September 2007
Monthly Archive
September 26, 2007
Hamid Karzai reads impassioned speeches to Canadians written by our own, newly political, armed forces. Another young man is sacrificed. Now it turns out that a seismic event has hit Karzai’s already wobbly and corrupt Kabul government.
The New York Times reports that the Karzai government is locked in an escalating power struggle with the warlords and mujahedeen in Afghanistan’s legislature.
It is said to have begun in May when the lower house overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for the removal of the country’s foreign minister, something Karzai has refused, calling the measure illegal.
Mr. Karzai’s opponents have promised to boycott Parliament unless he removes the minister, Rangeen Dadfar Spanta. In recent days, a group of more than 50 legislators, most of them members of a new opposition coalition, have threatened to quit altogether over the president’s intransigence.
“This is serious,” said Wadir Safi, a member of the faculty of law and political science at Kabul University. “It’s dangerous for the government and the nation.” The showdown, he said, is eroding whatever public confidence in the elected leadership remains.
“Karzai has a particular vision for dealing with government, and it doesn’t involve a big role for the legislative branch,” said a Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
But the president has long been dogged by criticism of ineffectiveness and chronic indecision. Government corruption and poppy cultivation are rampant and public services remain a wreck; food prices are soaring, unemployment remains high and resurgent Taliban forces in the south are pressing toward this capital.
As public confidence in Mr. Karzai has evaporated, opposition has escalated sharply from within the government, led by regional power brokers who feel he has marginalized them.
The roots of this crisis go back to Karzai’s decision not to block the warlords and criminal element from being elected to his government. The Afghan foreign minister has infuriated these types by attempting to derail their legislation granting themselves amnesty for their war crimes in the 30-year old civil war. In short, Karzai put a nest of vipers in his bed and now they’re threatening to attack him.
Six years now and this is what we’ve got to show for our sacrifice. Great, just great.
September 25, 2007
When I opened my web browser the first things I saw were the words “Canadian soldier” and the picture of a fine-looking young man in his beret and camo gear with a Canadian flag in the background. My heart sank because I knew the story could only be an announcement of this fellow’s death. It was his funerary photo just like all the others.
Nathan Hornburg at 24-years old has been killed in Afghanistan. It seems he was struck by mortar shrapnel while exposed in trying to fix a thrown tread from a Leopard tank. The tank broke down, the insurgents watched and waited, Hornburg got out to repair the tread, the bad guys fired, he died.
According to the commander, General Guy Laroche, “The terrain was very rough and (tank treads falling off) is something that we see on a regular basis.” They sure do because tanks aren’t suited to running patrols across rough terrain. They’re fighting machines, not patrol vehicles.
What were they doing when this happened? According to Laroche, it was a one-day sweep to improve security in Panjwai province. A sweep. It’s what you do when you don’t have enough soldiers or equipment to fight an insurgency effectively. You sweep through. The bad guys keep the initiative and their control of the territory. They decide when to fight and when to simply lay low until you’re gone. If they see a vulnerability – a tank with a thrown track, for example – they take advantage of it.
Why are we squandering the lives of young men like Hornburg on this farce of a mission? Read Petraeus’ counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24. You can get the whole thing in PDF format on the web, free. It prescribes a ratio of 20-25 counterinsurgents for every 1,000 of the civilian population. We would need anywhere between 15-25,000 combat troops on the ground to meet that ratio in Kandahar province. Instead we’re handing the job to a 1,000-strong battle group.
Supporting the troops isn’t setting them up to lose by saddling them with a fight they have neither the numbers nor the equipment to win. If you support “the mission”, try supporting the troops. Demand that the government get off its sanctimonious, jingoistic arse; recruit, train and properly equip the small army that’s needed for this job and then get on with it – or – support the troops and leave.
September 24, 2007
If there’s one corner of the world that the Pentagon has ignored, it has to be Africa. Not North Africa so much. Places like Libya and Egypt have had plenty of attention from America’s military. A little further south though, in “deepest, darkest” (read: blackest) Africa, not so much.
