America Positioning

Malalai Joya, a 31-year-old activist and politician, was once called “the bravest woman in Afghanistan” by the BBC. During the Taliban years, she defied her country’s rulers by running underground girls’ schools. After the Taliban’s fall, she helped start an orphanage and a medical clinic, and eventually became the youngest member of Afghanistan’s legislature. She has been fearless in taking on the warlords who populate the government of Hamid Karzai—declared the presidential victor Monday after a runoff election was canceled—so much so that in 2007, her political opponents voted to suspend her from parliament on the grounds that she had “insulted” the institution. Calling for her reinstatement, six female Nobel Peace Prize laureates compared her to Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi, describing her as “a model for women everywhere seeking to make the world more just.”

"My message on behalf of my people to [the] great American people is that democracy never comes by barrel of gun, by cluster bomb, by war,” she told me during a recent interview in New York, her words rushing out in an impassioned torrent. “They say war of Iraq is bad war, war of Afghanistan is good war, while both are war. You should raise your voice against the wrong policy of your government.”

Joya rejects the argument that NATO troops are the only thing standing in the way of a Taliban takeover. In fact, she says, the widespread civilian deaths caused by American bombs are fueling the Taliban’s growing grassroots strength. Increasingly, she says, Afghans speculate that the United States is deliberately killing innocent civilians as revenge for the innocent American civilians killed on Sept. 11. “We are between two powerful enemies,” she says. “We are fighting against occupation, and also against Taliban and warlords who now negotiate with each other. So with the withdrawal of one enemy, these occupation forces whose government is giving more money and power to these terrorists… it’s much easier to fight against one enemy instead of two.”

It can be dangerous to over- or under-interpret Tuesday’s election results. While Politico said that neither the Virginia nor the New Jersey race could be called a referendum on Obama, Democrats' loss was "humiliating" and "emphatically not in Obama's favor." Democrats with formerly Republican congressional seats who are up for reelection in 2010 ought to pay close attention, because many of their districts—located in the southern and border states, or the Ohio River Valley—have political conditions similar to Virginia. Overall, independents jumped ship from the Democratic Party, but rather than revealing a partisan verdict, the elections, particularly the Democrats' consolation prize in New York's 23rd House district "revealed a deeply aggrieved electorate" that is "ready to rough up incumbents of all varieties." The electorate's sea-change may have repercussions for current political debates—Obama could have a tougher time convincing moderate Democrats to support liberal priorities such as an expanded government role in health care.

source: the dailybeast.com

* US top diplomat says things would have been different if US had done a better job in Afghanistan against Qaeda

* Says job won’t be finished merely by clearing Swat, Waziristan

WASHINGTON: The US let Al Qaeda off the hook in Afghanistan in 2001 who then escaped into Pakistan, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conceded in an interview with FOX News aired late on Monday.

Clinton said she appreciated Islamabad’s campaign against the Taliban in South Waziristan but called for routing Al Qaeda.

Asked if the US was to blame for the surge in violence in Pakistan, Clinton said, “Clearly, Al Qaeda left Afghanistan. And we let them out. We should have taken them out when we had the chance back in 2001 and 2002. And they escaped into Pakistan.”

Better job: “If we had done a better job in Afghanistan and captured the people who had attacked us or killed them, we would be in a different position,’’ she added.

Clinton agreed that any US military strategy in Afghanistan “bleeds’’ into Pakistan. “When we first reviewed taking office, we concluded that you had to look at Afghanistan and Pakistan together and in light of the war on terror... and we are well aware that the stronger partnership we have with Pakistan, the stronger their efforts to root out terrorists in their own country, the better the situation will be” in Afghanistan.

Now that the Afghan presidential elections have been settled, the Obama administration must face what a Karzai victory means for its troop decision. General Stanley McChrystal's request for 44,000 more troops to Afghanistan in a strategy of broad counterterrorism is being met with caution by administration officials who doubt Karzai's ability to govern legitimately. Karzai's record is marred with corruption, and he has crossed administration officials in the past. U.S. leaders who fear that Karzai can't be trusted endorse a narrower counterinsurgency, one that focuses on al Qaeda and a reduced threat to American lives by maintaining the current troop levels. The Washington Post reports that "Biden and other Obama advisers believe the relationship that Bush developed with Karzai masked the Afghan leader's flaws and made it difficult to demand accountability."

source: thedailybeast.com

It has been calculated that Afghani farmers have collectively earned over $6 billion from poppy cultivation between 2002 and 2008. Afghan traffickers, on the other hand, have made almost $18 billion from opiate processing and trading within the country. Moreover, the combined global heroin and opium market is worth some $65 billion per year, and most of the remaining money is pocketed by criminal gangs operating beyond Afghanistan. As a consequence of this lucrative illicit trade, a lethal combination of drugs, crime and insurgency is now said to have infested the famous ancient Silk Route.

The political reality in the home countries of the troops fighting in the ‘marshes’ of Afghanistan and on the ground is very different. The Taliban insurgency is stronger and growing at a time when the popular support for the war is declining fast

Afghanistan is a dry country, but it seems that coalition forces are stuck in the mud and more they try to pull themselves up, more they sink in. A marsh is a more apt description of the situation because it reminds everyone of America’s Vietnam experience.

The Vietnam War is one of those uncomfortable truths that American society has lived with for almost a generation. The American establishment and the leaders at that time thought they had a global responsibility to defend the ‘free world’ and resist by all means the ‘evil’ forces of communism.

KABUL: Bomb attacks killed another eight American soldiers on Tuesday in southern Afghanistan, making October the deadliest month for US forces in their eight-year war against the Taliban.

The latest attacks, which were claimed by the Taliban, came the day after 14 US soldiers died in helicopter crashes, piling pressure on US President Barack Obama as he mulls sending tens of thousands more troops.

Seven of the soldiers were killed, along with an Afghan civilian, in one attack in the south of the country, said Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The eighth died in a separate attack in another part of the south, said ISAF without giving further details about the locations.