JCT: First, the bad news, we can't win. Second, the worse
news. Harper won't quit. During Karzai's visit, CTV-TV had
Eric Margolis to comment, not what they were expecting.

>West won't win Afghan war
>Sun, September 17, 2006
>By ERIC MARGOLIS Toronto Sun

JCT: Though Eric Margolis is as misinformed about money as
most everyone else, he sure speaks reality about politics:

EM: As Canadian, American and British soldiers continue to
die in Afghanistan, it is time the truth be told about this
ugly little war. Much of what we've so far been told by our
governments and media has been untrue, wishful thinking, or
crass jingoism.

JCT: Our government's been lying, exaggerating, wishing?

EM: The respected European think tank, Senlis Council, which
focuses on Afghanistan, just reported the Taliban is "taking
back Afghanistan" and now controls that nation's southern
half.

JCT: And Harper wants Canadians to stem the tide.

EM: According to Senlis, southern Afghanistan is suffering
"a humanitarian crisis of starvation and poverty. "U.S.
policies in Afghanistan have re-created the safe haven for
terrorism that the 2001 invasion aimed to destroy," Senlis
found. Claims that withdrawing Western garrisons from
Afghanistan or Iraq will leave a void certain to be filled
by extremists are nonsense. Half of Afghanistan and a third
of Iraq are already largely controlled by anti-Western
resistance forces. Were it not for omnipotent U.S. airpower,
American and NATO forces would be quickly driven from the
area.

Last week, Canadian and British commanders boasted they were
about to annihilate Taliban forces "surrounded" around
Panjwai and Zahri.

JCT: Our Public Relations Forces on attack.

EM: They crowed about already killing an "estimated 500
Taliban." After a storm of bombing and shelling, British and
Canadian commanders admitted "we were surprised the enemy
had fled." Surprised? "Good Morning, Afghanistan!" Doesn't
anyone remember the Vietnam War's fruitless search-and-
destroy missions and inflated body counts? Don't NATO
commanders know their every move is telegraphed in advance
to Taliban forces? Did Canadian officers making such
fanciful claims really believe the Taliban's veteran
guerillas would be stupid enough to sit still and be
destroyed by U.S. air power?

JCT: Evidently, they must be that stupid.

EM: U.S., British and Canadian politicians say they are
surprised by intensifying Taliban resistance. They have only
their own ignorance to blame. Attacking Pashtuns, renowned
for xenophobia, warlike spirits, and love of independence,
is a fool's mission. Pashtuns are Afghanistan's ethnic
majority; long-term national stability is impossible without
their co-operation.

What the West calls "Taliban" is actually a growing
coalition of veteran Taliban fighters led by Mullah
Dadullah, other clans of Pashtun tribal warriors, and
nationalist resistance forces under Jalalladin Hakkani and
former prime minister Gulbadin Hekmatyar. Many are former
mujahadeen once hailed as "freedom fighters" by the West,
and branded "terrorists" by the Soviets.

The UN's anti-narcotic agency reports narco-state
Afghanistan now supplies 92% of the world's heroin.
Production surged 20% last year alone. Who is responsible?
The U.S. and NATO. Washington, Ottawa and London can't keep
pretending this is someone else's problem. Drug money fuels
the Afghan economy and keeps local warlords loyal to the
U.S.-installed Kabul regime.

JCT: Should have mentioned how the Taliban had almost
eradicated the cultivation of poppies before the CIA stepped
in and saved their most important Black Ops crop.

EM: Russian influence
Afghanistan's north has become a sphere of influence of
Russia and its local allies, the Uzbek-Tajik Northern
Alliance (led by notorious war criminals and leaders of the
old Afghan Communist Party). The U.S. and its allies are not
going to win the Afghan war. They will be lucky, the way
things are going, not to lose it in the same humiliating
manner the Soviets did in 1989.

JCT: More humiliating. Their mission was right next door,
we're half a world away.

EM: Ottawa's deepening involvement in a conflict in which it
lacks any national interests - save pleasing Washington and
selling lumber - jeopardizes Canada's security. Western
troops are not fighting "terrorism" in Afghanistan, as Prime
Minister Stephen Harper claims. They are fighting the Afghan
people. Every new civilian killed, and every village bombed,
breeds new enemies for the West.

