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  • Preaching to the choir, brother-man!

    This thing needs to play out in accord with the rules of nature and decidedly NOT via the U.S. Dept. of State.
    "This aggression will not stand, man!" Jeff Lebowski
    "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool." Lester Bangs

    Comment


    • With Bags of Cash, C.I.A. Seeks Influence in Afghanistan: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/wo...pagewanted=all

      "Mr. Salehi, though, is better known for being arrested in 2010 in connection with a sprawling, American-led investigation that tied together Afghan cash smuggling, Taliban finances and the opium trade. Mr. Karzai had him released within hours, and the C.I.A. then helped persuade the Obama administration to back off its anticorruption push, American officials said.

      After his release, Mr. Salehi jokingly came up with a motto that succinctly summed up America’s conflicting priorities. He was, he began telling colleagues, “an enemy of the F.B.I., and a hero to the C.I.A.”"

      Comment


      • U.S. Considers Faster Pullout in Afghanistan: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/wo...ref=world&_r=0

        "Increasingly frustrated by his dealings with President Hamid Karzai, President Obama is giving serious consideration to speeding up the withdrawal of United States forces from Afghanistan and to a “zero option” that would leave no American troops there after next year, according to American and European officials."

        Comment


        • Originally posted by 1980s View Post
          U.S. Considers Faster Pullout in Afghanistan: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/wo...ref=world&_r=0

          "Increasingly frustrated by his dealings with President Hamid Karzai, President Obama is giving serious consideration to speeding up the withdrawal of United States forces from Afghanistan and to a “zero option” that would leave no American troops there after next year, according to American and European officials."

          Please, just leave them a reminder that the next Americans they see will have funny names like Fat Man and Little Boy...

          Comment


          • I wouldn't put bets on that.

            However, I am sure they can meet few with Indian tools. Like Tomahawk.
            No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

            To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

            Comment


            • Abandon Afghanistan? A dumb idea

              Good points.

              Abandon Afghanistan? A dumb idea
              By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

              (CNN) -- President Barack Obama is seriously contemplating withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan sometime in 2014, a senior administration official told CNN's Jessica Yellin.

              The Obama administration had been considering leaving a force of at least several thousand soldiers to act as trainers and to hunt leaders of the Taliban and other militant groups after the long-scheduled withdrawal of all combat troops in December 2014.

              But Obama has grown increasingly frustrated in his dealings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who last month cut off negotiations about the size of the post-2014 American military force. Karzai objected to the United States beginning formal direct discussions with the Taliban about peace; he regarded this move as happening behind his
              Let's stipulate that Karzai can be a frustrating leader to deal with and that he can even be quite mercurial on occasions. That said, the Obama administration shouldn't be making important strategic decisions merely on the basis of whether or not its leaders like dealing with another country's leader.

              Further, Karzai will be gone in April 2014, when the next Afghan presidential election will take place; in only nine months, the Obama administration won't have to deal with him at all.

              In any case, zeroing out U.S. troop levels in the post-2014 Afghanistan is a bad idea on its face -- and even raising this concept publicly is maladroit strategic messaging to Afghanistan and the region writ large.

              Why so? Afghans well remember something that most Americans have forgotten.

              After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, something that was accomplished at the cost of more than a million Afghan lives and billions of dollars of U.S. aid, the United States closed its embassy in Afghanistan in 1989 during the George H.W. Bush administration and then zeroed out aid to one of the poorest countries in the world under the Clinton administration. It essentially turned its back on Afghans once they had served their purpose of dealing a deathblow to the Soviets.

              As a result, the United States had virtually no understanding of the subsequent vacuum in Afghanistan into which eventually stepped the Taliban, who rose to power in the mid-1990s. The Taliban granted shelter to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization from 1996 onward.

              After the overthrow of the Taliban, a form of this mistake was made again by the George W. Bush administration, which had an ideological disdain for nation building and was distracted by the Iraq War, so that in the first years after the fall of the Taliban, only a few thousand U.S. soldiers were stationed in Afghanistan.

