Reuters
U.S. says two Americans dead, more "at risk"
Rabbi and wife killed at Mumbai Jewish center
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department said on Friday two Americans had been confirmed killed in the rash of militant attacks in Mumbai and more U.S. citizens were "at risk" as Indian efforts to rescue hostages continued.
"There are still Americans at risk on the ground and we want to be very, very careful with any facts," State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid told reporters.
He declined to provide further information, except to say there were still "operations" ongoing at a Jewish center in the Indian financial capital as well as at the luxury Taj hotel, where commandos were conducting rescue efforts.
Duguid declined to name the dead Americans but said their families had been informed. Two Americans were wounded, he added.
Earlier, a group called the Synchronicity Foundation said two Americans who were in India as part of a meditation program had died in the attacks.
Alan Scherr and his 13-year-old daughter Naomi were killed, the group said on its website, adding the family had been involved in the Synchronicity community in Faber, Virginia for more than a decade.
At least 124 people have been killed and 284 wounded in the attacks and Indian officials say the death toll could rise.
The United States has offered to send investigators to help but Duguid said he did not know when they would leave or whether India's government had accepted the offer.
Over the past 36 hours, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had spoken to India's foreign minister and Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari, said Duguid.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947 and Duguid said Rice had spoken to Zardari to "get a good sense of what is happening in the region."
India pointed the finger at Pakistan-linked "elements" over the deadly attacks in Mumbai, raising the prospect of a breakdown in recent peace efforts by the nuclear-armed rivals.
"I am not going to speculate on the grander questions of what this attack (implies), where it has come from, how it was produced. There is plenty of time for that after this situation is stabilized and people are safe," said Duguid.
(Reporting by Sue Pleming and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by John O'Callaghan)
Americans are bombarded with messages that death and danger are just around the corner. Reality is usually much different.
Assume that you are a 40-year-old man. What do you think the chances are that you will die of a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years? (Please forgive the morbidity of the question; there is a purpose to this pop quiz.) The answer: just 4 out of 10,000 according to Drs. Steve Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, authors of Know Your Chances. The chances that you will die in an accident before reaching your 50th birthday are 50 percent higher: 6 out of 10,000.
Nevertheless, many men remain convinced that they are at great risk of dying from vascular disease, particularly as they get older. In truth, even at age 60, the odds that a heart attack or stroke will end your life over the next decade are only 37 out of 10,000. Over that span, you are three times more likely to die of another cause -- with the chance of an fatal accident (5 out of 10,000) just as high as the chance of a stroke. Moreover, for reasons we do not fully understand, the incidence of heart attacks is declining.
"Fifty hears ago, heart attacks were a scourge. Everyone knew a working-age man who'd dropped dead from one," writes Dr. Nortin Hadler in his new book, Worried Sick. Today "the decline in mortality from coronary artery disease is well documented."
There is one exception: If you are a 60-year-old smoker, the chance of a fatal heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years climbs to 67 out of 10,000, and your chance of dying of lung disease rises to 59 out of 10,000.
The moral? The average man should probably worry less about his cholesterol levels and more about driving safely and avoiding tobacco.
For many women, breast cancer is the great fear. Again, let's look at the numbers. If you are a 35-year-old woman, what do you think the chances are that you will die of breast cancer before you turn 45? Just 1 out of 10,000 according to Woloshin and Schwartz. The chances that you will die in an accident over the next decade are twice as high: 2 out of 10,000.
Granted, as you grow older, your chances of dying from breast cancer rise, but so do your chances of dying from other causes. When you are 60, the odds that breast cancer will kill you over the next 10 years are 7 out of 10,000. Slim odds. The chances you will die of a heart attack are twice as high: 14 out of 10,000. Maybe you shouldn't worry quite so much about breast cancer. (continue reading)
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig / Alternet
The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food pantries around the country have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer.
Elba Figueroa worked as a nurse’s aide until she got Parkinson’s disease. She lost her job. She lost her health care. She receives $703 a month in government assistance. Her rent alone costs $750. And so she borrows money from friends and neighbors every month to stay in her apartment. She laboriously negotiates her wheelchair up and down steps and along the frigid sidewalks of Trenton, N.J., to get to soup kitchens and food pantries to eat.
“Food prices have gone up,” the 47-year-old Figueroa said, waiting to get inside the food pantry run by the Crisis Ministry of Princeton and Trenton. “I don’t have any money. I run out of things to eat. I worked until I physically could not work anymore. Now I live like this.”
