were possible as long as Taliban leaders, at the end of the process, agreed to renounce violence, lay down their arms, and pledge fidelity to the Afghan Constitution. As recently as August, two senior American officials said, Mr. Obama was updated on the progress of those efforts, officials said, and reaffirmed that the United States should aid the process, even if the Taliban involved in the talks represented only breakaway factions of the insurgent group.

“We’re not expecting Mullah Omar to walk in the door,” one senior administration official said recently, referring to the Taliban figure Mullah Muhammad Omar. “But there have been pings from commanders a few notches down.”

The NATO official said: “These are in the very preliminary stages of discussions. So you would not yet characterize this by any means as a negotiation.”

The NATO official discussed developments in Afghanistan on standard diplomatic ground rules of anonymity because of the delicacy of the reconciliation discussions. The official spoke in advance of a NATO meeting in Brussels on Thursday that will include alliance ministers of foreign affairs and of defense. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates are scheduled to attend.

Next month, President Obama is expected to attend a NATO summit meeting in Lisbon, where the United States must make the case to nervous – and in some cases, soon-departing – allies that there is a viable plan for turning more of Afghanistan over to the government. That effort will have little chance of success, many officials believe, if there is no political path for integrating low-level Taliban fighters and reconciling with their leaders.

Congressional officials and independent experts voiced skepticism on Wednesday that the current discussions would lead to any immediate breakthrough.

“We’ve now got two years of reports of talks about talks, but none of it has panned out as serious,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who led Mr. Obama’s first Afghanistan policy review.

But the increased NATO military operations in southern Afghanistan aimed at killing or capturing midlevel Taliban commanders has caused some Taliban leaders “nervousness about life and fortune,” Mr. Riedel said.

“It’s a more dicey game. You’re starting to see people wanting to put money down on all bets.”

Thom Shanker reported from Brussels, and David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

Relatives Tell of Civilians Killed by U.S. Soldiers

By TAIMOOR SHAH and ALISSA J. RUBIN

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - It was difficult enough for the people of western Kandahar Province. They are beleaguered both by the Taliban, who control the roads, demand taxes and execute anyone suspected of disloyalty, and by the American military, who often show little regard for people and whose demands that locals stand up to the insurgents seem unreasonable.

Still, there was no reason to anticipate something far worse: American soldiers suspected of being a sadistic rogue band led by Sgt. Calvin Gibbs.

For Mullah Allah Dad, a poppy farmer and the mullah of a hamlet of just 15 homes in Kandahar Province, the end came quickly. He was sipping tea when he heard screams, and several of his children ran in. American soldiers in tanks were coming, they told him. Moments later, two young soldiers came in and grabbed him, his wife, Mora, said.

“In a minute I heard shooting,” she said. “I saw my husband face down, and a black American stood next to him. Another soldier pushed me away. They pushed me back into the house and the interpreter made me go inside one of the rooms.

“Minutes after that I heard an explosion,” she said. “I rushed out of that inner room and out the gate and the translator was telling me to stop, but I did not pay any attention, and then I saw my husband, my husband was burning.”

According to court papers filed by the military, Mullah Allah Dad, 45, of the Kalagi hamlet, was the third victim of soldiers who killed Afghan civilians for no apparent reason.

Five of the platoon soldiers have been charged in at least three murders, one of them Mullah Allah Dad’s, and seven other soldiers have been charged with crimes including assault, the use of hashish and attempts to impede the investigation.

The New York Times sent an emissary to Maiwand, the western district of Kandahar where the killings took place, to find the families of the three who were killed. Mullah Allah Dad’s family was afraid to come to the provincial capital to meet with a Times reporter because they feared that coalition troops might again attack them or that the Taliban would stop them. They agreed to come only as far as a nearby village that had cellphone coverage, and they were interviewed by phone.

Mrs. Dad described how the soldiers searched the family’s house, apparently trying to justify the killing. “They tore and broke everything,” she said. “But they did not find a single bullet in my home.”

Later, Mrs. Dad’s father, Abdullah Jan, and two tribal elders listened in disbelief to an Afghan intelligence agent at the district governor’s office as he related his conversation with American soldiers when they handed over Mullah Allah Dad’s body.

“He told me that the Americans claimed that Allah Dad had a grenade and was going to attack them, and then the grenade went off and he was killed,” said Mr. Jan. “I tried to explain his background, that he was a mullah in his village mosque, he had no link with the Taliban and he didn’t want one.

“They put the grenade under his body,” he said.

An hour later, Mr. Jan said, he picked up his son-in-law’s body and was shocked to find that it was wrapped in a black plastic bag. “It was treated like garbage,” he said.

Just a mile or two from Kalagi, near the village of Karez, another man died in almost the same way.

Gulbaddin, 37, was moving into his new home on a chilly January day when American soldiers came in several armored vehicles to the village, said Haji Abdul Qayoum, a neighbor and tribal elder there. “His son was crying, but the soldiers did not care,” he said. “He was shot right before his home and with his son there.”

