RUPEE NEWS: Recording History, Narrating Archives, Strategic Intellibrief Analysis: Noticias de Rupia | Nouvelles de Roupie | Rupiennachrichten | новости рупии | 卢比新闻 | Rupi Nyheter | ルピーニュース | اخبار روپیہ

Noticias de Rupia | Nouvelles de Roupie | Rupiennachrichten | новости рупии | 卢比新闻 | Roepienieuws | Rupi Nyheter | ルピーニュース | Notizie di Rupia | PAKISTAN LEDGER | پاکستاني کھاتا | RUPEE NEWS | March2nd, 2009 | Moin Ansari | معین آنصآرّی | اخبار روپیہ |

Americans are good people, as neighbors, as employers and as friends. However as a nation we are gullible, unaware of world affairs and how others manipulate our good intentions. We want to believe in justice and fair play, but are ignorant of the injustices perpetuated in the name of national interests. Whatever happened to humanity, kindness, and love for fellow man? Whatever happened to the global village? Today the press has given up its role as the 4th pillar of the state. Gone are the days when the major papers in America challenge the painting and shatter the paradigms. Dennis Kucinich made the statement that today’s American media is worse than Izvestia and Pravada which used to present only on side of the picture in the totalitarian USSR.  Ron Jacobs has written a prodigiously effulgent piece criticizing the hypocrisy, shallowness ruthlessness and inhumanity of the Rand Papers.

All other arguments fall on deaf ears.

The review documents are simply repackaged demagoguery justifying the Banality of Occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan: The Think Tank Papers attempt to complete the circle of complicity between a sycophantic press, and a non-inquisitive servile public which has been forced to accept the the only argument that is being repeatedly propagated by a cabal of right wing ideologues. Unable to see the other options the nation is forced to accept the ruthless occupation as necessary and the only way forward. Python swallows alligator and explodes: Lessons from the Peloponnesian War.

The President is once again violating international law by invading yet another nation which has not attacked the United States. Once again, he places our troops and our reputation at risk. Once again, he creates more enemies for America. Pakistan’s objections to the illegal US Predator strikes inside the country’s border should be a clear indication of how Pakistan would respond to another illegal attack upon their sovereign nation.

“Pakistan is a nuclear flash point on the Asian subcontinent. This situation requires intense diplomacy. The United States under George Bush is playing with fire, creating more instability, killing innocent Pakistanis, imperiling our troops in the region and weakening the hold our allies have on their democratic governments. Instead of limiting aggression, Bush expands it.

Congress must intervene legislatively and legally to block Bush from continuing down this dangerous path.US Congressman Dennis Kucinich. Sept 13th, 2008

So far 546,000 have registered as internally displaced people (IDPs) according to figures provided by Rabia Ali, spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and Maqbool Shah Roghani, administrator for IDPs at the Commission for Afghan Refugees. The commissioner’s office says there are thousands more unregistered people who have taken refuge with relatives and friends or who are in rented accommodation. Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan, Hard Rain Keeps Falling By CHRIS FLOYD

The  liberals are quiet about the suffering of more than half a million people who are suffering. They are always concerned about the Mukhtaran Mai and Chand Bibi. They seem unconcerned about the 250,000 women who have suffering becuase of the US drone bombing.

• The end of an era: The shrinking superpower& the emerging Quad led by China
• It is a document that hides the nature of the US operations in those countries behind an emasculated technospeak, rendering the true nature of the killing and destruction done in the name of the people of the US and the west
• …, the task is to kill those who don’t want you there and convince the others that they are either better off with the occupier
• deciding factor in favor of the US occupying forces is their ability to kill with overwhelming force. Naturally, the indigenous population is aware of this–a fact which causes many to go along with the occupier merely as a means to survive
• report is essentially an analyst’s blueprint for perfecting the occupation of a country with the idea that the eventual result will be domination of the locals’ minds, culture and economy, with the domination of the geography of secondary consideration or of no consideration at all.
• the RAND study ignores the human and creative face of resistance by reducing ever element to a quantitative possibility with only so many possible outcomes.
• The numbers it quotes and the classifications it makes hide the true intent and outcome of the imperial military’s actions much like the statistical sheets maintained by men like Adolf Eichmann hid the true nature of the crimes against humanity perpetrated in the removal of Jewish Germans from the fatherland
• It is repeated in the newspeak of government officials and the sycophantic media that reports their words without challenging their consequences
• The circle of complicity is completed when the public accepts the arguments made by those officials and media as being the only argument that exists.
• Imperial blindness: Another Empire stuck in Af-Pak quagmire unable to extricate itself out of Kipling’s hell.

