Sunday, November 8, 2009

Saturday, November 7, 2009

If you to see why nothing gets done in Congress, specifically the House, tune in to C-Span’s broadcast of the Health care bill hearings this weekend. Republicans constantly saying, I object, I object. “Mr. Speaker, parliamentary inquiry” http://www.c-span.org/Watch/C-SPAN_wm.aspx

From The Huffington Post,
Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel charged with monitoring the bank bailout, was on Morning Joe Friday morning to dig in to the newly released unemployment report. The numbers are bleak — unemployment has surpassed 10 percent for the first time since 1983 — and Warren is not surprised.

“Let’s face it,” Warren said, “This is sort of how we went about the rescue — we rescued at the top and we left the bottom to kind of fend for itself — and that’s showing up in the unemployment numbers.”

Warren went on to explain that the report is really about the guarantees the Government made to protect banks’ assets while leaving the public out to dry.

“Look, it saved the top of the system,” Warren acknowledged. “It helped stabilize it, but not so much for families who are hard hit down on the ground, the real economy.” There’s always the question, Warren explains, about how you save the top — in this case, the public pays for the banks’ guarantees and the top executives benefit. “We said, in effect, at the top, there’s really not any pain in return for taxpayer support. Not so much so when it comes to folks at the bottom. We said wait a year, we’ll get there, we’ll do what we can.”

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough suggested that it was the old “socialize the profits, privatize the gains” scenario, but Warren took it one step further.

“The way I think of it is: they say something like ‘Give me your money, investors and I’m going to Las Vegas and put it all on red 22. And if red 22 comes in — woo! we are RICH. If red 22 doesn’t come in, don’t worry because the tax payers will pay you back the money you invested.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/06/elizabeth-warren-we-rescu_n_348397.html in

Friday, November 6, 2009

“Police raid shooting suspect’s Killeen apartment,” by Victor O’Brien for the Killeen Daily Herald, November 6…http://www.kdhnews.com

Bell County SWAT teams barricaded and evacuated a downtown Killeen apartment complex where Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan lived before authorities say he killed 13 people and injured 30 more during a massacre at Fort Hood Thursday….
In the morning, neighbors said Hasan handed Qurans and donated his furniture to anyone who would take it.

Neighbors described Hasan as a quiet man who began wearing “Arabic clothing” in recent weeks. Edward Windsor, a neighbor, never suspected Hasan was in the Army. Hasan’s rank surprised Windsor who would never have imagined an officer with a rank of major would have lived in an apartment that rents for $350 and houses soldiers ranked as private first class….http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/11/fort-hood-jihad-shooter-handed-out-korans-the-morning-of-his-attack.html

Here’s how a young Winston Churchill found the land in 1898 as a reporter covering the ends of the British Empire …
Source: From the Agora blog, http://agorabum.blogspot.com/2006/11/wild-tribal-areas-of-pakistan-and.html

The inhabitants of these wild but wealthy valleys are of many tribes, but of similar character and condition. The abundant crops which a warm sun and copious rains raise from a fertile soil, support a numerous population in a state of warlike leisure. Except at the times of sowing and of harvest, a continual state of feud and strife prevails throughout the land. Tribe wars with tribe. The people of one valley fight with those of the next. To the quarrels of communities are added the combats of individuals. Khan assails khan, each supported by his retainers. Every tribesman has a blood feud with his neighbor. Every man’s hand is against the other, and all against the stranger…

Every influence, every motive, that provokes the spirit of murder among men, impels these mountaineers to deeds of treachery and violence. The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherit in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour. That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword — the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men — stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism. The love of plunder, always a characteristic of hill tribes, is fostered by the spectacle of opulence and luxury which, to their eyes, the cities and plains of the south display. A code of honour not less punctilious than that of old Spain, is supported by vendettas as implacable as those of Corsica…

This state of continual tumult has produced a habit of mind which [reckons] little of injuries, holds life cheap and embarks on war with careless levity, and the tribesmen of the Afghan border afford the spectacle of a people, who fight without passion, and kill one another without loss of temper. Such a disposition, combined with an absolute lack of reverence for all forms of law and authority, and a complete assurance of equality, is the cause of their frequent quarrels with the British power. A trifle rouses their animosity. They make a sudden attack on some frontier post. They are repulsed. From their point of view the incident is closed. There has been a fair fight in which they have had the worst fortune. What puzzles them is that “the Sirkar” should regard so small an affair in a serious light. Thus the Mohmands cross the frontier and the action of Shabkadr is fought. They are surprised and aggrieved that the Government are not content with the victory, but must needs invade their territories, and impose punishment. Or again, the Mamunds, because a village has been burnt, assail the camp of the Second Brigade by night. It is a drawn game. They are astounded that the troops do not take it in good part.

