“Afghan civilians frequently prefer Taliban governance over GIRoA [the Afghan government], usually as a result of government corruption, ethnic bias and lack of connection with local religious and tribal leaders”.
That is a direct quote from a NATO report. This blog has been telling you for six years that the Afghan government rigged its elections, is enormously corrupt, full of warlords and deeply implicated in the heroin trade. That the “Afghan army” is a tribal construct based on the Northern Alliance, and channels weapons to warlords. That no development is really happening. That the government of Afghanistan is comprised of individuals who make money from war and have no interest in peace.
All this has been at odds with the mainstream media narrative, which consists of embedded journalists and visiting ministers telling us that British troops are bringing civilisation to Afghanistan, roads are being built, markets opened and little girls going to school. The leaking of a candid NATO report on the genuine situation has brought us one day of reporting which jars with the general narrative flow.
Watch the propaganda machine go into top gear and more of the same old lies pouring forth in the next few days.
…Not to mention the convenient uncovering of potential terrorist plots here and there
Where would we be without leaks and whistleblowers?
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Craig, little clean-up needed on the blockquote.
We told the MSM years ago that the Afghan people don’t want or need us there.
Nothing has changed.
I’m work in International Development (non Governmental) and have been to Kabul twice in the past 3 months.
Every single person I met was completely against the Taliban and each had their own personal story of that time.
However we view the conflict, ordinary Afgan people, who have little say in their Government, seemed to be united in their opposition to the Taliban and appalled that they might return.
aidworker1
has it occurred to you that people in Kabul who speak to foreign aid workers are a small and very particular subset of the people of Afghanistan?
In next weeks news they will be telling us that the Taliban was created by the ISI and the CIA, one caper after the other. As soon as Karzai is leaving for sunnier climes, we will see a new front open up between Tajiks and Pashtuns. Both have amassed weapons and monies. If they have any sense they will start developing Afghanistan and bury their differences, show the world that they can do something else apart from being horrible to their women and children.
Looking at the past and how clever warlords of likes of Hekmatiar think, the interest of foreign companies and countries in Afghan resources could also offer an option for a grand coalition of sorts, maybe a rotating Government or powersharing agreement. If brutes like Dostum want to throw their weight about, then the country will very fast descend into a creeping civil war. lets hope I’m wrong.
@MerkinOnParis
“We told the MSM years ago that the Afghan people don’t want or need us there.
Nothing has changed.”
– If you mean Main Stream Media, their job is to provide an echo chamber to official state policy for the most part.
So, what are the options? :
1) This is obviously not what they want to hear, so it doesn’t exist
2) From their point of view your opinion doesn’t matter anyway, so it doesn’t exist
3) The opinions of ordinary Afghan citizens don’t matter, so it doesn’t exist
4) See 1, 2 and 3 together
“I’m up to my keister with these leaks” Ronald Reagan.
I wonder who’s gonna be on the carpet for this leak?
Whistleblowers are becoming endemic…..
If enough of them populate the closed-loop of government secrecy, it will create a safer environment, despite supposed ‘protections’ for same.
Was this document really leaked or was it allowed to be leaked! to me it seems this is prelude to pull out, “They want Taliban , they prefer them to an democratically elected government, so in the name of Democracy as this is what majority of Afghan prefer, we should leave”!.
AZRA;
Leaks can be used by any side in the squabble. But, they’re all good as long as we have the freedom to vett.
‘In the Assange case we are all suspects now’
John Pilger
http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2012/02/pilger-assange-australian#jasup
Extract from Pilger:
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WikiLeaks has given Australians a rare glimpse of how their country is run. In 2010, leaked US cables disclosed that top government figures in the Labor Party coup that brought Julia Gillard to power were “protected” sources of the US embassy: what the CIA calls “assets”. Kevin Rudd, the prime minister Gillard ousted, apparently had displeased Washington by being disobedient, even suggesting that Australian troops withdraw from Afghanistan.