JCT: The very same thing I've been saying except I add that
these new enemies are innocent of doing 911. Everyone wants
to forget that major inconvenient fact. For those of us who
don't believe charcoal can melt you barbeque nor 2
planeloads of aviation fuel melting 3 steel buildings.
---

>A proposal to win the heart of Afghanistan
>By Gwynne Dyer/ Syndicated Columnist
>Sunday, September 17, 2006

JCT: Gwynne Dyer is the second good analyst:

GD: Most people in Afghanistan are farmers. If Hamid
Karzai's Western-backed government in Kabul is to survive,
it must have their support.

JCT: If the puppet government is to survive, it must have
the support of the Taliban farmers.

GD: So not destroying their main cash crop should be an
obvious priority for Karzai's foreign supporters. But what
the hell, let's go burn some poppies.

JCT: And yet, the Taliban had almost eradicated poppy
cultivation and the CIA used Nato forces to start their
drug-running operations up again. People forget quickly that
the Taliban almost had the job done.

GD: "We need to realize that we could actually fail here,"
said Lieutenant General David Richards, British commander of
Nato forces in Afghanistan, last week.

JCT: After 5 years, he's starting to figure it out.

GD: In south-western Afghanistan, where 7,000 British,
Canadian and Dutch troops were committed during the summer
to contain a resurgent Taliban, the guerillas now actually
stand and fight, even against NATO's overwhelming firepower
and air power, and everything that moves on the roads gets
ambushed.

JCT: Sounds like Viet Nam in the end days before the
Amerikans left the battlefield with their tails between
their legs. I hope Canadians prove just as adept at getting
their asses out of harm's way.

GD: The combat in Afghanistan is more severe and sustained
than anything seen in Iraq, for the Taliban fight in
organized units with good light infantry weapons. In the
past month, Britain and Canada have lost about half as many
soldiers killed in Afghanistan as the U.S. lost in Iraq in
the same time, out of a combat force perhaps one-tenth as
big.

JCT: Is Parliament ever sending our patsies to easy deaths
in this mountainous quagmire.

GD: Concern in Europe about Western casualties in
Afghanistan is already so great that none of the NATO
countries was willing to commit more troops to the fighting
when their defense chiefs met in Belgium on September 13,
despite an urgent appeal from General Richards for 2,500
more combat troops. Most of them just don't believe that a
few thousand more troops will save the situation in
Afghanistan.

JCT: 40 million Pashtuns shouldn't be that hard to control
with US mastery of the skies. As always, our side can
slaughter thousands of civilians from the skies. They can
never oust our superior air forces. All they can do is get
our inferior ground forces.

GD: To limit their casualties, the British have already
abandoned their original "section-house" strategy of
spreading troops through the villages of the southwest in
small groups that would provide security and help with
reconstruction.

JCT: Har, har, har, har. Spreading them out among the
natives who are the Taliban.

GD: They were just too vulnerable, so they have been pulled
back to bigger base camps and replaced by Afghan police (who
will make deals with the local Taliban forces to save their
lives.)

JCT: Sounds like the invaders are being surrounded by the
"terrorist" natives.

GD:The rapid collapse of the Taliban government in the face
of America's air power and its locally purchased allies in
late 2001 created a wholly misleading impression that the
question of who controls the country had been settled.

JCT: The guerrillas melted into the mountains so the
invaders would think they had been beaten. In Poker, it's
called slow-playing or bush-whacking your opponent.

GD: Afghanistan has always been an easy country to invade
but a hard country to occupy. Resistance to foreign
intervention takes time to build up, but the Afghans
defeated British occupations (twice) and a Soviet occupation
when those empires were at the height of their power, and
they are well on the way to doing it again.

JCT: I wonder if the British bookies are taking action
whether we keep Karzai's quislings in power or whether the
Taliban Pashtuns manage to copy Viet Nam's victory over the
American-led invaders. Keep in mind, Parliament made Canada
the patsy supporting the lying U.S. invaders.

GD: Perhaps if the U.S. and its allies had smothered the
country in troops and drowned it in aid at the outset, the
rapid increase in security and prosperity would have created
a solid base of support for the government they installed
under President Karzai.

