Noticias de Rupia | Nouvelles de Roupie | Rupiennachrichten | ??????? ????? | ???? | Roepienieuws | Rupi Nyheter | ??????? | Notizie di Rupia | PAKISTAN LEDGER | ???????? ????? | Moin Ansari | ???? ??????? |  ????? ????? |  February 23rd, 2009 |

The USSR tangled with the Afghans and after a decade of fruitless war finally imploded. Right now the US in entangled in Afghanistan for a decade. LIke the USSR, the USA faces tremendous economic pressures–perhaps the worst in its two hundred history. NATO, ISAF and Europe is in no mood to fund a never ending war which according to the British and American generals is  not winnable. The Taliban (which actually includes 38 insurgent groups) has been described as undefetable, invincible and unbreakable. Ruthlessly honest, and brutally efficient, the Taliban control 80% of Afghan territory with an iron hand. Swat & FATA for dummies: Who has Infiltrated the “Taliban”. Who are the terrorists in Pakistan?

MOSCOW (Agencies): Russia last week marked the 20th anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan with avowals from its leaders that they really, truly do not want the U.S. military mission there to suffer the same humiliating fate. In practice, though, it often seems that Russia cannot decide whether it hopes that America’s current venture in Afghanistan succeeds, collapses or just ends up in a lengthy slog that might be cause for furtive grins in the backrooms of the Kremlin.

These contradictory impulses were underscored this month when the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan announced that a crucial U.S. military base that supplies forces in nearby Afghanistan would be closed – apparently at Moscow’s urging. At the same time, the Russians said they would let nonlethal cargo for the U.S.-led NATO mission be transported across Russia. Russia’s ambivalence stems in large part from its renewed effort to assert a zone of influence, flexing its power across the former Soviet Union and deepening tensions with the United States on a variety of issues. Its unease over supposed Western encroachment spurred its August war with Georgia, which wants NATO membership; now it is coming to bear on Afghanistan. The Frontier Post. Russia wants US military mission not to suffer humiliating fate

The 20th anniversary of the defeat of the USSR in Afghanistan is a poignant reminder to occupation armies that the Hindu Kush mountains are the “graveyard of empires“. The Khyber for 5000 years has witnessed the hordes of invaders come down to the Indus–but the Khyber Pass is a one way street. No invader has been able to go up the Khyber and occupy Pakhtun lands. The Mongols, Alexander, the British, the Russians all discovered it the hard way.NATO war: UK 1880 defeats in Afghanistan.The rising fire of Anti-Americanism has engulfed the land from the Indus to the Amu Darya.

In 2001 the US was considered the liberator and was immensely popular in Afghanistan and even though there was a tiff with Islamabad on the Nuclear bomb, America was still popular in Pakistan. The elites in both countries were definitely pro-American–many educated and trained in the USA. There was tremendous goodwill  left over from the First Afghan war. President Bush had an opportunity to use the weakened USSR to build bridges and spread American influence from Karachi to Kabul and then spread it to Baku, Samarkhand, Bokhara and right up to the Chinese border and beyond.

“are playing Russian roulette with America’s future with their bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric. Muslims may constitute as much as a third of humankind by 2050, forming a vast market and a crucial labor pool. They will be sitting on the lion’s share of the world’s energy resources. The United States will increasingly have to compete with emerging rivals such as China and India for access to those Muslim resources and markets, and if its elites go on denigrating Muslims, America will be at a profound disadvantage during the next century.” Juan Cole

The Kremlin under Vladimir Putin is essentially making clear that because the United States is maneuvering in Russia’s neighborhood, the Kremlin must exert some control – even if it means hampering the ability to supply the Afghanistan mission. “Russia wants to be the only master of the Central Asian domain,” said Andrei Serenko, a founder of the Center for the Study of Contemporary Afghanistan, a Russian research group. “Russia is interested, to the maximum extent possible, in making things difficult for the U.S. – in making the transfer of American forces into Afghanistan be dependent on the will of the Kremlin.”

On its face, Russia has a lot to lose in Afghanistan. It fears the spread of Islamic extremism from Afghanistan into Central Asia and on to southern Russia, where for years it has battled an Islamic insurgency in Chechnya and nearby regions. Confronting a serious heroin problem, Russia also urgently needs the Afghan authorities to curtail poppy production. And of course, given the history, Russia might be expected to empathize with NATO over the mission’s difficulties. Beyond its concerns about U.S. soldiers nearby, the Kremlin also seems reluctant to offer significant help until it knows the Obama administration’s stance toward Russia. Relations soured under President George W. Bush after he called for Ukraine and Georgia to enter NATO and proposed an antimissile system for Eastern Europe. Obama has not yet said whether he would pursue those policies.