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In the wake of her portentous rise to power, Gillard attacked WikiLeaks’s actions as “illegal” and her attorney general threatened to withdraw Assange’s passport. Yet the Australian Federal Police reported that Assange and WikiLeaks had broken no law. Freedom of Information files have since shown that Australian diplomats have colluded with the US in its pursuit of Assange. This is not unusual. The government of John Howard ignored the rule of law and conspired with the US to keep David Hicks, an Australian citizen, in Guantanamo Bay, where he was tortured …
http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2012/02/pilger-assange-australian#jasup
But those are the wrong kind of Afghans. They need to be re-educated before they appreciate the benefits of Western civilisation.
AidWorker1 wrote: “I’m work in International Development (non Governmental) and have been to Kabul twice in the past 3 months.
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Every single person I met was completely against the Taliban and each had their own personal story of that time.”
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That is true elsewhere too. I believe you could get a representative view of the opinions of UK citizens simply by asking questions of a few London cab drivers.
Nuid, thank you for the link. John Pilger is of that rare breed who has not sold his soul.
Yonatan : You are of course joking.. You can only get a representative view if you talk to many many individuals of the various professions, background and education, and from various area of a country. What a cab driver in London tell you can be very different from what a Cab driver in North of the country will tell you.
Aidworker1 : did you ever think that those Afghan told you what they thought you want to hear? believe me it happens a lot….
Azra: irony alert.
Hi,
It’s happening on the days C4 news, where the thrust in the report is about Pakistan’s involvement, rather than the abject failure of western/Nato policy against the Taliban.
What happened to C4 News, what happened to journalistic scepticism?
Yours kindly,
MN
Kabullshit
Now we’re killing them with kindness for that s just what we do
To help them redevelop and even have a zoo.
Killing them with kindness as we drag them out of bed
Cuff little hands behind and shoot them through the head.
Oh we’re killing them with kindness for that s just what we do
If they’re Uzbek or Hazara,Pashtun or Tajik
It really doesn’t matter if they play hide and seek
As we’ll bomb all their weddings and their funerals too,
For that s just,well that s just what we do,
Oh we’re killing them with kindness
Killing them with kindness
And if you hear that we slit pricks at Bagram or elsewhere
Do remember that it s done with tender loving care,
As we’re killing them with kindness
For that s just what we do
To help them redevelop and even keep that Zoo,
Hi,
The arrogance of the Colonialist:
For prosperity, you need peace.
For Peace you need Security.
Completely not politically-correct to the idealists over pragmatists, but before the wrong-headed spiteful American invasion of 2001, there was a consistency of rule greater than exists now in Afghanistan, there were meetings with Taliban representatives with the western powers and there was a more accommodating tone than will ever exist again, including the control on corruption and drugs.
But hey, as long as a certain ignorant segment can get off on drinking the cool-aid of bringing the same liberal values that 1000 years of relative-stability have brought us, in the blink of an eye to a foreign culture with different roots………….
Yours kindly,
MN
A good report about the rally held last Saturday outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, including videos of the speeches.
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Hundreds of anti-war protesters gathered in central London today at a demonstration against Western intervention in Iran and Syria.
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The rally, organised by the Stop the War Coalition, took place outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square.
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/…
http://stopwar.org.uk/index.php/video/1078-stop-the-war-protests-against-iran-and-syria-intervention-
On the other hand the Taleban are not beyond the influence of corrupt ideologies which are foreign to Afghanistan. What a stinking choice for the poor people of Afghanistan who surely deserve something better.
Thanks Nuid for posting John Pilger’s article entitled:
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In the Assange case we are all suspects now
Washington’s enemy is not “terrorism” but the principle of free speech and voices of conscience within its militarist state.
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As usual, he is spot on. Some of the comments printed beneath it are both outrageous and appalling in their ignorance. The authors seemto be unaware of the creep of fascism within the so called Western democracies and within the US puppet, Australia. These democracies are illusory.
