Shouldn't Dr. (!) Strangelove be locked up then?

'The War Is a Breeding Program for Terrorists'

Of course the Americans had to react to that [9/11] attack. But did that mean that they had to bomb Kabul? It's absurd, bombing a country to fight a handful of terrorists who weren't even Afghans. The United States should have used special forces to eliminate Osama bin Laden. Instead, they allowed him to get away at Tora Bora, like in some slapstick comedy. And Taliban leader Mullah Omar was able to escape from them on a motorcycle.

SPIEGEL:

What has to happen in Afghanistan so that NATO can withdraw?

Struck:

Everyone involved agrees that we have to devote more of our attention to training the Afghan army and the Afghan police force. Unfortunately, this proceeded at a very slow pace in the past. The Bundeswehr is doing a lot more in this respect today.

Todenhöfer:

The Afghans are born fighters. They have been the target of attacks for thousands of years. Every 14-year-old boy in Afghanistan can handle a weapon. They don't need a lot of training. They need money. Why should a young, unemployed Afghan join the national army, where he makes less than $100 (€71) a month, if he can earn $400-600 (€285-430) with the Taliban? We have to pay the Afghan national army better. Only Afghans can defeat Afghans.

SPIEGEL:

The Americans are now taking the war to Pakistan. Is this the right thing to do, focusing more attention on the neighboring country, which is also unstable?

Todenhöfer:

The US attacks are weakening the Pakistani government, because the population increasingly sees it as an accessory or lackey of the Americans. The American drone attacks in Pakistan are constantly killing civilians. Several dozen people attending a funeral were killed in a bombing just last week. The alternative to this madness is that Afghanistan and Pakistan proceed jointly against the Taliban.

Struck:

I agree. An Afghan solution is impossible without Pakistan. We must succeed in convincing the Pakistani government to fight the Taliban together with the Afghans. Given the geographic circumstances, however, I believe a military solution is out of the question. In my view, diplomacy is the only option.

SPIEGEL:

You want to talk to the Taliban, Mr. Struck?

Struck:

Yes, that's the right approach. I have already spoken with Taliban officials in Kunduz. We have to include everyone, or at least the moderate Taliban. I would exclude someone like Mullah Omar. I've examined his record. He's a mass murderer.

Todenhöfer:

By the same logic, the Afghans whose family members died in a hail of American bombs would also have to reject talks with the Americans. If you want to exclude radical members of the Taliban from negotiations, it's as if the Americans had said during the peace negotiations with Vietnam: We will only talk to the moderate Viet Cong. That's ridiculous. We need a reconciliation "loya jirga," a tribal council in which all insurgents participate.

SPIEGEL:

Would you also negotiate with al-Qaida?

Todenhöfer:

Al-Qaida no longer plays a role in Afghanistan. Even the American commander-in-chief, General David Petraeus, says that. Anyone who claims that we would be leaving the country to al-Qaida if we withdraw is spouting nonsense. Criminals rarely return to the hiding place from which they have just been ejected.

SPIEGEL:

***If we are no longer hunting terrorists, what are we still doing in Afghanistan?***

Todenhöfer:

***We are fighting a national, anti-Western insurgency in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is of geostrategic importance***, because it is a place from which one can monitor Russia, India, Pakistan and China. The country is also phenomenally well situated in terms of the politics of natural resources. In fact, the Americans want to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan.

SPIEGEL:

You don't seriously believe that German soldiers are dying for economic interests?

Todenhöfer:

***I believe that our soldiers in Afghanistan are dying out of a falsely interpreted solidarity with the United States*** -- and that our politicians are perfectly aware of this.

Struck:

Our soldiers are not stationed in the Hindu Kush for economic reasons. We want to prevent this country from becoming a failed state, one that constitutes a risk of terrorism for the West. For this reason, I will support continuing the mandate for as long as I remain in the Bundestag. However, I am extremely disappointed with President Karzai. He has not managed to effectively combat corruption.