They, when they fight among themselves, bear little malice, and the combatants not infrequently make friends over the corpses of their comrades or suspend operations for a festival or a horse race. At the end of the contest cordial relations are at once re-established. And yet so full of contradictions is their character, that all this is without prejudice to what has been written of their family vendettas and private blood feuds. Their system of ethics, which regards treachery and violence as virtues rather than vices, has produced a code of honour so strange and inconsistent, that it is incomprehensible to a logical mind. I have been told that if a white man could grasp it fully, and were to understand their mental impulses — if he knew, when it was their honour to stand by him, and when it was their honour to betray him; when they were bound to protect and when to kill him–he might, by judging his times and opportunities, pass safely from one end of the mountains to the other. But a civilised European is as little able to accomplish this, as to appreciate the feelings of those strange creatures, which, when a drop of water is examined under a microscope, are revealed amiably gobbling each other up, and being themselves complacently devoured.

In such a state of society, all property is held directly by main force. Every man is a soldier. Either he is the retainer of some khan — the man-at-arms of some feudal baron as it were — or he is a unit in the armed force of his village — the burgher of mediaeval history. The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War, (Churchill’s first book) http://www.amazon.com/Story-Malakand-Field-Force-Frontier/dp/0393028143

Mother Jones interview with author’s Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, who published Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story (2009) http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-History-Afghanistans-Untold-Story/dp/0872864944

“In 1981, Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald were the first US journalists to enter Afghanistan after the Western press corps had been expelled from the country a month after the 1979 Soviet invasion. The footage that they shot for CBS News painted a far different picture of the occupation than had been portrayed in the US media. Yet they say that the story that Dan Rather aired that spring buried the most important revelations–a problem that they’ve seen with US media coverage of Afghanistan ever since.

In January 2009, they published “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story,” a book that Selig Harrison, the Washington Post’s former South Asia bureau chief, calls “a much needed corrective to five decades of biased journalistic and academic writing about Afghanistan that has covered up the destructive and self-defeating US role there.” Mother Jones spoke with Gould and Fitzgerald last month.

Mother Jones: In your view, what do most people not understand about the US government’s early involvement in Afghanistan?

Paul Fitzgerald: In the major media, you get the story about a Soviet invasion. What you don’t get are all the politics and motivations that were behind that.

Elizabeth Gould: When the Soviets crossed the Afghan border, President Carter exclaimed that this was the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War. The claim was that the Soviets were running out of oil and this was their first step to the Persian Gulf to get our oil. So that became the mantra.

MJ: So when did a different explanation catch on?

Gould: In 1998 Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski went public with the fact that six months prior to the Soviet invasion, he was getting a black project signed by President Carter to basically allow for a provocation on the Soviet Union’s southern border to increase the chances that the Soviets would be drawn into Afghanistan, into what Brzezinski referred to as the Afghan trap. And in fact there was actually an active desire on the part of many within the intelligence community to give the Soviets their own Vietnam. And that’s what it became known as at the time. Part of the goal was not only to draw them into Afghanistan, but to hold them there and to destroy them there. So these are all part of the back-story that really was missing when that first exclamation came out of President Carter.

MJ: Then you have the version of events laid out in “Charlie Wilson’s War,” the book and movie, which you take issue with. Could you explain that?

Gould: [Texas congressman] Charlie Wilson came online around 1984 with the idea that the Soviets were never going to leave Afghanistan, so Congress had to increase the supply of arms to insurgents to drive them out. In 1983, a little more than two years after the Soviets had invaded, we took Roger Fisher of the Harvard Negotiation Project to Afghanistan for Nightline to assess the possibility of negotiating the Soviets out of the country. We came back with the story that the Soviets were actually desperate to get out and really wanted to save face, effectively.

MJ: Why was that?

Gould: The big issue really was the insurgency. The Soviets were in Afghanistan primarily because of the insurgency that was flowing from Pakistan and was basically burning schools and burning down power lines and disrupting the ability of the Afghan government to function. When Charlie Wilson actually did in fact get his budget going, and increase the insurgency, it actually held the Soviets there as opposed to driving them out. Charlie Wilson kept the Soviets in Afghanistan for another six years. He didn’t drive them out.

MJ: So if the U.S. hadn’t funneled arms to the insurgency, the Marxist government that was in power in Afghanistan would continue and at that point the Soviets wouldn’t need to be there?

