EnMasse

[Hephaestion]

[Tehanu]

Karzai is considering conscription. Now, I do indeed want Canadian troops out of there asap, but I've got to wonder how effective a conscripted army is going to be ... plus, apparently they're not having recruiting troubles. A job is a job, I guess.

[thwap]

That's a disaster coming for sure then! A government that can't even survive without foreign troops is going to try to force young men to fight for it!

Will these idiots ever learn?
_________________
Man! I hate them fancy-lads!

[Rufus Polson]

[thwap]

Paul Dewar asked Stockwell Day about this. 10 percent of the army recruits desert. Dewar asked if there was any effort to track them, because some of them are probably insurgents who take their weapons and training and go after Canadian troops.

Stockwell said that he'd have to get back to him on the subject.
_________________
Man! I hate them fancy-lads!

[Hephaestion]

Afghanistan: Taliban chops off nose, ears of 19-year-old girl for "shaming" her in-laws

[Senor Magoo]

It's amazing the things that shame them and the things that don't.
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ø¤°`°¤ø,¸_¸,ø¤°`°¤ø,¸_¸,ø¤°°¤ø,¸_¸,ø¤°°¤ø,

[TS.]

That's just horrific.
_________________
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

[Hephaestion]

Clinton wants continued Canadian Afghan presence

[Hephaestion]

US military admits role in killing of Afghan women

[Maestro]

Apparently Karzai has threatened to quit his job and join the Taliban if the 'West' doesn't stop pressuring him...

Karzai's Taliban threat unacceptable: Harper

[Tehanu]

[TS.]

I think Karzai is very well aware that the hand is very close to not feeding him any more, at which point he will have every reason to make whatever personal deal he can with the Taliban.
_________________
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

[Hephaestion]

The Dancing Boys Of Afghanistan

[Hephaestion]

Top soldier in Afghanistan booted in scandal

[Maestro]

[Fidel]

Afghans believe US is funding Taliban Intellectuals and respected Afghan professionals are convinced the west is prolonging conflict to maintain influence in the region May 2010

Underwriting the Taliban 2001
_________________
Democracy should more appropriately be referred to as Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. - George Washington

[TS.]

What a surprise - despite all those claims of improvement we hear every day, the violence is getting worse.

[Diane Demorney]

Sorry, Trillions in Unmined Mineral Wealth Is Not a Reason to Keep Occupying Afghanistan

[Tehanu]

It's a search-and-replace sort of thing for the USA.

Big Boss General says something mean about Obama, gets fired. Soldiers are saying Big Boss General was wussy because he put in rules marginally protecting civilians. Ha. New Big Boss General -- who happens to be a Former Big Boss General From Another War -- comes in and thumps his chest and says he's in it to win, win, win.

I love the smell of testosterone in the morning.

[thwap]

So McCrystal's ouster is a cover for the cowardly devastation of more villages?

Fuck-you Obama, you sanctimonious piece of shit. And fuck you harper, you worthless, shit-licking toadie.
_________________
Man! I hate them fancy-lads!

[Rufus Polson]

Hmmm . . . but Petraeus is a much more accomplished liar than McChrystal. I suspect his approach in real life will be more like his approach in Iraq. That is to say, it will involve beating a big drum back home about how he's got all these troops pushing the Taliban back, while in Afghanistan he mostly tries to bribe them to go away or actively put them on the payroll. It could work, although I think that kind of thing is less likely to work with Afghans than with Iraqis. In Afghanistan they've already been through a lot of infighting and side-switching and attempts by all kinds of different people both foreign and local to use money to gain power. They seem to have a very nuanced approach to the question of loyalty; from our perspective they look treacherous, and some of them simply are. But for many it seems like the question of loyalty is a lot less tied in with the question of pay. It's a bit more like "fools who think loyalty can be bought are soon parted from their money". So for instance you get all these people joining the Afghan armed forces, scoring a bit of pay, some square meals, some training and a gun, and then buggering off to fight for the Taliban. That's cuz their loyalty was to their people and the ability to scam some supplies out of the enemy didn't change that.
Plus, in Iraq they mostly fought just a piece of the Sunni minority and they couldn't really handle that. The Shi'ite and Kurds they mainly dealt with by giving them what the Sunni used to have. The Taliban represent a much bigger ethnic group and they're not just hanging on, they're arguably winning. They have less motivation to let themselves be co-opted.