Mr. Qayoum, at the request of The New York Times, went to ask Gulbaddin’s father if he would discuss his son’s death. His response was the cry of every father who has lost his child.

“Don’t talk about my son,” said Gulbaddin’s father. “My mind is not ready even to hear his name. Even you mentioning his name makes me angry and puts my heart in pain. Please, please don’t hurt my heart.”

Local elders estimate that in the past eight months at least 42 civilians have been killed in Maiwand during American operations. The Taliban have also killed civilians in the district, but it is the 42 whose deaths are etched in local memory.

“I am from the area, and my family has been living here for centuries,” said Haji Hayatullah, an elder from Maiwand District. “I know the people who are supporting the Taliban and the people who are not. But the Americans have killed many people who did not support the Taliban, which is painful for us and actually creates hatred toward Americans. And that is why there is little or no help to the Americans from the civilians here.”

“For us, death is inevitable, but not in the way they have been killing.”

The family of Mullah Allah Dad has received no apology and no compensation for his death, his father-in-law said.

A spokeswoman for the Army, Maj. Kathleen Turner, said she could not answer any questions about the case because of the continuing investigation.

Taimoor Shah reported from Kandahar, and Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul, Afghanistan.

NATO apologises over deaths of Pakistani soldiers

• Rasmussen hopes border will be open for supplies as soon as possible
• Qureshi says Pakistan will only reopen supply route once public anger eases, security improves

ISLAMABAD/BRUSSELS: NATO’s chief expressed regret on Monday for the deaths of Pakistani soldiers last week and said he hoped Pakistan’s border would reopen for NATO supplies to Afghanistan as soon as possible.

Angered by repeated attacks by NATO helicopters on targets within its borders, Pakistan blocked one of the supply routes for NATO troops in Afghanistan after a strike killed three Pakistani soldiers in the Kurram region.

Analysts and Western officials said Pakistan’s closure of the border for a few days would not seriously impact the war effort in Afghanistan.

“I expressed my regret for the incident last week in which Pakistani soldiers lost their lives,” NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said after meeting Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi in Brussels. “I expressed my hope the border will be open for supplies as soon as possible.”

The apology came after gunmen attacked a convoy of trucks taking goods to Western forces in Afghanistan on the outskirts of Islamabad, killing three guards. Rasmussen said the killing of the three soldiers was unintended and showed the need to improve coordination between the NATO and the Pakistani military.

Also, Qureshi expressed Pakistan’s concern over the border violations and attacks in Pakistani territory by NATO and ISAF forces.

He said that Pakistan would only reopen the supply route once public anger eases and security improves. “Unless the reaction cools down and we make sure that the supply line is secured, we cannot reopen it,” he said, adding that the UN mandate for ISAF was confined to Afghanistan and NATO/ISAF forces were again advised to refrain from any actions that constitute a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. agencies

Afghanistan bans foreign security firms

By Waheedullah Massoud (AFP)

KABUL – Afghanistan has formally banned eight foreign private security firms, including the controversial company formerly called Blackwater, a spokesman for President Hamid Karzai said on Sunday.

There are 52 private security contractors in Afghanistan, who must cease operations by January 2011

The Afghan government announced in August that it was giving security firms working in Afghanistan four months to cease operations, potentially hitting hard efforts by NATO-led troops fighting a nine-year insurgency in the country.

There are fears the measure could create huge problems for the military and other international entities that depend on the estimated 40,000 employees of private security contractors.

“The Afghan interior ministry today reported the dissolution of eight private security companies to the national security council of Afghanistan,” Waheed Omer told reporters.

Omer said some of the companies had been fully dissolved and their weapons had been collected, while for others the process was still under way.

Xe — the former Blackwater — and White Eagle Security Services, which provides security for Afghan government officials and NGOs in particular, are among the first companies banned.

The security firms provide a wide range of services including protecting supply convoys for NATO, guarding foreigners’ compounds, embassies and other installations, as well as training Afghan security forces.

The dissolution will not immediately affect companies’ activities that deal with the training of national security forces or those guards who operate inside buildings to provide protection, Omer said.

“The focus is on those security companies which are protecting the highways, protecting transport caravans — those areas other than the training of Afghan security forces or protecting the internal premises of international organisations or embassies, or others,” Omer said.

Omer said the eight companies included both Afghan and international firms, and two of them were small outfits employing only about 100 guards.

The August presidential decree ordered the 52 private security contractors operating in the country, both Afghan and international, to cease operations by January 1, 2011.

Karzai had accused the security companies of running an “economic mafia” based around “corruption contracts” favoured by the international community.

He has said the firms duplicate the work of the Afghan security forces and divert much-needed resources, while Afghans criticise the private guards as overbearing and abusive, particularly on the country’s roads.

Omer said security had improved along some highways since the banning of private guards operating as escorts for supply convoys in those areas.

