Despite new findings in NIE briefing, Obama kept up arcane rhetoric on Pakistan

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Despite new findings in NIE briefing, Obama kept up arcane rhetoric on Pakistan

Posted on 13 October 2008. Tags: Barack Obama, Elections, Ibama ignores sane advice, NEI, USA

Senator Barack Obama was recently briefed by the intelligence agencies, which clearly says that Afghanistan’s issues were created by the Afghans and Mr. Karzai is responsible for the bulk of the problems that exist there–the drug trade, the inability to take control of any major portion of Afghan territory, and allowing India to create and use a terror network to destabilize Pakistan.

Either Senator Obama has a tin ear, or he does not have a clue about the complexities of the situation on the Afghan Pakistan border. His consistent rhetoric against Pakistan where he harps on his old mantra which essentially says “I am itching to bomb Pakistan and expand the war to Pakistan” displays a naivete of the situation which is reminiscent of George Bush’s insistence on attacking Iraq–despite an overwhelming body of evidence that Iraq never had any WMDs.

Starving in Kabul
If you’re walking his street, there isn’t a single day when you won’t see Zayainullah. For as long as he can remember, the 11-year-old has perched on the sidewalk at one of Kabul’s busiest intersections. Zayainullah has only one arm; the Taliban blew the other one away when he was a child. He uses this arm to beg for handouts, quietly in the mornings, more desperately as the day goes on. Both his parents are dead so he lives with his aunt, a widow. Given the mores of modern-day Afghanistan, she can’t work because a woman needs a man’s sanction to leave the house. So she puts young Zayainullah on the street as her sole breadwinner. If he comes home empty-handed she beats him, sometimes until he can no longer move.

He sits there, shirtless, with a heaving, rounded belly – distended from severe malnutrition – as scores of other beggars and pedestrians stream by him. No one really notices him though, because poverty has become endemic in this country.

Afghanistan is now one of the poorest countries on the planet. It takes its place among desperate, destitute nations like Burkina Faso and Somalia whenever any international organization bothers to measure. The official unemployment rate, last calculated in 2005, was 40%. According to recent estimates, it may today reach as high as 80% in some parts of the country.

Approximately 45% of the population is now unable to purchase enough food to guarantee bare minimum health levels, according to the Brookings Institution. This winter, Afghan officials claim that hunger may kill up to 80% of the population in some northern provinces caught in a vicious drought. Reports are emerging of parents selling their children simply to make ends meet. In one district of the southern province of Ghazni last spring things got so bad that villagers started eating grass. Locals say that after a harsh winter and almost no food, they had no choice.

Kabul itself lies in tatters. Roads have gone unpaved since 2001. Massive craters from decades of war blot the capital city. Poor Afghans live in crumbling warrens with no electricity and often without safe drinking water. Kabul, a city designed for about 800,000 people, now holds more than four million, mostly squeezed into informal settlements and squatters’ shacks.

Washington spends about $100 million a day on this war – close to $36 billion a year – but only five cents of every dollar actually goes towards aid. From this paltry sum, the Agency Coordinating Gopal. Christian Science Monitor

DEFEAT IN AFGHANISTAN-

For the first time in a decade the US Administration has been able to differentiate between the various rebel groups in the area, previously lumped togther under the nebulous and ephmerial moniker “Taliban”. However it still has not woken up to the fact that the 38 groups in Afghanistan are fighting “the occupation”, and any links that may have had with Al-Qaeda are incidental and of only historical and cultural significance to the war at hand. The US bombing of Afghan villages and Pakistani tribal areas have spawned and strengthened the ranks of those fighting the militants.

Officials described the Pakistan-based extremist network, which the Pentagon calls “the syndicate,” as a loose alliance of three elements. Kashmiri militants, constrained by recent agreements between Pakistan and India, have “leaned over” to assist a domestic terrorist campaign launched by homegrown extremists often referred to as the “Pakistani Taliban,” one official said. The Afghan Taliban — itself divided into several groups — is based in Pakistan but focused on Afghanistan, as are the forces led by warlords Jalauddin Haqqani and his son Siraj, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, among others. Traditional tribal groups in Pakistan’s western, Federally Administered Tribal Areas — FATA — are a third element. Those groups are said to be focused primarily on keeping the Pakistani military and government out of their areas, and assisting the Afghan-oriented parts of the network.