The pantry, which occupies a dilapidated three-story art deco building in Old Trenton, one of the poorest sections of the city, is one of about two dozen charities that struggle to provide shelter and food to the poor. Those who quality for assistance are permitted to come once a month and push a shopping cart in a U shape around the first floor where, clutching a piece of paper with allotted points, they can stock up on items using the pantry’s point system according to the number of people in a household. The shelves of the pantry hold bags of rice, jars of peanut butter, macaroni and cheese and cans of beets, corn and peas. Two refrigerated cases hold eggs, chickens, fresh carrots and beef hot dogs. “All Fresh Produce 2 pounds = 1 point,” a sign on the glass door of the refrigerated unit reads. Another reads: “1 Dozen EGGS equal 3 protein points. Limit of 1 dozen per household.”
The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food pantries around the country, many of them elderly or single women with children, have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer. General welfare recipients receive $140 a month in cash and another $140 in food stamps. This is all many in Trenton and other impoverished areas have to live on. (continue reading)
Posted by Eli , Firedoglake / Alternet
I have this theory that Michael Savage's primary purpose in life is to make Rush Limbaugh look tolerant and sane. Here, let me show you what I mean:
Well, socially, we're far worse -- more degenerate than Weimar Germany. At least in Weimar Germany, men couldn't marry men and women couldn't marry women. So we're probably 10 leagues below the degeneracy that brought about Hitler. We're probably 50 leagues below the degeneracy that brought about Hitler. We are the sickest, most disgusting country on the earth, and we are... psychotic as a nation.
It's a psychotic nation when the attorney general of the state of California, when the senator from the state of California named Dianne Feinstein, when the governor from the state of California who posed as a strongman gets up there and says that homosexuals have a right to marry that's equal to a man and a woman, they're insane. They are fundamentally insane.
Got that? The fact that there was opposition to Prop 8, that there are actually people who -- gasp -- believe that gay people should have the same right as everyone else, means that we are the most degenerate country in the world, and that the moral backlash from righteous people like Michael Savage will almost certainly lead to the second coming of Adolf Hitler. Awesome.
In fact, gay marriage is so terrible that it's actually the single biggest problem that America has, and all our other problems are merely a symptom of our horrific amoral gay tolerance:
[Y]ou may say, "Why should we care about homosexuals trying to destroy families through the mock marriage that they perform in order to mock God, the church, the family, children, the fetus, the DNA of the human species? Why should we care about it while we have a financial meltdown?" Because the spiritual side of the downturn on Wall Street is directly related to the moral downturn in the United States of America. (...)
[T]he government has no right to force people to accept homosexual marriage. It is why the West is dying. It is why we're melting down as a nation.
So that's the root cause! And all this time I thought it was the Bush administration and its enablers' total disrespect for human decency and the rule of law! I am so glad there are superior intellects like Michael Savage around to set me straight and remind me what's really important.
WKOW-TV
Madison (WKOW) -- Videotape obtained by 27 News of a woman fan who was subjected to a taser during a Badger football game suggests the incident created chaos.
The videotape recorded by eyewitness Seth Dahmen captures fans yelling at UW police officers over police handling of ejected fan Margaret Hiebing. Hiebing, 54, a long time season ticket holder who had not been drinking, was ejected from Camp Randall stadium during the Oct. 11 game against Penn State after she was discovered sitting in a stadium aisle, with her seat occupied by someone else. Authorities said a taser was used to subdue Heibing.
"She was lying on the ground face down and she was still kind of squirming, so they tasered her," Dahmen told 27 News. "On the back of the calf."
"I was shocked. I couldn't believe it, it was just really (a) scary sight." Dahmen said a police officer initially threatened Hiebing with pepper spray when Hiebing refused to leave the stadium seating area.
Former Wisconsin Department of Justice Training and Standards Director Dennis Hanson told 27 News the use of a taser is an accepted intermediate option when the subject of police commands is not cooperating.
"There are hand tactics, compliance holds, and pain tactics that are deployed first," Hanson said.
Hanson said factors such as thick, layered clothing can sometimes prevent officers from using less aggressive tactics than a taser.
While not familiar with the October Camp Randall incident, Hanson said officers may have had to force Hiebing into the prone position in the stadium concourse, and the escalation to a taser may have been the next step to force compliance.
