Political leanings

[geezer]

So honest question. Do you think Afghanistan as a whole (not just the southern Pastun areas) was better off under the Soviets, the anarchy of the interwar years or the current ISAF occupation?

[Torurot]

They certainly were not worse off under the Soviets, vs the current OCCUPATION by current ISAF. If "we" all just fcked off and left them alone. They are fighting an OCCUPIER. "They" don't give a flying fck WHO it is. Just want them out. If it was YOUR country occupied, would you fight the occupier?

No "Empire" has ever won in Afghanistan..... ever!!!!!

[geezer]

I'm curoius then why aren't the are the Tajik, the Hazara, the Uzbek, the Aimak, and the Tukmen polulations fighting against the ISAF if they are fighting the occupiers in your opinion? All these groups fought the Soviets, why not the ISAF? Do you think they'd agree with you that they had it just as bad under the Soviets?

In answer to your question, If someone came to fight islamic extemists in my country. No I would not fight them. I'd probably help them.

[Torurot]

Your positive that NONE of the tribes you mention ever fight the ISAF? "Allegiances" change depending on the patron and the $$$ paid. Why are "we" fighting there?

[Torurot]

Gross Violations of Human Rights
Why Not Sanctions for Israel?
http://counterpunch.org/roberts09012009.html
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS September 1, 2009

In Israel, a country stolen from the Palestinians, fanatics control the government. One of the fanatics is the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Last week Netanyahu called for €œcrippling sanctions€ against Iran.

The kind of blockade that Netanyahu wants qualifies as an act of war. Israel has long threatened to attack Iran on its own but prefers to draw in the US and NATO.

Why does Israel want to initiate a war between the United States and Iran?

Is Iran attacking other countries, bombing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure?

No. These are crimes committed by Israel and the US.

Is Iran evicting peoples from lands they have occupied for centuries and herding them into ghettoes?

No, that€™s what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for 60 years.

What is Iran doing?

Iran is developing nuclear energy, which is its right as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran€™s nuclear energy program is subject to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which consistently reports that its inspections find no diversion of enriched uranium to a weapons program.

The position taken by Israel, and by Israel€™s puppet in Washington, is that Iran must not be allowed to have the rights as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty that every other signatory has, because Iran might divert enriched uranium to a weapons program.

In other words, Israel and the US claim the right to abrogate Iran€™s right to develop nuclear energy. The Israeli/US position has no basis in international law or in anything other than the arrogance of Israel and the United States.

The hypocrisy is extreme. Israel is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and developed its nuclear weapons illegally on the sly, with, as far as we know, US help.

As Israel is an illegal possessor of nuclear weapons and has a fanatical government that is capable of using them, crippling sanctions should be applied to Israel to force it to disarm.

Israel qualifies for crippling sanctions for another reason. It is an apartheid state, as former US President Jimmy Carter demonstrated in his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

The US led the imposition of sanctions against South Africa because of South Africa€™s apartheid practices. The sanctions forced the white government to hand over political power to the black population. Israel practices a worse form of apartheid than did the white South African government. Yet, Israel maintains that it is €œanti-semitic€ to criticize Israel for a practice that the world regards as abhorrent.

What remains of the Palestinian West Bank that has not been stolen by Israel consists of isolated ghettoes. Palestinians are cut off from hospitals, schools, their farms, and from one another. They cannot travel from one ghetto to another without Israeli permission enforced at checkpoints.

The Israeli government€™s explanation for its gross violation of human rights comprises one of the greatest collection of lies in world history. No one, with the exception of American €œchristian zionists,€ believes one word of it.

The United States also qualifies for crippling sanctions. Indeed, the US is over-qualified. On the basis of lies and intentional deception of the US Congress, the US public, the UN and NATO, the US government invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and used the €œwar on terror€ that Washington orchestrated to overturn US civil liberties enshrined in the US Constitution. One million Iraqis have paid with their lives for America€™s crimes and four million are displaced. Iraq and its infrastructure are in ruins, and Iraq€™s professional elites, necessary to a modern organized society, are dead or dispersed. The US government has committed a war crime on a grand scale. If Iran qualifies for sanctions, the US qualifies a thousand times over.