Critics, though, say the tight deadline will not allow enough time to negotiate an alternative to private contractors in a country were security is a priority and police are generally not trusted.

Private security firms in Afghanistan are employed by US and NATO forces, the Pentagon, the UN mission, aid and non-governmental organisations, embassies and Western media.

They employ about 26,000 registered personnel, though experts say the real number could be as high as 40,000.

The contractors themselves have been reluctant to comment publicly but some have said privately they believe many of their clients would leave the country if they could not source their own security.

Xe, formerly Blackwater, gained notoriety in Iraq after guards protecting a convoy opened fire in a busy Baghdad square in September 2007, killing as many as 17 civilians.

Last month two former Blackwater security guards went on trial in the United States, accused of the murder of two Afghan citizens in a 2009 shooting.

Let’s stop playing into bin Laden’s hands

By Ted Koppel

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, succeeded far beyond anything Osama bin Laden could possibly have envisioned. This is not just because they resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths, nor only because they struck at the heart of American financial and military power. Those outcomes were only the bait; it would remain for the United States to spring the trap.

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.

It did not have to be this way. The Bush administration’s initial response was just about right. The calibrated combination of CIA operatives, special forces and air power broke the Taliban in Afghanistan and sent bin Laden and the remnants of al-Qaeda scurrying across the border into Pakistan. The American reaction was quick, powerful and effective — a clear warning to any organization contemplating another terrorist attack against the United States. This is the point at which President George W. Bush should have declared “mission accomplished,” with the caveat that unspecified U.S. agencies and branches of the military would continue the hunt for al-Qaeda’s leader. The world would have understood, and most Americans would probably have been satisfied.

But the insidious thing about terrorism is that there is no such thing as absolute security. Each incident provokes the contemplation of something worse to come. The Bush administration convinced itself that the minds that conspired to turn passenger jets into ballistic missiles might discover the means to arm such “missiles” with chemical, biological or nuclear payloads. This became the existential nightmare that led, in short order, to a progression of unsubstantiated assumptions: that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons; that there was a connection between the Iraqi leader and al-Qaeda.

Bin Laden had nothing to do with fostering these misconceptions. None of this had any real connection to 9/11. There was no group known as “al-Qaeda in Iraq” at that time. But the political climate of the moment overcame whatever flaccid opposition there was to invading Iraq, and the United States marched into a second theater of war, one that would prove far more intractable and painful and draining than its supporters had envisioned.

While President Obama has recently declared America’s combat role in Iraq over, he glossed over the likelihood that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will have to remain there, possibly for several years to come, because Iraq lacks the military capability to protect itself against external (read: Iranian) aggression. The ultimate irony is that Hussein, to keep his neighbors in check, allowed them and the rest of the world to believe that he might have weapons of mass destruction. He thereby brought about his own destruction, as well as the need now for U.S. forces to fill the void that he and his menacing presence once provided.

As for the 100,000 U.S. troops in or headed for Afghanistan, many of them will be there for years to come, too — not because of America’s commitment to a functioning democracy there; even less because of what would happen to Afghan girls and women if the Taliban were to regain control. The reason is nuclear weapons. Pakistan has an arsenal of 60 to 100 nuclear warheads. Were any of those to fall into the hands of al-Qaeda’s fundamentalist allies in Pakistan, there is no telling what the consequences might be.

Again, this dilemma is partly of our own making. America’s war on terrorism is widely perceived throughout Pakistan as a war on Islam. A muscular Islamic fundamentalism is gaining ground there and threatening the stability of the government, upon which we depend to guarantee the security of those nuclear weapons. Since a robust U.S. military presence in Pakistan is untenable for the government in Islamabad, however, tens of thousands of U.S. troops are likely to remain parked next door in Afghanistan for some time.

Perhaps bin Laden foresaw some of these outcomes when he launched his 9/11 operation from Taliban-secured bases in Afghanistan. Since nations targeted by terrorist groups routinely abandon some of their cherished principles, he may also have foreseen something along the lines of Abu Ghraib, “black sites,” extraordinary rendition and even the prison at Guantanamo Bay. But in these and many other developments, bin Laden needed our unwitting collaboration, and we have provided it — more than $1 trillion spent on two wars, more than 5,000 of our troops killed, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead. Our military is so overstretched that defense contracting — for everything from interrogation to security to the gathering of intelligence — is one of our few growth industries.

We have raced to Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently to Yemen and Somalia; we have created a swollen national security apparatus; and we are so absorbed in our own fury and so oblivious to our enemy’s intentions that we inflate the building of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan into a national debate and watch, helpless, while a minister in Florida outrages even our friends in the Islamic world by threatening to burn copies of the Koran.

If bin Laden did not foresee all this, then he quickly came to understand it. In a 2004 video message, he boasted about leading America on the path to self-destruction. “All we have to do is send two mujaheddin . . . to raise a small piece of cloth on which is written ‘al-Qaeda’ in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses.”