              The relatively small number of American boots on the ground in Afghanistan helped to create a vacuum of security in the country, which the Taliban would deftly exploit, so that by 2007, they once again posed a significant military threat in Afghanistan.

              In 2009, Obama ordered a surge of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan to blunt the Taliban's gathering momentum, which it has certainly accomplished.

              But when Obama announced the new troops of the Afghan surge, most media accounts of the speech seized on the fact that the president also said that some of those troops would be coming home in July 2011.

              This had the unintended effect of signaling to the Taliban that the U.S. was pulling out of Afghanistan reasonably soon and fit into the longstanding narrative that many Afghans have that the United States will abandon them again.

              Similarly, the current public discussion of zero U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan after 2014 will encourage those hardliner elements of the Taliban who have no interest in a negotiated settlement and believe they can simply wait the Americans out.

              It also discourages the many millions of Afghans who see a longtime U.S. presence as the best guarantor that the Taliban won't come back in any meaningful way and also an important element in dissuading powerful neighbors such as Pakistan from interference in Afghanistan's internal affairs.

              Instead of publicly discussing the zero option on troops in Afghanistan after 2014, a much smarter American messaging strategy for the country and the region would be to emphasize that the Strategic Partnership Agreement that the United States has already negotiated with Afghanistan last year guarantees that the United States will have some form of partnership with the Afghans until 2024.

              In this messaging strategy, the point should be made that the exact size of the American troop presence after 2014 is less important than the fact that U.S. soldiers will stay in the country for many years, with Afghan consent, as a guarantor of Afghanistan's stability.

              The United States continues to station thousands of troops in South Korea more than five decades after the end of the Korean War. Under this American security umbrella, South Korea has gone from being one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest.

              It is this kind of model that most Afghans want and the United States needs to provide so Afghanistan doesn't revert to the kind of chaos that beset it in the mid-1990s and from which the Taliban first emerged.
              Opinion: Abandon Afghanistan? A dumb idea - CNN.com
              To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

              Comment


              • Originally posted by Doktor View Post
                I wouldn't put bets on that.

                However, I am sure they can meet few with Indian tools. Like Tomahawk.
                As chicken livered as our politicians might be, if they had a pair and told all the powers and players in Pakistan that any further global terror attacks would be met with a 1000-1 reprisal system the attacks would stop.

                Comment


                • Looks like GOI is assisting the ANA stand on its feet after all...the report gives us some idea of things that have not been highlighted before.


                  US exit: India steps up Afghan army training - Times Of India
                  US exit: India steps up Afghan army training

                  NEW DELHI: India is stepping up training of Afghan National Army (ANA) in a major way, even as it also considers supply of military equipment to the fledgling force, in the backdrop of the US-led coalition preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014.

                  Defence ministry sources say "a major Indian effort has been launched for capability enhancement of the ANA" to ensure it can handle the internal security of Afghanistan after the progressive exit of the 100,000 foreign soldiers from there by end-2014......

                  Cheers!...on the rocks!!

                  Comment


                  • Originally posted by lemontree View Post
                    Looks like GOI is assisting the ANA stand on its feet after all...the report gives us some idea of things that have not been highlighted before.


                    US exit: India steps up Afghan army training - Times Of India
                    Around 1000 soldiers by 2013, sounds a tad small scale to me. would it not be better to try and establish some training school over there and staff with training officers?
                    "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" ~ Epicurus

                    Comment


                    • Originally posted by antimony View Post
                      Around 1000 soldiers by 2013, sounds a tad small scale to me. would it not be better to try and establish some training school over there and staff with training officers?
                      I believe that's a 1000 ANA officers they've opened up slots for in IMA, NDA, OTA, etc.. Problem with establishing training schools in Afghanistan is that you cannot take back and instill the same military culture which you would find in Indian academies. Training the Afghans in India, among the IA officers, means they take back that culture and some way down the future, will be able to inject the same into ANA academies.
                      Cow is the only animal that not only inhales oxygen, but also exhales it.
                      -Rekha Arya, Former Minister of Animal Husbandry

                      Comment


                      • Originally posted by antimony View Post
                        Around 1000 soldiers by 2013, sounds a tad small scale to me. would it not be better to try and establish some training school over there and staff with training officers?
                        It may appear small, but this number would be mainly officers being trained in the academies as mentioned by Tronic. The report specifies that Afghans (would be mainly officers & NCOs are attending courses in Indian schools for Arty, Mech and Inf. The courses imparted train the student to be (a) proficient in the trade he is learning (b) to be good enough to be an instructor in a similar institute (c) to be good enough to impart training at unit level. So what ever is being taught here will be taught by these Afghan students in their respective units.