No one knows how many women, children, and village elders have been murdered by the US in Afghanistan. However, the American war of aggression against the Afghan people is now in its ninth year. According to the US military, an American victory is still a long ways away. Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared in August that the military situation in Afghanistan is €œserious and deteriorating.€

Older Americans can look forward to the continuation of this war for the rest of their lives, while their Social Security and Medicare rights are reduced in order to free up funds for the US armaments industry. Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden have made munitions the only safe stock investment in the United States.

What is the purpose of the war of aggression against Afghanistan? Soon after his inauguration, President Obama promised to provide an answer but did not. Instead, Obama quickly escalated the war in Afghanistan and launched a new one in Pakistan that has already displaced 2 million Pakistanis. Obama has sent 21,000 more US troops into Afghanistan and already the US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, is requesting 20,000 more.

Obama is escalating America€™s war of aggression against the Afghanistan people despite three high profile opinion polls that show that the American public is firmly opposed to the continuation of the war against Afghanistan.

Sadly, the ironclad agreement between Israel and Washington to war against Muslim peoples is far stronger than the connection between the American public and the American government. At a farewell dinner party last Thursday for Israel€™s military attache in Washington, who is returning to Israel to become deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, and and Dan Shapiro, who is in charge of Middle East affairs on the National Security Council, were present to pay their respects. Admiral Mullen declared that the US will always stand with Israel. No matter how many war crimes Israel commits. No matter how many women and children Israel murders. No many how many Palestinians Israel drives from their homes, villages, and lands. If truth could be told, the true axis-of-evil is the United States and Israel.

Millions of Americans are now homeless because of foreclosures. Millions more have lost their jobs, and even more millions have no access to health care. Yet, the US government continues to squander hundreds of billions of dollars on wars that serve no US purpose. President Obama and General McChrystal have taken the position that they know best, the American public be damned.

It could not be made any clearer that the President of the United States and the US military have no regard whatsoever for democracy, human rights, and international law. This is yet another reason to apply crippling sanctions against Washington, a government that has emerged under Bush/Obama as a brownshirt state that deals in lies, torture, murder, war crimes, and deception.

Many governments are complicit in America€™s war crimes. With Obama€™s budget deep in the red, Washington€™s wars of naked aggression are dependent on financing by the Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Saudis, South Koreans, Indians, Canadians and Europeans. The second this foreign financing of American war crimes stops, America€™s wars of aggression against Muslims stop.

The US is not a forever €œsuperpower€ that can indefinitely ignore its own laws and international law. The US will eventually fall as a result of its hubris, arrogance, and imperial overreach. When the American Empire collapses, will its enablers also be held accountable in the war crimes court?

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: [email protected]

[Torurot]

An Unpopular War
What Obama Isn't Telling You About Afghanistan
http://counterpunch.org/dimaggio08312009.html
By ANTONY DiMAGGIO August 31, 2009

President Obama finds himself in a precarious position when calling for escalation of the war in Afghanistan. While this conflict is traditionally seen as the €œgood war,€ American and Afghan public support appears mixed at best. There is good reason to suspect that the limited support for war that exists will evaporate after casualties on both sides increase and Afghanistan€™s security further deteriorates.

A significant problem we run into when assessing the war is the tremendous lack of information available about Americans€™ reasons for opposing war. Scholars note the tendency of polling firms to €œsocially construct€ public opinion by refusing to ask questions about Americans€™ moral challenges to U.S. foreign policy. Benjamin Ginsberg argues in The Captive Public that €œpolls generally raise questions that are of interest to clients and purchasers of poll data - newspapers, political candidates, governmental agencies, and business corporations€¦questions of no immediate relevance to government, business, or politicians will not easily find their way into the surveys. This is particularly true of issues such as the validity of the capitalist economic system, or the legitimacy of governmental authority, issues that business and government prefer not to see raised at all, much less at their own expense.€

In the case of Afghanistan, polls ask whether the war is €œworth fighting€ - €œconsidering the costs€ - and whether the U.S. is €œwinning or losing.€ Surveys ask Americans €œhow well the military effort is going,€ with the primary concern being whether the war is winnable.

