----- Original Message ----- From: "Sid Shniad" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=359&objectid=10469334&pnum=0 Afghanistan - A war won and lost By Gwynne Dyer New Zealand Herald: October 12, 2007 We have just had the sixth anniversary of the start of US air strikes against al Qaeda and its Taleban hosts in Afghanistan. It was a very clever politico-military operation, and by December of 2001 all of Afghanistan was under the control of the United States and its local allies for a total cost of 12 American dead. Then, for no good reason, it fell apart, and now the war is lost. In the days after 9/11 George Tenet, the Central Intelligence Agency's chief, came up with a bold proposal. Why invade Afghanistan with a large American army, deploying massive firepower that kills large numbers of locals and alienates the population? Why give Osama bin Laden the long anti-American guerrilla war that he was undoubtedly counting on? Instead, Tenet proposed sending teams of CIA agents and special forces into the country to win the support of the various militias, loosely linked as the Northern Alliance, that still dominated the northern regions of the country. Although the Taleban had controlled most of the country since 1996, they had never decisively won the civil war. So why not intervene in that war, shower their opponents with money and weapons, and tip the balance against the Taleban? It worked like a charm. Pakistan, whose intelligence services had originally created the Taleban, withdrew its support, the regime fled Kabul, and most of the Taleban troops melted back into their villages. The Government of a country of 27 million people was taken down for a death toll that probably did not exceed 4000 on all sides. By mid-December 2001 the United States effectively controlled Afghanistan through its local allies, all drawn from the northern minority groups: Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara. There had not been the mass killing of innocent bystanders that would inevitably have accompanied a conventional US invasion, so there was no guerrilla war. The traditional ruling group and biggest minority, the Pashtun, who had put their money on the Taleban and lost, would have to be brought back into the game somehow, but the usual Afghan deal-making would suffice. Washington had the wit to make Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from a clan that never had much to do with the Taleban, its puppet President in Kabul, but it didn't carry through. It froze out all the prominent Pashtun political and religious leaders who had had dealings with the Taleban - which was, of course, almost all of them. The Taleban had been the Government of Afghanistan for almost five years, and were at the time the political vehicle of the Pashtun ascendancy in the country. If you were a traditional Pashtun leader, how could you not have had dealings with them? An amnesty that turned a blind eye to the past, plus pressure by the United States on its recent allies to grant the Pashtuns a fair share of the national pie, would have created a regime in Kabul to which Pashtuns could give their loyalty, even if they were less dominant than usual. But that never happened. The United States had so closely identified the Taleban with al Qaeda (although bin Laden probably never told the Taleban leadership what he was planning) that it would not talk to Pashtun leaders who had been linked to the Taleban. Six years after the invasion that wasn't, the Pashtuns are still largely frozen out. That is why the Taleban are coming back. Afghanistan has usually been run by regional and tribal warlords with little central control. Nothing new there. But now it is also a country where the biggest minority has been largely excluded from power by foreign invaders who sided with the smaller minorities, and then blocked the process of accommodation by which the various Afghan ethnic groups normally make power-sharing deals. The Taleban are still the main political vehicle of the Pashtuns, because there has been no time to build another. It doesn't mean that all Pashtuns are fanatics or terrorists. Indeed, not all the Taleban are fanatics (though many of them are), and hardly any of them nurse the desire to carry out terrorist acts in other countries. That was the specialty of their (rather ungrateful) Arab guests, who fled across the border into the tribal areas of Pakistan almost six years ago. The current fighting in the south, the Pashtun heartland, which is causing a steady dribble of American, British and Canadian casualties, will continue until the Western countries pull out. (Most other Nato members sent their troops to various parts of northern Afghanistan, where non-Pashtun warlords rule non-Pashtun populations and nobody dares attack the foreigners.) Then, after the foreigners are gone, the Afghans will make the traditional inter-ethnic deals and something like peace will return. Will Karzai still be the President after that? Yes, if he can convince the Pashtuns that he is open to such a deal once the foreigners leave. Will the Taleban come back to power? No, only to a share of power, and only to the extent that they can still command the loyalty of the Pashtuns once it is no longer a question of resistance to foreigners. Will Osama bin Laden return and recreate a "nest of terrorists" in Afghanistan. Very unlikely. The Afghans paid too high a price for their hospitality the first time round. * Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. *** ----- Original Message ----- From: Mha Atma/Earth Action Network Hi Ed. The below reply from someone on my list came after I passed on the Rich article which you sent to your list. -----Forwarded Message----- From: Paul Rosenberger Sent: Oct 14, 2007 10:04 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: The 'Good Germans' Among Us You might be interested in the letter to the editor that I just submitted to the New York Times on this subject. Please see below: As a native German who grew up under the Nazi regime, I appreciate the parallels that Frank Rich draws between the “Good Germans” under Hitler and current Americans under the Bush administration. These comparisons are indeed valid and frighteningly so. To make matters worse, under the Bush administration we still have a largely free and independent press(although there is some legitimate doubt as to the latter), that informs us as to what is really going on. We also still enjoy free expression of opinion and the opportunity of peaceful protest against practices that we deem immoral. The “Good Germans” had none of these privileges. The only information available was the official Nazi propaganda and protest or just open verbal dissent meant predawn arrest and disappearance in a concentration camp or a kangaroo court that meted out death sentences to be carried out without recourse to any judicial review. This makes us worse than the “Good Germans”. We have the information and we have the freedom to act on it, yet we do nothing. Paul W. Rosenberger 133 16th. Street Manhattan Beach, Ca 90266 310-545-3531 = *** From: All the News That Doesn't Fit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [NYTr] From Dachau to Jerusalem to Nuremberg to Munich to Annapolis sent by Francis Boyle - Oct 5, 2007 From Dachau to Jerusalem to Nuremberg to Munich to Annapolis by Francis A. Boyle During the summer of 1982 I had the opportunity to visit the Nazi concentration camp just outside Dachau, Germany and then the little town itself. Given the proximity of the town to the camp, my immediate reaction was: "This town is so close to the camp that the citizens of Dachau must have known what was going on out there. Why did they not do anything about it?" I had the exact same reaction during the last two weeks of May 1986 as I traveled up and down the West Bank and Gaza Strip in order to investigate Israel's atrocities and war crimes against the Palestinians. When I then complained about these reprehensible practices to the appropriate high-level legal officials sequentially at the Israeli Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I was told that they were all required by and could be justified under the doctrine of "military necessity." Rather than engaging in an extended debate over this point, I simply responded to all three of these lawyers that this was precisely the argument used by the Nazi war criminals before the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945 to justify their own incredible outrages upon humanity, including the Jewish people. After a bit more argumentation, these three lawyers basically conceded my Nuremberg analysis, but then each independently, uncannily, and matter-of-factly informed me: "We have public relations people in the United States who take care of these matters for us." Even more distressingly, upon a visit to the office of the Legal Adviser to the Foreign Ministry to discuss the prospects for peace, I was immediately informed by him that Israel had a "claim" under international law to the West Bank: it might not constitute the basis for perfect title, but it was nevertheless a "claim." At the time I recalled the fact that of course Hitler had a "claim" to the Sudetenland as well. Although the Munich Pact of 1938 permitted German occupation and annexation of the Sudetenland into the Nazi Reich, this act of cowardice by Great Britain and France ultimately paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War one year later, with all the tragic consequences that conflagration entailed for the Jewish people, among others. Today, the United States and Israel are striving to consummate a Middle East version of the Munich Pact that will sell out of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and a real independent state of their own. Only history will tell if the consequences shall be as tragic for the fate of the Arab and Jewish peoples in the Middle East, if not the rest of the world. I fear that there is a high probability that history will repeat itself. [Professor Francis A. Boyle, University of Illinois College of Law served as Legal Advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations and its Chair Dr Haidar Abdul Shaffi from 1991 to 1993. He is the author of Palestine, Palestinians and International Law (Clarity Press: 2003).] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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