Noticias de Rupia | Nouvelles de Roupie | Rupiennachrichten | ??????? ????? | ???? | Roepienieuws | Rupi Nyheter | ??????? | Notizie di Rupia | PAKISTAN LEDGER | ???????? ????? | RUPEE NEWS | May 7th, 2008 | Moin Ansari | ???? ??????? | ????? ????? |

Pakistani Cheese for Western whine:

The UK papers are reporting a UK defeat in Afghanistan. “”I told you so’s” are so sweet. Pakistan was not consulted when an anti-Pakistan cabal of non-Pashtun minorities, and coterie of corrupt incompetent warlords was imposed on Kabul. Pakistan was not listened to when she gave free advice to make the government more inclusive. Pakistan was not consulted when Mr. Karzai embraced India and opened up 4 Consulates and 13 information centers in Afghanistan.

Now the chickens have come home to roost. The Taliban for the first time in months attacked Kabul with the help of Karzai’s police and “army”. Western capitals are jittery and clearly a rattled Karzai doenst know hat to do.

A convoy of US Marines pushes through the deserted Afghan town of Garmser as part of an operation by the new Nato-commanded reserve forces to distrupt Taliban infilitration and drug smuggling in the area. Photograph: Declan Walsh

There is only silence in Garmser, a ghost town on the edge of the desert in southern Afghanistan. The bazaar is a lonely line of abandoned shops and debris-strewn streets. There is just one trader – a baker – whose sole customers are British soldiers and Afghan police.

Further out, giant bomb craters dot the broken gardens and shredded fruit orchards of empty houses. Now they are inhabited by the British.

Squatting on a rickety rooftop, Corporal Lachlan MacNeil pointed to a cluster of long, low buildings. “That’s the madrasa [Islamic school]. It’s a training camp for the Taliban,” he said, his face glistening from the morning heat. “Mostly foreigners inside, we hear – central Asians and Arabs, but especially Pakistanis.”

For many Taliban fighters, this deserted, dog-eared town is where the war starts. Garmser is the gateway to Afghanistan for insurgents who stream across the border from Pakistan, 120 miles to the south. The British base here is their first encounter with the “infidels”.

“They blood themselves against UK forces here, then graduate into the upper valleys,” said Major Neil Den-McKay, officer commanding of a Scottish infantry company stationed at Garmser’s agricultural college.

The fighters that pass before the British doorstep are as diverse as the Taliban has become. There are hard-bitten ideologues from the original Taliban movement of the 1990s, hired local fighters known as “$10 Taliban”, Baluch drug smugglers and al-Qaida- linked Arabs. In ghost town where Afghan war begins, UK fights losing battle. This article appeared in  on  on p1 of the  section. It was last updated at 00:17 on May 05 2008.

The story of Afghanistan and colonialism begins a long time ago. British tried to take up White Man’s burden in Afghanistan. It suffered badly in Kabul and could not hold it. NATO Lessons: 1880 UK defeat at Maiwand-Afghanistan. Today ISAF is making the same mistakes as the British did more than a century ago. Is NATO committing suicide in Afghanistan? There is a powerplay going on. …the CIA assassination. Juggling all the permutations and the permutations, the US has considered every possibility. However the most obvious one escapes the $80 Billion think tank industry in the USA. Saving the Pashtuns of Afghania from Afghanistan. Eradicating the Pashtun plight and ending occupation.

But most, Afghan and British officials say, are Pakistani – ideologically driven young men who consider the war as a religious obligation of struggle, or jihad.

“Our understanding is that the madrasas of northern Pakistan are a major breeding ground that provide the bulk of brainwashed Taliban fighters,” said Lieutenant Colonel Nick Borton, commanding officer of Battlegroup South.

Up to 60% of the fighters in Garmser are Pakistani, the Afghan intelligence chief in Garmser, Mir Hamza, said. They come from militant hotspots such as Waziristan and Swat, but also from Punjab, a rich agricultural province with a history of producing radical Islamists.

“Sometimes the Pakistanis have trouble communicating with local [Pashto-speaking] fighters, because they only speak Urdu or Punjabi,” he said.

The insurgents cross from Baluchistan, a sprawling province in western Pakistan whose capital, Quetta, is considered to be the Taliban headquarters by Nato commanders. They muster in remote refugee camps west of Quetta – Girdi Jungle is most frequently mentioned – before slipping across the border in four-wheel drive convoys that split up to avoid detection, said Den-McKay. Sometimes sympathetic border guards help them on their way, he said. In ghost town where Afghan war begins, UK fights losing battle. This article appeared in  on  on p1 of the  section. It was last updated at 00:17 on May 05 2008

Imran Khan, the mercurial Pakistani politician said it best “The Americans will leave and we will have to clean the mess, just like they left the mess for us to clean when the USSR left Afghanistan“. Imran Khan in his sane adivce to the Pakistani governemnt asked it to not take the Obama Aid, and stop Pakistan’s coperation with the USA in the “Global War on Terror” or its new name “COIN” (Counter insurgency operations) or whatever the Obama Administration calls it this week. The headlines about Pakistan in the media: Understanding the Rupert Murdock-Neocon-Hinduvata doomsayer machine which is running scared of defeat and retreat

