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via Balloon Juice

[cross-posted at NPR Check]

Is Sorya Sarhaddi Nelson really and truly in Afghanistan? I've heard her interviewed the last day or so regarding the fortunes of of the US debacle in Afghanistan - in light of the non-runoff runoff and the "victory" of Hamid Karzai - and I can't say I've learned anything from it.

Nelson was on ATC Monday talking to Michelle Norris and this exchange occurred:

Norris: "With Hamid Karzai now declared the official winner of the presidential election, to what degree does that now solve the political uncertainty in Afghanistan?"

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For those of you who can't do youtube, here's the transcript:

I think that the aid program is a fig leaf trying to make congress and the American people feel better about the war and about killing. I think that diplomacy in the areas of fig leaf to try to make the American people think that there is some constructive alternative to the war when the war itself is destructive and not constructive.
I think that the basic premise that we can alter afghan society is greatly flawed. Afghanistan is simply the part of Asia that was never occupied by the Russians or the English (inaudible). It’s not a country, it’s not even a place. It’s just an empty place on the map. It’s terra incognita. People who live there are a welter of different tribes, different language groups, different religious beliefs.
All over the country you find different people who have nothing to do with each other except for the fact that we call them Afghans, and they don’t even call themselves afghans. They’re (inaudible) or they’re Pashtuns, or they’re (other groups, inaudible)). The things that hold them together are simply the things that we try to create artificially.

And the idea that we could transform that society or any other society through aid I think is entirely questionable. I’ve never seen it happen, probably never will happen.

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[cross-posted at NPR Check]

Monday's Morning Edition featured another NPR exclusive on Afghanistan. Mary Louise Kelly was on to explain all about the Two-Clock Theory of War. Opening the report Renee Montagne explains:

"We begin this morning with Afghanistan and a story about two clocks: one ticks in Washington, the other in Kabul. They measure progress in the war. The challenge: they are moving at very different speeds" [notice the bloodless euphemisms - "progress" and "challenge"].

All perspectives in the story are provided by war advocates [Peter Feaver -Bush speech-shaper, warmakers Petraeus, Gates, and Mullen - and Steven Biddle, CFR fellow, who Kelly notes is "part of a team advising General Stanley McChrystal...on his war strategy"].

According to Kelly and all her experts, there are always two clocks in US warmaking: the grown-up, big-boy clock of the presidents, generals, and admirals as they bomb, occupy, kill, and destroy. This serious and mature clock ticks very slowly and takes years to produce progress and - ultimately - victory. Opposed to this is the childish, impatient clock of the American public which whizzes away at double or triple time and leads the uninformed masses to reject the wisdom of the wars that the serious grown-ups are running. Kelly's guest Feaver states that "A longstanding criticism of democracies, but especially the American democracy, is that Americans are impatient. They want to see success sooner than later."

[cross posted at NPR Check]

If you wondered why the US is in Afghanistan [has nothing to do with the sordid geopolitics of uranium, copper, oil and gas -of course], it's all about keeping promises - so says Steve Inskeep:

[cross posted at NPR Check]

NPR may struggle mightily with what to call torture - "the problem is that the word torture is loaded with political and social implications for several reasons, including the fact that torture is illegal under U.S. law and international treaties the United States has signed" - but when it comes to human beings killed by the US military, be they civilians or irregular forces, there's no hesitation: they are militants plain and simple.

[cross posted a NPR Check]

In these times of austerity and job "shedding" at NPR, I have an excellent money-saving idea for those running the show at NPR. Instead of spending all the money it must take to embed a reporter like Tom Bowman with the US military in Afghanistan, why not cut him out of the picture and just hand a microphone to one of the officers or commanders there? Heck, if that's too expensive, why not just get on the Internets and pull some hard-hitting journalism from the military web site of whatever unit Tom would have been embedded with? It sure would be a lot cheaper, even though it would mean we wouldn't get the kind of critical insight that Bowman coughed up for us this morning:

[cross-posted at NPR Check]

On Tuesday morning Tom Bowman - embedded with Green Berets (it's special) - proclaims that

"What happened in this village [Azizabad] last summer tightened the rules about the use of air strikes. They should only be used in life or death situations."

Life or death situations: that is a statement that Yossarian would appreciate!

[cross posted at NPR Check]

[cross posted at NPR Check]
If you were listening to NPR last night you might have thought Tom Bowman was describing US foreign policy in Afghanistan when he said, "picture a Brinks truck on steroids." Actually he was simply describing a US armored vehicle.

[cross posted at NPR Check]

On Monday's ME, Tom Bowman and Renee Montagne assess the Obama War switch of commanders in Afghanistan from General McKiernan to General McChrystal and - boy - is Bowman juiced by McChrystal's Green Beret credentials.

[cross posted at NPR Check]

As mentioned in an earlier post on the most recent Afghan carnage from US air strikes, NPR presents heaps of skepticism when the US military is accused of any wrongdoing. This drumbeat was maintained by the "liberal" Dan Schorr on Saturday morning:

"...although military sources say they believe that the Taliban itself may have been responsible for at least some of those. The real problem there is that because we don't have enough troops in Afghanistan - that they do a lot of their work from the air, and if you are working from the air...clearly if we go on being blamed for, whether or not we did it, being blamed for the civilian casualties - it's not going to help our cause very much."