Through the initial spending of a few hundred thousand dollars, training and then sacrificing 19 of his foot soldiers, bin Laden has watched his relatively tiny and all but anonymous organization of a few hundred zealots turn into the most recognized international franchise since McDonald’s. Could any enemy of the United States have achieved more with less?

Could bin Laden, in his wildest imaginings, have hoped to provoke greater chaos? It is past time to reflect on what our enemy sought, and still seeks, to accomplish — and how we have accommodated him.

Ted Koppel, who was managing editor of ABC’s “Nightline” from 1980 to 2005, is a contributing analyst for BBC World News America.

Security in Afghanistan Is Deteriorating, Aid Groups Say

By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan – Even as more American troops flow into the country, Afghanistan is more dangerous than it has ever been during this war, with security deteriorating in recent months, according to international organizations and humanitarian groups.

Declining security means that in many districts, aid workers and unarmed government employees can no longer travel safely. The road leading beyond this point in Wardak Province is unsafe.

Large parts of the country that were once completely safe, like most of the northern provinces, now have a substantial Taliban presence – even in areas where there are few Pashtuns, who previously were the Taliban’s only supporters. As NATO forces poured in and shifted to the south to battle the Taliban in their stronghold, the Taliban responded with a surge of their own, greatly increasing their activities in the north and parts of the east.

The worsening security comes as the Obama administration is under increasing pressure to show results to maintain public support for the war, and raises serious concerns about whether the country can hold legitimate nationwide elections for Parliament next Saturday.

Unarmed government employees can no longer travel safely in 30 percent of the country’s 368 districts, according to published United Nations estimates, and there are districts deemed too dangerous to visit in all but one of the country’s 34 provinces.

The number of insurgent attacks has increased significantly; in August 2009, insurgents carried out 630 attacks. This August, they initiated at least 1,353, according to the Afghan N.G.O. Safety Office, an independent organization financed by Western governments and agencies to monitor safety for aid workers.

An attack on a Western medical team in northern Afghanistan in early August, which killed 10 people, was the largest massacre in years of aid workers in Afghanistan.

“The humanitarian space is shrinking day by day,” said a CARE Afghanistan official, Abdul Kebar.

The International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, does not routinely release detailed data on attacks around the country, and the Afghan government stopped doing so in mid-2009. United Nations officials have also stopped releasing details of attacks, though they monitor them closely. Requests for access to that information were denied.

ISAF officials dispute the notion that security is slipping from them, pointing to their successes with targeted killings and captures of Taliban field commanders and members of the Taliban shadow government.

American military officials say the increased level of violence is related to the rise in the number of its forces here. The last 2,000 of 30,000 new American troops are expected to arrive in the next week or two, military officials say. The result is more military operations, they say, and more opportunities for the insurgents to attack coalition forces.

That does not entirely explain the increased activity of the Taliban in areas where they were seldom seen before, and where the coalition presence is light, however.

Last year, American military leaders adopted a strategy of concentrating operations in what they identified as 80 “key terrain districts,” mostly in the south and east of the country, less than a fourth of Afghanistan’s districts.

The idea was to attack the Taliban where they were strongest, and concentrate forces where populations were largest.

While how many fighters the insurgents have is a matter of estimate and conjecture, the impact they have had is easy enough to judge.

Last month, ISAF recorded 4,919 “kinetic events,” including small-arms fire, bombs and shelling, a 7 percent increase over the previous month, and a 49 percent increase over August 2009, according to Maj. Sunset R. Belinsky, an ISAF spokeswoman. August 2009 was itself an unusually active month for the insurgency as it sought to disrupt the presidential elections then.

With one attack after another, the Taliban and their insurgent allies have degraded security in almost every part of the country (the one exception is Panjshir Province in the north, which has never succumbed to Taliban control).

The Afghan N.G.O. Safety Office says that by almost every metric it has, Afghanistan is more dangerous now than at any time since 2001.

The most recent troop buildup comes in response to steady advances by the Taliban. Four years ago, the insurgents were active in only four provinces. Now they are active in 33 of 34, the organizations say.

“We do not support the perspective that this constitutes ‘things getting worse before they get better,’ ” said Nic Lee, director of the Afghan N.G.O. Safety Office, “but rather see it as being consistent with the five-year trend of things just getting worse.”

Despite the spread of the conflict, humanitarian organizations say they are still able to serve Afghans in much of the country. They have to be much more careful, restricting their movements and pulling back from some areas altogether.

They use Afghan workers rather than international staff members. They avoid travel by road and take greater security precautions. They have also taken to operating incognito as a matter of routine. As a result, while insurgent attacks have more than doubled since last year, attacks on N.G.O.’s have actually declined by 35 percent, Mr. Lee said.