                        The baisc training is being done in Afghanistan in a big way by the NATO forces. Each participant country is handling training for different trades. It is a massive and and focused effort. Today the ANA is handling most terror incidents on their own without any NATO backup.

                        Cheers!...on the rocks!!

                        Comment


                        • Originally posted by lemontree View Post
                          It may appear small, but this number would be mainly officers being trained in the academies as mentioned by Tronic. The report specifies that Afghans (would be mainly officers & NCOs are attending courses in Indian schools for Arty, Mech and Inf. The courses imparted train the student to be (a) proficient in the trade he is learning (b) to be good enough to be an instructor in a similar institute (c) to be good enough to impart training at unit level. So what ever is being taught here will be taught by these Afghan students in their respective units.

                          The baisc training is being done in Afghanistan in a big way by the NATO forces. Each participant country is handling training for different trades. It is a massive and and focused effort. Today the ANA is handling most terror incidents on their own without any NATO backup.
                          So basically what we call in the industry the "Train the trainer" model then? Ok, now makes more sense. Hopefully it would work out
                          "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" ~ Epicurus

                          Comment


                          • Originally posted by antimony View Post
                            So basically what we call in the industry the "Train the trainer" model then? Ok, now makes more sense. Hopefully it would work out
                            It works very well, infact this is the system that is roughly followed in most commonwealth armies.

                            Cheers!...on the rocks!!

                            Comment


                            • Quite a few good points

                              Oct 4, '13
                              Afghanistan down the memory hole
                              By Ann Jones

                              Will the United States still be meddling in Afghanistan 30 years from now? If history is any guide, the answer is yes. And if history is any guide, three decades from now most Americans will have only the haziest idea why.

                              Since the 1950s, the US has been trying to mold that remote land to its own desires, first through an aid "war" in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union; then, starting as the 1970s ended, an increasingly bitter and brutally hot proxy war with the Soviets, intended to pay them back for supporting America's enemies during the war in Vietnam. One bad war leads to another.

                              From then until the early 1990s, Washington put weapons in the hands of Islamic fundamentalist extremists of all sorts - thought to be natural, devoutly religious allies in the war against "godless communism" - gloated over the Red Army's defeat and the surprising implosion of the Soviet empire, and then experienced its own catastrophic blowback from Afghanistan on September 11, 2001. After 50 years of scheming behind the scenes, the US put boots on the ground in 2001 and now, 12 years later, is still fighting there - against some Afghans on behalf of other Afghans while training Afghan troops to take over and fight their countrymen, and others, on their own.

                              Through it all, the US has always claimed to have the best interests of Afghans at heart - waving at various opportune moments the bright flags of modernization, democracy, education, or the rights of women. Yet today, how many Afghans would choose to roll back the clock to 1950, before the Americans ever dropped in? After 12 years of direct combat, after 35 years of arming and funding one faction or another, after 60 years of trying to remake Afghanistan to serve American aims, what has it all meant? If we ever knew, we've forgotten. Weary of official reports of progress, Americans tuned out long ago.

                              Back in 1991, as Steve Coll reports in Ghost Wars, an unnamed CIA agent mentioned the war in Afghanistan to President George H W Bush. Not long before, he had okayed the shipment of Iraqi weaponry captured in the first Gulf War - worth US$30 million - to multiple factions of Islamist extremists then battling each other and probably using those secondhand Iraqi arms to destroy Afghanistan's capital, Kabul. Still, Bush seemed puzzled by the CIA man's question about the war. He reportedly asked, "Is that thing still going on?"