Fitzgerald: The Soviets even prior to their invasion had been trying to convince the Marxists that they should step down from running the country. They told them point blank, you are not capable, you are not diverse enough, your party isn’t broad enough to run the country. And they were letting the United States know. In the summer of 1979, through their emissaries, the Soviet Union let the US know that they wanted the Marxist government of Hafizullah Amin and Nur Mohammed Taraki, to step down. According to the declassified cables the U.S was fully aware of the Soviet’s desire for a political solution. The Soviets expected that they would get cooperation from the United States in setting up a coalition government.

Gould: In fact, the Soviets actually wanted to bring back the king Zahir Shah.

Fitzgerald: The Pakistanis, of course, did not want the king back in Afghanistan because that was Afghan nationalism, and the Pakistanis had been against the Afghan nation from the very beginning. From the very existence of the state of Pakistan in 1947, you have an issue of this disputed territory called Pashtunistan. The Durand Line, which was drawn by the British in 1893, was drawn right down the middle of this 3000-5000 year old Afghan tribal homeland of the Pashtuns. So, now you’ve got 20 million Pashtuns on one side of the border and 40 million Pashtuns on the other side of the border. And since 1893 neither the Pashtuns nor the Afghan government recognizes the border. As a result of that, the situation developed as a constant source of conflict.

MJ: So basically, the Soviets wanted to bring the King back to Afghanistan but Pakistan opposed that idea. And that left them stuck supporting the Marxist government.

Fitzgerald: Yes. When we went back in 1983, about two weeks before we got there, they’d had the annual revolutionary parade for the Saur (April) revolution. And President Babrak Karmal had not been on the viewing stand. So it was a telltale sign that the Soviets were publicly withdrawing their support for him. Roger Fisher [the Harvard professor] came back from the Soviet embassy after meeting with the Soviet specialist on Afghanistan who’d flown down from Moscow and he said, “The Russians are willing to have Karmal step down.”

MJ: I saw a review of your book in the Boston Globe, which said, “In rejecting the precepts of the neoconservatives and their cold warrior predecessors, Fitzgerald and Gould substitute the premises of a pacifist, progressive outlook. Afghans don’t dwell in either of those ideological lands.” To what degree is your book making a case that Afghanistan should be thought of within some sort of framework?

Gould: We have no ideological purpose. [Among other things], the reviewer was criticizing the claim issued by Steve Coll in his book that Benazir Bhutto’s government was responsible for the original creation of the Taliban. That’s not Liz and Paul saying that. That’s actually a quote from Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars. It’s carefully cited that way in our book. Charles Cogan, who was the chief of the Near East and South Asia Division in the [CIA’s] Directorate of Operations, from 1979-1984 and was CIA chief in Paris went on record in the September 22, 2008 issue of World Policy Journal with an article titled “Partners In Time,” where he described the creation of the Taliban as a wholly owned subsidiary of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence, with the purpose of creating a Pakistani-friendly government in Afghanistan.

MJ: What are the main points you hope people will take away from the book?

Gould: What we’ve done is trailed the way that the media did not lay out the fundamental facts about what was really going on. CBS and Dan Rather were specifically cited in the late 1980s for having used fake footage. It’s well documented. That’s how extreme the idea of propagandizing the story got. Not only that, but you have the United States Information Agency actually formulating a whole policy of disinformation–the manufacturing of propaganda in order to promote the idea that the Soviets went into Afghanistan with no provocation and absolutely were hell-bent on getting to the Persian Gulf. You can read about it in Alvin A. Syder’s book, “Warriors of Disinformation.” If the media had been doing its job, many of these things could not have happened the way they did. It would never have gotten so far out of hand.

MJ: What is the practical use of your book for those who want to keep the U.S. accountable in Afghanistan?

Fitzgerald: Unfortunately, the underlying agenda is still the same as it was in 1898, and that is to secure these trade routes for essentially American and Western interests.

MJ: So if you believe that, how does that affect what you think the US should actually be doing?

Gould: The US during the Bush years blew it. Afghanistan was Washington’s to lose and they lost it. Can they get it back? The Afghan people are very nationalistic, but they have lost faith in the genuineness of the US effort to help them. They know that the U.S. is there for its own interests and nothing else. We empowered the warlords and we never actually implemented real security or reconstruction. They still don’t have enough electricity, enough water. The roads are not rebuilt. The whole economy is still very weak. This is the main reason why the Taliban idea keeps popping up as competition. In most cases this is not even an ideological issue, this is an economic issue.
http://www.motherjones.com/riff/2009/07/alternative-history-us-involvement-afghanistan