Because of the lack of security, CARE, like many humanitarian groups, no longer uses the country’s principal highway, the Grand Trunk Road connecting Kabul, the capital, to Peshawar in Pakistan. CARE has 10 offices around the country to manage its 1,000 employees, but its own international staff members can safely visit only four or five of them, according to a spokeswoman, Jennifer Rowell.

Likewise, there is no longer an Oxfam sign on display in the entire country, although the British-based aid group finances projects in scores of villages, mostly staffed by Afghans.

“Most N.G.O.’s don’t send foreigners to most places any longer,” said Ashley Jackson, head of policy and advocacy for Oxfam in Kabul, referring to nongovernmental organizations. Like many major aid groups, Oxfam now subcontracts much of its work in the provinces to partners, usually Afghan aid groups.

The threat to government workers is just as severe. Last month, Afghan police and army officials asked the Independent Election Commission to cancel 938 of its proposed 6,835 polling centers, almost 14 percent, because it could not guarantee security for those areas. Polling places in 25 provinces were affected.

On Tuesday the election commission said it would cancel 81 other polling sites, nearly a fifth of the polling places in eastern Nangarhar Province, which was relatively safe during last year’s presidential election. The commission has warned that it may have to close still more polling centers in other provinces if the authorities cannot provide adequate security for voters.

Only 500 international observers are coming to monitor these elections, compared with more than a thousand last year, according to Jindad Spinghar of the Free and Fair Election Foundation. International observers will be able to go only to provincial capitals, not rural areas, where most of the population lives, he said. The election foundation, the leading Afghan monitoring group, has had to cut back its own observers, who will be watching only 60 percent of polling places.

“Because the control of the central government is decreasing,” Mr. Spinghar said, “power brokers and warlords will be able to use their influence at the local level, where there are no observers.” It was in just such areas in 2009 that widespread voting fraud took place, resulting in a disputed and internationally discredited presidential election.

Military officials counter that they are making headway against the Taliban. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the ISAF commander, said recently that NATO forces had killed or captured 2,974 insurgents this summer, 235 of them commanders. Last December, the military assessed Taliban strength at 25,000.

“While we do not routinely release data on total attacks around the country, we did expect the number of attacks to go up as the number of ISAF troops increased,” said Major Belinsky, the ISAF spokeswoman.

“We are pushing into areas where the Taliban have enjoyed safe haven in the past, and we are taking that away from them,” Major Belinsky said. “They are putting up a tough fight, with more tough fighting to come, but we are making progress.”

A top coalition general bristled recently when asked about views among some critics that NATO was losing the fight. “How do they know we’re losing? I can lay out rhyme and reason about where we’re making progress. We’re building, they’re destroying. I say to them, prove it.”

Top US commander: Burning Quran endangers troops

By KIMBERLY DOZIER (AP)

Afghans burn an effigy of Dove World Outreach Center’s pastor Terry Jones during a demonstration against the United States in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Sept. 6, 2010. Hundreds of Afghans railed against the U.S. and called for President Barack Obama’s death at a rally in the capital Monday to denounce the American church’s plans to burn the Islamic holy book on 9/11. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)

KABUL, Afghanistan – The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warned Tuesday that an American church’s threat to burn copies of the Muslim holy book the Quran could endanger U.S. troops in the country and Americans worldwide.

“Images of the burning of a Quran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan – and around the world – to inflame public opinion and incite violence,” Gen. David Petraeus said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

His comments followed a protest Monday by hundreds of Afghans over the plans by Gainesville, Florida-based Dove World Outreach Center – an evangelical Christian church that espouses anti-Islam philosophy – to burn copies of the Quran on church grounds to mark the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States that provoked the Afghan war.

Muslims consider the Quran to be the word of God and insist that it be treated with the utmost respect, along with any printed material containing its verses or the name of Allah or the Prophet Muhammad. Any intentional damage or show of disrespect to the Quran is deeply offensive.

In 2005, 15 people died and scores were wounded in riots in Afghanistan sparked by a story in Newsweek magazine alleging that interrogators at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay placed copies of the Quran in washrooms and had flushed one down the toilet to get inmates to talk. Newsweek later retracted the story.

At Monday’s protest, several hundred Afghans rallied outside a Kabul mosque, burning American flags and an effigy of Dove World’s pastor and chanting “death to America.” Members of the crowd briefly pelted a passing U.S. military convoy with stones, but were ordered to stop by rally organizers.

Two days earlier, thousands of Indonesian Muslims had rallied outside the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta and in five other cities to protest the church’s plans.

Petraeus warned images of burning Qurans could be used to incite anti-American sentiments similar to the pictures of prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Graib (ah-booh GRABE) prison.

“I am very concerned by the potential repercussions of the possible (Quran) burning. Even the rumor that it might take place has sparked demonstrations such as the one that took place in Kabul yesterday,” Petraeus said in his message. “Were the actual burning to take place, the safety of our soldiers and civilians would be put in jeopardy and accomplishment of the mission would be made more difficult.”