Barely a decade ago the Pentagon dismissed Africa in a one-liner: “Ultimately we see very little traditional strategic interest in Africa.” What a difference a decade makes. Today the Pentagon has its very own branch, AFRICOM or Africa Command, that’s now seeking to establish fully two dozen permanent bases throughout the continent. That’s a heap of “strategic interest.” So what happened to make the Pentagon change its outlook on Africa. China. China happened.
Africa has, let’s call them for the sake of argument “resources.” Natural resources and pretty reasonable quantities of them to boot. While America ignored Africa, taking its access to African resources for granted, China saw its opportunity to fill the vacuum. In it went.
A week after Chinese President Hu Jintao began a high-profile, eight-country African tour, during which he signed more than 50 cooperation agreements and pledged to double China’s assistance to Africa by 2009, Bush announced the creation of AFRICOM.
The Chinese moves have Bush’s neo-con faithful doing it in their pants. The neo-con Heritage Foundation issued this warning: “The United States must be alert to the potential long-term disruption of American access to important raw materials and energy sources as these resources are ‘locked up’ by Chinese firms.”
The US projects that African petroleum could make up 25% of America’s oil imports by 2015. That is unless China gets that oil that it too desperately wants locked up before then.
Now, as for AFRICOM, US officials have said it “..isn’t about chasing terrorists around Africa”; “AFRICOM isn’t going to be used to protect natural resources”. Strangely enough, they haven’t actually said what AFRICOM is about. Go figure.
September 24, 2007
Media Matters for America has kicked the darling of rednecks everywhere, open mouth creep, Bill O’Reilly right back into the gutter where he belongs. Media Matters followed up on O’Reilly’s latest backhanded smear of African Americans where he described having dinner with Al Sharpton at a Harlem restaurant, Sylvia’s:
“I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship.”
“There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M-Fer, I want more iced tea.’ You know, I mean, everybody was — it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”
The Media Matters article catalogues several other bigoted cracks from O’Reilly, such as these:
On the August 16, 2006, edition of The O’Reilly Factor, O’Reilly argued extensively for “profiling of Muslims” at airports, arguing that detaining all “Muslims between the ages of 16 and 45” for questioning “isn’t racial profiling,” but “criminal profiling.”
During the April 12, 2006, broadcast of The Radio Factor, O’Reilly claimed that on the April 11 edition of The O’Reilly Factor, guest Charles Barron, a New York City councilman, had revealed the “hidden agenda” behind the current immigration debate, which, O’Reilly said, was “to wipe out ‘white privilege’ and to have the browning of America.”
Any decent nation has no time for people of O’Reilly’s ilk. That he flourishes in the United States speaks volumes for what plagues that once great country.
September 24, 2007
From the “if it sounds too good to be true…” file.
The International Herald Tribune has a story on a new, internet phone company, Pudding Media, that’s offering service without any long distance charges – but there is a catch:
a start-up based in San Jose, California, is introducing an Internet phone service Monday that will be supported by advertising related to what people are talking about in their calls. The Web-based phone service is similar to Skype’s online service — consumers plug a headset and a microphone into their computers, dial any phone number and chat away. But unlike Internet phone services that charge by the length of the calls, Pudding Media offers calling without any toll charges.
The trade-off is that Pudding Media is eavesdropping on phone calls in order to display ads on the screen that are related to the conversation. Voice recognition software monitors the calls, selects ads based on what it hears and pushes the ads to the subscriber’s computer screen while he or she is still talking.
Maislos said that Pudding Media had considered the privacy question carefully. The company is not keeping recordings or logs of the content of any phone calls, he said, so advertisements only relate to current calls, not past ones, and will only arrive during the call itself.
Besides, [Pudding CEO Ariel] Maislos said, he thought that young people, the group his company is focusing on with the call service, are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are.
“The trade-off of getting personalized content versus privacy is a concept that is accepted in the world,” he said.
September 24, 2007
He’s Joe Galloway and, if you don’t know the name, think of him as this generation’s Ernie Pyle.