                              Such forgetfulness about wars has, it seems, become an all-American skill. Certainly, the country has had little trouble forgetting the war in Iraq, and why should Afghanistan be any different?

                              Sure, the exit from that country is going to take more time and effort. No seacoast, no ships, bad roads, high tolls, improvized explosive devices (IEDs). Trucking stuff out is problematic; flying it out, wildly expensive, especially since a lot of the things are really, really big. Take MRAPs, for example - that's Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles - 11,000 of them, weighing 14 tons or more apiece. For that workhorse transport plane, the C-17, a full load of MRAPs numbers only four.

                              The equipment inventory keeps changing, but estimates run to 100,000 shipping containers and about 50,000 vehicles to be removed by the end of 2014, adding up to more than $36 billion worth of equipment now classified as "retrograde". The estimated shipping bill has quickly risen to $6 billion, and like the overall cost of the war, it is sure to keep rising.

                              Seven billion dollars worth of equipment - about 20% of what the US sent in to that distant land - is simply being torn up, chopped down, split, shredded, stomped, and, when possible, sold off for scrap at pennies a pound. Toughest to break up are the weighty MRAPs. Introduced in 2007 at a cost of $1 million apiece to counteract deadly roadside bombs, they were later discovered to be no better at protecting American soldiers than the cheaper vehicles they replaced. Of the 11,000 shipped to Afghanistan, 2,000 are on the chopping block, leaving a mere 9,000 to be flown to Kuwait, four at a time, and shipped home or "repositioned" elsewhere to await some future enemy.

                              The military is not exaggerating when it calls this colossal destruction of surplus equipment historic. A disposal effort on this scale is unprecedented in the annals of the Pentagon. The centerpiece of this demolition derby may be the brand-new, 64,000-square-foot (5,946-square-meter), $34-million, state-of-the art command center completed in Helmand Province just as most US troops left, and now likely to be demolished. Or the new $45 million facility in Kandahar built as a repair center for armored vehicles, now used for their demolition, and probably destined to follow them.

                              Taxpayers may one day want to ask some questions about such profligate and historic waste, but it's sure to keep arms manufacturers happy, resupplying the military until we can get ourselves into another full-scale war.

                              So this exit is a really big job, and that's without even mentioning the paperwork. All those exit plans, all the documents to be filed with the Afghan government for permission to export our own equipment, all the fines assessed for missing customs forms (already running to $70 million), all the export fees to be paid, and the bribes to be offered, and the protection money to be slipped to the Taliban so our enemies won't shoot at the stuff being trucked out. All that takes time.

                              But when it comes right down to it, the United States has a surefire way of ending a war, no matter when it actually ends (or doesn't). When we say it's over, it's over.

                              Enduring operation, enduring freedom

                              As it happens, things probably won't be quite so decisively "over" for everybody. Look at Iraq, for example. The last American troops drove out of Iraq in December 2011, leaving behind a staff of at least 16,000, including 5,000 private security contractors, assigned to the vast $750 million fortress of a US Embassy in Baghdad.

                              That war has now been over for almost two years, the embassy staff is being trimmed, and yet, the drumbeat of news about car bombs, suicide bombers, and the latest rounds of sectarian cleansing has not slackened. Nearly 6,000 Iraqis have been killed so far this year, 1,000 in July alone, making it the deadliest month in Iraq since 2008. Even Iraqis who lived through the war in their own homes are now fleeing, like millions of Iraqis before them - many the victims of sectarian cleansing practiced during the American-led "surge" of 2007 and now polished to a fine art. From the foreign diplomatic corps in Baghdad come informal messages that include the words "worse than ever".

                              In Afghanistan, too, as the end of a longer war supposedly draws near, the rate at which civilians are being killed has actually picked up, and the numbers of women and children among the civilian dead have risen dramatically. This week, as the Nation magazine devotes a special issue to a comprehensive study of the civilian death toll in Afghanistan - the painstaking work of Bob Dreyfuss and Nick Turse - the pace of civilian death seems only to be gaining momentum as if in some morbid race to the finish.