Given the state of people’s retirement accounts and job prospects, where will the public be regarding Afghanistan a year from now? I’d guess that the Administration has no more than a year to show striking progress in Afghanistan before the public starts to growl like it did at the Bush Administration in the 2006 mid-term elections.

But Afghanistan is only the most obvious potential casualty of the recession. Also at stake are the expensive weapons programs and air and sea platforms that allow the United States to sustain its position as a global military hegemon. Regardless of what happens on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. dominates the air and the main sea lines of communication (SLOCs). Ultimately, it is this fact that makes this country the preeminent global power that it is, and gives our diplomacy the heft it requires to sit at the front of the table at critical gatherings around the world. Yet maintaining that position doesn’t just cost money, it costs lots and lots of money-billions, not millions.

The fact that the public has docilely accepted this arrangement for so long does not mean that it will continue to do so. Despite the many new billions that President Obama’s budget allocates for jump-starting the economy, he intends to substantially cut the Pentagon’s money-line. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has warned that the financial “spigot that opened on 9/11…is closing.” Gates might more accurately have said it is the financial spigot that opened following Pearl Harbor that’s closing. For the only interruption to the succession of high budgets the Pentagon has enjoyed since Pearl Harbor occurred during the 1990s, when America felt itself at peace, with no overbearing security threats. That decade saw the Navy lose almost half of its ships. The 1990s may provide only a taste of what is to come as the recession deepens and elongates, leading to tectonic changes in the public mood.

Conservatives are already protesting the short shrift President Obama seems to be giving the Pentagon, but they are crying into the wind. The President’s approval rating is exceedingly high. The lesson seems to be that the President and the Democrats can do what they want with Pentagon budgets, and, if the economy doesn’t pull out of its tailspin relatively soon, they will. Atlantic Monthly. Why the recession could spell the end of American dominance. The Shrinking Superpower by Robert D. Kaplan

Today the Anti-War movement is as sickly as an AIDS patient in the last throes of his death sentence. It is numb with inactivity and marginalized by the six media empires that simply overwhelm the senses with Orwellian doublespeak. The left has chosen the wrong war over the bad war. In justifying its existence and in order to avoid being labeled as weak, the Democrats have simply tried to rationalize the Afghan war as “the good war”– even though deep inside every Democrat knows that there were and still are  several options available in Kabul. There are other ways of nabbing the evil does other than using daisycutters on the population in the Hindukush.

The media cannot and will not speak. The silence is deafening!

Recently, the online site known as Wikileaks (which frequently publishes documents from government and corporate think tanks not meant to be seen by the general public) released a Rand Corporation report on Iraq and Afghanistan counterinsurgency operations titled Intelligence Operations and Metrics in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although unclassified, the document is marked “For Official Use Only” and was distributed to various high officials in the United States and other “Coalition” governments. In one respect, it can be argued that this paper, along with a series of three or four other Rand reports, could be considered in the same vein as the Pentagon Papers on their release in 1971. A more accurate appraisal, however, would characterize this 318 page report as a summation of what the US military and intelligence agencies could have done more effectively.

This report is essentially an analyst’s blueprint for perfecting the occupation of a country with the idea that the eventual result will be domination of the locals’ minds, culture and economy, with the domination of the geography of secondary consideration or of no consideration at all. Like the television show Numbers that features a mathematician who works with the FBI by providing mathematical thinking to human endeavors like serial killing, drug smuggling, etc., the RAND study ignores the human and creative face of resistance by reducing ever element to a quantitative possibility with only so many possible outcomes. The numbers it quotes and the classifications it makes hide the true intent and outcome of the imperial military’s actions much like the statistical sheets maintained by men like Adolf Eichmann hid the true nature of the crimes against humanity perpetrated in the removal of Jewish Germans from the fatherland. The report draws from counterinsurgency experiences in Vietnam,Northern Ireland, Malaya, and of course, Iraq and Afghanistan.The Rand Papers on Iraq and Afghanistan The Banality of Occupation, By RON JACOBS. Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs’ essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch’s collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at:rjacobs3625@charter.net

The Rand Papers are 300 paged propaganda gimmick disseminated to justify war, destruction, mayhem and aggression. The defeat of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan has come at great cost to the citizens of those countries. Baghdad is resilient and recovered from the devastation of invasion of Mongols under Halaku Khan who obliterated the capital city. This invasion has been worse, because it uses modern means of exterminating enemies. In Iraq more than one million have been killed and 3.5 million left the country and life as refugees in Syria and elsewhere. In Afghanistan the carpet bombing sent the country to the Neanderthal days of Chengiz Khan and the other Mongols who had tried to occupy it earlier.

The Rand report and other “reviews” simply regurgitate the ideas which have gotten us into so much trouble.