Todenhöfer:

But the ***international aid organizations are far more corrupt. Western companies are raking in profits of 400, 600 and sometimes 1,000 percent there.*** Only a fraction of the money passes through the Afghan government, while the rest ends up in private hands. In Kabul, a Western company submitted a bill for $10 million (€7.1 million) -- for a 1.5-kilometer (0.9-mile) metal fence around the Zarnegar Park. Karzai had the matter investigated, and it turned out that this fence was worth no more than $70,000 (€50,000). This doesn't exactly strengthen the Afghan's trust in Western development aid. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,633842,00.html

Colonizing Iraq

By Michael Schwartz

[...]

In 2007, Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve, told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that "taking Saddam out was essential" -- a point he made in his book The Age of Turbulence -- because the United States could not afford to be "beholden to potentially unfriendly sources of oil and gas" in Iraq. It's exactly that sort of thinking that's still operating in U.S. policy circles: the 2008 National Defense Strategy, for example, calls for the use of American military power to maintain "access to and flow of energy resources vital to the world economy."

After only five months in office, the Obama administration has already provided significant evidence that, like its predecessor, it remains committed to maintaining that "access to and flow of energy resources" in Iraq, even as it places its major military bet on winning the expanding war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There can be no question that Washington is now engaged in an effort to significantly reduce its military footprint in Iraq, but without, if all goes well for Washington, reducing its influence.

[...]

War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (Haymarket Books), which explains how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the U.S. to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling a sectarian civil war.

The obsessiveness of some about Iraq puzzles me, but the obituary below might put that war into context.  This, er, gentleman was an "old school" warrior — he wasn't too concerned about mass civilian casualties.  Ask any SE Asian.  (One who survived years of B-52 strikes, I mean.)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124701408081309143.html

So...is the Iraq war something new, perhaps part of Bush's "war on Islam"...?  (The earlier Iraq war was, then, part of Bush Senior's "prequel to the war on Islam"...?)  Or is it of a piece: America's war on assorted swarthy Third World types?  Too bad we can't ask McNamara.

Anyway, I'm going to go back to googling "pelosi" and "liar" (alternatively "obama" and "fiscal potlatch")....

Wars are less deadly than they've been for 12,000 years.

http://www.slate.com/id/2224275/

Another eye opener for a linguist, perfect for the silly season (called cucumber season in Polish) on the beach: http://tomdispatch.com/post/175103/john_feffer_their_martyrs_and_our_heroes

Our Suicide Bombers: Thoughts on Western Jihad

As it happens, we have our suicide bombers too. "We" are the powerful, developed countries, the ones with an overriding concern for individual liberties and individual lives. "We" form a moral archipelago that encompasses the United States, Europe, Israel, present-day Japan, and occasionally Russia. Whether in real war stories or inspiring vignettes served up in fiction and movies, our lore is full of heroes who sacrifice themselves for motherland, democracy, or simply their band of brothers. Admittedly, these men weren't expecting 72 virgins in paradise and they didn't make film records of their last moments, but our suicidal heroes generally have received just as much praise and recognition as "their" martyrs.

The scholarly work on suicide bombers is large and growing. Most of these studies focus on why those other people do such terrible things, sometimes against their own compatriots but mainly against us. According to the popular view, Shiite or Tamil or Chechen suicide martyrs have a fundamentally different attitude toward life and death.

If, however, we have our own rich tradition of suicide bombers -- and our own unfortunate tendency to kill civilians in our military campaigns -- how different can these attitudes really be?

[...]

I picked up The Guardian Weekly at the train station and was thrilled to discover on the train that this is one of those respectable papers that carry (almost) no advertising. It's a pleasure to pay for publications like that, while knowing that they will be shortly extinct, replaced by electronic gizmos.