A taste of what’s to come.
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http://sturdyblog.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/thou-shalt-not-demonstrate/
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Brian Haw RIP.
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The addressee for complaints works in the Treasury Solicitors’ Department and has been growing a moustache in aid of promoting men’s health. Scroll down to the bottom {http://uk.movember.com/mospace/828512}
Little girls really were going to school in 1979 when the Soviet Army was called in to defend the Kabul government. The US was funding Mujahideen (or however you spell it) rebels to help overthrow the regime. It was part of the Cold War strategy to gain Afghanistan as a ‘sphere of influence’ and actually ended up with warring Mujahideen factions fighting among themselves to establish their tribal rights, which excluded the education of females, and was paid for in a fistful of dirty dollars.
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Margaret Thatcher, advised UK residents not to go to the Moscow Olympics (1980) in protest at what was called the Soviet occupation. Always happy to oblige Thatcher those of us who went were treated like lords. We slept in the best hotels with colour televisions in the rooms and the service was much better than might have been expected in a Soviet country. I wish somebody would boycott the London Olympics this year in protest of the UK involvement in all its Middle Eastern/ North African wars. Perhaps I might then be able to afford to stay in a London hotel.
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NATO has been in Afghanistan for more than a decade paid for with dirty dollars it does not possess and left another unholy mess in its wake. For what? The problem with Afghanistan is its geographical position. The greed of Superpowers to possess this desert and deploy its military in case something considered bad happens in the region is why Afghanistan has known nothing but war.
John Goss,
Thanks for the comment, you beat me to the post so to speak.
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However, Afghanistan is not an empty desert, the natural gas reserves, as well as a huge wealth of minerals, is to be found in that desert like place.
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Most important of all, Afghanistan is next to China, playing the buffer zone for US to keep China shut off from the mid east oil fields.
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Afghans had a decent chance of making it under their communist government, alas that probability proved to be intolerable to US fascists masquerading as capitalists, and for ever afraid of domino theory, in continuation of their war for total control of the planet!
Mary, here’s to Brian Haw. I wish I could have spent more time with him in Parliament Square.
Are you sure you don’t mean that it’s the UK govt.comprises individuals who make money from war and have no interest in peace?
Craig,
I agree with your proposal but can’t agree to your arguments. As far as I know, an average Afghan civilian doesn’t give a damn whether Karzai’s government is elected “democratically”, implicated in heroin trade, or consists of warlords. What the nation expects from rulers is to provide (1) safety, and (2) rule of law. The Taliban have offered both. Karzai’s government has offered neither. When an Afghan villager has a choice between gun-totting policemen, sent in from Kabul, who terrorise the population, burn crops and gangrape local boys (“bacha bazi”), and the Taliban who (in theory at least) have banned sexual exploitation, introduced dura lex sed lex, supported livelihoods (even if it was through poppy farming), and hail from among the local people – who do you think they go for?
Even if elections would be held every four years and be 100% fair and transparent – who would they chose?
I am not arguing for the Taliban here; only pointing out that Afghanistan’s problems does not lie in lack of democracy or the fact that some big fishes on the top make heaps of money (name me where they don’t). Democracy is not an answer to poverty; worse: according to some authors, as a pretty costly system democracy can work only when GDP per capita exceeds a threshold amount of around ~2,000 USD.
Neither are ethnic animosities a *cause* of Afghanistan’s misfortune IMHO.
Give people work, give them that security of being able to work five days a week and spend the money over weekends, and have law enforcement fair and trust-able – and they won’t have time or reason to fight. Then get a strong taxman – and you will then afford to have a bunch of populists elected every couple of years at taxpayer’s expense to pretend they rule the country.
That the Afghan war would be a failure for the invaders was clear from the very beginning. Why today’s invaders would be supposed to meet different fate than all others in the last 2000 years? Then, you know well – better than me – that the war was not really about conquering the Afghan desert but about (1) government orders from the US arms industry, (2) chances of exercising control over a part of planed oil/gas transit route from Central Asia to India, (3) opportunity of establishing military bases close to Russia’s southern borders.
