'Premature To Change Strategy In Afghanistan' - Gates

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said it would be "premature" to change strategy in the Afghan war on a surprise farewell trip to the war-torn country Saturday. We say - ' What, premature after 10 years of abject failure?' Gates also urged President Hamid Karzai's government to "step up" to ensure that the process of handing control of security from foreign to Afghan troops, due to start within weeks, was a success. He said 'success was the only strategy' in Afghanistan. It's nice to see that someone acknowledges the need to have a strategy 10 years in, but is he talking about the kind of success that Obama and Pentagon paint in their fantasy, rose-tinted reports and analyses? Yes, I hear you say. He is.

Taliban Slowly Taking Over - From The Agonist

Armed men on motorcycles simply showed up at orangeade dusk, summoned the elders, and announced the new laws. A 10 percent tax on all earnings to feed the Taliban coffers. A lifestyle guided by the strictest interpretation of Shariah. All government collaborators will be punished as traitors.

There was no one at hand to fend off the offensive. There were no policemen in the villages, no Afghan or NATO soldiers nearby. The villagers themselves, sapped by two consecutive years of drought and a lifetime of recurring bloodshed, put up no resistance.

Some of these villages I know quite well. I have swapped jewelry and cooked rice in too much oil with their women. I have walked to town across the predawn desert on bazaar days with their men. I have drawn ballpoint flower tattoos on the grimy palms of their children. I have fallen asleep on their rooftops, watching the Big Dipper scoop out the mountains I could just skylight against the star-bejeweled sky.

During each of my visits over the last 13 months, my village friends and I would trade the latest stories and rumors about the steady advance of the insurgency across Balkh province. The Taliban have gained control of two of the province's 14 districts. Three. Four. It was like watching the spread of a pandemic. We would drink murky green tea and click our tongues and shake our heads. Then we would part, promising to see each other soon.

We were, I now think, a little bit in denial.

On Sunday, I received a call from Oqa, a destitute hamlet of two-score clay homes prostrate in hungry supplication in the middle of the arid Northern Plains. I was supposed to drive up for farewell elevenses before leaving Afghanistan this week.

"The Taliban arrived last night," the caller told me. "Don't come, Anna."

I rang a farmer I know in Karaghuzhlah, an oasis of apricot and almond groves that shimmers over the tufted camel's hide of the desert. He had invited me to try the apricots. They are now in season.

"The Taliban have been here for two days," the farmer said. "If you want apricots, I'll send them to you in Mazar-e-Sharif."

What about Zadyan, the intricate clay cylinder of its 12th-century minaret watching over teenage carpet weavers like some somber desert custodian? Or Khairabad, to which Oqa's boys trek in winter with their camel caravans loaded with tumbleweed to sell for firewood?

On Sunday, a police official recited to me a grim roster. "As of 10:30 this morning, we no longer control the villages of Karaghuzhlah, Khairabad, Karshigak, Zadyan, Shingilabad, Joi Arab, Shahraq...." The list went on; the officer named about two dozen villages. Some of them quiver in diffraction only a few miles away from Mazar-e-Sharif, the provincial capital.

Four weeks after the Taliban announced the beginning of their annual spring offensive, the insurgents have quietly taken over most of Balkh. Reporter - Anna Badkhen.

UK Helicopters Deployed In Libya

Hellfire missiles and 30mm cannon were used to attack Libyan targets. The helicopters then returned to HMS Ocean said the MOD statement this morning (Saturday 4th June). This is clear mission creep, almost certiain to create the same type of defiance which NATO have created against themselves and the US in Afghanistan. The statement about targets being 'rigorously selected' is an obvious back-coverer for any civilian casualties which will happen as surely and inevitably as the numerous bloodbaths NATO has perpetrated in Afghanistan.

LIBYA LIVE BLOG HERE.

Who Are The Terrorists?

Siegfried Sassoon - On Passing The New Menin Gate

Immortal words by the soldier and champion of peace, Siegfried Sassoon. Written in 1927.

Media Manipulation By AIPAC

US(SR)A Occupation of Afghanistan

The recent setbacks for NATO/ISAF, with more to follow as the Taliban step it up through the Summer, invite a stocktake by everyone who is interested.
The USSRA is now the old Russia in Afghanistan.The war has evolved from a war against al-Qaeda to a war against the Taliban and Afghani nationalists. As more and more civilians die, the people are becoming more and more anti-American. The Afghani people are seeing the Americans much as they saw the Soviets in 1989 – as invading infidels.

Whether the US leaves Afghanistan now or later, the US is in no way poised to win anything at all from their bloody occupation.

Afhanistan War - Some Thoughts Ten Years On

Crassness Like This Fuels The Continuing Insanity

We do not do too much editorialising on this site. But here is some OpEd for once. The widely respected International Crisis Group’s latest report on Afghanistan says: “The exit strategy sounds fairly simple: Try to pound the Taliban, build support by protecting civilians, lure disillusioned Taliban over to the government, expand access to basic services and create resilient security forces. The problem is that none of this is working.” The memory of thousands of innocents being killed by US Drone and bomb attacks is the historical legacy of this misadventure (see posts passim). The killings by the Taiban, and the victims, will be forgotten.Decades of non-outcomes and targets which keeps shifting are not worth the expense in lives and never could have been. This occupation has been a fiasco (ten years in). Did we really think we could bomb Afghanistan into submission without a strategy or an occupation plan (or any plan)? 


Postscript: We are now bombing Libya. Guess what's next? 

Canada And War Crimes In Afghanistan

The clear pattern of intentionality revealed in the words and actions of senior Canadian government bureaucrats and senior military officers is both embarrassing (these people actually believe, despite copious evidence to the contrary, that torture produces real ‘intelligence’)[43] and also a scandalous offence against the rule of law.More scandalous still is the evidence that these people were acting on directives from Stephen Harper—that Harper knew perfectly well that the Afghan puppet-state tortures the prisoners handed over to it by the Canadian Forces, but nonetheless permitted the continuation of this system, and that he actually took charge of the program of lying about it.

More here.   (H/T True North)

NATO Tankers Burning At Pakistan Border 31.5.11

Arab Spring - Film Updates

Afghan Houses Mortared - Polish Culprits Walk Away

WARSAW, Poland (AP) -- A military court on Wednesday acquitted seven Polish soldiers in the killing of Afghan civilians in a 2007 attack in which they fired mortars and machine guns on a village in Afghanistan, killing civilians.(Readers of this blog will know that we have always noted that the NATO civilian killings are a very cosmopolitan operation).

Prosecutors had charged them with war crimes, in the first such case in Poland, but a five-judge panel ruled that there was not enough evidence to support those charges.

The defendants had argued that the mortar and machine-gun attack that killed the civilians in the Afghan village of Nangarkhel on Aug. 16, 2007, was an accident. They said they had been targeting Taliban extremists and that in the confusion of war they killed civilians by accident.The defense made the case that in Afghanistan it can sometimes be 'hard for soldiers to distinguish civilians and extremists'. Too bad, no problem there, then, we say.Poland has about 1,600 troops in NATO's mission in Afghanistan.

Prosecutors had sought prison sentences ranging from five to 12 years for the soldiers.