Kandahar Effort Off to Slow Start

[unhappycamper]

Kandahar Effort Off to Slow Start
May 14, 2010
Mclatchy -Tribune News Service

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Although it is just beginning, the U.S.-led effort to pacify the Taliban's spiritual capital in southern Afghanistan already appears to be faltering.

Key military operations have been delayed until the fall, efforts to improve local government are having little effect and a Taliban assassination campaign has brought a sense of dread to Kandahar's dusty streets.

NATO officials once spoke of demonstrating major progress by mid-August, but U.S. commanders now say the turning point may not be reached until November, and perhaps later.

At the urging of Afghan leaders, U.S. officials have stopped describing the plan as a military operation. Instead, they've dubbed it "Cooperation for Kandahar," a moniker meant to focus attention on efforts to build up local governance while reducing fears of street battles.

"We're not using the term 'operation' or 'major operations' because that often brings to mind in peoples' psyche the idea of a D-Day and an H-Hour and an attack," U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of U.S.-led international forces in Afghanistan, said Thursday in Washington.

[mmonk]

1. A "letter" from Khalil Nouri to Zalmay Khalizad

KHALIL NOURI: AFGHANISTAN: MR. KHALILZAD, WHY SHOULD THE WHITE HOUSE PAGE YOU?


This Afghan war is undeniably escalating like a runaway train, and increasingly propagating cripples, mourners, thieves, kidnappers, warlords and drug barons in your place of birth. It is an unimaginable quagmire, the product of hardcore neocon faction policy makers like you; who wholeheartedly had the ears of the Bush-Cheney administration in post 9/11. They totally relied on you for their perception of realities that guided their decisions, based on their faith in your understanding of Afghanistan. And yet, paradoxically you are now being lobbied for a rendezvous with the Obama administration by some ill-informed journalist who has illusions of you taming the Afghan President, Mr. Karzai, with your magical “healing power” and saving us from his “tantrums.”

Needless to say, the true evidence of your failed policies in Afghanistan is likely to exhort a deeper impression on current U.S. policy, whereby their negative results have exacerbated conditions to a level almost beyond repair.

A level that initially began with you as an “envoy” of the Bush-Cheney administration; and as always, your charming and skillfully understated powers of persuasion allowed you to intriguingly and deliberately engineer a path to become the backroom powerbroker who’s scheming implanted your Unocal pal, Mr. Hamid Karzai, as the head of Afghanistan’s transitional government; at the emergency “Loya Jirgah” on June 10, 2002.

-snip-

Of course, that manipulative deal that you endorsed, inflicted upon Afghanistan the incompetent Hamed Karzai, instead of the dignified and popular ex-King Zahir Shah; who was viewed by all as a real “healing power” for the Afghans. In fact, your only interest in the late Zahir Shah was to use his popularity to legitimize Karzai. And still today Zahir Shah’s portraits are in high demand at Karzai’s tribal powwows.

-snip-

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/05/05/khalil-nouri-afghanistan-mr-khalilzad-why-should-the-whitehouse-page-you/

[bemildred]

2. Boy, this is getting almost Bush-like.

The thrashing around, the waste, the disorganization, the dissembling of failure, and the lack of noticeable positive effects from loudly trumpeted "initiatives".