The situation is much more complicated than it seems and definitely too complicated for Sarah Palin to understand. The war in Afghanistan is not one that can be "won". I think the Obama administration still understands the situation better than the Republicans. We are seeing changes in their way of dealing with us. When Hillary Clinton came to Pakistan, although her visit was short still she utilized it pretty well. She did a number of debates with our top journalists on tv who asked many difficult and critical questions. The way she answered them and took all the questios and criticism tactfully and gave replies to them was wonderful. I myself watched many of her interviews on TV. She went to a number of mosques and shrines. She showed her respect by covering her head going there. These are the things that mean a lot to the common man here. For me, it was a refreshing change that she pronounced “Pakistan” correctly unlike other Americans.
The aid that is coming from America, for the first time is going to non-governmental organizations instead of the pockets of our corrupt politicians. They will get some part of it but the fact that any part of it will be going directly to NGOs too is amazing. Although the common man can still not be won by just these measures as the history of mistrust goes back to decades but these measures still do at least some pat in easing the tension. Increasing troops in Afghanistan might help a little but you need to understand that Pakistan is at the center-stage of this whole drama. Some Taliban in Afghanistan are locals but most of them are foreigners and we all know that a huge number of them come from Pakistan who are trained at here. Whenever the America launches a full scale military offensive against them, they just come here to Pakistan which they consider a safe haven and as soon as things get better there they go back.
Even if they are stopped from escaping to Pakistan by tighter border control and lets say all of the Taliban are killed in Afghanistan, more will be recruited from these same madrassahs and extremist training camps from Pakistan. America keeps launching drone attacks from time to time in our tribal areas which have been effective but have caused a large number of civilian casualties as well. What needs to be done is better intelligence services and attacking the militant safe havens and training grounds in Pakistan secretly in association with Pakistani government. This goal can be achieved with the help of American intelligence agencies. It is true that Pakistani government needs to do more in fighting these terrorists. Unfortunately our politicians are just as bad as the military dictators. I do believe that the government in some ways is trying to make things bad here to get more aid from America which obviously wont go to the people but to the pockets of the politicians themselves.
Some people do believe that some or even most of the bomb blasts in Pakistan are actually arranged by the government so they can show to the world and especially America that “look what Taliban have done and what they are capable of and what they can do to you also, so give us more and more money in aid and funds that we can use to fight Taliban”. Most of the money in fact goes to their own pocket and little goes to do what it was given for. The government of Afghanistan lead by Hamid Karzai is also very corrupt. He is sometimes called the “the corruption king”. Until more schools and hospitals and factories and jobs are created in Afghanistan and the quality of life of afghans is improved , no real change can come. Sometimes they become Taliban because that’s the only option they have. Also there are a number of madrassahs still operating in Pakistan who turn regular people who just want to get knowledge about Islam into terrorists. Even in a lot of mosques, the Friday sermon is more America bashing speeches than anything related to Islam. There are religious shows and channels on TV that preach extremist ideology and urge people to take up arms.
Nothing is being done about them by the Pakistani government . All that is very important, because nobody can deny Pakistan’s role in the war that is going in Afghanistan. There is a lot of social unrest here in Pakistan. The poverty, unemployment and inflation are out of control. People are selling their children and committing suicide because they cannot provide for their families. It is much easier to persuade a person like that to take up arms to go on a “road to heaven” than someone who actually has some part of his/her life in control. Our mullahs come in all shapes and sizes, hair styles, beard styles and clothing to cater to the religious needs of all social strata. It is more like a business. The other day a more modern looking mullah on TV with a shorter beard and a pant suit with few sentences of English sprinkled here and there in his speech was urging young people to India as it was the prophecy of prophet Muhammad. This is so frustrating that these type of psychos are allowed to spread their message of hate and war on TV with no restrictions.
So America should urge Pakistani government to do something about these mullahs and madrasshas and TV channels also who are misleading people, recruiting more Taliban and making things worse for America in Afghanistan.
WASHINGTON – Morale has fallen among soldiers in Afghanistan, where troops are seeing record violence in the 8-year-old war, while those in Iraq show much improved mental health amid much lower violence,Look for the Right to praise the surge as a success and berate Obama for dithering on Afghanistan.
[..] President Obama has made his decision on Afghan Strategy Review 2.0 and is preparing for a roll-out sometime around the 19th or 20th of November. Senior officials are clearing their schedules, giving heads-up to allies, and generally girding their loins for a major public relations push. But a push for what?
McClatchey reports that, as expected, the president will split the difference between his warring advisors. He will embrace the counterinsurgency approach recommended by General McChrystal and other military advisors. He will reject the narrower approach favored by Vice President Biden and other political advisors. But he will not authorize the upper-bound of military resources McChrystal requested. If the McClatchey report is accurate, the final choice comes close to resembling the option dubbed "McChrystal light," but probably not light enough to avoid a political battle with the anti-war faction at home.
One consequence of having been alive through a lot of modern American history is remembering a lot of mass shootings. I was working at a high school summer job when news came over the radio that Charles Whitman had gunned down more than 40 people, killing 14, from the main tower at the University of Texas at Austin. I was editing a news magazine during the schoolyard killings in Paducah, Kentucky in 1997 and sent reporters to try to figure out what it all meant. I can remember where I was when the live-news coverage switched to the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, and the shootings at the one-room schoolhouse in the Amish country of Pennsylvania, and the Virginia Tech shootings two years ago. And all the rest.Normally I'd be in agreement, as I was after the Virginia Tech massacre.
