From Tom Dispatch
By Anand Gopal

A bit past midnight on a balmy night in late August, Hedayatullah awoke to a deafening blast. He stumbled out of bed and heard angry voices drawing closer. Suddenly, his bedroom doors banged open and dozens of silhouetted figures burst in, some shouting in a strange language.

The intruders blindfolded Hedayatullah and, screaming with fury, forced him to the ground. An Afghan voice told him not to move or speak, or he would be killed. He listened for sounds from the next room, where his brother Noorullah slept with his family. He could hear his nephew, eight months old, crying hysterically. Then came the sound of an automatic rifle, after which his nephew fell silent.

The rest of the family — 18 people in all, including aunts, uncles, and cousins — was herded outside into the darkness. The Afghan voice explained to Hedayatullah’s terrified mother, “We are the Afghan National Army, here to accompany the American military. The Americans have killed one of your sons and his two children. They also shot his wife and they’re taking her to the hospital.”

“Why?” Hedayatullah’s mother stammered.

“There is no why,” the soldier replied. When she heard this, she started screaming, slamming her fists into her chest in anguish. The Afghan soldiers left her and loaded Hedayatullah and his cousin into the back of a military van, after which they drove off with an American convoy into the black of night.

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From The Washington Post
By Dan Froomkin

With less than four months left in their tenure, White House aides are scrambling to come up with some sort of winning strategy for Afghanistan, the long-eclipsed war that’s looking increasingly like another major debacle for President Bush’s legacy.

There’s no question Afghanistan demands a new approach. Experts have been saying that for months if not years. But the White House’s new sense of urgency may have more to do with trying to insulate Bush from history’s verdict that he let Afghanistan slip through his fingers.

Karen DeYoung writes in The Washington Post: “The White House has launched an urgent review of Afghanistan policy, fast-tracked for completion in the next several weeks, amid growing concern that the administration lacks a comprehensive strategy for the foundering war there and as intelligence officials warn of a rapidly worsening situation on the ground.

“Underlying the deliberations is a nearly completed National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan and the Pakistan-based extremists fighting there. Analysts have concluded that reconstituted elements of al-Qaeda and the resurgent Taliban are collaborating with an expanding network of militant groups, making the counterinsurgency war infinitely more complicated.

Read more Bush Failure

From The Black Agenda Report
By Margaret Kimberley

In the past two weeks the Democratic majorities in the Senate and House worked hand in hand with Republicans to dole out $700 billion to the financial services industry that has brought the United States and the world to ruin. The bailout of Wall Street has been on the tip of every tongue, the subject of numerous editorials and the issue by which the two major party presidential candidates are being judged. Almost nothing has been said about the bill signed by President Bush which authorizes $611 billion in military spending.

Without debate, or mention in the corporate media, congress passed a military spending authorization that is nearly as large as the much talked about financial services bail out bill. The defense bill is every bit as wasteful and just as much a harbinger of doom as the much discussed Wall Street bailout, but has elicited hardly any debate, even from progressives. The damage that military spending does both to the federal budget and to the overall economy is just as bad as that of the “cash for trash” scheme cooked up by Treasury Secretary Paulson.

The American military budget is larger than the military budgets of the rest of the world combined. That spending does nothing to improve this nation’s economy and in fact puts it firmly on the road to bankruptcy.

There is rarely any debate in either party regarding the need for additional bases overseas (there are currently 700), new weapons systems or plans for future wars. The public who rose up in righteous anger over efforts to privatize Social Security or to reward Paulson and friends say nothing about their tax dollars going down a black hole of spending for helicopters, aircraft carriers and new weapons systems that make them poorer and don’t keep them any safer.

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From The Seattle PI
By Patrick Cockburn

The first serious talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban took place 10 days ago in Mecca under the auspices of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. During the discussions all sides agreed that the war in Afghanistan is going to be solved by dialogue and not by fighting. The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, was not present but his representatives said he was no longer allied to al-Qaida.

The admission by a senior British Army commander, Mark Carleton-Smith, over the weekend that absolute military victory in Afghanistan is impossible has been overtaken by the talks in Mecca. “If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that is precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this,” said Carleton-Smith. “That shouldn’t make people uncomfortable.”

This sounds as if Britain’s latest military venture in Afghanistan is going to end in a retreat with none of its ill-defined objectives achieved. In the U.S., an understanding of the real situation on the ground has been slower to come. John McCain and Barack Obama still speak as if a few more brigades of American soldiers sent to chase the Taliban around the mountains of southern Afghanistan would change the outcome of the war.

U.S. policy in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has been constantly denigrated as a recipe for self-inflicted disaster. But President Bush’s policy in Afghanistan in the wake of the fall of the Taliban was just as catastrophically misconceived. In both countries, the administration’s agenda was primarily geared to using military victory to make sure that the Republicans won elections at home.

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From The Boston Globe
Editorial

The next President will inherit a daunting set of national security problems. Captivated at the start by an illusory belief that the United States could, and should, impose its will on the world’s bad actors by shock and awe, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld drove the world’s sole surviving superpower into a diplomatic, strategic, and fiscal ditch.

On the last lap of the Bush administration, there has been one tonic voice of reason, which the next administration would do well to heed. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a former CIA director and president of Texas A&M, has labored to undo the damage done by his predecessor.

Gates has been realistic about what military force can and cannot achieve. He has astonished jaded observers of bureacratic turf battles by calling for increased funding for the State Department, traditionally the funding rival of Defense. He did so because he grasps the interrelatedness of diplomacy and force.

He has called for regional cooperation to foster reconciliation and stability in Iraq. And he has argued in public, as in private, for diplomatic means of dissuading Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

Above all, Gates has used his authority as defense secretary to change course at the Pentagon: to prepare for the missions the uniformed military is likely to confront in the future, rather than the conventional state-against-state conflicts that have for too long shaped the Pentagon’s procurement policies. This remedial aim was at the core of a sage and pointed speech he delivered Monday to military officers at the National Defense University in Washington.

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From uExpress
By Ted Rall

Credit has dried up. The stock market is disintegrating. Unless someone pours money into capital markets, everyone agrees, we could wind up like people in Baghdad, fondly remembering the day five years ago when they pushed the handle and their toilets still flushed. Only one “someone” has enough cash to fix the problem: the U.S. government.

The Bush Administration and Congressional Democrats want taxpayers to pay $700 billion to bail out failing banks. Progressives would prefer to bail out homeowners facing the imminent foreclosure of their homes, as well as those in danger of being foreclosed upon during 2009, at a cost of $1.3 trillion.

Never mind which approach is better. Where will the government find the money?

There are two elephants in the room: war and Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. We can’t afford either. Yet, to abuse the animal metaphor, everyone acts like they’re sacred cows.

When you think about it, it’s sheer madness. The city marshal is at the door, brandishing a shotgun, ready to evict you and your family for nonpayment of rent. But while your kids are screaming in terror, you’re at the computer, wasting thousands on online gambling. You could pay off your landlord instead. You could make the marshal go away. All you have to do is stop. But you keep on keeping on. Click, click. More money squandered.

What the hell is wrong with you? What the hell is wrong with us?

In 2007 the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the final cost of our biggest national compulsion, the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, could total $2.4 trillion, or $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country. That’s twice as much as the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf Wars combined. It’s also two-thirds the cost of World War II. Yet no one–not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the media, not even the left–insists that we get out.

Read more Mad Money

From The Washington Post
By David Ignatius

If there was one foreign policy issue on which Barack Obama and John McCain agreed during Friday night’s debate, it was that the United States should send more troops to Afghanistan. The bipartisan enthusiasm for this surge is so strong that there has been relatively little discussion of whether this strategy makes sense.

So here’s a skeptical look at the issue, drawn from conversations during a visit to Afghanistan this month with Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Rather than more troops, the real game-changer in Afghanistan may be Gates’s plan to spend an extra $1.3 billion on surveillance technology to find and destroy the leadership of the insurgency.

The case for more troops was made forcefully by the new U.S. commander, Gen. David McKiernan. He said in a briefing in Kabul that to cope with rising violence, he needs three more combat brigades, in addition to the extra brigade already promised for early next year. That could add at least 15,000 troops to the current force of about 35,000. Other senior officers made similar pitches in briefings at Bagram and Jalalabad.

But the commanders’ description of the enemy that these troops will be fighting was fuzzy. The adversary isn’t al-Qaeda; it’s not even the Taliban. It’s what McKiernan called a “nexus of insurgency” and what other officers described as a “syndicate” of insurgents and criminal groups. It’s not clear that this nexus, or syndicate, or whatever you want to call it, poses a mortal threat to the United States — or even, necessarily, to the government of Afghanistan.

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From The Raw Story
By John Byrne

A secret US intelligence report which says the political and military situation in Afghanistan is “grim” will be withheld from the public until after the election, a new report says.

Intelligence officials are finishing up the National Intelligence Estimate on Aghanistan, according to ABC’s Brian Ross, “but there are ‘no plans to declassify’ any of it before the election,” an official said.

Keeping the intelligence report under wraps would likely help Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). McCain has focused on what he sees as the success of the Iraq “surge,” in which the US added troops to lessen violence. Attention to problems in Afghanistan would put the spotlight on President Bush’s failures, which might rub off on the Republican presidential nominee.

“According to people who have been briefed, the NIE will paint a ‘grim’ picture of the situation in Afghanistan, seven years after the US invaded in an effort to dismantle the al Qaeda network and its Taliban protectors,” Ross writes.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen told Congress last week the US is struggling to retain control.

“I’m not convinced we’re winning it in Afghanistan,” he said, adding, “we’re running out of time.”

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From The Independent UK
By Robert Fisk

Poor old Algerians. They are being served the same old pap from their cruel government. In 1997, the Pouvoir announced a “final victory” over their vicious Islamist enemies. On at least three occasions, I reported – not, of course, without appropriate cynicism – that the Algerian authorities believed their enemies were finally beaten because the “terrorists” were so desperate that they were beheading every man, woman and child in the villages they captured in the mountains around Algiers and Oran.

And now they’re at it again. After a ferocious resurgence of car bombing by their newly merged “al-Qa’ida in the Maghreb” antagonists, the decrepit old FLN government in Algiers has announced the “terminal phase” in its battle against armed Islamists. As the Algerian journalist Hocine Belaffoufi said with consummate wit the other day, “According to this political discourse … the increase in attacks represents undeniable proof of the defeat of terrorism. The more terrorism collapsed, the more the attacks increased … so the stronger (terrorism) becomes, the fewer attacks there will be.”

We, of course, have been peddling this crackpot nonsense for years in south-west Asia. First of all, back in 2001, we won the war in Afghanistan by overthrowing the Taliban. Then we marched off to win the war in Iraq. Now – with at least one suicide bombing a day and the nation carved up into mutually antagonistic sectarian enclaves – we have won the war in Iraq and are heading back to re-win the war in Afghanistan where the Taliban, so thoroughly trounced by our chaps seven years ago, have proved their moral and political bankruptcy by recapturing half the country.

It seems an age since Donald “Stuff Happens” Rumsfeld declared,”A government has been put in place (in Afghanistan), and the Islamists are no more the law in Kabul. Of course, from time to time a hand grenade, a mortar explodes – but in New York and in San Francisco, victims also fall. As for me, I’m full of hope.” Oddly, back in the Eighties, I heard exactly the same from a Soviet general at the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan – yes, the very same Bagram airbase where the CIA lads tortured to death a few of the Afghans who escaped the earlier Russian massacres. Only “terrorist remnants” remained in the Afghan mountains, the jolly Russian general assured us. Afghan troops, along with the limited Soviet “intervention” forces, were restoring peace to democratic Afghanistan.

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From Tom Dispatch
By Tariq Ali

The decision to make public a presidential order of last July authorizing American strikes inside Pakistan without seeking the approval of the Pakistani government ends a long debate within, and on the periphery of, the Bush administration. Senator Barack Obama, aware of this ongoing debate during his own long battle with Hillary Clinton, tried to outflank her by supporting a policy of U.S. strikes into Pakistan. Senator John McCain and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin have now echoed this view and so it has become, by consensus, official U.S. policy.

Its effects on Pakistan could be catastrophic, creating a severe crisis within the army and in the country at large. The overwhelming majority of Pakistanis are opposed to the U.S. presence in the region, viewing it as the most serious threat to peace.

Why, then, has the U.S. decided to destabilize a crucial ally? Within Pakistan, some analysts argue that this is a carefully coordinated move to weaken the Pakistani state yet further by creating a crisis that extends way beyond the badlands on the frontier with Afghanistan. Its ultimate aim, they claim, would be the extraction of the Pakistani military’s nuclear fangs. If this were the case, it would imply that Washington was indeed determined to break up the Pakistani state, since the country would very simply not survive a disaster on that scale.

In my view, however, the expansion of the war relates far more to the Bush administration’s disastrous occupation in Afghanistan. It is hardly a secret that the regime of President Hamid Karzai is becoming more isolated with each passing day, as Taliban guerrillas move ever closer to Kabul.

When in doubt, escalate the war is an old imperial motto. The strikes against Pakistan represent — like the decisions of President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to bomb and then invade Cambodia (acts that, in the end, empowered Pol Pot and his monsters) — a desperate bid to salvage a war that was never good, but has now gone badly wrong.

Read more Pakistan