Taliban Storm a School in Pakistan, 126 Dead

Fundamentalist religion continues to prove that it is among the foulest forces in the world.   Taliban forces have stormed a school in Pakistan and reports are that 126 have died in the ensuing carnage.  Like ISIS, the Taliban claims allegiance to a ultra far right and brutal version of Islam that justifies, if not revels in brutality against others who fail to subscribe to such toxic beliefs.  And where are the "good Muslims" in all of this?  Like the "good Christians" who allow evil to be done by Christofascists, they sit on their hands.  The Washington Post looks at the horrors done in Pakistan.  Here are highlights:

Taliban militants stormed an elite army high school in northwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, killing at least 126 students and teachers, and holding others hostage, in one of the worst school shootings in modern times, according to Pakistani security and hospital officials.

More than three hours after the siege began at mid-day at an army-run high school on a Pakistan military installation in Peshawar, explosions and gunfire continued to be heard coming coming from the school.

A spokesman for the provincial government said 126 dead bodies had been recovered so far and 120 students and teachers have been wounded. Most of the dead were teenagers, he said. 

[E]ight to ten terrorists wearing military uniforms carried out the mid-day attack. He said they started “indiscriminate firing” after entering the school through a back door.

 “They started firing at students participating in a function at the auditorium,” Ghani told local journalists gathered at the scene. “The terrorists wanted to kill as many people as they could and they seemed to be not interested in hostage taking.”

In a statement, the Pakistani Taliban took credit for the attack, saying it was to avenge the Pakistan military operation in North Waziristan. The Taliban said six militants, including three suicide bombers, carried out the assault. 

Why a school as a target?  One reason is that modern knowledge and education are among the biggest enemies of fundamentalist religions.  It's no coincidence that while the the Taliban attacked a school. here at home the Christofascists want to dumb down public education and erode curriculum that show the lie of their 12th century beliefs.

America's Continued Fool's Errand in Afghanistan

After 13 years, thousands of squandered American lives and billions of wasted dollars, Afghanistan remains a disaster and horrific backwater rivaled only by some of the failed nations in Africa where colonial rule gave way to gross corruption and often a worsening of local economies.   Yet if one listens to statements by politicians and perhaps worse yet, military leaders, they continue the myth that America has accomplished something in Afghanistan and that democracy and societal modernization are just around the corner.   Not only is such blather wishful thinking, its an outright lie.  A column in the New York Times looks at the reality in Afghanistan and what politicians of both parties and the ever eager for war generals prefer Americans not understand.  Here are excerpts:

John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, apparently is the only official in Washington who dares speak truth to power. In a Sept. 12 speech at Georgetown University, he said that Afghanistan “remains under assault by insurgents and is short of domestic revenue, plagued by corruption, afflicted by criminal elements involved in opium and smuggling, and struggling to execute basic functions of government.” His comments were largely ignored by the American media, and there was no immediate reaction from the Obama administration.

And yet anything less than a heavy dose of honesty and fresh thinking by Afghans and their Western supporters will almost certainly mean the relapse of Afghanistan into civil war and the emergence of groups even more extreme than the Taliban, as has happened in Iraq and Syria.

Moving from the lengthy U.S. military presence to full Afghan sovereignty was premised on the completion of four distinct transitions. But none has been successfully carried out, despite more than $640 billion in U.S. direct spending in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2013.

The most critical transition, the one on which everything else rested, was political. Rather than build state institutions or carry out much-needed electoral reforms, President Hamid Karzai spent his long tenure encouraging a form of crony politics that failed to sap the power of the warlords. He won a second term in 2009, after a vastly fraudulent election. The following year, according to U.N. officials, he asked that the United Nations stop supervising elections in the country, and Washington and NATO went along.

The second promised transition was military. U.S. forces were to hand over security matters to Afghan forces, proving that the new, U.S.-trained Afghan Army would then be able to hold back the Taliban on its own. Yet Interior Minister Mohammad Omar Daudzai told Parliament in Kabul on Sept. 16 that the previous six months had been the deadliest ever for the Afghan police. Today there is fighting in 18 of 34 provinces, Afghan and NATO officials have told me. In many areas, Afghan soldiers are barely able to secure their own bases, much less retake lost territory. Helmand, the critical drugs-producing province in southern Afghanistan, is at risk of being taken over by the Taliban. If it falls, all of southern Afghanistan might too.

The third failed transition has to do with economics.  . . . . here has been little large-scale investment in agriculture or basic industry; instead, the bulk of the economy has focused on servicing foreign troops and on their spending. And now the troops are about to withdraw.

When I first visited Afghanistan in the 1970s, the country was desperately poor, but it was almost self-sufficient in food and had a small yet thriving export trade in fruit, handicrafts, furs and gems. Today, Afghanistan imports much of its food and it produces very few commercial goods. The service economy, which is run by the middle class, has been collapsing, as both educated people and billions of dollars in capital have left the country. 

The fourth contribution expected of the U.S. presence was insulating Afghanistan from foreign interference, which many Afghans fear as much as the Taliban . . . . that, too, has not happened, and the country remains vulnerable to meddling from outside.