So, after the war is over, after the West killed tens of thousand Afghan civilians, and after the Western military and the arms industry pocketed trillions, Afghanistan is back at square 1. We can only feel personal satisfaction we never supported the war.
Well looks like there is another Vietnam style saga of insane loss of life, huge cost and folly coming to an end it would seem, where will the war mongers go next to keep the financial war cash cow flowing?
One good possible outcome though would be if the Taliban regain control then possibly we may see the worlds largest supplier of opium shut down yet again. In July 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, collaborating with the United Nations to eradicate heroin production in Afghanistan, declared that growing poppies was un-Islamic, resulting in one of the world’s most successful anti-drug campaigns. As a result of this ban, opium poppy cultivation was reduced by 91% from the previous year’s estimate of 82,172 hectares. The ban was so effective that Helmand Province, which had accounted for more than half of this area, recorded no poppy cultivation during the 2001 season.
They effectively shut it down from producing around 3,300 tonnes in 2000 to 185 tonnes in 2001, an unprecedented shut down of the worlds leading supplier of opium which was supplying over 80% of the worlds opium.
But did we congratulate them on succeeding in stopping a major blight and problem on this planet, did we meet with them and offer help in establishing alternative crops for the farmers to grow and offer assistance in maintaining the continuation an opium free Afghanistan, because surely given the substantial negative impact on our own societies of that would have been the logical thing to do,,,,,,,,, NO,,,,,,, we invaded Afghanistan and the opium trade not only re-opened there but flourished to new and greater production heights. 2002:3,400 tonnes, 2003:3,600 tonnes, 2004:4,200 tonnes, by 2006 it was recorded by the United nations to have hit 6,100 tonnes, a figure they noted which actually meant that 1/3rd more opium was being produced at that point than was needed to supply the demand of the world’s heroin users. Way to go United States and Britain,,,,,,,,,
Did we invade Afghanistan to reopen the gates to the worlds opium supply or was it just a by-product of our invasion? One thing is for sure, anyone that believes that the only parties with a financial interests in Afghanistan opium are the Afghanistan people would be deluding themselves in the extreme, heroin is a worldwide multi billion dollar trade and like all suppliers of anything the Afghanistan poppy farmers were receiving a tiny percentage of that multi billion dollar racket, that trade goes well beyond Afghanistan or its supposed terrorist involvement in it, Afghan heroin sells on the international narcotics market for 100 times the price farmers get for their opium right out of the field and there are far more financially powerful players in the game in the West that don`t want that trade to stop than there are in reality in Afghanistan.
“Watch the propaganda machine go into top gear”
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Agent Cameron has stressed the ‘war’ in Afghanistan is necessary to keep us safe.
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Terrorism remains a major asset for wars and regime change. Internal intelligence in the West is fine tuned to develop plans that enforce this stratagem, the little game, the tricks and frame-ups. The secrecy of internal intelligence frustrates the judicial process already impeded by security checks such as the searching of members of the Bar at courts, dictaphone bans and removal of footwear (except policemen who may lose dignity).
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Courts have made the general observation that where sentences are imposed that are more severe than are warranted, this is “likely to inflame rather than deter extremism” thus the recent ‘plotting’ to bomb the London Stock Exchange and targeting Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, has witnessed an 11th-hour plea bargain in court using the ‘Goodyear Direction’ which means six years for Rahman.
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Interestingly the Intelligence and Security Committee enquiry into the 7/7 London bombings, published in May 2009, found
that basic data on terrorist convictions in the UK had not been compiled. It concluded:
The Committee is both disappointed and concerned that such a simple, yet essential, piece of the evidence base – the successful conviction of terrorists – was not only unused, but was not even available. This is basic information that should have been being analysed to assess how well aspects of the strategy were working and what changes needed to be made – particularly in terms of legislation.