Al-Qaeda, composed largely of Arabs and, increasingly, Uzbeks, Chechens and other Central Asians, is described as sitting atop the structure, providing money and training to the others in exchange for sanctuary. “They are oriented to just keeping the Pakistani military and government out of their areas,” the intelligence official said. “They help the groups who are interested in Afghanistan.” Washington Post: By Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, October 9, 2008; Page A01.

The White House and the NIE has still not been able to grapple with the role that Iran and India are playing in Afghanistan. The Neocons vested interest is to “blame Pakistan first”. the fact is that India has now created its own terror network, to destabilize Pakistan. The Swat and Baluch groups are being aided and abetted by the Indian RAW machinery. The Iranians are supporting Gulbaddin Hikmatyar. The Russian angle in all this has yet to be explored. Placing all blame on Pakistan spells an inability to understand the complex situation in West Asia

We have repeatedly reported for the past decade that no amount of “do more mantras” and no amount of bombs on Pakistani territory will resolve the Afghanistan quagmire. Drowned in a cacophony of Neocon voices, which may or may not have America’s best interest at hear, the American Tin ear has not been able to hear sanity.

By Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, October 9, 2008; Page A01. The White House has launched an urgent review of Afghanistan policy, fast-tracked for completion in the next several weeks, amid growing concern that the administration lacks a comprehensive strategy for the foundering war there and as intelligence officials warn of a rapidly worsening situation on the ground.

Reports indicate that the US has now realized that the problem with Afghanistan lies with Afghanistan itself. Blaming Pakistan was the wrong thing to do, and smacks of the Cambodiazation of the Vietnam War. It achieved nothing.

The [National Intelligence Estimate] report, a nearly completed version of a National Intelligence Estimate, is set to be finished after the November elections and will be the most comprehensive U.S. assessment in years on the situation in Afghanistan. Its conclusions represent a harsh verdict on decision-making in the Bush administration, which in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks made Afghanistan the central focus of a global campaign against terrorism.

Beyond the cross-border attacks launched by militants in neighboring Pakistan, the intelligence report asserts that many of Afghanistan’s most vexing problems are of the country’s own making, the officials said. SFGate Mark Mazzetti,Eric Schmitt, New York Times, Thursday, October 9, 2008

The report cites gains in the building of Afghanistan’s national army, the officials said. But they said it also laid out in stark terms what it described as the destabilizing impact of the booming heroin trade, which by some estimates accounts for 50 percent of Afghanistan’s economy. SFGate Mark Mazzetti,Eric Schmitt, New York Times, Thursday, October 9, 2008

DEFEATS IN AFGHANISTAN: Then & Now
NATO Lessons: 1880 UK defeat at Maiwand-Afghanistan

How much analysis does it take to realize the obvious. The war in Afghanistan is a fiasco.

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, senior officials have expressed worry that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is so tenuous that it may fall apart while a new set of U.S. policymakers settles in. Others believe a more comprehensive, airtight road map for the way ahead would limit the new president’s options.

Alarms were first sounded early this year, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice returned from a trip to Afghanistan in early February — her first in two years — convinced that the war there was heading downhill. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates shared her pessimism, telling Congress that same week that Taliban insurgents had adopted more dangerous tactics, that the U.S.-led military coalition was disorganized, and that international development efforts were failing because “there is no overarching strategy.” Washington Post: By Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, October 9, 2008; Page A01.

Is NATO committing suicide in Afghanistan.

The story of Afghanistan and colonialism begins a long time ago. British tried to take up White Man’s burden in Afghanistan.

Now the latest intelligence report supports the remarks made by the British and American commanders on the ground—the writing on the wall says “Defeat in Afghanistan” is complete. The announcement has now been made. The Surrender documents (“peace deal”) is being negotiated which will replace Mr. Karzai with Mr. Khalilzad as a puppet president, but the Taliban will be in power in Kabul.