2015 is supposed to mark the start of Afghanistan’s “Transformation Decade.” But if the country is to even get to 2015 in one piece, its new leaders must act fast to correct course after the failed transformation of the last decade.

What’s So Scary About Smart Girls?

While I often disagree with his views, every now and then Nicholas Kristoff hits it out of the ball park.  In a column today he looks at why religious fundamentalists of all stripes - and, that includes American Christofascists - find educated girls and women so frightening.  Simply put, educated girls and women are harder to subjugate (by small minded males) and harder to keep in a barefoot and pregnant status.  Be it the Taliban, Islamic extremists in Africa or fundamentalist preachers in the Bible Belt, the common thread is that these male dominated groups want women kept as near chattel and forbidden from having rights and minds of their own.  Here are column highlights:

WHEN terrorists in Nigeria organized a secret attack last month, they didn’t target an army barracks, a police department or a drone base. No, Boko Haram militants attacked what is even scarier to a fanatic: a girls’ school.

That’s what extremists do. They target educated girls, their worst nightmare.

That’s why the Pakistani Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai in the head at age 15. That’s why the Afghan Taliban throws acid on the faces of girls who dare to seek an education.

Why are fanatics so terrified of girls’ education? Because there’s no force more powerful to transform a society. The greatest threat to extremism isn’t drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.

In that sense, Boko Haram was behaving perfectly rationally — albeit barbarically — when it kidnapped some of the brightest, most ambitious girls in the region and announced plans to sell them as slaves. If you want to mire a nation in backwardness, manacle your daughters.

So why does girls’ education matter so much? First, because it changes demography.

One of the factors that correlates most strongly to instability is a youth bulge in a population. The more unemployed young men ages 15 to 24, the more upheaval.

[C]urbing birthrates tends to lead to stability, and that’s where educating girls comes in. You educate a boy, and he’ll have fewer children, but it’s a small effect. You educate a girl, and, on average, she will have a significantly smaller family. One robust Nigeria study managed to tease out correlation from causation and found that for each additional year of primary school, a girl has 0.26 fewer children. So if we want to reduce the youth bulge a decade from now, educate girls today.

More broadly, girls’ education can, in effect, almost double the formal labor force. It boosts the economy, raising living standards and promoting a virtuous cycle of development. Asia’s economic boom was built by educating girls and moving them from the villages to far more productive work in the cities.

One example of the power of girls’ education is Bangladesh, which until 1971 was (the seemingly hopeless) part of Pakistan. After Bangladesh gained independence, it emphasized education, including of girls; today, it actually has more girls in high school than boys.

Boko Haram has a stronghold in northeastern Nigeria because it’s an area where education is weak and women are marginalized. Some two-thirds of women in the region have had no formal education. Only 1 in 20 has completed high school. Half are married by age 15.

Obviously, the situation in the United States is incomparably better. But we have our own problems. It’s estimated that 100,000 girls under 18 years old in the United States are trafficked into commercial sex each year. So let’s fight to #BringBackOurGirls in Nigeria but also here in the United States and around the world.

Afghanistan - The Fool's Errand Continues

My oldest daughter and her husband - who is still recovering from wounds he received in Afghanistan the week prior to last Thanksgiving - visited last week.   While he was here, my son-in-law drove to Walter Reed Hospital near Washington, D.C., to see a friend and former roommate who had lost both legs to an IED explosion.  Words cannot express my support and concern for our men and women in uniform.  Likewise, words cannot properly describe my contempt for those who sent America nation to war in a fools errand in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Would that these hubris filled bastard could suffer the same grievous wounds that they have brought upon others.  And unfortunately, the needless deaths and injuries continue.  America needs to leave Afghanistan NOW.  The Seattle Times reports on the latest needless American deaths.  Here are highlights:

Militants killed six Americans, including a female diplomat, and an Afghan doctor Saturday in a pair of attacks in Afghanistan. It was the deadliest day for the United States in the war in eight months.
The violence — hours after the U.S. military’s top officer arrived for consultations with Afghan and U.S.-led coalition officials — illustrates the instability plaguing the nation as foreign forces work to pull nearly all their combat troops out of the country by the end of 2014.

The attacks came just days after insurgents stormed a courthouse, killing more than 46 people in one of the deadliest attacks of the war, now in its 12th year.

The three U.S. service members, two U.S. civilians and the doctor were killed when the group was struck by an explosion while traveling south to donate books to students in a new school in Qalat, the provincial capital of Zabul province, officials and the State Department said.

Officials said the explosion occurred just as a coalition convoy drove past a caravan of vehicles carrying the governor of Zabul province to the same school event. It is unclear whether the attack was aimed at the coalition forces or the governor.

Another U.S. civilian was killed in a separate insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said in a statement.

It was the deadliest day for Americans since Aug. 16, when seven U.S. service members were killed in two attacks in Kandahar province, the birthplace of the Taliban insurgency. Six were killed when their helicopter was shot down by insurgents and one soldier died in a roadside bomb explosion.
Violence in Afghanistan is expected to pick up in the coming weeks and months, as the warm weather spreads. Further, as the NATO troops who have secured the country for the past decade pack up and leave at the end of 2014, the Taliban are expected to intensify efforts to destabilize the Afghan security forces, who are taking over the battle.

