President George W. Bush's administration has launched an urgent review of US policy in Afghanistan as US intelligence officials warn of a "downward spiral" in conditions there, US newspapers reported Thursday.
The papers cite officials familiar with a draft National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan, a comprehensive and classified report combining analyses of 16 US intelligence agencies that is due for completion after US elections in November.
The report concludes that Afghanistan is in a "downward spiral" and casts doubt on the ability of its government to stem the resurgence of Taliban influence there, the New York Times said.
"The classified report finds that the breakdown in central authority in Afghanistan has been accelerated by rampant corruption within the government of President Hamid Karzai and by an increase in violence by militants who have launched increasingly sophisticated attacks from havens in Pakistan," the Times said.
It also describes the impact of a heroin trade "which by some estimates account for 50 percent of Afghanistan's economy," the Times said.
According to The Washington Post, "analysts have concluded that reconstituted elements of Al-Qaeda and the resurgent Taliban are collaborating with an expanding network of militant groups, making the counterinsurgency war infinitely more complicated."
"As the US presidential election approaches, senior officials have expressed worry that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is so tenuous that it may fall apart while a new set of US policymakers settles in." when a new administration takes over in January, the Post said.
_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
With the outlook in Afghanistan already looking worse every day, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen told reporters this morning that the situation in Afghanistan will likely get even worse next year. He said the situation will not improve until the US and its coalition partners embrace a new strategy that links the Afghan conflict with the situation in neighboring Pakistan.
It was also reported today that the White House has launched an urgent policy review for Afghanistan, expected to be completed in the next several weeks. The violence in Afghanistan has soared this year to the highest levels since the war began in 2001. Admiral Mullen told the House Armed Services Committee last month that he was not convinced the US is winning the war, and said that time was running out to change directions.
The escalating violence and ensuing pessimism is not restricted to US officials either. French Army Chief General Jean-Louis Georgelin said today that he shares the sentiment expressed by British Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith that military victory in Afghanistan was “neither feasible nor supportable.”
General David McKiernan has called for an increase in the troop levels in the nation “as quickly as possible.” But the United States has struggled to increase its own forces with 146,000 troops still stuck in Iraq, and has instead pressed its NATO allies to contribute more troops to the effort.
Besides increasing its attacks in Pakistan, the US strategy for Afghanistan thus far seems to center around using the military to crack down on the heroin trade which is a considerable portion of the nation’s economy. But many NATO nations have balked at the move, fearing it will lead to an even greater backlash against international forces operating in the war-torn country.
_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
While America continues its giddy, self-congratulatory celebration of "change," Afghans find themselves mired in the tragically familiar: yet another round of mourning for yet another massacre of innocent civilians in yet another blind, bludgeoning air strike by American forces.
This time almost 40 people, including 10 women and 23 children, were ripped to shreds of bone and viscera when an American missile struck a wedding party in the remote village of Wech Bakhtu, according to Washington's own hand-picked native satrap, President Hamid Karzai. As the Guardian and National Post report:
The bombing on Monday of Wech Baghtu in the southern province of Kandahar destroyed an Afghan housing complex where women and children had gathered to celebrate. Body parts littered the wreckage and farm animals lay dead.
Abdul Jalil, a 37-year-old grape farmer whose niece was getting married, said at the scene of the bombing that US troops and Taliban fighters had been fighting about half a mile from his home.
A short while later fighter planes bombed the complex, killing 23 children, 10 women and four men, he claimed.
"In the bombing, mostly women and children were killed," said villager Hyat Ullah. "Some lost their head. Some lost their hand. They were in very bad condition."
Such mass slaughters of civilians are now a regular occurrence in the occupied land. At last 18 people -- three women and 15 children -- were killed by an allied air strike in Helmand in mid-October. Some 90 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in a night raid on the village of Azizabad in September -- an atrocity that the Pentagon at first tried, My Lai-like, to cover up completely, but was eventually forced to partially acknowledge, admitting "only" 33 civilian deaths in a report that contradicted the eyewitness evidence gathered by the Afghan government, NGOs and UN investigators who detailed the much larger true death toll. In July, Americans bombed yet another wedding party in Nangahar, killing 47 civilians -- including the bride, as the NY Times notes.
In deploring the new slaughter at Wech Bakhtu, Karzai pleaded with the incoming U.S. president, Barack Obama, to "end civilian casualties in Afghanistan" after he takes over the American war machine in January. But there is little chance of that happening. Obama has pledged to send even more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
more...
_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
TimeVirus Galactic Overlord
Posts: 26138
Posted: Sun Nov 09, 08 10:57 am Post subject:
It's not about Bin Laden... And the Taliban had almost eliminated opium production until we interferred...