                              Like Iraqis, Afghans, too, are in flight - fearing the unknown end game to come. The number of Afghans filing applications for asylum in other countries, rising sharply since 2010, reached 30,000 in 2012. Undocumented thousands flee the country illegally in all sorts of dangerous ways. Their desperate journeys by land and sea spark controversy in countries they're aiming for. It was Afghan boat people who roused the anti-immigrant rhetoric of candidates in the recent Australian elections, revealing a dark side of the national character even as Afghans and others drowned off their shores. War reverberates, even where you least expect it.

                              Afghans who remain at home are on edge. Their immediate focus: the presidential election scheduled for April 5, 2014. It's already common knowledge that the number of existing voter cards far exceeds the number of eligible voters, and millions more are being issued to new registrants, making it likely that this presidential contest will be as fraudulent as the last, in 2009, when voter cards were sold by the handful.

                              With President Hamid Karzai constitutionally barred from a third term, the presidential race is either wide open, or - as many believe - already a done deal. In August, Afghan news services reported that Karzai had chaired a meeting with a few of the country's most powerful warlords to call for the candidacy of Abdul Rab Rasoul Sayyaf, intimidator of women in parliament, longtime pal of Osama bin Laden, mentor of al-Qaeda's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, likely collaborator in the assassination two days before 9/11 of the Taliban's greatest opponent, Ahmad Shah Massoud - in short the quintessential untouchable jihadi.

                              There's an irony so ludicrous as to be terrible in the thought that, while the US supposedly fought this interminable war to ensure that al-Qaeda would never again find a haven in Afghanistan, the country's next president could be the very guy who invited bin Laden to Afghanistan in the first place and became his partner in building al-Qaeda training camps.

                              Even Karzai, who likes to poke his finger in American eyes, quickly backed away from that insult. Within hours of the news reports, he announced that he would remain "neutral". Americans scarcely seemed to notice, but Afghans noted what Karzai had done in the first place. Now, as Sayyaf and other potential candidates do backroom deals, jockeying for position, Afghans wait anxiously to learn which ones will actually register to run before the October 6 deadline.

                              The names bandied about are those of the usual suspects: familiar militia commanders from times past, former jihadis, and political hacks. At this writing, a coalition of some of the most powerful are said to be aligning behind former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, who came in second to Karzai's overstuffed ballot boxes in 2009 and declined to take part in a runoff likely to be just as fixed by fraud.

                              One Afghan politico, surveying a recent gathering of likely candidates, expressed to the Washington Post an opinion widely held by Afghans: "These are the people who destroyed our country. They should all be thrown down a well."

                              Beleaguered Afghans have lived through all of this with all of them before. Sometimes it ends in a crooked election. Sometimes in a coup. Once in recent memory, in a civil war that could go into reruns.

                              Meanwhile, Karzai has also been tampering with the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), a government body headed by Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr Sima Samar and the most respected public body in the country precisely because it has maintained its independence from government politics.

                              In December 2011, Karzai blocked the AIHRC's non-partisan work by allowing the terms of three of its most effective members to expire. Another respected member had been killed earlier in 2011, together with her husband and four children, by a Taliban suicide-bomber reportedly aiming for officials of Xe (formerly Blackwater, now Academi) in a Kabul supermarket. The members Karzai cut loose included Ahmad Nader Nadery, an assiduous researcher of war crimes, largely responsible for a "Mapping Project", never officially released, that reportedly names prominent warlords and members of Karzai's government.

                              After stalling for 18 months, last July Karzai stacked the AIHRC staff with five political cronies unqualified in human rights. They include an army general, a member of an Islamist fundamentalist political party, and a mullah who served in the Taliban government, spent three years in the US military prison at Bagram (without being charged), considers Shariah law the best source of human rights legislation, and opposes laws currently on the books that aim to protect women from violence.

                              In September, Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, made a rare personal visit to Kabul to urge Karzai to reconsider his appointments before the AIHRC lost its international "A" rating and donor nations were forced to rethink their aid to a repressive government. She left with no assurances, repeating her concern that "improvement in human rights" had not merely "peaked" in Afghanistan but was "in reality waning".