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul also issued a statement condemning the church’s plans, saying Washington was “deeply concerned about deliberate attempts to offend members of religious or ethnic groups.”

Dove World Outreach Center, which made headlines last year after distributing T-shirts that said “Islam is of the Devil,” has been denied a permit to set a bonfire but has vowed to proceed with the burning.

A surge in troop deployments has brought the number of U.S. forces battling the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan to about 100,000 and Petraeus is asking for 2,000 more soldiers to join the 140,000-strong international force here, NATO officials said Monday. It was unclear how many would be Americans.

Coalition officials said nearly half will be trainers for the rapidly expanding Afghan security forces and will include troops trained to neutralize roadside bombs that have been responsible for about 60 percent of the 2,000 allied deaths in the nearly 9-year war.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not supposed to talk about the issue with media, said the NATO-led command had been asking for the troops even before Gen. David Petraeus assumed command here in July.

Petraeus recently renewed that request with the NATO command in Brussels. The alliance has had trouble raising more troops for the war effort, with at least 450 training slots still unfilled after more than a year.

With casualties rising, the war has become deeply unpopular in many of NATO’s 28 member countries, suggesting the additional forces will have to come from the United States. In Europe, polls show the majority of voters consider it an unnecessary drain on finances at a time of sharp cuts in public spending and other austerity measures.

US to step up pressure on Al-Qaeda in Yemen

By Dan De Luce (AFP)

WASHINGTON – The United States is increasingly concerned about the threat posed by Al-Qaeda’s network in Yemen and is moving to pile pressure on the militants, a US counter-terrorism official said on Wednesday.

Yemeni security forces guard the street in the southern city of Aden

While Al-Qaeda’s leadership based in Pakistan had suffered serious setbacks, its affiliates in Yemen had regrouped and emerged as a “virulent” danger, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.

“They’re not feeling the same kind of heat — not yet, anyway — as their friends in the tribal areas” of Pakistan, he said.

“And everyone involved on our side understands that has to change.”

The official did not specify how the United States would counter militants in Yemen but in Pakistan, the Central Intelligence Agency has targeted Al-Qaeda and Taliban figures with a major bombing campaign using unmanned aircraft.

The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post reported Wednesday that the new assessment of the threat raised the prospect of expanded US operations in Yemen, including CIA drone strikes.

Asked about the revised assessment of the threat in Yemen and possible stepped up US operations, CIA spokesman George Little said: “This agency and our government as a whole work against al-Qaeda and its violent allies, wherever they appear.”

A US effort to counter militants in Yemen has been led mostly by the US military, but some inside the administration have proposed a larger role for the CIA, similar to the drone strikes in Pakistan, the Journal wrote, citing unnamed officials.

The US counter-terrorism official said the administration would take a “tailored approach” to Yemen and that it was not a case of choosing intelligence agencies over the military.

“When it comes to who carries out that policy, it’s not a zero-sum game or a question of this organization or that. You have to combine and apply the tools and tactics that make the most sense, given the specific situation,” the official said.

“Yemen isn’t Pakistan, and the United States in any case takes a tailored approach.”

The CIA and the US military’s special operations forces have deployed surveillance equipment, robotic aircraft and personnel in Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya and Ethiopia to target Al-Qaeda’s network in Yemen as well as Islamist militants in Somalia’s Shebab movement, the Journal reported.

US officials believe Al-Qaeda in Yemen and Shebab in Somalia are forging stronger links, the paper said.

Yemeni security forces meanwhile have been battling suspected Al-Qaeda militants for control of the southern town of Loder in recent days.

Yemeni authorities said late Tuesday they had gained back control of the town and that more than 12 suspected Al-Qaeda militants were killed in the fighting which started Friday.

US intelligence agencies had raised alarms about Al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen even before the failed attempt to blow up a US-bound airliner on Christmas Day last year, a plot blamed on the group.

The administration has also confirmed it is actively hunting down Anwar Al-Awlaqi, a US-born cleric in Yemen who has defended the suspect in the Christmas Day plot, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, and blessed a shooting rampage last year at Fort Hood in Texas by a Muslim US Army officer.

The NATO Money to Ensure Taliban Security

The Moral Equivalents of American Founding Fathers Are Now Terrorists!

By Sohail Parwaz

The English Prime Minister David Cameron, who before kicking off for India on a business tour few days ago, very rudely and snobbishly, keeping all the diplomatic norms aside, warned Pakistan to behave and to stop exporting terror to India. The interesting part is that the British Prime Minister insisted that he had neither caused offence to Pakistan nor accused the Islamabad government of promoting terrorism. Amid deep anger in Pakistan, the Prime Minister said that he would always talk straight forwardly to Britain’s friends. Although the former British foreign secretary Mr. Milliband quite aptly snubbed him by saying that, ‘there was a big difference between straight-talking and being a loudmouth’.