"While favourable weather conditions have boosted harvests, the recurrent conflicts, because of the destruction, poverty and general insecurity that they entail, are likely to be an important factor in explaining the increases in opium production," says an agency study monitoring the supply of heroin into Europe.
_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
The USG Open Source Center translates an article from the Persian Afghan press alleging that French troops were at one point close to capturing Usamah Bin Ladin in Afghanistan, but that American forces stopped them from doing so. It says that a forthcoming French documentary containing interviews with the French soldiers provides proof for the allegation. The argument is that the Bush administration needed Bin Ladin to be at large in order to justify its military expansionism.
Hasht-e-Sobh
Friday, October 3, 2008
Document Type: OSC Translated Text
Afghan article says US Bin-Ladin hunt phoney
Text of article, "Bin-Ladin on the run? The rumour which was fact", by Afghan independent secular daily newspaper Hasht-e Sobh on 29 September
So, the rumour was right: French soldiers trapped Usamah Bin-Ladin, but were not allowed by the Americans to arrest the apparent fugitive leader of Al-Qa`idah. A Bin-Ladin documentary just released by French documentary cinema examines this issue, an issue which has led to heated debate in the French media.
This French documentary shows how the Americans are interested in continuing the game, a bloody and expensive game whose victims are only the unprotected and local people of our dry and dusty country. It was last year that rumours spread about this report in Kabul, but it has not been taken seriously by the media. But watching this revealing French documentary changes the rumours into disturbing facts. "Bin Laden, the failings of a manhunt", produced by Emmanuel Razavi and Eric de Lavarene, two French filmmakers and reporters, assesses and confirms the claims of French soldiers that they could have killed Usamah within two operations, but the American forces prevented them. This film has not been broadcast publicly yet and is to be broadcast by Planet, a French network.
Even though French soldiers have insisted on this in the battlefield many times, the Elysees Palace in Paris and the White House in America have rejected this, and the Afghan leadership does not have any information about it yet!
The main question that arises is the extent to which the "Bin Laden on the run" project is a problem for America and Afghanistan. Seven years of suicide bombing and explosions, blood and violence, unmanned fighter planes, and old vehicles full of explosives, all to catch a long-bearded Arab whom America apparently hates? And an Arab who worked for the CIA in the name of Allah, and who now, also in the name of that same Allah, has conducted a jihad against that same CIA?
Facing the facts in this Usamah film is a bitter and disturbing experience and will make you nervous and wish that what it is that you are watching is just a baseless rumour, or a figment of Hollywood's imagination. But it is not. The pictures are real and you are facing a debate in documentary form. The only justification for the bloody presence of America in Afghanistan is the ambiguous existence of Usamah Bin-Ladin and the Al-Qa'idah terrorist network.
George Bush, with his "war on terror" project, has transformed the middle east and Afghanistan into an inflamed bomb ready to explode, but has not found out anything about his beloved lost Usamah Bin-Ladin so far.
What is seen, and the film also emphases this, is that all these slogans, this fighting and killing are a game, a painful and prolonged game whose end even the players do not know and which is running out of control. Apparently, it is a game of cat and mouse, just like "Tom and Jerry", the famous cartoon. But it is a reality that the stubborn one from Texas does not want to catch the mouse - unlike credulous Tom - and that the long-bearded Wahhabi Arab does not want to hide - unlike the intelligent and roaming Jerry. Their prolonged game has made not only the audiences tired but has also transformed the playground into a big pool of blood.
There have always been questions that neither the politicians have been willing to answer, nor the independent western media to raise. If Usamah is not the lost one of the Americans, then who is? What are the Americans searching for in Afghanistan and who are they looking for? The main media in the West remained silent before the report of the Usamah Bin-Ladin arrest by French soldiers. And, through a news boycott, they reduced a certain fact to a rumour.
Certainly, they will do the same before this film, too. But instead they will try to complicate the scenario. More painful than anything else is the political fair in Kabul, a poor fair where everyone offers his despicable commodity - a combination of generous western customers and thankful sellers of the country. Everyone knows the fact, like "an obvious secret", but no one wants to irritate the delicate minds of their nervous guests, guests who will be staying at home until the new year.
Politicians try to forget such news in Kabul, and this is the advice they give to the people. Forgetting and ignoring such facts is possible, but how can we forget and ignore the bombs exploding next to our houses every day?
Bombs which sometimes rise from the ground and sometimes descend from the air.