THE PROBLEM:

Despite the commitment to increase U.S. troop levels, Gates has publicly warned that a larger foreign military “footprint” in Afghanistan may prove counterproductive. Afghanistan hopes to double the size of its army — to 134,000 — in the next two years. But maintaining such a force, Gates told Congress, would cost $2 billion to $2.5 billion a year — at least three times Afghanistan’s total revenue for 2008.

In recent months, the Pentagon has sent emissaries around the world with a proposition: If they do not want to fight in Afghanistan, they should at least be prepared to pay for those who do. “There is a real effort made to figure out which among the nations not contributing forces can pony up,” a defense official said.

Just before the recent change in government in Japan, he said by way of example, “our Asia guys went over there and said: ‘You don’t want to send forces? We understand. How about contributing $20 billion over the next five years?’ ”

The Japanese, he said, “swallowed their chopsticks–Washington Post: By Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, October 9, 2008; Page A01

NATO lessons: UK defeat at Maiwind may shed some light on today’s situation.

This has not been a good week for the Karzais (Both the drug baron and the president who sponsors the drug baron). First the New York Times splashes a front page story on his brothers drug trade. Then the US, UK and NATO commanders sya that the Taliban are undefeatable. Now the White House revaluation of the war. The National Intelligence estimate says it all. It blames Mr. Hamid Karzia for the drug trade, and place the blame for the Afghan fiasco where it squarely belongs, at the doorstep of the “forbidden palace” where Mr. Karzai is sequestered.

The intelligence assessment is also highly pessimistic about the prospects that Afghan President Hamid Karzai can or will move forcefully to stem corruption inside his government or that the flourishing drug trade can be significantly reversed.Washington Post: By Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, October 9, 2008; Page A01

The only reasonable solution is to withdraw the NATO, US and ISAF forces, eliminate Indian influences in Afghanistan, and allow the Pakistani boots on the ground to bring peace to the Pakhtun areas. Afghanistan should then me merged with Pakistan.

SOLUTIONS FOR AFGHANS Saving the Pashtuns of Afghania from Afghanistan. Eradicating the Pashtun plight and ending occupation.

END OF ARTICLE

APPENDIX A

Afghanistan in a ‘downward spiral,’ study says

SFGate Mark Mazzetti,Eric Schmitt, New York Times, Thursday, October 9, 2008

(10-09) 04:00 PDT Washington - –

A draft report by U.S. intelligence agencies concludes that Afghanistan is in a “downward spiral” and casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban’s influence there, according to American officials familiar with the document.

The classified report finds that the breakdown in central authority in Afghanistan has been accelerated by rampant corruption within the government of President Hamid Karzai and by an increase in violence from militants who have launched increasingly sophisticated attacks from havens in Pakistan.

The report, a nearly completed version of a National Intelligence Estimate, is set to be finished after the November elections and will be the most comprehensive U.S. assessment in years on the situation in Afghanistan. Its conclusions represent a harsh verdict on decision-making in the Bush administration, which in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks made Afghanistan the central focus of a global campaign against terrorism.

Beyond the cross-border attacks launched by militants in neighboring Pakistan, the intelligence report asserts that many of Afghanistan’s most vexing problems are of the country’s own making, the officials said.

The report cites gains in the building of Afghanistan’s national army, the officials said. But they said it also laid out in stark terms what it described as the destabilizing impact of the booming heroin trade, which by some estimates accounts for 50 percent of Afghanistan’s economy.

The Bush administration has initiated a major review of its Afghanistan policy and has decided to send additional troops to the country. The downward slide in the security situation in Afghanistan has also become an issue in the presidential campaign, along with questions about whether the White House emphasis in recent years on the war in Iraq has been misplaced.

Inside the government, reports issued by the CIA for more than two years have chronicled the worsening violence and rampant corruption inside Afghanistan, and some in the agency say they believe that it has taken the White House too long to respond to the warnings.