So I don't think that much of Petraeus' chances. But I suspect a lot of his martial noise is just that--martial noise for the benefit of the kids back home, while he gets on with realpolitik approaches.

[TS.]

[bshmr]

WikiLeaks to expose "classified reports from the line" ! Truth is profoundly simple and free yet ego-sensitive PTB insist on the hard, wasteful expense of deceit, cover-up, and face/pretense.

( see http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.html#ref... amongst others )

The Afghanistan Protocol: Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It
Date:Sun July 25 2010 15:12

[Rufus Polson]

Those WikiLeaks folks are very cool. I hope they don't get assassinated or something.

[thwap]

So there's this pro-war putz named Brian Platt who I used to keep on my blog-roll as a source of decent-minded pro-war information until he turned out to be a dishonest, cowardly hack/crybaby.

For a lark, I went to check out his response to the Wikileaks story and his first entry was some sputtering drivel about "treason" (from a stateless organization), then he recovered his sense enough to say that the info wasn't new or dangerous (except for some in-country officials who, supposedly, the Taliban would not otherwise have known about) and that (get this!) everything is for the best because the more people know about "the mission" the more they tend to support it (!!!!ha!ha!ha!!!!)

So, then, his latest tactic is to point to statistics about all the girls we're educating n' shit, and all the cellphones some Afghans have, as if that justifies propping-up a hideously corrupt, unpopular government of torturers and pedophiles.

His source for these stats was Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic, so i decided to check out what Sullivan was saying, and i didn't see the statistics, but I did see his article on the significance of the Wikileaks and I'll have to say that I agree almost entirely.

[Rufus Polson]

This bit seems kind of irrelevant, though:

[thwap]

Considering that our allies tie people to tank treads as punishment, yeah.
_________________
Man! I hate them fancy-lads!

[thwap]

Here's what Admiral Mike Mullen had to say about Julian Assange and the Wikileaks exposure of military information on the war in Afghanistan.

[anne cameron]

Well, I sit here on the west coast of Vancouver Island, in a village of less than three hundred people, surrounded by mountains on three sides and the Pacific Ocean on the fourth side and I only know what I glean from TV news, from En Masse, and from some "alternate" on-line news sources. I have never been to Afghanistan, don't think I've ever met an Afghani, and I'm sure nothing I say , do, write, or think is going to in any way at all influence "policy". I'm a dyke, a mother, a grandmother and a great-grandmother and I probably can more easily relate to a grandmother in some country I've never seen than I can relate to this or any other mercenary.

I think all the fuss and furor about these 400 pages is bumph. It's just bumph. Publishing a report about something which happened several years ago is probably not going to put anybody anywhere near "harms way".

I haven't read the whole thing. What I have read did not teach me anything I didn't already know. I might not know the specifics; the village, the names of the citizens, the exact hour of day or night or... but I already knew innocent people were being turned to grue . I already knew acts of raw savagery are being committed, international law is being flouted, war crimes are common place and the military is quite happily turning blind eyes and condoning behaviour which, if committed on the streets of Vancouver or Toronto would result in life sentences without possibility of parole for twentyfive years.

Obama isn't going to do much which is different from what Dubya did and would still do. He might do it faster... or slower... and he might be able to deliver a better speech justifying or even celebrating his decisions but the Excited States has been a nation of war since inception. That isn't going to change any time soon.

The nation has beggared itself with war, war, war so that a few individuals and corporations can accumulate obscene profit. The poor are poorer, there are more unemployed than at any time in the past fifty or so years, and, for increasing numbers of unemployed the only hope of any kind of pay cheque is to join the military.

I don't think that is co-inky-dinky, I don't think that's an accident. As more and more people run out of unemployment benefits, and more and more jobs are "outsourced", there will be lots and lots and really lots of desperate men and women who will don the uniform in order to have a bed and some food. And as more and more people sign on, there will be more and more need to USE them, so there will be more wars which will drain the country financially while profiting those who already have far too much...education will suffer, health care will suffer, every kind of social programme will be slashed...and the nation will writhe until it implodes. Then they can declare war on themselves and each other.