(Description of Source: Kabul Hasht-e-Sobh in Dari Kabul Hasht-e Sobh in Dari - Eight-page secular daily launched in May 2007; editor-in-chief, Qasim Akhgar, is a political analyst and Head of the Association for the Freedom of Speech. )
_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
KABUL, Afghanistan – U.S. Special Forces killed six Afghan police and wounded 13 Wednesday in a case of mistaken identity by both sides after the police fired on the Americans during an operation against an insurgent commander.
A U.S. military statement said police fired on the American forces after the troops battled and killed an armed militant in the city of Qalat, capital of the southern province of Zabul. The Americans returned fire on the police but only later learned their identities. An Afghan civilian was also killed in the exchange.
"Coalition forces deeply regret the incident of mistaken fire," said Col. Jerry O'Hara, a U.S. military spokesman. "Initial reports indicate this was a tragic case of mistaken identity on both parts."
Gulab Shah Alikhail, the province's deputy governor, said U.S. Special Forces carried out an operation in a village near a police checkpoint on the outskirts of Qalat. The police, thinking it was a Taliban attack, opened fire, he said. Then a helicopter fired on the security post and destroyed it, he said.
The attack collapsed the police station roof and damaged a nearby home, said Gilani Khan, the deputy provincial police chief.
"Unfortunately, the Special Forces didn't inform the police that they were going to the village," Alikhail said.
U.S. officials quietly admit that they are hesitant to share detailed plans of raids against militant commanders for fear that government officials connected to the Taliban could tip off the militants.
more...
_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
Afghanistan now supplies over 90 percent of the world’s heroin, generating nearly $200 billion in revenue. Since the U.S. invasion on Oct. 7, 2001, opium output has increased 33-fold (to over 8,250 metric tons a year).
The U.S. has been in Afghanistan for over seven years, has spent $177 billion in that country alone, and has the most powerful and technologically advanced military on Earth. GPS tracking devices can locate any spot imaginable by simply pushing a few buttons.
Still, bumper crops keep flourishing year after year, even though heroin production is a laborious, intricate process. The poppies must be planted, grown and harvested; then after the morphine is extracted it has to be cooked, refined, packaged into bricks and transported from rural locales across national borders. To make heroin from morphine requires another 12-14 hours of laborious chemical reactions. Thousands of people are involved, yet—despite the massive resources at our disposal—heroin keeps flowing at record levels.
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_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.
Four blue pills. Viagra.
"Take one of these. You'll love it," the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.
The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes -- followed by a request for more pills.
more...
_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
Tigger Entropy Engineer
Posts: 1667
Posted: Sat Dec 27, 08 5:49 am Post subject:
I love that one. What some men won't do for peace and quiet from their wives eh?
IMHO the west should get out of Afghanistan PDQ. Fundamentally, who cares if the place is run by the Taliban? I don't. They are just the old Muhajadin that fought against the Russians in the first place. The Russkies never beat them, and neither will we.
Complete waste of money, time, lives etc. Human Rights? Well, it's been cited many times that the whole of the Middle-East is not familiar with them, and never will be. What are we trying to bring to these countries?
It's all about the oil, Caspian sea pipeline route etc.
_________________ AAN
не замарайте с бодрым тигром
TimeVirus Galactic Overlord
Posts: 26138
Posted: Sat Dec 27, 08 9:12 am Post subject:
It's about the opium almost as much as the oil route. Record amounts being produced since we intervened. The Taliban had almost entirely wiped it out prior to our meddling.
_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
As President Barack Obama steps into the White House and into history, the Taliban have a message for him: Leave Afghanistan.
"The insurgent Taliban said Wednesday that US President Barack Obama should learn from the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan and pull his troops out of the country to allow Afghans to decide their own fate," reports The News, a popular English-language daily in Pakistan.
"We have no problem with Obama," a spokesman for the extremist Islamist movement [said] after the inauguration of the new US president. However, "he must learn lessons from [former US president George W. Bush] and before that the Soviets," Yousuf Ahmadi said by telephone.
Their remarks come as militants in neighboring Pakistan widened a bloody campaign in the country's North West Frontier Province, blowing up girls' schools and engaging in pitched battles with Pakistani military forces.
As President Obama officially enters the White House, some analysts say the fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan may be his toughest international challenge, reports ABC News.
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_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
TimeVirus Galactic Overlord
Posts: 26138
Posted: Sun Jan 25, 09 5:45 pm Post subject:
3 minute clip gives insight into US/Afghanistan situation
_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
TimeVirus Galactic Overlord
Posts: 26138
Posted: Tue Feb 17, 09 3:31 pm Post subject:
Considering that Afghanistan was the biggest cause of the Soviet Union going bankrupt, the incompetence of this action is staggering.