Anyway, here is an excerpt:

"Four years later, as a resurgent Taliban mounts daring operations in Kabul itself, the western mission in Afghanistan looks more doomed than ever. Desk-bound columnists, such as John Lloyd in the Financial Times this week, may continue to speak of western "honour" and warn that defeat in Helmand will embolden jihadists in Bradford. But no Taliban has been implicated in any terrorist conspiracy in Britain, and perhaps even Lloyd, a staunch supporter of Tony Blair's wars, doesn't assume that killing many more Muslims of southern Afghanistan would impress the Muslims of West Yorkshire.

When ill-conceived military adventures look doomed, their advocates tend to grow more strident about honor, especially if it can be upheld to the last drop of other people's blood. Richard Nixon's "peace with honor" primarily consisted of devastating Cambodia in addition to Vietnam; for some years now, maintaining honor in Afghanistan has amounted to little more than the Talibanisation of nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Finally, the endgame in Afghanistan is in sight. Endorsed by the US state department, Britain's Foreign Office now speaks openly of talks with the Taliban. But thousands of British soldiers continue to fight, and the war, certain now to peter out in some face-saving compromise, has only just entered the most terrible phase for those still in the thick of battle. As Senator John Kerry, speaking in 1971 of his army service in Vietnam, put it, "Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands off Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say we have made a mistake."

"How do you ask," Kerry challenged the US Senate foreign relations committee, "a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" But of course governments can't ask this even if they awaken in time to the utter folly of their wars. Hence, our clear sympathy for objectors like Kerry, who refuse to serve as cannon fodder for the hubristic geopolitical experiments of politicians and journalists. Hence, too, our profound unease with uniformed men and women on active duty: they provoke our admiration for risking much more than we ever would, even if we suspect that they do so only to prolong other people's mistakes."

An excerpt from

Deadlier than the male

Eta was once a man’s world. Industrial workers, middle-class Marxists and Basque-speaking farmers from tiny villages high up in the green, steep-valleyed hills of Goerri came together in an anger initially stirred by dictator General Francisco Franco - and largely left their women at home. For years, the public role of women was mainly as tough, grieving mothers at the gravesides of male activists. “They were seen as the keepers of the flame,” says Jesus Casquete. Eta’s founders wanted “peaceful women dedicated to cultural and humanitarian work; violent men who await only a little more strength and an order”. Only a handful broke the mould. ...

In 2002, only 12% of Eta-affiliated prisoners were women. By 2009 that figure has risen close to a quarter. If the latest arrests are an indicator, the proportion among recent recruits is nearer a half. Not everyone is surprised. “You must remember that when Eta called a ceasefire in 2006, it was a woman who read out the communique,” says Beñat Zarrabeitia, of Etxerat, a group representing prisoners’ families. “And in the previous ceasefire, in 1999, they named Belen González Peñalba, a woman, as one of their negotiators.” Women have, in fact, been present in Eta’s history since the beginning, though almost always in background roles. They ran safe houses, hid activists, trailed targets or stashed arms. They tracked politicians or police officers to mass, sitting demurely in the back rows of the church. The front-line stuff, of planting bombs and shooting people, was largely a man’s thing.

The first women to join comandos found their gender an obstacle. One anonymous Eta gunwoman recalled the first time she and a female friend were sent out with pistols. “We said: ‘Well, depending on how we do it tomorrow, they will accept us or not.’ And that was because we were women. You have a lot more to prove when you are a woman,” she told the anthropologist Miren Alcedo. Indeed, early gunwomen gained a reputation within Eta as more bloodthirsty than the men. ...

During one attack in Madrid she was detailed to cover another comando member as he opened fire on a car full of army officers. She could not, however, resist spraying it with bullets first. She is now serving a 30-year jail sentence for 23 murders. “She used to complain that women had to prove themselves twice as much as men,” a former companion-in-arms said.

Over the past decade, however, a new trend has emerged. The first symbol of change was Olaia Castresana, a 22-year-old infant-school teacher from San Sebastian. On weekdays Castresana looked after children under six; at weekends and during the holidays she blew up things, and people, for Eta. ...

The Guardian Wekly