The next time you hear some bombastic politician claiming to "support our troops," ask him or her whether they supported the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.  If they say "yes," they need to be called out as liars in so far as they claim to support our troops.  You do not send out young men and women out on an unwinnable fool's errand and get off claiming that you support the.

Afghanistan: The Fools Errand Continues As Does the Betrayal of Our Troops

Click image to enlarge

The United States has expended billions of dollars and squandered thousands of young American lives in the doomed from the outset fiasco in Afghanistan.  Anyone other than the cretinous George W. Bush and the war mad Emperor Palpatine Cheney could have predicted the outcome of America's fool's errand given the last 2,000+ years of Afghan history.  But, no, the Chimperator and his malevolent Vice President were more concerned in fighting a religious crusade and enriching defense contractors like Halliburton than look out for America's true interests.  And what do we have to show for the wasted billions and lives?  One of the most corrupt and incompetent nations on earth.  At least that is the finding of Transparency International which has just released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index.  How bad are things in Afghanistan?  It is tied with Somalia and North Korea as the most corrupt nation in the world.  Here's a sampling of some of the findings via the Washington Post:

Afghanistan ranks as one of the most corrupt countries, and it seems bribes and fraud permeate nearly every level of life there. One Afghan in seven paid a bribe in 2010, and the average bribe is equal to one third of the average Afghan salary. A recent report found that high-level political interference and institutional failures thwarted efforts to probe the 2010 collapse of Afghanistan’s Kabul Bank, recover hundreds of millions of dollars from fraudulent loans and prosecute the people who profited, the Washington Post’s Pamela Constable reported. The Transparency International authors concluded last year, ”Corruption, weak institutions and a lack of economic development pose a fatal threat to the viability of Afghanistan,” and it seems the situation this year is sadly no different.

As for the "progress" that senior military leaders claim to be making, UPI has this:

KHOST, Afghanistan, Dec. 8 (UPI) -- Taliban militants in Afghanistan's Khost province ambushed a convoy of NATO-led coalition security forces and claimed to have killed nine NATO troops.

Local authorities confirmed that the incident took place, but have denied that there were any casualties, Khaama Press reported Saturday.  No other information on the incident was released.

Based on the experience of how information was kept under wraps when my son-in-law was badly wounded in Afghanistan last month, I am sure no account of the incident will be released until the military brass decides how to best spin yet another failure in security.  Meanwhile two more Americans have lost their lives for nothing:
  

The Department of Defense announced today the death of two soldiers who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. 

They died Dec. 3, in Lashkar Gah City, Helmand province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked their unit with an improvised explosive device. They were assigned to the 818th Engineer Company, 164th Engineer Battalion, Williston, N.D. 

Killed were:Sgt. 1st Class. Darren M. Linde, 41, of Sidney, Mont., andSpc. Tyler J. Orgaard, 20, of Bismarck, N.D.

Americans and politicians who really support our troops should be demanding that we withdraw completely from Afghanistan NOW.

Taliban Shot Pakistani Teenage Girl for Supporting Girls’ Rights

Meanwhile, the Islamic equivalents of Charlie Fuqua and his Neanderthal knuckle draggers in the Republican Party are putting into action precisely what Fuqua advocates: the Taliban shot and seriously wounded a 14 year old girl in Pakistan for advocating for education of girls.   The Christofascists always take offense, but if they look at the Taliban and Islamic extremists, they are actually looking at a mirror image of themselves: groups that are fighting against modernity and clinging to a perverted version of religion based on writings of authors who were nothing short of ignorant by modern standards.   The Washington Post looks at the shooting of ninth-grader Malala Yousafzai.  Here are some article excerpts:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A 14-year-old Pakistani student who won international acclaim for speaking out for girls barred from school by the Taliban was critically wounded Tuesday by a gunman who boarded her school bus, asked for her by name, aimed his pistol at her head and fired, officials said.

The Pakistani Taliban asserted responsibility for the attack on ninth-grader Malala Yousafzai, who gained notice in early 2009 when she wrote a diary about Taliban atrocities under a pen name for the BBC’s Urdu service. Yousafzai lives in Mingora, a city in the scenic northwestern Swat Valley, where Taliban insurgents imposed harsh Islamic law for two years before being routed by a major military operation in May 2009. 

Tuesday’s daylight attack demonstrated the Taliban’s continued ability to infiltrate the area, which adjoins Pakistan’s insurgency-plagued tribal belt.

Many Pakistanis view Yousafzai, who also promoted literacy and peace, as a symbol of hope in a country long beset by violence and despair. In 2011, the Pakistani government awarded her a national peace prize and 1 million rupees ($10,500). 

She also was a finalist last year for the International Children’s Peace Prize, awarded by a Dutch organization that lauded her bravery in standing up for girls’ education rights amid rising fundamentalism when few others in Pakistan would do so. 