                              Down and out in Afghanistan

                              Now that the end of the international occupation approaches, the story of its success is undergoing a peculiar revision. The stunning advances Washington claimed in Afghanistan seem somehow much smaller and so much less impressive. Education, health care, and human rights, just like the fabled MRAP, have not lived up to their publicity.

                              For example, Western leaders have taken particular pride in supposed advances in Afghan education since the defeat of the Taliban in 2001, in schools built and students enrolled by the millions. (The US Agency for International Development alone spent $934 million on Afghan education in the last 12 years.) But UNICEF reports that almost half the "schools" supposedly built or opened have no actual buildings, and in those that do, students double up on seats and share antiquated texts.

                              Teachers are scarce and fewer than a quarter of those now teaching are considered "qualified," even by Afghanistan's minimal standards. Impressive school enrollment figures determine how much money a school gets from the government, but don't reveal the much smaller numbers of enrollees who actually attend. No more than 10% of students, mostly boys, finish high school. In 2012, according to UNICEF, only half of school-age children went to school at all.

                              Advances in Afghan health care have been another source of Western donors' pride. But dramatic claims that 85% of Afghans now have access to basic health care turn out to mean only that something called a "health care facility" exists in 85% of Afghan districts, many of which are enormous.

                              Tens of thousands of Afghans now have "access" to health care facilities only because they fled their war-torn provinces for refugee camps on the fringes of major cities. The country's high rates of maternal and infant mortality have slightly improved but remain among the worst in the world. You have to wonder if Washington couldn't have turned all that MRAP money to better purpose.

                              As for the advancement of the human rights of women, much ballyhooed by American politicians and others, a report filed by the independent Afghan Rights Monitor in December 2012 tells a more accurate tale. It describes merely 10 of the many women assassinated in recent years because of their "work and ideals": "women's development activists, a doctor, two journalists, a provincial lawmaker, a teacher, and a police officer".

                              Assassinated only two weeks ago was a courageous veteran police lieutenant named Nigara, who once stopped a suicide bomber by grabbing him in a bear hug. Men on a motorcycle shot her in the neck from behind as she stood waiting for a government bus to take her to work. She was the senior policewoman in Helmand Province, having taken over the duties of her predecessor, Islam Bibi, assassinated only three months earlier in the same popular drive-by style.

                              No Afghan has ever been brought to trial for any of these assassinations, nor does President Karzai ever speak out against them. The government keeps no record of its women employees slain in the course of duty.

                              Good neighbor Pakistan chose this moment to release from detention at an "undisclosed location" Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, longtime pal of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and formerly his second-in-command. Karzai campaigned for his release to facilitate the Afghan "peace process", but now that Baradar is free, his whereabouts are officially unknown. How do you suppose women in Afghanistan, or girls in Pakistan's Swat Valley, receive that news?

                              So that's the way the war is ending - in waste, destruction, anxiety, conspiracy, and the evaporation of illusory achievements. A thousand diminutions mark the waning of Afghanistan, punctuated by the sudden violent death of women.

                              But even when the war "ends" and Americans have forgotten it altogether, it won't be over in Afghanistan. Obama and Karzai continue negotiations toward a bilateral security agreement to allow the US to keep at least nine of the biggest bases it built and several thousand "trainers" (and undoubtedly special operations forces) in Afghanistan seemingly forever.

                              It won't be over in the US either. For American soldiers who took part in it and returned with catastrophic physical and mental injuries, and for their families, the battles are just beginning.

                              For American taxpayers, the war will continue at least until midcentury. Think of all the families of the dead soldiers to be compensated for their loss, all the wounded with their health care bills, all the brain-damaged veterans [under the care of] the Department of Veterans Affairs. Think of the ongoing cost of their drugs and prosthetics and benefits. Medical and disability costs alone are projected to reach $754 billion. Not to mention the hefty retirement pay of all those generals who issued all those reports of progress as they so ambitiously fought more than one war leading nowhere.

                              Then there's the urgent need to replace all that retrograde equipment, so efficiently trashed, and recruit a whole new army, so that any month now we can start the next war. Let's not forget about that.