Pollsters ask respondents whether they support increases in U.S. forces and whether they support the war. They don€™t probe Americans about their concerns for Afghan civilian casualties that are caused by U.S. bombing, about whether war can realistically be used to promote humanitarianism, or about whether they would support an end to the conflict if the Afghan people demand it. Many questions might be asked to determine whether Americans accept foundational challenges to U.S. policy, but none of these questions are seen as worthy of exploration.

Americans are uneasy about escalation in Afghanistan. As of August 2009, an ABC-Washington Post poll finds that 51 percent of Americans think the war is not €œworth fighting.€ The same poll finds that just 24 percent support an increase in U.S. forces; 45 percent support a reduction, and 32% support the status quo. A July poll by CNN finds that 41 percent favor continuing the Afghan war, while 54 percent oppose it. Americans are increasingly suspicious of promises to fight terrorism through war. They see the United States€™ endless reliance on violence as counter-productive and dangerous. A Pew poll from February 2009 finds that 50 percent of Americans feel that reducing U.S. troops abroad will help €œreduce terrorism€ (just 31 percent support an increase in troops to fight terror). Such opposition has significantly increased since 2002 - in the wake of the 9/11 attacks - when just 29 percent supported a decrease in troops to fight terror.

None of these results should be taken as an indication that Americans oppose violence. Support for escalation in Afghanistan is still supported by many Americans, and pro-war views are more common among men, whites, older Americans, Republicans, and conservatives, and the less educated. The Pew center also finds that, as of July 2009, six in ten Americans support a €œCIA program that targets al Qaeda leaders for assassination.€

Supporters of escalation in Washington will be encouraged by the fact that many Afghans support the U.S. presence, but this finding must be carefully qualified. It is true that, according to a February 2009 BBC poll, nearly seven in ten Afghans are happy that the U.S. overthrew the Taliban in 2001, and over six in ten somewhat or strongly support having U.S. forces in Afghanistan. At first glance, this would seem to fit nicely with Obama€™s increase of troops. Obama promises to €œdisrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and their extremist allies,€ including the Taliban.

Are these goals compatible with the Afghan public€™s wishes? In reality, there is little evidence that Afghans want the U.S. to engage in military activities against Islamic fundamentalists. Afghans want the U.S. in the country - not to bomb €œinsurgent€ targets - but to pursue reconstruction. According to the February BBC poll only 33 percent of Afghans think the U.S. and Afghan government will be successful in their goal to destroy al Qaeda and the Taliban. Most think alternative scenarios will play out. Majorities believe one of the following will occur: 1. the Taliban will emerge victorious; 2. fighting will continue with no winner; or 3. the Afghan government will negotiate a settlement with the Taliban. Whatever the solution that emerges, most do not accept the U.S. narrative ending in a victory for Obama and a defeat of al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Most Afghans vehemently oppose U.S. violence. 77 percent find it €œunacceptable€™ for the U.S. to €œuse air strikes€ to €œdefeat the Taliban and anti-government fighters€ - mainly because these attacks €œendanger too many innocent civilians.€ Afghans are more likely to blame the U.S. for civilian casualties, as opposed to €œanti-government forces€ that live €œamong civilians.€ Afghan opposition to the occupation is likely to increase as Obama escalates the conflict, considering that the mandate is not for a new bombing campaign, but for reconstruction. About 65 percent of Afghans currently have not experienced €œbombing or shelling by U.S., NATO or ISAF forces.€ As U.S. violence spreads to previously unaffected regions, however, the Afghan people will grow increasingly hostile to the occupation.