Yousafzai was flown by helicopter to a military hospital in Peshawar, where doctors on Wednesday said they removed a bullet lodged near her spine. The girl’s condition was improving, but officials said she had not yet regained consciousness.

Fundamentalist religion remains one of the biggest threats to peace and stability in the world today.  Yet it is to religious extremists little different from the Taliban in terms of their hatred of others - the Christian Taliban - to whom Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan (and George Allen here in Virginia) have sold their souls for political gain.  These religious extremists are frightening and need to be driven into the political wilderness rather than embraced by the Republican Party.

Feel the "Christian" Love Rev. Donald Spitz Style

Give the nature of my law practice and the upscale nature of the boyfriend's salon clientele, it's sometimes easy to forget the very frightening Neanderthals that inhabit Hampton Roads, especially in Chesapeake and some of the more rural areas.  I received a harsh reminder of the near life threatening hate harbored by some who claim to be "godly Christians."   A case in point is a comment left on a post about the Tracy Thorne-Begland judicial appointment controversy in which the Richmond Circuit Court judges - at the urging of all of the five Virginia based mega law firms - appointed Tracy to a General District Court judgeship.  The author of the comment? The Rev. Donald Spitz (pictured above left), a Chesapeake based anti-abortion extremist who has been written up by the Southern Poverty Law Center.   Among other things, Spitz stated in his comment (which I did NOT publish):

Sodomites like Thorne-Begland belong in prison not on the bench. Homosexuals commit crimes against God, against nature, against the Holy Bible and against the human race. 

After last year's Hampton Roads Pride event in Town Point Park in downtown Norfolk on the waterfront, Spitz nearly blew a gasket and ranted that Town Point Park had been taken over by sodomites who he says are worthy of death.  He also accused gays of being sexual predators of children and lambasted members  of Norfolk City Council "who did zero to stop this sodomite pollution to our city and to our children."   But Spitz's hatred isn't limited to gays.  He advocates the murder of abortion providers and the bombing of abortion clinics.  And he's moved on to adding racism to his resume as the SPLC noted some years back:

The Rev. Donald Spitz has never been a pleasant man. Considered a wild-eyed extremist even among his colleagues on the radical anti-abortion scene, the head of Pro-Life Virginia and long-time principal of the Army of God Web site (armyofgod.com) applauds the murderers of physicians, clinic workers and secretaries.

He rails against "filthy faggots" and "lesbos." Islam is "Satanic," Arabs are "Rag-Heads," and Muslims "should not be allowed to live in the United States." New York City is a "sex perverted cesspool" that richly deserved Sept. 11.

But there is one type of vicious group hatred Don Spitz has always denied — the "false accusations of racism" against blacks "put out by desperate babykilling abortionists." If a black man accepts Christ, "then that man is my brother."  Well, maybe. And maybe not.

This summer, on the Web site long run by Spitz, a remarkable series of headlines began to appear under "Current News Stories for Christians." To almost anyone but Spitz, these racy one-liners reflect the crudest kind of racism.

"African-American on bike randomly shoots people," screams one link to a legitimate news story. "83 Year old White Woman beaten to death by three African-Americans," says another. "African-American Killed her," a third reads under photos of the principals, "because she was White and her parents 'didn't allow her to have sex with a black man.'" And the list goes on.

With representatives like Spitz, it's little wonder why the under 30 generations of Americans are deserting institutional Christianity in droves. 

And like most of his Christofacsist brethren, Spitz seems to have an utter contempt for the U. S. Constitution  and its guarantee of freedom of religion to ALL citizens, not just the Christofascists.  If one wants a glimpse of what America would be like under the rule of Spitz and his fellow Christianists, one need only look to this story out of Pakistan where the Islamic version of Spitz and his fellow hate merchants continue to cost innocent lives:

A popular female Pakistani singer who defied the Taliban's decree against singing and dancing was shot and killed in northwest Pakistan Monday night, police and hospital officials told CNN.

Ghazala Javed, who recorded scores of songs in her native Pashto language and became a household name among young, progressive ethnic Pashtuns in northwest Pakistan, had just left a beauty salon and was driving home with her father when gunmen on a motorcycle raced towards their car and sprayed it with bullets, Altaf said.

Javed was hit with six bullets and pronounced dead at a hospital in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, according to hospital official Rahim Afridi. Javed's father also was killed, police said.

In recent years the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the region and the group's ban against singing and dancing made it difficult for Javed and other musical artists to perform and record songs in Pakistan. Javed recorded and taped many of her latest songs and music videos in nearby Dubai.

Last year Javed made headlines when she asked for a divorce from her husband after she reportedly found out that he had at least one other wife. It was a rare decision in a deeply conservative and male-dominated society where many view a woman's demand for a divorce as a dishonor to the husband.

Javed is pictured above.  Fundamentalist religion of whatever label is an evil.   Individuals like Spitz are, in my opinion, a clear and present danger to the rule of law and constitutional government.  His advocacy of what amounts to terrorism is indeed scary.