The stubborn Pakistanis. The pugnacious columnist and impetuous journalist has eloquently described the Pakistani position as a response to President Barack Obama’s speech. Most Pakistanis yawned at the euphoria from the office of the servile President Asif Zardari. Perhaps he was calculating what 10% of $7.5 Billion would be. Geo and other CNN/VOA subsidiaries began parading the “Blame Pakistan first” crowd, the Sehgals, Alams and the Askari type of analysts who have nothing good to say about Pakistan anyway. What surprises most Pakistanis is the fact that a Pakistani channel held hostage to his mentality and these columnists. The resilience of Pakistan and the nation’s continuing collective refusal to do what the west would like it to do

• Afghanistan fiasco: Cleaning up the Am-Brit failures in Kabul again
• Tick Tock Tick Tock: Obama’s shrinking Afghan timeline-2011
• Perpetual Mimitic War: Strategy for continued Failure in Afghanistan

Inside Afghanistan the fighters thunder across the Dasht-i-Margo – a harsh expanse of ancient smuggling trails which means “desert of death” – before reaching the river Helmand. Here, the sand turns to lush fields of poppy and wheat, and they reach Garmser, home to the most southerly British base in Helmand.

A wall-sized map in the British base shows the balance of forces. The British control the town centre; the Taliban a sprawl of mud-walled farmhouses that spills south and east. With its irrigation canals, world war one-style trenches and thick vegetation, the area makes for fine guerrilla ground. “This is one of the few places in Afghanistan where there is a visible frontline,” said Captain Ross Boyd, sitting in an outpost surrounded by barbed wire.

Last week US marines joined the battle, sending more than 1,000 troops to punch through the Taliban lines around Garmser. Their mission is to disrupt the two-way traffic of fighters scooting north and opium shipments headed south. The Americans met with sporadic, but dogged resistance. Black-clad fighters ambushed them with small arms and rocket propelled grenades, drawing deadly ripostes from helicopter gunships and fighter jets.

The combat continued yesterday as American heavy guns pounded Taliban positions near Garmser.

At the British base, the UK’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Sherard Cowper-Coles, had a taste of the action. As he was being briefed on the fighting, Taliban machine gun fire erupted close to the camp. The exchange ended when British attack helicopters and mortars opened fire on the suspected Taliban positions.

British officers say they have ample evidence that many of the enemy are Pakistani. While remaining coy about their sources of intelligence, they speak of hearing Punjab accents and of finding Pakistani papers and telephone contacts on dead fighters.

Four months ago, Den-McKay said, British Gurkhas shot dead a Taliban militant near a small outpost known as Hamburger Hill. Searching the fighter’s body, they discovered a Pakistani identity card and handwritten notes in Punjabi.

The issue of cross-border infiltration has vexed relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Afghan officials say that Islamabad at best turns a blind eye to the flow, at worst encourages it.

Last Wednesday, Afghanistan’s intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, alleged that an assassination attempt against President Hamid Karzai the previous weekend had been hatched in Pakistan’s tribal areas. He said the attackers had been “receiving orders from the other side of the border until the last moments”.

The debate has a very different tone in Pakistan. A spate of Islamist bombs has rocked major cities in the past year. But Pakistanis blame the American and Nato aggression in Afghanistan for inflaming Islamist passions, and see the Taliban as an expression of Pashtun nationalism. Pakistanis are also suspicious of the proliferation of Indian consulates in southern Afghanistan.

In Garmser, the Scottish infantrymen hope to push the Taliban back and fill the town with people again. The continuing marine operation may help that objective.

But the main British effort is concentrated in northern Helmand, and local governance is weak in Garmser, where most of the town elders and administrators have fled to the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.

And as the poppy harvest draws to a close, commanders expect a fresh spurt of fighting in the coming weeks. Combined with the stream of Taliban from Pakistan, British officers recognise they are only holding the line.

“I’m under no illusions. We are not stopping the movement north,” said Den-McKay. “We’re just giving them something to talk about.” In ghost town where Afghan war begins, UK fights losing battle. This article appeared in  on  on p1 of the  section. It was last updated at 00:17 on May 05 2008.

US AfPak policy review results mimic Chinese demads given to Hillary Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived. ~Abraham Lincoln In 1821 The Taliban was a construct of the CIA and was armed by the CIA:–Congressman Dana Rohrabacher Obama’s Vietnam & Cambodiazation of the Afghan war Solutions to “Obama’s Vietnam” Kabul: The Final Spring Offensive? End of NATO? Afghanistan: The writing is on the wall. Can Obama read it? UK Brig. Smith: “We’re not going to win this [Afghan] war”
Failure and Defeat in Afghanistan: Inevitable Frustration & misdirected Payback for ally Pakistan US Charge of the Light Brigade into Pakistan is a US failure and has to stop

Pakistan’s do more list for the USA Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan & Swat run by Taliban Huge Migraine for India

Facing the Khyber poltergeist & Ganges hobgoblin NATO war: UK 1880 defeats in Afghanistan
“Charge of the Light Brigade” in Afghanistan AGAIN: Unfortunately the lessons of the unmitigated disaster of “Auckland’s Folly”, (First Anglo-Afghan War 1838–42) have not been taught to the Oxbridge students.

Bin Laden used Reagan’s USSR strategy to Destroy US Capitalism? Cambodiazation of the Afghan war Rescueing the Pashtuns of Afghania from Afghanistan

Unite! Erase the Durand Line Solution: Fixing “AfPak” expedites the inevitable union between Pakistan & Afghanistan