In the saturation coverage right after the events, the "expert" talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre "mean"? A decade later, do we "know" anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.
We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They've got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don't mean nothing.
RIP.
If you have not seen Karen DeYoung’s Oct 27 story, “U.S. Official Resigns Over Afghan War”, you owe it to yourself, your country, and our soldiers over there to read it. But even more powerful than Ms. DeYoung’s stunner of a scoop is the accompanying letter of resignation itself of Matthew P. Hoh, the 36-year old Marine-turned-Foreign Service Officer. It is a cry of conscience and an indictment of our continued presence in Afghanistan.
One can only pray—I use the word literally—that President Obama will read it before he makes his fateful decision about where we go from here in Afghanistan.
[..] Reading Mr. Hoh’s anguished, principled and urgent letter put me in mind of two great Americans of the Vietnam era: John Paul Vann and Frank Snepp. Vann, a soldier turned foreign service officer was the indispensable man of Acts 1 and 2 of our Vietnam tragedy. Frank Snepp, the CIA officer who spoke out against our shameless betrayal of our friends when Saigon fell, and who was unjustly punished for that act of conscience, was the hero of Act 3. With his letter, Matthew Hoh becomes the indispensable man of what one prays will be the final act of our adventure in the land that defeated Alexander the Great, Great Britain, and Russia.
If after reading Ms. DeYoung’s account and Mr. Hoh’s letter, you draw these same conclusions, do more than post a comment here. Do the old fashioned thing: call your congressman and senator. Tell them, "It’s time for us to go."
what seems to be conspicuously absent from the conversation in the United States is the realization that Afghanistan’s corruption problem, like its security problem, can be best addressed by additional troops.Yglesias snarks: At long last the case for military occupation of Louisiana and Illinois that we've been waiting for.
An Afghan bill allowing a husband to starve his wife if she refuses to have sex has been published in the official gazette and become law.Welcome to Afghanistan. Please set your clocks back 800 years.
[..] It allows a man to withhold food from his wife if she refuses his sexual demands; a woman must get her husband's permission to work; and fathers and grandfathers are given exclusive custody of children.
Dear Gherald,I called my representative, a staunch progressive, and her office doesn't yet know how she'll be voting. Check out the list and call yours to put some pressure on and get them to join Republicans (because of the IMF funding) and bat this thing down.
Rahm Emmanuel is pressuring progressives to change their vote and abandon their principles. You can help fight back.
Your Representative is getting intense pressure from Emmanuel to pass more money for the war in Afghanistan, as well as $100 billion to bail out European banks, not to mention an amendment to block the release of detainee torture photos.
Your Representative voted the right way the first time. Give them a call and ask them to hold firm: http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/supplemental
If 39 Democrats commit to vote against the bill it won't pass, and 10 have already agreed to do so. We need 29 more.
For once, the votes of progressive members of Congress actually matter when it comes to funding the war. But they are being heavily pressured by Congressional leadership to toe the line.
Please call your Representative's office and let them know you support their commitment to bringing our troops home safely, and urge them to vote against this bill.
We've got the phone number for your Representative here: http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/supplemental
After you call, please forward this email to friends in your district, and ask them to call too. A few hundred phone calls at this crucial time may make all the difference!
Thank you for help.
Jane Hamsher
FDL Action
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is expected to announce on Monday the restructuring of several dozen major defense programs as part of the Obama administration's bid to shift military spending from preparations for large-scale war against traditional rivals to the counterinsurgency programs that Gates and others consider likely to dominate U.S. conflicts in coming decades.Yglesias: European aid to Afghanistan...
Gates's aides say his plan would boost spending for some programs and take large whacks at others, including some with powerful constituencies on Capitol Hill and among influential contractors, making his announcement more of an opening bid than a decisive end to weeks of sometimes acrimonious internal Pentagon debate.
Obama’s haul looks pretty modest—about 3,000 extra troops to provide election-related security plus about 2,000 troops to do embedded police trading, plus $100 million more for training and $500 million more for humanitarian aid. Still I’d say the negative tone of the press coverage suggests the perils of expectations more than anything else. The Bush administration has been trying to get more out of the Europeans for years and failing. Obama tried and he’s got something.NYT: Liberty, Equality, Envy...
[...] the real time to ask for additional European support in Afghanistan would have been 2002 and 2003 when many countries were eager to cooperate with the United States. Instead, the Bush administration leaned on America’s best friends in Europe and around the world to contribute tens of thousands of soldiers to Iraq.
The feeling in Europe, and especially in France, about Barack Obama’s presidency is as clear as day: we are envious.The Reality-Based Community:
The Post: The Radicalization of Ben Bernanke...A. A. Gill reports from London that "Mr. Obama is the only popular politician left iin the world. He could win an election in any of the G-20 countries, and his fellow world leaders will do anything to take home a touch of that reflected popularity."
If that's true, it's a substantial foreign-policy advantage.
Timothy Geithner and his predecessor Henry Paulson have been the public faces of the U.S. government's battle against the global economic crisis. But even as the secretaries of the Treasury have garnered the headlines -- as well as popular anger surrounding bank bailouts and corporate bonuses -- another official has quickly amassed great influence by committing trillions of dollars to keep markets afloat, radically redefining his institution and taking on serious risks as he seeks to rescue the American economy. Without a doubt, this crisis is now Ben Bernanke's war.And why are Asian kids so good at math? Curiouser and curiouser
Political Browser | washington