U.S. officials express little interest in Afghan reconstruction. On the other hand, the Afghan people are more likely to see economic problems, poverty, and the lack of jobs as a bigger problem than the €œsecurity€ issues stressed by U.S. leaders. According to the BBC poll, seven in ten Afghans judge job availability and economic opportunities as €œvery€ or €œsomewhat bad.€ A majority think that the conditions of the country€™s roads, bridges, and infrastructure, and the supply of electricity are €œvery€ or €œsomewhat bad.€ Most admit they have difficulties affording basic goods that they want or need.

Why should anyone be surprised that Afghans resent violent occupation? Is it a revelation that people don€™t like being occupied, and seeing their country destroyed - their family and friends killed - in the name of €œprogress,€ €œfighting terror,€ and €œdemocracy?€ As British reporter Patrick Cockburn argues: €œIn Afghanistan American and British forces became participants in civil wars which their own presence has exacerbated and prolonged. The U.S. and U.K. governments persistently ignore the extent to which foreign military occupation has destabilized Afghanistan€¦ foreign occupations have seldom been popular throughout history. The occupiers consult their own political, military and economic interests before that of the allied governments which they are supposedly supporting. This de-legitimized the Kabul government and enabled its opponents to pose as the patriotic opposition. In addition, foreign military armies, whatever their declared intentions, enforce their authority by violence, invariably producing friction with the local population.€ We would do well to take Cockburn€™s insights seriously when considering expansion of the war in Afghanistan.

Anthony DiMaggio teaches American and Global Politics at Illinois State University. He is the author of Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008) and the forthcoming When Media Goes to War (2010). He can be reached at [email protected]

[Tomcat]

(Torurot @ Sep. 02 2009,05:57) foreign occupations have seldom been popular throughout history.

. In addition, foreign military armies, whatever their declared intentions, enforce their authority by violence,

Just stating the obvious.. what do people expect the Armed forces to use.
Guns that shoot flowers perhaps

Wars are nasty and people do get killed...or am i missing something

[Torurot]

Yep "collateral damage". INNOCENT civilians being murdered by soldiers. There's NO nice way to say it. The OCCUPIERS must go!

[Torurot]

From http://warincontext.org

   Editor€™s Comment €” €œOperation Enduring Freedom, through the lens of vital national interests, was largely won but for some inexplicable reason we have not realized it.€

   An inexplicable reason? If George Bush had not been surrounded by neoconservative handlers, I dare say that rather than come up with an overblown €œwar on terror€ he would have kept it simple. The task in hand was to €œget bin Laden.€ And that€™s why the war has never ended: it has failed to accomplish its primary goal.

   Of course, as any fool knows, a real man hunt requires stealth.



Is the war in Afghanistan in the interests of the United States and its allies?
By Major Jeremy Kotkin, Small Wars Journal, August 30, 2009
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/jou...287-kotkin.pdf
[Afghan landscape]
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog....an-in-t
Operation Enduring Freedom [OEF], through the lens of vital national interests, was largely won but for some inexplicable reason we have not realized it. What is worse, we allowed our strategy to change before the initial, imperative mission was fully accomplished. Having to a great extent captured, killed, and seriously disrupted the al-Qaeda leadership and training infrastructure in Afghanistan, the necessity, and therefore strategy for this war, has gotten away from us. This is true for one reason and one reason alone: we have transferred the consequence of the very real threat of al Qaeda to the Taliban, to fields of Afghan poppies, and to the political and economic shambles that was and is Afghanistan. These things are not existential threats to our nation. With public debate and approval, they might be worthy of continued political and economic transformation and support through other aspects of national power, but not wholesale military intervention.