I have read articles which have tried to claim these four hundred pages are as important as...this, that, or the next revelatory expose of the past... they're no more important than any note passed from one kid in grade three to another...if they were really important the people who made them available would be in some morgue somewhere, maybe the same one which got the body of Karen Silkwood...

Those four hundred pages were ALLOWED to be made public. It's a great diversion. TV pundits can blether on about whether or not troops will be put in harms way and a great furor can ensue and while the public is watching and listening to all that bumph something vile, atrocious and disgusting is being played out without any fanfare at all. Another errant Hollywood "star" is released from jail way ahead of time in order to go to "recovery" and take "treatment" and be "rehabilitated" while uncounted numbers of unemployed are forced to resort to robbing the corner store in order to get enough money to buy a Big Mac (supersized). Fortified with a stomach full of junk food they will tomorrow go down and sign on with the military, after which they will be carefully taught to slaughter others like themselves until such time as they are either crippled for life or killed.

None of it is an accident. And what those four hundred pages DON'T say is probably more important than anything they do reveal.

Homeland Security now does what the KGB used to do and if any more people get ethnically profiled and put on the no-fly list the airlines will go broke for lack of passengers...

but hey, you can now get the very latest electronic gadget in an expanded array of colours!

It's all unfolding exactly as the corporations want it to unfold.

[thwap]

I'm not so sure that Wikileaks is just part of a plot. I don't think it's as important as the Pentagon Papers was, but it's evidence that the small fry are not entirely powerless, which is something to celebrate.

Remember Gouzenko was just a Russian cipher clerk who didn't want to live in Stalin's USSR so he took his valuable evidence to the Canadian government.

Julian Assange has a system whereby people can dump official secrets anonymously and it can be released electronically throughout the world through the magic of the internet. The same way they can spy on us, ... we have a wee bit of ability to reveal stuff about them.

http://creekside1.blogspot.com/2010/08/snitch-hackers-and-end-of-pr...
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Man! I hate them fancy-lads!

[Tehanu]

Karzai has said he's done with foreign security companies, and is phasing most of them out over the next four months.

An aid official opines in the NYT that this is a bad idea; he's not confident that Afghan police and army can provide enough protection for aid workers.

[Rufus Polson]

Sounds like a smart move to me.
Let's face it, the foreigners can't really protect anyone the Taliban etc. don't want protected, anyway. So the only way to protect someone and have it stick is through bribery. The foreigners don't know who to pay protection, and some of them might not even be corrupt enough to twig that that's what you need to do (OK, admittedly this part is unlikely). At best they'll end up passing the bribes through extra levels before they get where they need to go, which is inefficient.

By giving the jobs to locals, you make sure the operation is being run by people who know the score and can directly bribe the relevant Taliban representatives, cutting out unproductive middlemen. All the security money stays in Afghanistan, and bloodshed is probably reduced. Everybody wins except the foreign contractors who lose out on the gravy train.

Aid officials aren't going to be happy about the concept because they'll worry it might get extended to them, and aid to Afghanistan seems to be largely one massive sinkhole of corruption, most of the "aid" being to the bank balances of aid officials and consultants. If the foreign security forces can get thrown off the gravy train, next thing you know Karzai might want to start directing aid money to local Afghan construction groups who would bribe Karzai for the chance at the contracts rather than being beholden to US government organizations . . .

[bshmr]

Contains a few observations which seem credible and deserve attention. Contrast to NPR's Talk of the Nation program (that I heard only a portion of) today.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,718656,00.html

Exotic Birds in a Cage
Criticism Grows of Afghanistan's Bloated NGO Industry
By Walter Mayr; 09/22/2010

[TS.]

You had to know this was coming sometime. Hamid Karzai has admitted that Iran has been funneling money into his office, literally by the bagload.

[sparqui]

Our course in Afghanistan was justified today [sarcasm].

The media is creaming themselves with Omar Khadr's admission of guilt. Harper smirks as Canadians celebrate the US prosecution of tall, burly and bearded terrorist. Now Speer's widow can sleep in peace.

[Rufus Polson]

[The Evil Twin]

[Rufus Polson]

God, the Khadr thing is such a revolting travesty.

[sparqui]

Cannon was disgusting in yesterday's QP, responding to a BQ question.
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“If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a tractor.”