You've just got to love that phrase "work from the air" - Schorr is certainly doing his work on the air!   Read more…

[Welcome Bread and Roses readers -- lambert]

Boris at the Canadian blog (Canada is up to its eyebrows in Afghanistan) The Galloping Beaver has an instructive take on why colonial wars like the ones in Afghanistan and/or northwestern Pakistan are so futile.

...Tahira Abdullah posits a hell of a problem for anyone involved who does not favour the Taleban: What is to be done?

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Speaker Pelosi gives an interview. Nice get for Maddow.  Read more…

So, if it's a "moral necessity" to spend over $100B a year to enforce "women's rights" in Afghanistan, why is it so hard to spend a couple of hundred million on American women who are poor but supposedly already have the right to choose? Just wonderin'.

LAT

For a change, the reporter actually went there and talked to real live Afghani fighters. Bottom line: there is no "victory" to be had there. At this point, I'm completely cynical about anything I hear coming from American politicians on what we're supposedly doing there. We're there to enrich energy companies, contractors and merc firms, and those political districts that benefit from profligate war spending. The exploding heroin market also plays a role. Anyone who says otherwise is bullshitting you.

Feeling rather unclever today, I don't have the snappy intro I wish I could have for this:

KABUL (Reuters) - The U.S. general commanding NATO forces in Afghanistan has ordered a merger of the office that releases news with "Psy Ops," which deals with propaganda, a move that goes against the alliance's policy, three officials said.

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Buried in the onslaught of economic bad news is word that the British Amabassador to Afghanistan has predicted that the war against the Taliban will fail and that what needs to be done is to prepare the public to accept a dictator in Afghanistan because that's the best option:

"The current situation is bad, the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption, and the government has lost all trust,” the British envoy, Sherard Cowper-Coles, was quoted as saying by the author of the cable, François Fitou, the French deputy ambassador to Kabul.

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For those who might have missed it last week we invaded Pakistan. Afterwards, the Pakistanis, led by their new President, Asaf Ali Zardari, Bhutto's widower, cut off the Khyber pass to briefly stop our using it to resupply Afghanistan (aren't we happy that we got NATO to piss off the Russians, our only other options for resupplying Afghanistan? But, hey, we're all Georgians now (by which I mean governed by an increasingly authoritarian, incompetent government)):

Russia accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan

The global proceeds of the Afghan drug trade is in excess of 150 billion dollars a year. There is mounting evidence that this illicit trade is protected by the US military.

Nice people are respectful of religion.

Occasionally, a journalist just doesn't play nice enough:

KABUL, Afghanistan - Conservative clerics and elders demanded Thursday that the Afghan government not interfere with a controversial death sentence handed down to a young journalist convicted of insulting Islam for distributing a report questioning polygamy.

...clerics and elders worried that Kaambakhsh would be let off the hook like Abdul Rahman, a Christian convert imprisoned in 2006 on charges of apostasy who was whisked off to Italy, where he had been granted asylum.

I was in a tiny minority back in 2001, believing as I did then that a bombing and strafing campaign that sent Talib leaders running for the safety of the hills of Warzistan was not the right response to 9/11. And even if it was, there's this thing called "follow through." Something most Repubicans no nothing about. More proof that we really need some adults in charge soon, because the dead of 9/11 must be wondering when, if ever, they will be avenged:

MONTREAL, Jan. 17 /CNW/ - Reporters Without Borders is very worried about the pressure being placed on the authorities by conservative religious leaders in the case of Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, a young journalist in the northern province of Balkh who has been detained since late October on charges of blasphemy and defaming Islam. The Council of Mullahs says he should be
sentenced to death.

"The calls for the death penalty for Kambakhsh highlight the growing influence of fundamentalist groups on intellectual debate," the organisation
said. "The blasphemy charges are an ill-disguised attempt to hide the desire of the local authorities to restrict press freedom."

A reporter for the newspaper Jahan-e Naw ("The New World") and ajournalism student at Balkh university, Kambakhsh, 23, was arrested on
27 October. Articles on the role of women in Muslim society were found at his
home. articles about women and Islam!!! the horror!

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Told you so. Keep this in mind anytime you try to understand why "we" do what we do in the Middle East, and why it often fails to work.

Ian does all the hard work, so just go read his excellent recap about drugs and why there is only one answer in the drug "war." Legalization, in some form or another, is going to happen. It's simply a matter of time. No matter how entrenched the Drug War MIC establishment, eventually it's going to be so ugly, corrupt and not effectual that taxpayers around the world will say, "enough." I think I'll begin to see it in this country in my lifetime; kids today really don't care about that Great Evil in the same way as folks my age and older have been brainwashed to be.

I just had a conversation with a friend, and I reminded him: it's always a good time to advocate sensible drug policy/legalization. Always. That is, as far as that political battle goes, our side is always going to lose. Pushing for drug legalization is a guaranteed no-go, as far as causes are concerned. Until that day that it is not.