The videotape also shows police officers confining Hiebing to a wheelchair in the process of ejecting her.
A petition signed by more than two dozen Badger fans who witnessed Hiebing's treatment, including Dahmen states police conduct was not appropriate. UW-Madison police lieutenant William Larson told 27 News the department's review of the use of a taser in subduing Hiebing has not been completed.
UW-Madison police officials have refused to consider releasing stadium videotape of the incident to 27 News until at least next month, when Hiebing and her husband have a scheduled court appearance on disorderly conduct citations. Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard declined to criminally charge the Hiebings.
When contacted by 27 News, Margaret Hiebing declined comment. Hiebing and her husband are long time football season ticket holders who have donated up to $5,000 to UW Athletics in the past two years.
by David Sirota - Alternet
Grover Norquist is regularly billed as one of the leading intellectual lights of the conservative movement - and I think you will agree that the arguments he made in a debate with me over taxes this morning on CNBC highlight not merely the shocking intellectual bankruptcy of the movement he leads, but just how out of touch Republicans in Washington really are.
The debate revolved around President-elect Obama's potential plans to put off raising taxes on the very wealthy. Norquist begins the debate with the claim - I kid you not - that "the economy is in the present state because when the Democrats took the House and Senate in 2006 you knew those tax increases were going to come in 2010." He insisted that, "The stock market began to collapse as soon as you recognize that those old tax rates were coming back." Yes, because under "those old tax rates" - ie. Clinton-era tax rates - the economy was so much worse than it is today.
As you'll see, the CNBC reporters start laughing at Norquist, having trouble taking him seriously. And I must say, I really wasn't sure he was being serious - but, of course, he was. I went on to make the point that I've often made in the past - the point that conservatives simply want everyone to forget: Namely, that President Clinton faced down a recession in 1993 by raising taxes on the wealthy in order to finance an economic stimulus package, and the economy subsequently boomed.
That simple, undeniable bit of history undermines the entire structure of conservatives claim that raising taxes on the super-rich will hurt the economy. And as you'll see from Norquist's response, they simply cannot deal with that truth. Indeed, Norquist actually goes all the way back to the 1920s as his example that raising taxes on the wealthy impedes economic growth - somehow ignoring the history from 15 years ago. He then goes on to claim with a straight face that Franklin Roosevelt created the Great Depression (this, along with the "center-right nation" propaganda, seems to be the right's new talking point).
The question now is whether the Obama administration buys into Norquist's fact-free nonsense, or whether it musters the same courage President Clinton mustered in prudently raising taxes on the super-rich to responsibly finance an economic stimulus package. Sure, temporary deficits are acceptable right now - there's no arguing that. But doing what's necessary to minimize those deficits is also important.
In terms of policy, if, as Congressional Quarterly reports, Obama wants to enforce budget discipline on a necessarily large economic stimulus package, it will require generating additional revenue from the wealthy. In terms of raw politics, if Clinton's 43 percent of the vote gave him enough political capital to come into office during an economic downturn and do that, I'd say Obama and his 53 percent gives him enough political capital to do the same today. And I would argue that if Obama backs off his promise to raise taxes on the wealthy, he will effectively validate the false conservative frame that claims tax increases on the wealthy endangers an economy.
While I certainly agree with the CNBC reporter that the 2008 is different than the 1990s, it isn't different when it comes to taxes - we have very recent history that proves raising taxes on the wealthy in order to raise revenues for economic stimulus, if done prudently, helps an economy recover. That is the argument that nobody during this debate was able to undermine - and it is the argument conservatives fear most, because they know it is accurate.
_______
About author
David Sirota is a political strategist and NY Times bestselling author whose work appears in major newspapers and magazines. He has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and The Colbert Report. He has appeared in TV debates with right-wing icons like Ann Coulter, John Stossel and John Fund. Email: david [at] davidsirota.com.
By Keith Weir and Tomasz Janowski - Reuters
LONDON/SINGAPORE (Reuters) - China warned on Thursday its economic downturn was deepening and pressure grew on the European Central Bank (ECB) to make a big cut in interest rates to help contain the global financial crisis.
In India, emerging Asia's other economic titan, financial markets were closed after Islamist militants killed more than 100 people in the commercial capital Mumbai.
Violence in India and political unrest in Thailand highlighted political risk as an extra potential threat to emerging markets battered by the global crisis.