This is not the first time that Pakistan has been accused of sponsoring terrorism. In the past most popular western lyric ‘Do More’ has been repeatedly orchestrated off and on. However the irony is that every time the Coalition while demanding from Pakistan to “do more” would forget about the pains they were taking at their ends to save the skin of their troops in Afghanistan. It’s impossible that Cameron’s predecessors had not told him about the efforts they were making before handing over the 10 Downing Street to him.

It is quite open a secret now that for months, British and the US diplomats and intelligence officers had been approaching those Taliban commanders whom they considered “soft and approachable”. Although the advances made by them were gauche and gawky and often sabotaged by mutual suspicion and above all a mistrust. Particularly the US and the Karzai government’s suspicions that always spoiled the British attempts to persuade Taliban fighters and other groups to abandon the insurgency yet at the end of the day the ‘conglomerate’ agreed on a coordinated international initiative in the shape of a discreet trust fund, the brain child of the British government officials, of course the same British government who claims now that Pakistan is exporting terrorism. Interestingly, the move reflects a growing realisation in London, Washington and elsewhere in the NATO countries that the conflict cannot be “won” in any military sense and that some kind of accommodation with the Taliban insurgency is inescapable.

The WikiLeaks made almost 90,000 cables and messages public but the publicity was given to those only which carried contents against Pakistan, however astonishingly the ‘Leaks’ are mysteriously quiet over the ‘under table dealings’ between the members of the Coalition forces and the Taliban to ensure the safety and a secure exit of the former’s troops. No one can disagree with the hard fact that 2010 is proving to be the most costly year of the entire war for the US-led occupation. The death toll has already reached 399, compared with the last year’s toll of 521. The number of deaths, however, is only one aspect of the mounting crisis being faced by the 100,000 American and 30,000 NATO and other allied troops in Afghanistan. The other alarming issue is the number of soldiers being wounded which has increased exponentially.

About a couple of years back an American Security Archive had published a pile of declassified documents alleging Pakistan to be the Taliban’s godfather. The papers were related to a period of seven years leading up to 9/11. That means it’s a 1994 onwards era? Barbara Elias was the lady who labored to arrange the jigsaw pieces of these ‘puzzling’ documents and gave them the title, ‘Pakistan – The Taliban’s godfather?’ Probably Barbra over looked (or intentionally skipped) the Document 21 which was the voice of the heart. It was the expunged extract of the U.S. Embassy Islamabad’s cable, through which the Assistant Secretary Robin Raphael was informed on March 10, 1997 and which reads, “The Embassy recommends a policy of “limited engagement to try to “moderate and modernize” the Taliban.” Full engagement would be against American interests as it would associate Washington with a “movement we find repugnant,” however a failure to engage the Taliban at all would further isolate Afghanistan”. Why has she also decided not to mention that at the invitation of Ronald Reagan a few Taliban leaders were invited to the White House, where Reagan in a welcome address, declared them to be the Moral Equivalents of the American Founding Fathers.

This premise made it clear and self explanatory that the recent visits of the American Secretary of the States to Pakistan and Afghanistan were in fact reflecting the volume of pressures being faced by the US and Allies in Afghanistan and also that the US government is desperately seeking an easy, safe, respectable and some phenomenal way out of Afghanistan. The above background would facilitate one to understand when it is explained that recently a number of incidents have been reported where the military operations are annexed and supported by the political maneuvers as well and that maneuvering includes the efforts to buy some influential Taliban leaders and bribing the drug mafia, warlords, ex Mujahedeen and some of the tribal elders of that area. Since making the direct efforts to achieve this all is not considered safe hence some indirect means have been chosen where the millions of dollars contracts are being sanctioned to a number of overt and covert transport and logistic support companies in Afghanistan who are fully aware that the fifteen to twenty percent of the contract amount is not meant for them rather it would be expanded as bribe to Taliban for the safe passage of logistic plying through the roads in fact. The one existing example is of a shady UK based NGO by the name of ‘Foreign & Commonwealth Office’ (FCO) which is apparently involved in stabilizing Helmand province while actually it is working to tone down the Taliban’s wrath in the area.

It’s next to impossible to trace anyone in Afghanistan who believes that the US and UK are not funding the Taliban. The lot is none other than the highly educated Afghan professionals, those employed by ISAF, USAID, international media organisations and even those who are advising US diplomats, seem the most convinced. They openly say that the aid organisations are nothing more than intelligence-collecting agencies, going into the risky regions where the ISAF troops cannot easily reach to obtain facts on the ground. They strongly believe that even a modest midwife-training project in Afghanistan is a spying outfit.

