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In a further bid to undermine his credibility, sartesian challenges me because he just can't believe the poor old Taliban have been taken the lives of 70% of the innocent casualities this year; I'll let Ron J tell him where my data come from. Greg's message is interesting, but so much is not Afghanistan an imperial interest that Bush and Rumsfeld abandoned it for the open-ended occupation of Iraq, encouraging Karzai to shore up his rule with the support of war lords. The US may have driven some of the Taliban back over a line that they don't recognize but they remain thought of as an asset by the ISI. Having allowed the Taliban and al-Qaeda to regroup, Bush then made a desperate attempt to bomb them out of existence in accordance with his own political time line, meanwhile putting no pressure on Pakistan to develop regional development programs and making no attempt to split the Taliban in Afghanistan so that legitimate Pashtun claims could be recognized. His desperate and militaristic strategy backfired, the Taliban became radicalized and strengthened and carried out more terrorist attacks, rocking the very foundations of Pakistani civil society, until Pakistani opinion shifted to supporting military actions against them even as that created a refugee crisis. You may think that all this is unknown to Obama and Ahmed Rashid. It's not. Even critics such as Chomsky rely on Ahmed Rashid and Barnett Rubin. It may well be that Obama has asked for more troops to decrease the reliance on military tactics that have cost the lives of so many civilians. Still I think the structural impediments on NATO and domestic contstraints on Obama are too great for NATO intervention not to backfire. Bhikhu Parekh has written perceptively of the limits of humanitarian intervention while recognizing that they should not be ruled out tout court. Rakesh ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