A crisis that began last year with the collapse of the U.S. housing market has spread around the world, bringing several financial institutions to their knees and pushing the United States, Japan and Europe into recession or to the brink of it.
Central banks around the globe have slashed interest rates to try to ease the flow of credit and restart stalled economies.
Economic sentiment in Europe's single currency zone slumped to 15-year lows in November and inflation expectations plunged, boosting the case for a big ECB rate cut next week.
"The euro zone is in a deep recession, upping the pressure on the ECB to cut interest rates further," said Christoph Weil, economist at Commerzbank. "We envisage a first move next week on a scale of 75 basis points to 2.5 percent."
Benchmark rates stand at 3.25 percent in the eurozone, compared with 1.0 percent in the United States.
China's central bank cut interest rates by the biggest margin in 11 years on Wednesday in response to a crisis which is reining in its once runaway growth, bringing worries about social unrest as jobs disappear.
China's State Information Centre, a government think-tank, forecast annual growth would slow to 8 percent this quarter from 9 percent in the third quarter, a cooling from double-digit rates recorded in the past five years.
JOB LOSSES
Job losses are increasing across the globe.
ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steelmaker, said it would slash up to 9,000 positions of largely white-collar staff.
The voluntary redundancy scheme, that could affect about 3 percent of the company's workforce, was aimed at achieving the company's aim of reducing costs by $1 billion.
In Britain, variety store group Woolworths went into administration, jeopardizing thousands of jobs.
The number of German unemployed fell in November to its lowest level since 1992, but officials said a 3-1/2-year labor market boom was fading as recession hits Europe's biggest economy.
Battered global stocks rose to their highest level in nearly two weeks with European equities buoyed by sharp gains in Asia and the United States, dampening demand for safer assets such as government debt.
European government bond yields crept up, ending recent declines that mirrored steep falls in U.S. Treasury yields.
On Wednesday, the U.S. benchmark 10-year yield hit a 50-year low below 3.0 percent after a flood of bleak U.S. economic reports spurred demand for government debt. U.S. markets were closed on Thursday for the Thanksgiving Day holiday.
Some strategists said the equities rally could prove ephemeral and added that the violence and upheaval in Asia added heightened political risk to a volatile mix.
BANKING WOES
Despite trillions of dollars in financial sector bailouts, the world's banking system is still not strong enough to support the economy and avoid a recession, the head of Britain's financial regulator told an Italian newspaper in an interview.
Adair Turner, chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority, added that the two key issues were bank capital strength and liquidity.
Japan's Norinchukin Bank said it would raise more than $10.5 billion to shore up its capital, the largest fundraising by a Japanese financial firm since the start of the global credit crisis.
Executive board members at Swiss bank UBS have given up their bonuses this year and former executives have returned a total of 70 million Swiss francs ($58.4 million) of payments from the bank, Chairman Peter Kurer told shareholders.
(Reporting by Reuters bureaux worldwide; editing by Michael Roddy)
Reuters
(Reuters) - An Italian right-wing party is offering 1,500 euros ($1,930) to parents who name their babies after wartime fascist dictator Benito Mussolini or his wife Rachele, saying their names are under threat.
The MSI-Fiamma Tricolore party, the descendant of Mussolini's fascist party, said the initiative in the poor, southern region of Basilicata was meant to keep alive names "at risk of extinction" and pay tribute to the movement's roots.
"Benito and Rachele are nice names and I hope our original initiative will get people going," party official Vincenzo Mancusi told Reuters.
The bonus -- intended to pay for baby clothes and food -- applies to babies born in 2009 in five villages where the birth rate is especially low, Mancusi said.
Mussolini ruled from 1922 to 1943 when he was ousted after leading Italy to ruin by entering World War Two as an ally of Germany. He was executed along with his mistress Claretta Petacci in 1945. His widow Rachele died in 1979.
Most Americans were shocked to learn that coordinated terrorist attacks struck the heart of Mumbai, India's commercial capital on Wednesday evening. After all, India is not Iraq or Afghanistan or even Pakistan. According to pundits such as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, India is a shining capitalist success story and the next global superpower. In the pro-globalization narrative, India's eager-beaver working class has benefited greatly from neoliberal economic policies. Intellectuals extol India as the world's largest democracy and an example for the rest of the developing world to follow. Today, India is a popular tourist destination for everyone from backpackers on spiritual voyages to white-collar executives on business meetings.