“This is a very delicate moment for Russia, because it is trying to understand the plans of the Obama administration,” said Vladimir Sotnikov, a South Asia expert at the Institute for Oriental Studies in Moscow. “In the Russian political elite, there is a struggle between pragmatists and conservatives. Pragmatists are standing for a new chapter in Russian-American relations, but conservatives are thinking in older terms – ‘Look, no major changes are going to take place, so let’s close down the American base.” The Frontier Post. Russia wants US military mission not to suffer humiliating fate

Several tectonic shifts have happened in the land of the Pamirs in the past few weeks. The reverberations from these earthquakes will be felt all the way to Washington and beyond. Facing the Khyber poltergeist & Ganges hobgoblin. The election campaign in Afghanistan has already started. Installing an Anti-Pakistan government in Kabul. Unable to venture beyond the confinement of his own capital, the mercurial Mr. Karzai was seen campaigning in Moscow and Delhi. The last days of the last “emperor”. The “Mayor of Kabul” is being replaced.  Mr. Hobrooke rebuffed Mr. Karzai by not meeting him for three days. The snub was very evident by the itinerary of the American envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan (”K” for Kashmir is silent in his portfolio). Mr. Holbrooke like President-Elect Biden (a few weeks ago) mentioned the inefficiency of the government in front of the frustrated host. The Grand Bargains for Kabul

India’s worst nightmares come true: Long term strategic malaise in a changing world 

The Russian position on Afghanistan would appear to loom increasingly large as President Barack Obama presses his plan to quell the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and seek out leaders of Al Qaeda along the largely ungoverned Pakistani border. Last week, he announced that he would send an additional 17,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Meanwhile, access to supply those troops through Pakistan has become more tenuous. So, even as administration officials have called for a new era of relations with Russia – what Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. described recently as pressing “the reset button” – they have also begun expressing irritation over Afghanistan. “The Russians are trying to have it both ways with respect to Afghanistan, in terms of Manas,” Robert Gates, the defense secretary, said last week, referring to the base in Kyrgyzstan. “And the question is, on one hand, you’re making positive noises about working with us in Afghanistan, and on the other hand you’re working against us in terms of that airfield, which is clearly important to us. So how do we go forward in that light?”

Gates said he hoped that the United States could reach a new agreement with Kyrgyzstan to keep the base open. His statement suggested that the administration believed that to improve the situation in Central Asia, it probably would have to go through Moscow. Igor Barinov, a Parliament member from Putin’s party who is a prominent voice on defense matters, said the Kremlin realized that it shared many goals with Washington in Afghanistan. He said he would favor eventually even allowing military hardware to be transported across Russia to Afghanistan. (Like other senior Russian officials, he said there was no chance of the Kremlin sending troops to Afghanistan, for obvious reasons.). The Frontier Post. Russia wants US military mission not to suffer humiliating fate

Vietnam, half a world away, seemed alien to many Americans and to Westerners generally. Afghanistan might as well be the moon. At least Vietnam had been a French colony, albeit a troubled one. Afghanistan resisted colonization, dispatching 19th-century British and 20th-century Russian soldiers with equal efficiency. “Afghanistan is not a nation, it is a collection of tribes,” according to a Saudi diplomat who did not wish to publicly disparage a Muslim neighbor. In Vietnam, the Ngo Dinh Diem government was seen as illegitimate because Diem was a Roman Catholic in a mostly Buddhist country and because it was propped up by the United States. In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai’s government was essentially created by the United States after local warlords, backed by American airpower, ousted the Taliban in 2001. (Karzai was elected in his own right in 2004, but at a time when he was clearly favored by America and faced no serious rivals.)

As in Diem’s Vietnam, government corruption is epic; even Karzai says so. “The banks of the world are full of the money of our statesmen,” he said last November. His former finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, rates his old government as “one of the five most corrupt in the world” and warns that Afghanistan is becoming a “failed, narco-mafia state.” In a country where seven out of 10 citizens live on about a dollar a day, the average family each year must pay about $100 in baksheesh, or bribes (in Vietnam, this was known as “tea” or “coffee” money). Foreign aid is, after narcotics, the readiest source of income in Afghanistan. But it has been widely estimated that because of stealing and mismanagement in Kabul, the capital, less than half of the money actually finds its way into projects, and only a quarter of that makes it to the countryside, where 70 percent of the people live. Newsweek, With Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai

Along with Joe Biden Bruce Riedel is one of the major foreign policy advisor to President Barack Obama. His understanding of Pakistan is based on Necon think tanks and Neolib polemical writings–some of which  are Pakistanphobic. It is up to President Barack Obama to distinguish the bull from the bluster. It is pedalogical ro analyze the writings of Mr. Reidel. Judging from the reaction of the Indian mainstream media , Mr. Reidel has ruffled a lot of tri color feathers. In many ways he makes a lot of sense. 

• Obama advisor Weinbaum predicts total Afghan policy review: Sees focus on talks & Reconciliation
• Afghanistan: Gen. Petraeus’ Pakistani advisors: Indians jittery
• Barack Obama is not a stranger to Pakistan
• Clinton: India chagrined at Obama’s Kashmir envoy proposal & U-turn in Afghan policy
• Peek into Obama’s brains: Bruce Reidel on Pakistan

Kabul: The Final assault begins. How long can NATO hang on? Does Obama have the courage to implement the real solutions to Obama’s Vietnam (AfPak)

2009: Obama’s South Asian policy: A Marshall Plan for AfPak

Selective Amnesia of Americans: Pakistan is the most mistreated friend in the world

Fixing AfPak expedites the inevitable union between Pakistan and Afghanistan

The Algeriafication of Pakistan, the Egyptianization of Bangladesh may will yield Iranian type of revolutions

Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived. ~Abraham Lincoln In 1821 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