According to Anna Tomforde, who wrote an article titled, ‘Paying off the Taliban – Incentive or Bribe?’ published January this year, ‘The Peace and Reintegration Trust Fund established at the London conference on Afghanistan is being hailed as an ‘economic alternative’ by its creators and condemned as ‘paying off the Taliban’ by its critics. There can be little doubt, however, that the idea of the fund, aimed at inciting ‘moderate’ elements of the Taliban to lay down their arms, is as much part of a new strategy on Afghanistan as proof of the realization that the conflict cannot be solved by military means alone’. It leaves no doubt in any mind when Pakistan’s role is placed vis-à-vis the US and ISAF forces that Pakistan is fighting the GWOT selflessly and without making the compromises .No one can deny the sacrifices mentioned by the Pakistan army’s Chief General Kayani, while talking to media about few month back. He informed media that roughly well over two thousand Pakistani army officers and soldiers had been killed in the fighting by that date which included one three-star General, two two-star generals and five brigadiers as the martyrs.

Almost 168 years back, the British over threw Amir Dost Mohammad Khan and installed Shah Shuja as a “puppet king” who was killed by the Afghans within months and the British were made to lick the dust in a way that in January 1842, out of 16,500 soldiers and 12,000 dependents only a solitary survivor, of mixed British-Indian garrison, was allowed by the Afghan warriors to reach back to Jalalabad Fort, on a stumbling pony. Undoubtedly the US and NATO forces are bribing and paying Taliban to avoid the unsafe and solitary return and definitely they are preferring the lives over money?

Karzai slams Pakistan … but with what?

Spearhead Research Analysis – 11.08.2010

By Shemrez Nauman Afzal
Research Analyst
Spearhead Research

A few days after the Wikileaks’ announcement of some 72,000 classified documents being leaked into the public domain, Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday urged his Western allies to destroy Islamist militant sanctuaries in neighbouring Pakistan, while an angry Islamabad described his statement as “incomprehensible”. As the Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary – a compendium of secret U.S. communications during the Afghan War between 2004 and 2010 – contained some 120 documents that “gravely implicated” Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), accusing it of “playing both sides” by actively funding, training and deploying Taliban terrorists in Afghanistan, President Karzai thought that the time was opportune enough to make his views heard on the issue as well.

Read Complete Article Here: http://www.zoneasia-pk.com/ZoneAsia-Pk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1331:karzai-slams-pakistan-but-with-what&catid=41:securityissues&Itemid=62

Dutch troops leave southern Afghanistan

By the CNN Wire Staff

Kabul, Afghanistan – More details about the Dutch withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan emerged on Monday.

The Netherlands became the first NATO ally to pull combat troops out of Afghanistan on Sunday as it handed over its mission in southern Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province to U.S. and Australian forces.

At the end of this year the Netherlands will have only 60 military personnel in Afghanistan, none in combat, Dutch Ministry of Defense spokeswoman Marloes Visser told CNN on Monday.

At the peak of their commitment, the Dutch had nearly 2,000 troops in Afghanistan. The bulk of that number, 1,500 personnel, were in Uruzgan, with 400 and 100 in Kandahar and Kabul, respectively.

Some staff units remain in Afghanistan, according to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, but the Air Task Force in Kandahar will pull out in December, emptying the country of Dutch troops. The remaining 60 personnel will work in the international headquarters in Kabul and Kandahar, Visser said.

The International Security Assistance Force-led multinational effort took over the Uruzgan mission Sunday. Combined Team-Uruzgan Commander, Colonel Jim Creighton, led a ceremony attended by acting governor for Uruzgan, Khodai Rahim Kahn, as well as ISAF and Afghan National Army personnel, according to an Australian Defence media release.

“The expansion of roads and bridges, the effectiveness of the Afghan National Security Forces, and enhanced security are examples of the improvements made by the hard work and efforts of Dutch and Australian personnel working with the Uruzgan leaders and people,” Creighton, who is from the United States, said.

More U.S. troops will have to enter the area to fill the void, he said.

“I am looking forward to building on the exceptional work that the Dutch and Australians have undertaken so far in Uruzgan.” Creighton said. Combined Team-Uruzgan includes around 1,800 US, Australian, Singaporean, Slovakian, New Zealand, and French personnel.

A 700-person task force will redeploy Dutch forces in Uruzgan Province back home, Visser said.

“The past four years brought the population of Uruzgan great improvements,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement Sunday. “Regrettably, the Netherlands is saddened by its 24 war casualties and 140 wounded.”

The Dutch government already had extended its mission by two years. NATO requested another extension as the United States and its allies beefed up forces at the end of 2009, but opposition to the proposal brought down Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende’s ruling coalition in February.

U.S. and NATO forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 in retaliation for the al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington that September. Allied and local forces quickly toppled the Taliban, the Islamic militia that ruled most of Afghanistan and allowed al Qaeda to operate within its territory.

But top Taliban and al Qaeda leaders escaped the invasion, and Taliban fighters regrouped along the rugged border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The group is now battling both coalition forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s government.

Soldiers from the Afghan National Security Forces and Australian Special Forces killed Mullah Dawood, a Taliban insurgent leader in central Uruzgan, on July 14, according to an Australian Defence media release published Monday.