The contradiction rampant throughout the report can be best phrased in the words of US Army Major Justin Featherstone who told the report’s writers after his extensive work with the urban population in southeastern Iraq: “Humanity is what it’s about, a genuine desire to do good by the good people, which can sit side-by-side with killing the people [whom you’re there to kill].” In other words, the task is to kill those who don’t want you there and convince the others that they are either better off with the occupier or at least not as bad off as they would be without them. Despite the constant warnings throughout the report’s recommendations to avoid killing noncombatants (without every providing a single definition of who composes this element), the report ultimately returns to this statement:

War, however, is the realm of destruction. Here will be instances in which these men and women will have to put innocents and their property at risk. In such cases, there may be no good outcome, no alternative that promises to benefit all desired ends, but rather one only less undesirable than its alternatives. A pilot might select the alternative of engaging only a few rooms instead of destroying an entire building, with the appropriate airframe and munitions being called on for the task. In lieu of devastating a town, a ground-force commander could find that a limited number of enemy concentrations provide the opportunity to wreak destruction over only a few blocks.

In other words, the occupier’s job remains one that depends on its overwhelming force. Even if the suggestions and lessons learned that are described in this report were to be put into place, the deciding factor in favor of the US occupying forces is their ability to kill with overwhelming force. Naturally, the indigenous population is aware of this–a fact which causes many to go along with the occupier merely as a means to survive. This is not a report about operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and their often bloody results so much as it is a review of the perceived success or failure of those operations. The primary intent of the report is to repeat already familiar lessons about how to construct and maintain an occupation of a country that minimizes the occupiers casualties, maintains domination via fear, cajolery, and manipulation of the personal and tribal relationships of the occupied while simultaneously convincing at least a sizable minority of the population of the occupying nation that their military (in league with the occupier) is working in their interest.

Written in what can best be described as something akin to a technical writing assignment, the report echoes the recent statements from US generals in the Iraq/Afghan theaters and is reflected in the recent decision by Barack Obama to reduce the numbers of US troops in Iraq to 50,000 over the next 16 months and escalate the battle to subdue Afghanistan. If there is one thing that this document makes clear, it is that the Pentagon and its civilian enablers have no intention of leaving Iraq or Afghanistan on their own. Furthermore, it is their intention to take the lessons they believe they have learned in those two countries and apply them to Pakistan and wherever else their manifest destiny compels them to subdue.

This is not the Pentagon Papers of the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations/wars. It is a document that hides the nature of the US operations in those countries behind an emasculated technospeak, rendering the true nature of the killing and destruction done in the name of the people of the US and the west. The contemporary version of the policy discussions that were revealed in the Pentagon Papers about the US operation in Vietnam are not here. Nor are the cables and directives that sent men off to kill and die. Those documents have yet to be uncovered. The usefulness of this report is in its look into the mindset of a modern imperial machine: a machine that never questions its mission or the human misery it causes but keeps its mind trained only on how to carry out that mission as efficiently as possible. The banality of the evil of modern warfare is contained in every neutered sentence of this document and the thousands of others like them. It is repeated in the newspeak of government officials and the sycophantic media that reports their words without challenging their consequences. The circle of complicity is completed when the public accepts the arguments made by those officials and media as being the only argument that exists. The Rand Papers on Iraq and Afghanistan The Banality of Occupation, By RON JACOBS. Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs’ essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch’s collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at:rjacobs3625@charter.net

The Orwellian empire of the media is slick in deflecting the issues. There aren’t enough hours in the day to shed light on the mendacity of the Murdock Empire that colludes with the other six media groups to propagate lies, half-truths and doublespeak. Instead of covering the colossal human suffering of the Iraqi people with visual images, the media discusses the schisms between the Shia and the Sunni as if that is the problem.

The Rupert Murdock organization thinks it has won the battle and the war. Actually its meager success has destroyed our prestige around the world and bankrupted our society. We are not talking about the financial meltdown. We can will will eventually recover from the depression–it is the moral bankruptcy that has to be fought in the nooks and crannies where intellectual capital hides.

Fixing Afpak: Inability to define exit strategy spells inevitable US military catastrophy in Kabul

The emerging “Leave Afghanistan to Pakistan” strategy goes mainstream. Extricating the US from the Lost war in the Khyber  

AfPak: Solutions beyond hubris, dictation, threats, sanctions, bombings, overt invasion, covert sabotage Hindu Kush cul de sac: Why are we in Afghanistan?

 Afpak backstage: Bombing the ephemeral “Hindu Kush Hoci Minh trail” nurtures the Khemer Rouge of the Khyber– The Taliban 80% of Afghanistan is under insurgent control. Taliban sanctuaries around Kabul thumb thier noses at ISAF, NATO & US forces. Why would Taliban need safe havens far away in Pakistan?