U. S. Afghan Nation-Building Programs not Sustainable

A version of this post's headline is the lead story in today's Washington Post. Tell us something any mediocre student of Afghanistan's history could have deduced a decade ago. For over two millennium no outside power has ever been able to successfully conquer and recast Afghanistan for any notable period of time. The last to arguably do so was Alexander the Great who married into the feudal like war lord hierarchy in order to pull it off. But none of history's lessons mattered to the American hubris that led the nation to war under Chimperator Bush in both Afghanistan and then Iraq. Now, billions of wasted dollars later and thousands of wasted lives later, a report says that the U. S. goal in Afghanistan is crumbling and is not sustainable. When are our leaders - especially our military leaders - going to start facing reality? The Middle East adventure begun by the Chimperator and Emperor Palpatine Cheney has always been a fools errand. Here are story highlights:
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The hugely expensive U.S. attempt at nation-building in Afghanistan has had only limited success and may not survive an American withdrawal, according to the findings of a two-year congressional investigation to be released Wednesday.
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The report calls on the administration to rethink urgently its assistance programs as President Obama prepares to begin drawing down the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan this summer.
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The report, prepared by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic majority staff, comes as Congress and the American public have grown increasingly restive about the human and economic cost of the decade-long war and reflects growing concerns about Obama’s war strategy even among supporters within his party.
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[I]t says that the enormous cash flows can overwhelm and distort local culture and economies, and that there is little evidence the positive results are sustainable. The report also warns that the Afghan economy could slide into a depression with the inevitable decline of the foreign military and development spending that now provides 97 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
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Even when U.S. development experts determine that a proposed project “lacks achievable goals and needs to be scaled back,” the U.S. military often takes it over and funds it anyway, the report says. It also cites excessive use and poor oversight of contractors.
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[A]n increasing number of lawmakers on both sides have called for a more wholesale reconsideration of Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan, saying that the war’s cost cannot be sustained at a time of domestic economic hardship. They point as well to changing realities on the ground, including signs of growing extremist violence in Pakistan and the killing last month of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
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Last week, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan said in a separate report that billions of dollars in U.S.-funded reconstruction projects in both countries could fall into disrepair over the next few years because of inadequate planning to pay for their ongoing operations and maintenance. That report warned that “the United States faces new waves of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
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Foreign aid expenditures by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in Afghanistan, about $320 million a month, pale beside the overall $10 billion monthly price tag for U.S. military operations.
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[E]vidence of successful aid programs based on “counterinsurgency theories” is limited, the Senate committee report says. “Some research suggests the opposite, and development best practices question the efficacy of using aid as a stabilization tool over the long run.”
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Other than a quick, limited assault on the Taliban (something Bush/Cheney screwed up), the U.S. should never have gone into Afghanistan. Now, the question is how many more billions of dollars and how many more lives will be squandered for nothing? We need to get out now.

Mosque Opponents Are Aiding Taliban Recruitment

Personally, I believe that the far right opponents of the proposed Islamic community center WANT and endless war against Islam. They, like the delusional Chimperator George W. Bush did while in office, believe that they are on an anti-Muslim crusade. Their handiwork, however, is aiding Taliban recruiting efforts and in the process likely to be endangering the lives of U.S. service members in Afghanistan - not to mention American civilians who could be targeted for another terror attack. Sadly, with the Christianists and far right elements of the GOP - e.g. Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, et al - I doubt they give a damn about the lives of innocent people that their vitriolic posturing might endanger. Rather, it's all about scoring perceived political points and satisfying their own Islamophobic inclinations that allow them to feel superior about themselves. It's disgusting and puts the worse aspects of the USA under the spotlight of the international media. Newsweek looks at the damage being done by these self-professed, but false patriots. Here are some highlights:
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Taliban officials know it’s sacrilegious to hope a mosque will not be built, but that’s exactly what they’re wishing for: the success of the fiery campaign to block the proposed Islamic cultural center and prayer room near the site of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. “By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor,” Taliban operative Zabihullah tells NEWSWEEK. (Like many Afghans, he uses a single name.) “It’s providing us with more recruits, donations, and popular support.”
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America’s enemies in Afghanistan are delighted by the vehement public opposition to the proposed “Ground Zero mosque.” The backlash against the project has drawn the heaviest e-mail response ever on jihadi Web sites, Zabihullah claims—far bigger even than France’s ban on burqas earlier this year.
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Zabihullah also claims that the issue is such a propaganda windfall—so tailor-made to show how “anti-Islamic” America is—that it now heads the list of talking points in Taliban meetings with fighters, villagers, and potential recruits. “We talk about how America tortures with waterboarding, about the cruel confinement of Muslims in wire cages in Guantánamo, about the killing of innocent women and children in air attacks—and now America gives us another gift with its street protests to prevent a mosque from being built in New York,” Zabihullah says. “Showing reality always makes the best propaganda.”
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“I expect we will soon be receiving more American Muslims like Faisal Shahzad who are looking for help in how to express their rage,” says a Taliban official who was a senior minister when the group ruled Afghanistan and who remains active in the insurgency. As an indication of the anger that is growing among some Muslims in the West, this official, who requested anonymity for security reasons, mentions the arrest of three Canadian Muslims in Ontario last week on charges of plotting to build and detonate improvised explosive devices.
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The more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get,” Zabihullah predicts.
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So, the next time you hear an Islamic bigot mouthing off, please take the time to point out to them that they are aiding and abetting the enemy - something sometimes called treason.

