Afghanistan - General McNeill (head of the "NATO" forces there) says it will take 400,000 troops

[ConsAreLiars]

to defeat the tribal resistance. And he is an optimist and an ignoramus, ignoring the fact that every Afghan they kill will create two or more family members who will be obligated by every sense of decency and honor that they bear within them to extract revenge of equal or greater lethality.

The simpleminded dispute on tactics and strategy between two arrogant imperialist idiot suck-up warmongers is summarized here: http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/02/military_taliban_afghanistan_080207w/

The prompt for this mini-rant was a very insightful interview on Bill Moyers Journal with Sarah Chayes, who gave up her PBS reporter job to set up workers coops (making herbal soaps and such) in Kandahar. She has that all too rare Rachel Corrie type faith that doing good work to counter injustice and hardship is simply necessary, and her comments on how people in Afghanistan cope with, understand, and are impacted by the US occupation and puppet government are very revealing.

See the index at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html and click on the "watch" link when the story appears to see the video. I recommend this to all who might suspect that brute force and overwhelming economic domination may not turn the people of that nation into obedient proles.

The transcript is at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02222008/transcript2.html

(edit minor typo)

[sutz12]

1. Guess we're due for a new commander...

Honesty is never a good career move with this White House.

:shrug:

[Lasher]

2. You got that right. And guess who's been given two additional stars while Junior's been in charge.

Wednesday, may 14, 2003

WASHINGTON -- The military believes a second trailer discovered May 9 near Mosul, Iraq, is also a mobile biological weapons laboratory -- albeit an incomplete one, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division said Tuesday.

The lab was found at the al-Kindi Rocket and Missile Research and Development Center in northern Iraq, said Army Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus.

"The expert I talked to this morning said that he had a reasonable degree of certainty that this is in fact a mobile biological agent production trailer," Petraeus said Tuesday in a video teleconference with Pentagon reporters.

Kurdish troops stopped a similar trailer loaded with suspicious equipment at a checkpoint in northern Iraq in April. The layout is nearly identical to the first trailer that was found and seems to have been made in the same facility as the other trailer, Petraeus said.

"We do not believe that the lab trailer that we found here was completed. Several welds were not finished, and shipping plugs were still in place. And in addition, a water pump, forward air compressor, canvas cover and some of the piping were looted," Petraeus said.

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/5/13/190328.shtml

[ConsAreLiars]

3. Even simple math within a shared, delusional and homicidal mass-murderer framework is unwelcome.

These monsters have no clue about the people of Afghanistan or most other parts of the world. They look at themselves and believe that the whole world is made of cowards with no sense of honor or decency. Chimpy, McNeill, McCain, they are all the same. Privileged fools who think that having more money and more guns means that everyone else will simply prostrate themselves at their feet and swear obedience to their masters.

[whistle]

4. That IS the mold of imperialistic thinking!

[leftofthedial]

5. what arrogance.

historically, that region has defied conquest and defeated far greater empires than ours.

[Disturbed]

6. The Afghanistan Failure

The Afghanistan Failure
By MIKE WHITNEY

Afghanistan is a tragic example of American foreign policy run amok. The promises of liberation and reconstruction have only generated more suffering and death." Operation Enduring Freedom" was nothing more than a marketing ploy designed to project American military power into the region and secure long-coveted pipeline routes. It has created a situation that is more unstable than before. A recent report from Kim Sengupta confirms this; "The UK Independent has learned that an all-party group of MPs from the Foreign Affairs Committee has returned from a visit to the country shocked and alarmed by what they witnessed. They warn that urgent action must be taken to save Afghanistan from plunging further into chaos because of Western neglect."

This is the reality of the Afghanistan campaign; a nation teetering towards anarchy because it fit nicely into the global designs of a handful of fanatics in Washington. It is a reality that has been scrupulously omitted from the establishment press because it doesn't exemplify the virtue of American warmongering. A faithful rendering of the facts of the Afghanistan war would convince the American people that it was a cruel and cynical misadventure that never should have taken place. Nearly, three years after the end of major hostilities, the country is still more fractured and unsettled than ever. Large swaths of the country are engaged in an unreported war and the drug trade is fueling even greater instability. The Taliban have been replaced by the equally misogynist warlords who rule with an iron fist and have a similar disregard for basic human rights.

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney06022004.html

[ConsAreLiars]

7. kick (nt)