                              Ann Jones, who has reported from Afghanistan since 2002, is the author of Kabul in Winter (Metropolitan 2006) and War Is Not Over When It's Over (Metropolitan 2010), among other books.

                              Comment


                              • Mehsud looks like he's packing on the pounds

                                BBC News - Full text: BBC interview with Taliban's Mehsud

                                Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud has told the BBC he is open to "serious talks" with the government and denies carrying out recent deadly attacks in public places. Here is a transcript of the interview with the BBC's Ahmed Wali Mujeeb.

                                BBC reporter: There have been recent attacks in public places, and the impression created is that the TTP [Pakistani Taliban] is behind these attacks. What do you say about this?

                                Hakimullah Mehsud: TTP is a faith-based ideological organisation that has Islamic scholars in its fold. Our faith is that all Muslims are brothers. All those who love Islam, and want the imposition of an Islamic system, and proclaim to rid themselves of the infidels, we consider them our brothers. We consider the safety of Muslims, of scholars, of mosques and madrassas as our sacred duty. These explosions in public places are certainly being carried out by secret agencies as part of a conspiracy to pollute the minds of the people about Taliban and to discourage them to co-operate with Taliban. Secondly, those who have faith in infidels are friends of America and follow the system of the infidels. Praise be to God, we have targeted those who are with the infidels, America, and we will continue to target them. But as for explosions which cause damage to the life and property of Muslims, we have denied any link the past, we deny any link today.

                                BBC: What is your position regarding peace talks with the government, and in what stage are the negotiations now.

                                Mehsud: We believe in serious talks but the government has taken no steps to approach us. The government needs to sit with us, then we will present our conditions. The proper way to do it is that if the government appoints a formal team, and they sit with us, and we discuss our respective positions, and we agree on some points and disagree on some other points, then you can say that talks are in such-and-such stage.

                                BBC: When peace talks were being debated, some scholars appealed to the government and the Taliban to announce a ceasefire. What are your views on this appeal?

                                Mehsud: Praise be to God, we consider scholars as our respected elders. We are many times more willing to abide by their appeal than the government. But for the ceasefire to be credible, it is important that drone strikes are also stopped.

                                BBC: There are concerns among some quarters that there are several groups within the Taliban movement and if a government team or jirga visits you, their security might be at risk. Will you welcome a government team and ensure its security?

                                Mehsud: We are Muslims and don't break promises. If a team comes, we can and will guarantee their security.

                                BBC: There's much debate in the media regarding the Taliban's preconditions for talks. Have you formally laid down any condition?

                                Mehsud: We will present our conditions before those who come to talks to us. We neither present our conditions nor listen to others' conditions on the media.

                                BBC: It is thought that in the past some major peace deals have been made between the government and the Taliban but many have not endured. It is said Taliban have been the cause of the failure of those deals. Is this correct?

                                Mehsud: Praise be to God, we are autonomous in what we do, but you can clearly see that the government of Pakistan bombs innocent tribal people due to pressure of America, to make America happy to earn dollars. They demolish mosques and madrassas, like they did with the Red Mosque and Jamia Hafsa [next-door women's seminary] in Islamabad. Peace deals failed because of the government. Drone strikes conducted by Americans were backed by Pakistan. Then the Americans pressed Pakistan to start ground operations in these areas, and Pakistan complied. So the government is responsible for past failures, and we have evidence of that which we can share if anyone from the government would sit down with us.

                                BBC: Will the American withdrawal from Afghanistan next year have an impact on your movement?

                                Mehsud: There will be no impact of the American withdrawal on the TTP, because friendship with America is only one of the two reasons we have to conduct jihad against Pakistan. The other reason is that Pakistan's system is un-Islamic, and we want that it should be replaced with the Islamic system. This demand and this desire will continue even after the American withdrawal.

                                BBC: There is usually a lot of tension on the India-Pakistan border. If the two countries go to war, which side will you support?

                                Mehsud: We will stand with the Muslims. We call on both governments and the Muslim people to submit themselves to the Islamic system, which guarantees success in this world as well as in the hereafter. We will stand by the Muslims.

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