Afghanistan: A Disaster That Cannot be Won

While Barack Obama has removed General McChrystal after his latest episode of diarrhea of the mouth, the move does nothing to solve the disaster that is Afghanistan. As Michael Hastings and others have noted, too little real reporting is coming out of Afghanistan - and Iraq too for that matter - because too many journalists fear that telling the truth will end their "access" to top military brass who continue to push the myth that Afghanistan is a winnable situation. Something that I have been saying from the get go and which the USA should have known after watching the former Soviet Union's 10 year debacle in that country. The sad truth is that since the time of Alexander the Great, no foreign power has been able to successfully control the wilds of Afghanistan. And even Alexander maintained ostensible control by retaining local satraps who swore loyalty to him after merciless assaults by Alexander's army. But unfortunately, the USA never seems to learn from experience and its military leaders seem to always think that they can somehow prevail where no one else ever has. The result? Needlessly lost American lives and squandered billions of dollars. On the reporting issue, Huffington Post has a piece where Hastings sums up what has been lost in today's American mainstream news media:
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Look, I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising. My views are critical but that shouldn't be mistaken for hostile - I'm just not a stenographer. There is a body of work that shows how I view these issues but that was hard-earned through experience, not something I learned going to a cocktail party on fucking K Street. That's what reporters are supposed to do, report the story.
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As for what is really happening in Afghanistan, The Economist has a lengthy article that looks at the ongoing debacle (note how one has to read a foreign news source to get the sad truth rather than the spin the military is feeding to American reporters). Here are some highlights:
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Mr Obama once described the fighting in Afghanistan as “a war of necessity”. The president must now put necessity aside and pose two fundamental questions. Can the American-led coalition still win in Afghanistan? And if so, how?
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In June Afghanistan surpassed Vietnam to become, by some measures, the longest campaign in America’s history. More than 1,000 of its men and women have been killed and almost 6,000 injured. Yet the Taliban are rampant, assassinating tribal leaders and intimidating their people. A survey in 120 districts racked by insurgency, a third of Afghanistan’s total, found little popular support for Mr Karzai. Over a third of their inhabitants backed the insurgents.
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The real test will come in Kandahar. Worryingly, one of General McChrystal’s last acts was to postpone the operation there until the autumn, amid signs that local people were not yet ready to back it. Even so, Mr Obama owes it to the West and to the Afghan people to determine whether COIN can in fact succeed under his best general. The Afghan war may yet end in an ignominious retreat. But nobody should welcome such an outcome.
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As for the dishonesty of America's leadership on the issue of Afghanistan, Bob Herbert has a column in today's New York Times that calls a spade a spade. Here are highlights:
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No one in official Washington is leveling with the public about what is really going on. We hear a lot about counterinsurgency, the latest hot cocktail-hour topic among the BlackBerry-thumbing crowd. But there is no evidence at all that counterinsurgency will work in Afghanistan. It’s not working now. And even if we managed to put all the proper pieces together, the fiercest counterinsurgency advocates in the military will tell you that something on the order of 10 to 15 years of hard effort would be required for this strategy to bear significant fruit.
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We’ve been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade already. It’s one of the most corrupt places on the planet and the epicenter of global opium production. Our ostensible ally, President Hamid Karzai, is convinced that the U.S. cannot prevail in the war and is in hot pursuit of his own deal with the enemy Taliban.
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Those who are so fascinated with counterinsurgency, from its chief advocate, Gen. David Petraeus, all the way down to the cocktail-hour kibitzers inside the Beltway, seem to have lost sight of a fundamental aspect of warfare: You don’t go to war half-stepping. You go to war to crush the enemy. You do this ferociously and as quickly as possible. If you don’t want to do it, if you have qualms about it, or don’t know how to do it, don’t go to war.
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We’re like a compulsive gambler plunging ever more deeply into debt in order to wager on a rigged game. There is no victory to be had in Afghanistan, only grief. We’re bulldozing Detroit while at the same time trying to establish model metropolises in Kabul and Kandahar. We’re spending endless billions on this wretched war but can’t extend the unemployment benefits of Americans suffering from the wretched economy here at home. The difference between this and a nightmare is that when you wake up from a nightmare it’s over. This is all too tragically real.