Americans are largely shielded from the shocking reality of India. According to the World Bank's own estimates on poverty, almost half of all Indians live below the new international poverty line of $1.25 (PPP) per day.[1] The World Bank further estimates that 33% of the global poor now reside in India. [2] Moreover, India also has 828 million people, or 75.6% of the population living below $2 a day, compared to 72.2% for Sub-Saharan Africa.[3] A quarter of the nation's population earns less than the government-specified poverty threshold of $0.40/day. Someone should tell the starving masses who have remained largely marginalized and subjugated that India is a "success story" because that's not reflected in most Indian's lives. Income inequality in India, as measured by the Gini coefficient, is increasing at a disturbingly destabilizing rate.[4] In addition, India has a higher rate of malnutrition among children under the age of three than any other country in the world (46% in year 2007).[5],[6] India is possibly the world's largest democracy by some definitions; however, as Mahatma Gandhi, once asked, "What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?"
Pundits such as Friedman play golf with the global elite and then pontificate on perceived economic trends. In Friedman's book, The World is Flat, he suggests that "Indians should celebrate Y2K as its second independence day." Yet, by some estimates, the high-tech sector employs just 0.2 percent of India's one billion people. Americans are largely unaware of the violent, systemic poverty plaguing India because the country is reduced to a caricature where everyone fielding Americans' inquiries in call centers is prospering. Having lived in India for four years and visited the country every other year, I am painfully aware of the reality on the ground. India is a country where children are forcefully amputated by beggar-masters and sent to elicit money; where poor women sell their bodies to truck drivers and contract HIV at alarming rates; and, where American tourists nonchalantly spend enough money in one day to support a hungry family for months.
The recent attacks in India are morally repugnant, but the debate on how to curb terrorism needs to consider why people engage in such desperate acts in the first place. The perpetrators of yesterday's violence targeted two of Mumbai's most luxurious hotels: Taj Mahal and the Oberioi Trident. One night at either of these hotels costs, on average, Rupees 17,500 (US $ 355) in a country where the annual salary is Rupees 29,069 (US $590).[7] The death of over a hundred people on Wednesday should deeply upset the world, but it should also lead us to question the death of the 18 million people who die annually from the systemic violence of endemic poverty.[8] As Yale professor Thomas Pogge notes, the affects of poverty are felt exponentially more in certain parts of our "unflat" world: "If the developed Western countries had their proportional shares of [gratuitous] deaths, severe poverty would kill some 3,500 Britons and 16,500 Americans per week."[9]
Mahan Abedin, an insurgency analyst, told Al Jazeera after Wednesday nights attacks: "We have seen an increase in recent years in indigenous Indian Muslim organizations beginning to take a violent stance towards the Indian state and sections of the Indian society, particularly the commercial elite of places like Mumbai, in order to highlight, they would say, the sheer inequality of life in India."[10] Abedin continued, "there is a middle class of around 100 million who live very well but 800 million-plus people live in miserable conditions." Even people who commit heinous acts of violence occasionally make a valid point. The latest attacks should not evoke a knee-jerk effort to ratchet up the so-called Global War on Terror but, instead, make us question how to avoid such attacks in the future. By showing genuine concern for the plight of the millions of people who are at risk of death from poverty and by honoring the sanctity of the lives of the most destitute, we have the best chance of defeating the ideologies of hate.[11]
by Robert Fisk - The Independent (UK)
As he leaves Afghanistan, The Independent's Middle East correspondent reflects on a failed state cursed by brutal fundamentalism and rampant corruption
The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands - all but a square mile at the centre of the city - and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul. Hamid Karzai's deeply corrupted government is almost as powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad's "Green Zone"; lorry drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country.
The Red Cross has already warned that humanitarian operations are being drastically curtailed in ever larger areas of Afghanistan; more than 4,000 people, at least a third of them civilians, have been killed in the past 11 months, along with scores of Nato troops and about 30 aid workers. Both the Taliban and Mr Karzai's government are executing their prisoners in ever greater numbers. The Afghan authorities hanged five men this month for murder, kidnap or rape - one prisoner, a distant relative of Mr Karzai, predictably had his sentence commuted - and more than 100 others are now on Kabul's death row.
This is not the democratic, peaceful, resurgent, "gender-sensitive" Afghanistan that the world promised to create after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Outside the capital and the far north of the country, almost every woman wears the all-enshrouding burkha, while fighters are now joining the Taliban's ranks from Kashmir, Uzbekistan, Chechnya and even Turkey. More than 300 Turkish fighters are now believed to be in Afghanistan, many of them holding European passports.