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama on Tuesday signed off on an increase in U.S. forces for the flagging war in Afghanistan.
"To meet urgent security needs, I approved a request from (Defense) Secretary Gates to deploy a Marine Expeditionary Brigade later this spring and an Army Stryker Brigade and the enabling forces necessary to support them later this summer," Obama said in a statement issued by the White House.
About 8,000 Marines are expected to go in first, followed by about 9,000 Army troops. Some 34,000 U.S. troops are already in Afghanistan.
more...
_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
Conventional wisdom appears to be that sending more troops to Afghanistan is a good idea -- and that President George W. Bush's decision to divert troops from Afghanistan to Iraq was bad.
But a progressive Senate Democrat isn't so sure. In a subtle rebuke to President Barack Obama's decision yesterday to deploy 17,000 more US troops to the war-torn country, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) questioned whether an increased US presence was a good idea.
"After years of a failed foreign policy which distracted us from our top national security priority of defeating al Qaeda and its affiliates, I am encouraged by President Obama's focus on Afghanistan where the 9/11 attacks originated," Feingold said in a statement that received little to no attention Tuesday. "But we need to make sure we have a strategy in place for Afghanistan that will actually work before we commit thousands more U.S. troops. A military escalation without a strategy to address the complex problems facing Afghanistan and the region could alienate the Afghan people and make it much more difficult to achieve our top national security goal of defeating al Qaeda."
more...
_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
TimeVirus Galactic Overlord
Posts: 26138
Posted: Sat Feb 21, 09 2:28 pm Post subject:
The Afghan trap
Ray McGovern: US attempt to trap USSR in 1979 is at the root of the current situation in Afghanistan
_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
In six years, the occupation has wrought one massive transformation in Afghanistan, a development so huge that it has increased Afghan GDP by 66 per cent and constitutes 40 per cent of the entire economy. That is a startling achievement, by any standards. Yet we are not trumpeting it. Why not?
The answer is this. The achievement is the highest harvests of opium the world has ever seen.
The Taliban had reduced the opium crop to precisely nil. I would not advocate their methods for doing this, which involved lopping bits, often vital bits, off people. The Taliban were a bunch of mad and deeply unpleasant religious fanatics. But one of the things they were vehemently against was opium.
That is an inconvenient truth that our spin has managed to obscure. Nobody has denied the sincerity of the Taliban's crazy religious zeal, and they were as unlikely to sell you heroin as a bottle of Johnnie Walker.
They stamped out the opium trade, and impoverished and drove out the drug warlords whose warring and rapacity had ruined what was left of the country after the Soviet war.
That is about the only good thing you can say about the Taliban; there are plenty of very bad things to say about them. But their suppression of the opium trade and the drug barons is undeniable fact.
Now we are occupying the country, that has changed. According to the United Nations, 2006 was the biggest opium harvest in history, smashing the previous record by 60 per cent. This year will be even bigger.
Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and 'value-added' operations.
It now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.
more...
_________________ True scientists don't manipulate complex data to get a simple answer they wanted to achieve from the start. That's not science.
Tigger Entropy Engineer
Posts: 1667
Posted: Sat Feb 21, 09 3:26 pm Post subject:
What was so bad about the Taliban? So they made their women go around with ankle chains on, and learn to stfu. They stamped out corruption, and started to make their own way in life. What was wrong with that?
It all seems good to me!
_________________ AAN
не замарайте с бодрым тигром
Lizard Entropy Engineer
Posts: 816
Posted: Sat Feb 21, 09 3:43 pm Post subject:
Tigger wrote:
What was so bad about the Taliban? So they made their women go around with ankle chains on, and learn to stfu. They stamped out corruption, and started to make their own way in life. What was wrong with that?
It all seems good to me!
yep even criminals were only sentenced to get stoned in public.
... so they had to smoke a couple of joints what's the big deal ?
Tigger Entropy Engineer
Posts: 1667
Posted: Sat Feb 21, 09 4:03 pm Post subject:
The big deal is it was up to them. Anyone that didn't like it could claim political refugee status in the West somewhere, and be thankful they got away.
However, since we in the West decided to have a Crusade against them, it pissed'em off. Now, we're the suckers. They come into our countries preaching hatred for all Western values rather than being attracted by them. LMAO.
_________________ AAN
не замарайте с бодрым тигром
Lizard Entropy Engineer
Posts: 816
Posted: Sat Feb 21, 09 4:05 pm Post subject:
crusades generally have a habit of going tits up, dunno why people bother having them anymore, you're much better off with a nice street party if you ask me.
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