Galloway made his reputation back during Vietnam. He wasn’t one of the Saigon Lilies like most but a real live, “in the field” combat reporter. By the way, he’s no pinko. That’s why I found Galloway’s verdict on George w. Bush last week so interesting that I thought I’d share some of it:
Extending the war, kicking that can down the road, was President Bush’s only strategic objective last January when he came up with the idea of escalating the number of American troops in Iraq from 130,000 to today’s 170,000. Put simply, the Decider wants to hand off the decision to pull the plug on his unwinnable war to someone else, anyone else.
Four and a half years after this president ordered the invasion of Iraq in a gross act of arrogance and ignorance based on faulty, bogus and politically twisted intelligence — and after repeatedly changing the rationales and objectives of the war as each has failed in turn — we’re going to continue this war because George W. Bush is incapable of admitting that he was wrong, wrong, wrong.
When our president talks of peace returning to the streets of Baghdad, he mistakes the silence of empty, abandoned homes and sectarian cleansing for progress. He confuses the segregation of Shia and Sunni, each in their own ghettos behind tall concrete walls, for progress. More than 3 million Iraqis have been driven from their homes and neighborhoods into exile, internal or external, and this he calls success.
Will Bush get away with this? From all the evidence at hand, the answer, sadly, is yes. Only the Democrats in Congress stand in his way, and they have yet to find their spines, or a semblance of moral courage, or even a sufficient understanding of the Constitution and its clauses on war making and war-financing, to override The Decider.
It’s a long journey from now to January 20, 2009, and the blood of many Americans and even more Iraqis will flow freely and stain the hands of those who allow this insane war to continue at the behest of a stubborn, unseeing, unthinking man from Crawford, Texas.
Joe Galloway writes for McClatchey Newspapers
September 24, 2007
No this isn’t about Oklahoma. Think Luton, Farnborough, Hampshire, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, and Northampton.
A number of tornadoes were recorded in various parts of central and southern England today. Tornadoes, England?
Flooding, tornadoes, droughts and heat waves? Couldn’t have anything to do with global warming. It’s gotta be the work of those damned Druids!
September 24, 2007
The world watches and waits as Burmese Buddhist monks hold firm in their challenge to Myanmar’s despotic military junta.
For 8-days now, an estimated 10,000 monks and thousands of their supporters have staged a protest in Yangon, formerly Rangoon, demanding an end to the military’s reign of oppression.
The Alliance of All Burmese Buddhist Monks has issued a statement in which they promise tocontinue the marches until they’ve “wiped the military dictatorship from the land.” It’s believed the ruling junta is being restrained from attacking the monks by China which doesn’t want the black eye it could receive with its Beijing olympics nearing.
September 24, 2007
Most world leaders are coming to grips with the perilous realities of global warming and the need for quick and effective action. Then there are the heel-draggers – the likes of George w. Bush and our own Harpo. From the Toronto Star:
Canada has backed the U.S. position at meetings earlier this year of the G8 and the Asia Pacific countries. In his speech to the UN meeting, Harper reiterated his position that a new global agreement should follow the principles that underpin the Harper government’s climate change plan, which has been roundly criticized by environmental groups and the international community.
Harper claims to support the goal of cutting GHG emissions by half by 2050 but then puts the lie to that by endorsing the radical, fivefold expansion of the Athabasca tar sands, already Canada’s primary industrial polluter. It’s obvious that Harpo has taken a page out of the Bush manual of bad governance, the one that suggests saying what people want to hear and then doing just the opposite. Mission Accomplished.
September 24, 2007
Security Unleashed – At Unisys, we’re looking at security in an entirely new way.Security is no longer a defensive measure. It’s an enabling catalyst for achievement.
That’s the official line from the company’s web site. According to the chairman of the House Homeland Security committee, Unisys may have bungled its $1.7-billion security contract with the department, enabling hackers to get into its computers and get information that was sent to a web service that connects to Chinese internet sites.
Representative Bennie Thompson accuses Unisys of not only failing to block the hackers but also not even noticing the cyber attacks for several months and then allegedly giving misleading information to HSD about the attacks.
Unisys has roots going back to 1873 and the creation of the E. Remington & Sons typewriter company.
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