"Nobody I know wants to see the Taliban back in power," a Kabul business executive says - anonymity is now as much demanded as it was before 2001 - "but people hate the government and the parliament which doesn't care about their security. The government is useless. With so many internally displaced refugees pouring into Kabul from the countryside, there's mass unemployment - but of course, there are no statistics.
"The 'open market' led many of us into financial disaster. Afghanistan is just a battlefield of ideology, opium and political corruption. Now you've got all these commercial outfits receiving contracts from people like USAID. First they skim off 30 to 50 per cent for their own profits - then they contract out and sub-contract to other companies and there's only 10 per cent of the original amount left for the Afghans themselves."
Afghans working for charitable organisations and for the UN are telling their employers that they are coming under increasing pressure to give information to the Taliban and provide them with safe houses. In the countryside, farmers live in fear of both sides in the war. A very senior NGO official in Kabul - again, anonymity was requested - says both the Taliban and the police regularly threaten villagers. "A Taliban group will arrive at a village headman's door at night - maybe 15 or 16 of them - and say they need food and shelter. And the headman tells the villagers to give them food and let them stay at the mosque. Then the police or army arrive in the day and accuse the villagers of colluding with the Taliban, detain innocent men and threaten to withhold humanitarian aid. Then there's the danger the village will be air-raided by the Americans."
In the city of Ghazni, the Taliban ordered all mobile phones to be switched off from 5pm until 6am for fear that spies would use them to give away guerrilla locations. The mobile phone war may be one conflict the government is winning. With American help the Interior Ministry police can now track and triangulate calls. Once more, the Americans are talking about forming "tribal militias" to combat the Taliban, much as they did in Iraq and as the Pakistani authorities have tried to do on the North West Frontier. But the tribal lashkars of the Eighties were corrupted by the Russians and when the system was first tried out two years ago - it was called the Auxiliary Police Force - it was a fiasco. The newly-formed constabulary stopped showing up for work, stole weapons and turned themselves into private militias.
"Now every time a new Western ambassador arrives in Kabul, they dredge it all up again," another NGO official says in near despair. "'Oh,' they proclaim, 'let's have local militias - what a bright idea.' But that will not solve the problem. The country is subject to brigandage as well as the cruelty of the Taliban and the air raids which Afghans find so outrageous. The international community has got to stop spinning and do some fundamental thinking which should have been done four or five years ago."
What this means to those Westerners who have spent years in Kabul is simple. Is it really the overriding ambition of Afghans to have "democracy"? Is a strong federal state possible in Afghanistan? Is the international community ready to take on the warlords and drug barons who are within Mr Karzai's own government? And - most important of all - is development really about "securing the country"? The tired old American adage that "where the Tarmac ends, the Taliban begins" is untrue. The Taliban are mounting checkpoints on those very same newly-built roads.
The Afghan Minister of Defence has 65,000 troops under his dubious command but says he needs 500,000 to control Afghanistan. The Soviets failed to contain the country even when they had 100,000 troops here with 150,000 Afghan soldiers in support. And as Barack Obama prepares to send another 7,000 US soldiers into the pit of Afghanistan, the Spanish and Italians are talking of leaving while the Norwegians may pull their 500 troops out of the area north of Heart. Repeatedly, Western leaders talk of the "key" - of training more and more Afghans to fight in the army. But that was the same "key" which the Russians tried - and it did not fit the lock.
"We" are not winning in Afghanistan. Talk of crushing the Taliban seems as bleakly unrealistic as it has ever been. Indeed, when the President of Afghanistan tries to talk to Mullah Omar - one of America's principal targets in this wretched war - you know the writing is on the wall. And even Mullah Omar didn't want to talk to Mr Karzai.
Partition is the one option that no one will discuss - giving the southern part of Afghanistan to the Taliban and keeping the rest - but that will only open another crisis with Pakistan because the Pashtuns, who form most of the Taliban, would want all of what they regard as "Pashtunistan"; and that would have to include much of Pakistan's own tribal territories. It will also be a return to the "Great Game" and the redrawing of borders in south-west Asia, something which - history shows - has always been accompanied by great bloodshed.
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1 comments:
Sometimes I feel like I would not get out of bed with all the doom and gloom..and I am sure others join me in this feeling
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