It is not a threat to the United States if the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan decides to live as if it were in the 15th century and create laws to mandate it. It is not a threat to the U.S. if they decide to ban women from attending school or stone them for adultery or not wearing a headscarf correctly. Nor is it a threat if poppies are their main cash crop. These are all variously horrible, unfortunate, and things we would like to see change, but do not constitute a direct, existential threat to the United States requiring a military response. Therefore, if the direct threats are not the Taliban (who was in power minding their own business since 1996), Sharia law (which has been used in various countries at various levels of fundamentalism for over 1400 years without being a threat to us), drugs, or necessarily even the failed or ungoverned state itself (of which examples have always been present on the global stage, also without being a threat to us), what are they? The direct threat was and is the loosely tied organization of al Qaeda and its affiliates. They are best destroyed just as we successfully prosecuted the early stages of OEF- through a combination of limited relationship building with local populations, deployments of Special Operations Forces [SOF], thorough intelligence, and targeted airstrikes. When we need to, our nation can call upon these assets to attack and defeat these threats. Then those assets can come home. Any continued presence should only be conducted by the occasional SOF, Foreign Service Officers, and/or USAID representatives (in permissive environments) to maintain networks of relationships when and where necessary and promote US interests. If al Qaeda were to again coalesce in Afghanistan, we would find, fix, and kill/capture them. This is the same strategy we follow when we find them anywhere else, be it Sudan, Yemen, Pakistan, or Newark, NJ. Why, then, does only Afghanistan warrant a total military-led effort to redesign their culture, system of government, and market-base based on US biases?

As Sun Tzu said, €œTactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.€ What is facing us now is a series of tactics and operations with no overlying match of policy and strategy. Even if there is a higher strategy that is in line with national policy, this policy does not pass the €œFamily Factor€ test that Kent Johnson defines in his article €œPolitical-Military Engagement Policy: Casualty Avoidance and the American Public.€ (Aerospace Power Journal, Spring 2001) Our limited war in early OEF quickly and silently evolved into something different with the intent of removing the Taliban in their entirety and €˜enabling€™ a centralized democracy to exist where none has before. After the war for our vital national interests, we allowed our nation€™s military to be the tool used to secure interests of a far less critical nature; to forcibly promote our beliefs of human rights, economic freedoms, and individual liberties. In our best Wilsonian imitation, we are determined to bestow the Peace of Westphalia upon Afghanistan, create a sovereign state in the best Western sense of the word, and allow them to move through the €œmajestic portal€ to bring them into the family of evolved nations. Somehow, this will be better for America than whatever locally legitimate ruling authority rises to power in Kabul or the rest of Afghanistan€™s provinces. In a utopian world, this might be fine, but in reality, where the native Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek people get a vote, it yields the quagmire we face today. Not only is this outside of our initial (and again, largely complete) mission in Afghanistan, it is outside of both the pragmatism and necessity of realpolitik and realism on one side and any cost-benefit analysis of political idealism on the other. To think that to secure the US homeland from attack we must install an amenable democratic government in Kabul awakens definite parallels in Afghani history.

Field Marshall Frederick Roberts who, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, led a successful attack against Kabul and the later 300-miles-in-3-weeks march from Kandahar to Kabul (to rescue an embattled British force) eventually said: €œThe less they see of us, the less they€™ll dislike us.€ In the end, he, and the British parliament, realized that after three consecutive wars in the same region for the same strategic purpose, Afghanistan wasn€™t as strategically important to the British as they had supposed all along. In their effort to maintain varying levels of control or influence in Afghan affairs to counter supposed Russian aims on British India, the British fought three politically debilitating wars with the Afghans resulting in less regional influence, less control, and more loss of life each time. They would eventually conclude that if the Russians wanted to attack British India through Afghanistan, they, the British, should let them. The impossible task and effort of maintaining influence over the Afghans was inordinate compared to the cost of defending India at the gates of India, not at the Hindu Kush. Invading Afghanistan was easy; the follow-on governing was impossible. It would be far easier to let Russia try and stretch their LOCs [lines of communication] and expend their blood and treasure through unconquerable Afghan territory to get to India, not the reverse.