The Missing Link From Killeen to Kabul - Anti-Muslim Bigotry

As I have mentioned in prior posts, I have a number of Muslim clients - in some ways, being openly gay seems to attract other minority group clients who face daily discrimination - and I find the rush among the haters of the far right to question the patriotism of Muslim Americans extremely offensive. My oldest daughter had some Muslim classmates in high school who were born in this country and as fully American as I am, yet because of their religious background they will never be "true Americans" in the eyes of Christianist bigots like Pat Robertson. Hard working, productive citizens and business owners should not be directly or indirectly attacked and denigrated simply because they do not subscribe to the religious beliefs of the Christo-fascists of the far right. Frank Rich's column in the New York Times looks at the anti-Muslim campaign of the far right. Here are some highlights:

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THE dead at Fort Hood had not even been laid to rest when their massacre became yet another political battle cry for the self-proclaimed patriots of the American right. Their verdict was unambiguous: Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an American-born psychiatrist Palestinian parentage who sent e-mail to a radical imam, was a terrorist. And he did not act alone. His co-conspirators included our military brass, the Defense Department, the F.B.I., the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and, of course, the liberal media and the Obama administration. All these institutions had failed to heed the warning signs raised by Hasan’s behavior and activities because they are blinded by political correctness toward Muslims. . . .
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William Bennett excoriated soft military leaders like Gen. George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, who had stood up for diversity and fretted openly about a backlash against Muslim soldiers in his ranks. “Blind diversity” that embraces Islam “equals death,” wrote Michelle Malkin. “There is a powerful case to be made that Islamic extremism is not some fringe phenomenon but part of the mainstream of Islamic life around the world,” wrote the columnist Jonah Goldberg. Islam is “not a religion,” declared the irrepressible Pat Robertson, but “a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world.”
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Yet the mass murder at Fort Hood didn’t happen in isolation. It unfolded against the backdrop of Obama’s final lap of decision-making about Afghanistan. For all the right’s jeremiads, its own brand of political correctness kept it from connecting two crucial dots: how our failing war against terrorists in Afghanistan might relate to our failure to stop a supposed terrorist attack at home. Most of those who decried the Army’s blindness to Hasan’s threat are strong proponents of sending more troops into our longest war.
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The reason they didn’t is obvious enough. Their screeds about the Hasan case are completely at odds with both the Afghanistan policy they endorse and the leadership that must execute that policy, including Gen. Stanley McChrystal. These hawks, all demanding that Obama act on McChrystal’s proposals immediately, do not seem to have read his strategy assessment for Afghanistan or the many press interviews he gave as it leaked out. If they had, they’d discover that the whole thrust of his counterinsurgency pitch is to befriend and win the support of the Afghan population — i.e., Muslims.
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As their Fort Hood rhetoric made clear, McChrystal’s most vehement partisans don’t trust American Muslims, let alone those of the Taliban, no matter how earnestly the general may argue that they can be won over by our troops’ friendliness (or bribes). If, as the right has it, our Army cannot be trusted to recognize a Hasan in its own ranks, then how will it figure out who the “good” Muslims will be as we try to build a “stable” state (whatever “stable” means) in a country that has never had a functioning central government?
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About the only prominent voice among the liberal-bashing, Obama-loathing right who has noted this gaping contradiction is Mark Steyn of National Review. “Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet” were “gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously,” he wrote. “And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas.”
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Perhaps those on the right are correct about Hasan, and he is just one cog in an apocalyptic jihadist plot that has infiltrated our armed forces. If so, then they have an obligation to explain how pouring more troops into Afghanistan would have stopped Hasan from plotting in Killeen. Don’t hold your breath.
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The truth is that the Chimperator threw away the opportunity to "win" in Afghanistan when he took America to war in Iraq based on lies and doctored intelligence. We are still paying the price for the Chimperator's and Emperor Palpatine Cheney's hubris, yet the very people who were the cheerleaders for the misadventure still do not get the full picture. They are blinded by the Christianist religious extremism and their hatred of all who are not white, Protestants of European descent. They long for a world and society that no longer exist - even assuming their faux image of 1950's America is accurate.

Resurgent Taliban

A new story at Yahoo News shows just how badly the Chimperator's so-called war on terror has failed. Billions and Billions of dollars later, with over 4,000 Americans dead, and tens of thousands horrifically injured, and much of Iraq destroyed, the Taliban is resurgent and the Iraq War has greatly increased the numbers of Muslims worldwide who hate the United States. Heck of a job, Chimpy!! A war crimes trial and execution would not begin to undo the nightmare that the Chimperator and his equally delusional minions have produced. Bush - and Cheney too - physically sicken me. Meanwhile the cretin has no concept of the damage his idiocy and hubris has wrought. He cannot leave office soon enough for me. Here are some story highlights of the growing mess in Afghanistan:

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KABUL, Afghanistan - As the two women hunkered down in the dark, enveloped in blue burqas, they thought the gun-toting Taliban might free them despite accusations they had run a prostitution ring for a U.S. base. Soon after, the militants shot them dead. The recent execution of the two women, witnessed in central Ghazni province by an Afghan journalist who contributes to The Associated Press, reflects the Taliban's resurgent presence in Afghanistan and their growing ability to dispense an extreme version of Islamic justice.

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[A]s the insurgency in Afghanistan turns more violent, the Taliban have once again gained control of significant parts of the country where the weak U.S.-backed central government has little authority. One sign of this comeback is the spread of a shadow justice system, with anecdotal reports of the militants' setting up "courts" and meting out harsh punishments.

