Yes, there are more civilian casualties, eroding goodwill toward the US-NATO forces. Worse, Karzai has pretty much scrapped anti-corruption efforts in his bid for power. It’s a mess there, and no surge of US forces is going to fix things with Karzai still at the top.
Recently, Pat Robertson had this to say about Haiti:
“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti … they were under the heel of the French, uh, you know, Napoleon the third and whatever … and they got together and swore a pact to the devil, they said, we will serve you, if you get us free from the Prince. True story.”
While it’s easy enough to say Robertson is an out-of-touch old crank, most everyone is taking exception to the devil crack and not to Robertson’s comment that Haiti is in deep trouble while its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, enjoys a happy, prosperous economy. This is wrong.
Criminal gangs in China have been kidnapping mentally disabled people. The gangs take their kidnap victims to mining operations and murder them deep underground in ways to make them look like they died in mining accidents. Then the gangs pose as members of the victim’s family and demand compensation from the mine owner. If the mine is operating illegally, chances are that the owners will pay what the criminals demand to keep the incident hushed up.
While using mentally disabled people is a new wrinkle, these murders have been going on across China for about a decade. These deaths are over and above the estimated 20,000 that die each year in China’s mines.
Basically, the moral of this story is to stay far, far away from China’s mines, especially if you’re Chinese. There are many illegal operations that are kept going because of their connections to government officials.
I hate luxury items. I really do. They are like drugs in that they enable violent factions in bloody civil wars to fund their wars from the greed of men.
With the recent spike in the price of gold, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is seeing an increase in violence, courtesy of the blood gold being mined there to fund its long-lasting civil war. Actually, it’s more a long-lasting looting project. I don’t think the factions want to run the country as much as they just want to sell off its mineral wealth for their gain.
Anyway, I already don’t buy diamonds. I’m now sure I don’t want to buy gold. The only bloodstained things left for me to not buy are my clothes and my gasoline.
Oh well…
Karzai’s election victory was rigged. Let’s not beat around the bush. It’s obvious, but unsubstantiable because the US does not want it substantiated. Now we’re asking a guy that rigged his election to clean up corruption in Afghanistan. Great idea. It’s like asking a leader of a military coup to rein in his country’s military.
This is just one more lesson about how nobody wins in Afghanistan, not even the Afghans. Karzai’s brother is a drug dealer on the level of “kingpin.” A san diego drug crimes attorney reveals that Karzai’s brother is also the only guy holding Kandahar, the most important city in the south. Therefore, the evidence that he’s a heroin-making machine has to be reduced to the level of unsubstantiated rumors. This also means immunity for anyone in his organization that does a good job for him. Should someone be on the outs with the President’s brother, he’ll likely get handed over to the police in a significant ceremony. Until then, the biggest dealer in Afghanistan will go untouched.
What about the provincial governors, many of whom are big dealers in their own right? Well, they’re doing what they can to keep their provinces together. The US is caught in a quandry: it must choose whether to fight the drugs in Afghanistan or to fight the Taliban. To be sure, the Taliban forces in Afghanistan are dealing in drugs for their own purposes, but nowhere on the level the Afghan government is dealing.
Once again, the USA has made a bargain with one set of criminals to fight another it sees as more dangerous. Every time the USA has done that, the criminals they picked turned out to be even worse than the ones they fought. So it goes again.
I was reading an article in The Independent about terrorists that changed their minds. Still reading it and it’s fascinating. The upshot of it is that I can’t get over how the recruitment techniques of the jihadis remind me of the way Scientologists rope in unsuspecting dupes. Or street gangs, for that matter. It’s just that Scientology makes for a more catchy headline, so I went with that.
Contested results, winner packing the ballot boxes to avoid a runoff, unrest in the provinces… except this time it’s not Iran, it’s Afghanistan.
The difference here is that the USA is supporting the “winner” instead of encouraging his opposition to post videos on YouTube. Karzai cheated on the election, plain and simple, and his cronies are the ones in charge of validating the results. Watch as the CIA does not stoke the fires of unrest in Afghanistan and as the US news media does not provide extensive, sympathetic coverage of the stolen election.
… and so it goes. The rules for one part of the world do not necessarily apply anywhere else if the USA is acting as the referee.
A recent US report stated that al-Qaeda can no longer operate from Afghan bases. Yippee. Honestly, I don’t think they’ve been operating from Afghan bases since 2002. They’re all in Pakistan and points beyond. This is known as a balloon effect: eradication of something somewhere only drives it to another location, just like the assault on coca growers in Colombia drove production into Ecuador and Bolivia. No al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is a hollow victory when at the same time the Taliban has a permanent presence in 80% of the country, with permanent presence defined as an area where one or more attacks on US forces, its allies, or Afghan government personnel happen per week.
Just for the record, at the time of this writing in October 2009, the US has less than 50,000 troops in Afghanistan. At the height of its occupation, Russia deployed over 100,000. Russia couldn’t hold all of Afghanistan with 100,000. They had strategies at first, but after 1985 they decided bombing everything in sight was the only way to do things, and even that they knew to be an exercise in futility. We knew Afghanistan would bring war without end to the USSR and undo its empire: why, then did we plunge into that nation, knowing full well what it does to empires?
MISHA POZHININSKY IS PROBABLY the only website columnist who has actually killed an Afghani. He spent his youth as a soldier in the Red Army’s elite Airborne corps, and returned for the first time since the war in February of 2000 to territory held by the Northern Alliance.
My friend Cali Ruchala posed a series of questions and assertions which have appeared in the American press about the ‘War Against Terror’ from both the Left and Right. He answered via email and telephone from Moscow. This was from November, 2001. It’s fascinating to read what he had to say then as the USA prepares to pour more soldiers into Afghanistan.
“I’ve got one rule of thumb: If the president of a country denies the Holocaust, you should believe the worst, not the best, about what they’re doing.” – Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC
I don’t care if you’re Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, or None of the Above: the above is a correct statement.
It also points to imminent war with Iran. Attitudes are hardening and the hawks are spreading their wings. Love war or hate it, it is coming soon, I feel.