Something about Afghanistan must breed strategic overstretch. As British €˜Forward Policy€™ of the 19th century delivered three strategically unwinnable wars, we similarly seem to think defense of the homeland begins at the Hindu Kush; that we must fight them there so we don€™t have to fight them here. The British realized in their successive efforts that punitive strikes and raids when necessary into Afghanistan were far more effective in the long run than trying to maintain even a semi-permanent presence and installing British-friendly (malleable) governments.

Beyond the supposed and indefensible argument that the Taliban provides us with an existential threat, we have allowed something far more insidious to occur; we have enabled al Qaeda of the 21st century to replace Russia of the 19th century in the way we, and the Victorian British before us, looked at and dealt with the territory and peoples of Afghanistan. Academically, the parallel is illuminating; in reality, it is tragic. Al Qaeda, far from requiring a massive, conventional military deployment (nor a global war on terrorism), should in actuality warrant only local police actions. If that is not possible or within the capacity of local forces, a €œlow-intensity,€ small footprint, or otherwise limited US response to negate that threat where present would suffice. This should be the modus operandi in Afghanistan, Yemen, central or northern Africa, Indonesia, or anywhere else. Large-scale deployments or nation building are not the answer. If for no other reason than to point out the fact that we do not see the need to try and €œfix€ every other un- or under-governed space across the world or forcibly promote our national interests everywhere else they might differ from our own. €œFixing€ Afghanistan is not a vital national interest. [continued€¦]
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/jou...287-kotkin.pdf

[stonefre]

Man, get a life.

[strocube]

"An inexplicable reason? If George Bush had not been surrounded by neoconservative handlers, I dare say that rather than come up with an overblown €œwar on terror€ he would have kept it simple. The task in hand was to €œget bin Laden.€ And that€™s why the war has never ended: it has failed to accomplish its primary goal."

I do not agree with this analysis. This war never ending, or endless war, is precisely the idea. In some perverse way these neocon pricks are Trotskyites. They are all about perpetual war.

[Lefty]

RIGHT ON STROCUBE!! YOU NAILED IT AS USUAL!!

[fleeing]

(strocube @ Sep. 02 2009,17:53) In some perverse way these neocon pricks are Trotskyites. They are all about perpetual war.

I've never been a commie, always considered them too dull and dreary (and way too right wing ) , but I thought Trotsky advocated perpetual revolution, which is of course entirely different to perpetual war.

Perpetual war is the construction of a permanent (false) sense of fear. Apparently the 'Nijvel Gang' (Bende van Nijvel) who shocked Belgium in the 1980s with a series of seemingly unmotivated and extremely violent robberies, was an example of such an attempt to introduce such a 'permanent' sense of fear.Surprisingly enough (not) the members of this gang were neo nazis, policemen and other 'patriots'.

If anything, Trotsky was one of the victims of the perpetual war doctrine introduced by his old mate Lenin.

[strocube]

     Thanks Lefty.
Of course, Fleeing you are correct. There is a big difference between perpetual war and perpetual revolution.
Yes, Stalin sent an assassin to kill Trotsky when he was in exile in Mexico. I think the killer used an ice ax.
My point was, that there are similarities between Trotsky's ideas of perpetual revolution, and the neocon's ideas about perpetual war. That's why I wrote, "In some perverse way. . ." It's the perpetual bit that's similar.

[alan1chef]

In my opinion, the escalation in Afghanistan against the Taliban is really about stability in Pakistan and not necessarily about turning Afghanistan into another Iraq. Afghanistan has been ruled for centuries by factions....warlords in the feudal sense who control their own territories. It is virtually impossible to centralize government in this scenario. Maybe a Canadian style system where provinces are created would be workable under the umbrella of a central government. Warlords would become provincial governors or something similar. If you want the "provincial governors" to keep Al Qaeda under control, it has to be economically advantageous to do so. Does this require long term military presence...no...short term, yes. It does require long term economic support...and why not convert the illegal growing of poppies into legal growing of poppies for sale. Throw in some subsidies so that the return is greater for legal growing and the illegal trade will subside.