-- Gilles Duceppe

[Maestro]

Mikhail Gorbachev has a few things to say about Afghanistan:

Gorbachev: Nato victory in Afghanistan impossible

[The Evil Twin]

[Tehanu]

Three more years. Fuckers. And no vote on this, of course, why would we have parliamentary accountability around where Canadian troops are stationed?

So that would be a lie that we were leaving in 2011, wouldn't it, Stephen Harper. And Ignatieff, thanks for rolling over on this. Really.

Note that the role is apparently to train Afghan security forces. Are we training them not to torture people?

[Raos]

I would love to see this government get turfed post haste, but sadly far too many Canadians appear to agree with Harper's preference for rank ideology over responsibility and accountability.

[sparqui]

Canadians have been consistent in opposing participation in Afghanistan. If anything, they are against this extension more than the previous ones. Polls have over 70% against this move. On Cross-Country Check-up, despite the host's claims that call were evenly divided, most I heard were against our involvement in Afghanistan. Even the comments section on the G & M article of the announcement today had the majority crying foul.

This is a crass political ploy - Harper wants to feel like he's a somebody at the NATO shindig this weekend. He wants them to respect him and treat him like he's a world player. Ignatieff is just a slimy opportunist who also happens to be an idiot. For all his intellectual bluster, he is not very politically astute. He can travel the road in a Winebego and roast hot dogs all he wants, but Canadians aren't warming up to him.

This is one issue where he might have bought an ounce of respect had he joined the NDP and BQ in condemning Harper's uni-lateral decision and demanding Parliamentary oversight to such an important and costly issue.
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“If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a tractor.”

-- Gilles Duceppe

[thwap]

So, after over 10 years, the Afghan government still can't fight its own battles against its own people? This is an insurgency with limited support from Pakistan and (MAYBE) Iran, versus a government with billions of dollars and the backing of NATO.

One wonders how the Taliban was able to stabilize the country completely on its own. Perhaps the degree of corruption and brutality of the Karzai regime is far, far worse than the grim fanaticism of the Taliban in the eyes of the Pashtun?

And after all this training, we still don't know how many insurgents are showing up to get a new rifle and tips on how to fire it, and how many are thugs sent by the warlords to learn how to more efficiently plunder and rape.

It boggles the mind. A majority of Canadians has consistently opposed the mission in Afghanistan, but the harpercons will have us believe that their attacks on Statistics Canada were motivated by a few e-mail complaints?
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Man! I hate them fancy-lads!

[ronb]

The Taliban is Pakistan's creature. Back when the Northern Alliance had no patrons, Pakistan rolled in and took over the country without opposition. Now that NATO has sided with the Northern Alliance, we are watching the two proxy armies duke it out. It's not polite to mention it, but we are actually at war with Pakistan at this point, which is why Obama is making kissy faces with India. Pakistan is out, India is in.

[thwap]

Used to be the other way around. Back when Nehru and Indira Gandhi were being all "non-aligned" in the Cold War, and the fanatics at the USA interpreted that as pro-USSR, Pakistan was the darling of the USA. Especially after Nixon warmed up to China which was a big protector of Pakistan and an occasional enemy of India.
_________________
Man! I hate them fancy-lads!

[Rufus Polson]

It's not completely the case to this day. There's a strong element of US policy on India vs. Pakistan that seems to be basically a combination of "divide and rule" and "people who are fighting buy our weapons".

At that, I'm not really convinced either that the Taliban, whatever Pakistan's ambitions, actually serves Pakistan in any real sense, or that to the extent it does the US has really grappled with the idea at a policy level. When dealing with "fuzzy-wuzzies", whatever the knowledge base of some individual administrators, overall US analysis never seems to get beyond "We gave them money for weapons, so they should be our boys now. Why aren't they co-operating with everything we ask? Must be ungrateful, I guess. Typical barbarians!"

So I would say that the US is helping India not so much because they've come to any definite understanding that Pakistan is in some sense siding against them as because they like selling weapons, they want to contain China, and they're sort of vaguely grumpy with Pakistan. But that last bit may not be that huge a factor--Israel is the US' darling and can do practically whatever it wants, but even Israel finds it hard to stop weapons sales to Arab countries in the Middle East. The muscle behind the arms business is hard for even them to buck.

[The Evil Twin]

The MSM has started noticing a trend which I predicted years ago: Karzai increasingly turning against Western allies: