http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick10072008.html
Obama and McCain's Goofy Afghan Bluster By PATRICK COCKBURN Counterpunch: October 7, 2008 The first serious talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban took place ten days ago in Mecca under the auspices of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. During the discussions all sides agreed that the war in Afghanistan is going to be solved by dialogue and not by fighting. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar was not present but his representatives said he was no longer allied to al Qa’ida. The admission by a senior British General Mark Carleton-Smith over the weekend that absolute military victory in Afghanistan is impossible has been overtaken by the talks in Mecca. “If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that’s precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this,” said Gen Carleton-Smith. “That shouldn’t make people uncomfortable.” This sounds as if Britain’s latest military venture in Afghanistan is going to end in a retreat with none of its ill-defined objectives achieved. In the US an understanding of the real situation on the ground has been slower in coming. John McCain and Barack Obama still speak as if a few more brigades of American soldiers sent to chase the Taliban around the mountains of southern Afghanistan would change the outcome of the war. US policy in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has been constantly denigrated as a recipe for self-inflicted disaster. But President Bush’s policy in Afghanistan on the wake of the fall of the Taliban was just as catastrophically misconceived. In both countries the administration’s agenda was primarily geared to using military victory to make sure that the Republicans won elections at home. The Taliban has always been notoriously dependent on Pakistan and on the Pakistani military’s intelligence service (ISI). It was the ISI which propelled the Taliban into power in the 1990s and covertly gave its militants a safe haven after their retreat from Afghanistan in 2001, enabling them to regroup and counter-attack. But at the very moment this was happening Mr Bush was lauding the Pakistani government of General Pervez Musharaf, which had fostered the Taliban, as America’s great ally in its war on terror. The self- defeating absurdity of this policy has not struck home in the US as did the debacle in Iraq though it is obvious that so long as the Taliban have a vast mountainous hinterland in which to base themselves, they will never be defeated. The presence of foreign troops was always more popular in Afghanistan than in Iraq. The Afghans have a deep loathing for their warlords. But no foreign occupation force, particularly if reliant on ill-directed air attacks and engaged in combat, stays popular for long. This is particularly true if the foreign troops do not, in fact, deliver security. Meanwhile their presence means that Taliban fighters can portray themselves as patriots battling for their country and their faith. The overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 was never quite what it looked like. Soon after they had given up the fight I drove from Kabul to Kandahar along one of the world’s worst built roads. The Taliban were adroitly changing sides or going home as local deals were hammered out. Casualties on both sides were mercifully low. In the ancient town of Ghazni an accord on the end to Taliban power was only delayed because of a disagreement on how many government cars could they retain. In a village outside Kandahar I asked a local leader if he could gather some former Taliban for me to meet and in half an hour the village guest house was full of confident and dangerous looking fighters. I thought it would not take much for them to make a come back. Yet they would not have been able to do so without the blunders of the White House and the Pentagon. By invading Iraq they convinced General Musharaf that it was safe to give support to the Taliban once again. There were enough foreign troops in Afghanistan to de-legitimize the Afghan government but not enough to defeat its enemies. Chasing Taliban fighters around the hinterland year after year only led to the insurgency expanding. The talks in Saudi Arabia are a long way from negotiations but they are a sign that the present political logjam might be beginning to break. General Carleton-Smith’s forthright admission that there can be no outright military victory also shows realism. The best route for Britain and the US in Afghanistan is to have modest and attainable objectives combined with a recognition that in its struggle for survival the Afghan government must fight and win its own battles. Patrick Cockburn is the the author of "Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq. *** http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20952.htm Down the Road to Serfdom By Ann Berg 06/10/08 "Anti War" -- -Threatening an imminent economic collapse, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke have bamboozled Congress into enacting the most brazen confiscatory scheme ever concocted by government. The scheme would have American taxpayers fork over $700 billion of their cash to help recapitalize some of the country's biggest banks - the same banks that recently larded their bigwigs with $62 billion in bonuses. Sensing a pushback by the world's dollar-surplus regions - Asia and the Mideast - to finance the largest debtor economy, the U.S. government will now plunder its own countrymen to keep capital running "uphill." As with most statist remedies, it is being marketed as a boon for Main Street, tantalizing its inhabitants with the prospect of profits wafting westward from those malodorous Wall Street investments. However, Congress has inured the Treasury from accountability and legal recourse, giving Paulson dictatorial power over the nation's financial sector. Rather than let this bloated segment of the economy shrink and consolidate, Paulson and his successor will extend it unlimited life support, bloodletting everything else, in a final ruin of the nation. The problem that is vexing the financial system, we are told, is the pile of mortgage-backed securities held by financial institutions. These have lost value as the underlying assets - the actual homes - have plummeted in value. But this is a fraud. This precipitating event no more caused the financial fiasco than the murder of someone named Ferdinand provoked World War I, as taught in elementary school. Remember the war? Not just the current and future wars, but the one that gave us the fiat monetary system: the war in Vietnam. Prior to that calamity the world operated under the Bretton Woods monetary system, a post-World War II arrangement that pegged all currencies to the dollar and made only the dollar convertible to gold, thereby ensuring the dollar's reserve currency status. During the 1950s, the system seemed invulnerable as U.S. gold reserves exceeded foreign liabilities by threefold. By 1970, however, as the U.S. inflated its money supply to fund the Southeast Asian conflict, the monetary position of the U.S. reversed, with foreign liabilities exceeding gold reserves fivefold. When France demanded gold for dollars at the statutory rate of $35/oz., President Nixon shut the gold window for good. As a result, currencies went from a fixed to a floating (and pegged) rate system in 1973. It has vexed economists ever since. This system of fiat currencies has given peculiar leverage to the U.S. dollar. As the world's reserve currency, the dollar has preserved faith in its purchasing power among its holders, including foreign central banks. This faith and willingness to buy U.S. low-yield debt instruments such as Treasuries has enabled the U.S. public and private sectors to go on the largest borrowing binge the world has ever seen, manifesting in the gargantuan twin deficits of budget and trade. These imbalances would never have occurred under a gold standard. Credit would have been constrained by statutory levels of gold reserves in the banking system, instead of being created out of thin air by the 40-1 leverage levels granted by the SEC in 2004 to the five now defunct investment banks. Also, the huge influx of imported goods would have halted due to inflationary pressures in the exporting countries - a phenomenon deemed the "price-specie flow mechanism" by 18th century philosopher David Hume. Robert Mundell, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who sparred with Milton Friedman over floating rates vs. the gold standard, had this to say about fiat currencies: "The present international monetary system neither manages the interdependence of currencies nor stabilizes prices. Instead of relying on the equilibrium produced by [gold's] automaticity, the superpower has to resort to 'bashing' its trading partners, which it treats as enemies." So here we are: a phony monetary system, $3 trillion wasted on wars, and a citizenry mired in debt. And what does Congress do? It adds more debt - a trillion dollars, just for starters, since once starting down this slippery slope, it won't be able to stop. It then gives the Treasury the green light to buy securities that are trading as low as 20 cents on the dollar at the hold-to-maturity value, i.e., par! Not surprisingly it has engaged in a media blitz to "sell" this boondoggle, convincing the taxpayer that this bucket of dross will one day turn to platinum. Sensing that working stiffs are a little perturbed about the fleecing, it has leapt to the offense: "No, this is not a bailout of Wall Street. This is a rescue plan for Main Street." By embracing the mortgage waste dump, U.S. citizens are supposedly saving jobs and retirement dreams. They are told that interest-free car loans will stream from dealerships and refi windows will again beckon, even to those with homes worth half the value of mortgage paper. With Congress granting the Treasury (along with an "oversight" board) almost unlimited power over the country's financial landscape, the U.S. has terminated its democracy and is well on the Road to Serfdom. As Friedrich Hayek explained in 1944, "Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life that can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower - in short, what men should believe and strive for." Farewell, America. Ann Berg has spent a 30-year career in commodities and capital markets as a trader, consultant, and writer. While a commodity futures trader and Director of the Chicago Board of Trade, she advised foreign governments, NGOs (the United Nations, World Bank), think tanks (Catalyst Institute), and multinational and foreign corporations on a variety market-related issues. She was also a frequent conference speaker at international derivatives markets forums. In recent years, she has contributed articles to several commodities/capital markets publications, including Futures Magazine, Traders Source, Financial Exchange, and the Financial Times editorial page. Berg is also an artist. She is currently working on a body of work entitled The Unknown Unknowns - The Things You Don't Know You Don't Know, which explores U.S. national security policy. ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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