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Many reports about Taliban justice come from the southern provinces, where the insurgency is strongest. There are signs, however, that the militants are spreading their tentacles further, and even outside Afghanistan. Taliban-style punishments have become commonplace in the border regions of neighboring Pakistan, where Islamic extremists now hold considerable sway. In June, militants executed two people they accused of spying for the U.S. in front of thousands of cheering supporters in Bajur, a Pakistani tribal region.

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The first thing the Taliban do when they come into an area is to set up courts, said Ahmed Rashid, a journalist and author who has written extensively on the militants.

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Equally upsetting is the fact that the Chimperators strongest domestic supporters are Christianists who want something akin to the Taliban's replacement of civi law with religious law.

Bush Iraq Crusade Continues to Help Taliban

The New York Times has yet another disturbing story on the growing power of the Taliban - you know, the group ACTUALLY in league with Al-Qeada - in Afghanistan and, more frighteningly, in Pakistan, a nation that DOES, in fact, have atomic weapons other than in the delusional mind of the Chimperator. While the USA removed Saddam, it has in many ways destroyed the nation of Iraq and meanwhile left the true enemies to rebuild and perhaps even flourish in some areas. Definitely a case of taking one's eye of the ball. That's assuming the idiot Chimperator ever knew what the ball was. A noted in passing yesterday the cretin's approval rating had dropped to 27%, a new low. Heck of a Job, Chimpy! Here are some highlights from the Times story:

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Now the area, around the town of Parachinar, is near the center of the new kind of struggle. The Taliban have inflamed and exploited a long-running sectarian conflict that has left the town under siege. The Taliban, which have solidified control across Pakistan’s tribal zone and are seeking new staging grounds to attack American soldiers in Afghanistan, have sided with fellow Sunni Muslims against an enclave of Shiites settled in Parachinar for centuries. The population of about 55,000 is short of food. The fruit crop is rotting, residents say, and the cost of a 66-pound bag of flour has skyrocketed to $100.

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And, in a mini-conflict that yet again demonstrates the growing influence of the Taliban and the Pakistan government’s lack of control over this highly sensitive border area, young and old, wounded and able-bodied, have become refugees in their own land. Last month, a Pakistani government relief convoy loaded with food and medicines that had been sent to break the siege was attacked by the Taliban at the village of Pir Qayyum. Many of the 22 vehicles were burned and 12 drivers were killed by the Taliban, according to government officials here and Shiites.

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Groups of Taliban affiliated with Mr. Mehsud, who according to the Bush administration is supported by Al Qaeda, now control wide swaths of the tribal areas, from Waziristan in the south to Bajur in the north. From some parts of the tribal areas, like Waziristan and Mohmand, the Taliban have stepped up their operations into Afghanistan against NATO and American soldiers, cross-border attacks that have resulted in rising casualties for coalition forces over the last two months, the Bush administration said.

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To try to quash the Taliban, the ministry would urge the local tribes to form small armies, known as lashkar, he said. The ministry was also offering local people financial rewards, he said, if they killed a Taliban leader. But whether the army would take a role in the efforts to find a solution appeared to remain an open question.

Afghanistan 'Is Going Down Fast'

This story from The Australian (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22575334-2703,00.html) details the worsening situation in Chimperator Bush's other disastrous military adventure. I continue to believe that history will judge the Chimperator as America's worse president in history:

THE bloodshed in Afghanistan has reached levels not seen since the 2001 invasion as anger at bungling by an ineffective Government in Kabul and its foreign backers stokes support for the Taliban and other extremist groups. The death of Trooper David Pearce underlines the rising dangers for Australia's 1000 soldiers in Afghanistan, most of them deployed in the Taliban's southern heartland -- a region some of Canberra's NATO allies consider too dangerous to fight in.

"This place can only go up or down, and it's going down fast, which is something the international community simply will not understand," said a security analyst who has been working in and out of Afghanistan for 30 years. Almost six years after the hardline Islamist Taliban were ousted, their insurgency is gaining strength, fuelled by resentment at NATO bombing of civilians, billions of dollars of wasted aid, a lack of jobs and record crops of opium, the raw material for heroin. The fighting is spreading to places once relatively safe, including the capital and the western and northern parts of the country.

"One reason for their renewed strength is that the people are more or less amenable to what they are doing and maybe some of the (NATO) bombardments have not been very wisely executed. "That has helped the people get closer to the Taliban. They are dying and they feel that they are the same (as the Talibs) from the religious point of view." Scores, possibly hundreds, of civilians have been killed in air strikes, mainly called in to support ground troops fighting rebels. The US-led NATO force, government officials and village leaders differ over details and numbers.

The Taliban-led insurgency is also being bolstered by drugs money -- the UN reported a 50per cent jump in this year's opium crop -- local and tribal disputes, and a lack of jobs. With the wrecked economy and the dangers of getting crops to market, being a paid fighter for the Taliban is often the only way isolated Afghans can feed their families. "It's important to emphasise: I don't think the Taliban themselves are wildly popular," Ms Nathan said.

"I don't think people want Taliban times back. It is a broad dissatisfaction with what is happening in the country now. I think the Taliban are very clever at appealing to people or groups that are locally disenfranchised or disempowered."