JCT: I doubt they would have ever accepted the Karzai U.S.-
installed government. Would anyone settle for being ruled by
a U.S.-installed government of our own?

GD: But most of the available troops were sent off to invade
Iraq instead, and most of the money went to American
contractors in Iraq, not American contractors in Afghanistan
(though little of it reached the local people in either
case).

JCT: But they suckered Canadian pasties into trying to hold
on to the illegal gained territory with a lie we were
chasing the guys who did 911. Then we found out Bin Laden
was probably still working for the CIA because only Bush
could have diverted the U.S. Air Force to permit 4 planes to
freely roam the U.S. skies for hours. Only a U.S. Government
operation could have diverted the Air Force. So chasing Al-
CIA-Duh to foreign lands at the bidding of Bush makes Canada
the patsies ruining all the peace-keeping goodwill we'd
earned with just one ill-advised war-making mission.

GD: The various warlords who allied themselves with the
United States are the real power in most of Afghanistan, and
in the traditional opium-producing areas in the south they
have encouraged a return to poppy-farming (which had been
almost eradicated under the Taliban) in order to get some
cash flow.

JCT: The various warlords allied with the United States are
the real opium-producing power and the Taliban were the real
opium-fighting power. The CIA's opium warlords vs. Taliban.
Taliban vs. Karzai's CIA opium warlords.

GD: Poor farmers struggling under staggering loads of debt

JCT: Always the usurers at the base of all strife which is
why UNILETS heralds the dawn of a new age.

GD: were happy to cooperate, and by now Afghanistan is
producing about 90 percent of the world's opium, the raw
material for heroin. That's the price you pay for disrupting
the established order, and the U.S. should just have paid
it. There's no real point in destroying poppies in
Afghanistan, because they'll just get planted elsewhere: so
long as heroin is illegal, the price will be high enough
that people somewhere will grow it. Even if it is
ideologically impossible for the United States to end its
foolish, unwinnable "war on drugs," it should have turned a
blind eye in Afghanistan.

JCT: Sounds like the insanity of the drug-war-makers extends
to the insanity of the real-war-makes.

GD: But it didn't. For the past five years a shadowy outfit
called DynCorps has been destroying the poppy-fields of
southern Afghanistan's poorest farmers with U.S. and British
military support.

JCT: Knocking out the competition to the CIA war-lord opium
producers. Getting the British and Canadian patsies to knock
out the competition is brilliant poppy-marketing.

GD: This was an opportunity the Taliban could not resist,
and the alliance between Taliban fighters and poppy-farmers
(now often the same people) is at the root of the resurgent
guerrilla war in the south.

JCT: For the poppy forces to be joining the anti-poppy
forces would indicate they won't keep growing poppies if
they defeat the Karzai CIA pro-opium government.

GD: It begins to smell like the last year or two in a
classic anti-colonial war, when the guerillas start winning
and local players begin to hedge their bets.

JCT: Sure does. Just like Viet Nam except it's Canadian kids
who will be doing the dying. Pretty neat for the Amerikan
invaders to get the Canadian patsies to take the fall, to
take the dying.

GD: After taking heavy casualties, Pakistan has agreed with
the tribes of Waziristan to withdraw its troops from the
lawless province, giving the Taliban a secure base on
Afghanistan's border.

JCT: The legitimate government that was originally ousted is
back in control. Remember that this legitimate government
was only ousted because we were told they helped do 911, now
known to be a Bush lie. Believed by our patsy Parliament.
Still. By some.

GD: Karzai, seeking allies who will help him survive the
eventual pull-out of Western troops, is appointing
gangsters and drug-runners as local police chiefs and
commanders.

JCT: Who else is ready to help Karzai oppose the legitimate
government that is resurging but his drug-runners and
gangsters? Quisling Karzai crooked crew are being run out of
town. And Canadian patsies are acting as his body-guards.

GD:The end-game has started, and the foreigners seem bound
to lose.

JCT: The invaders never had a chance to win. If the Russians
couldn't beat them being supplied from the other side of the
border, there's no way Canadians are going to beat them
being supplied from the other side of the world.

GD:Only one chance remains for them. The futile "war on
drugs" will drag on endlessly elsewhere, but if they
legalized the cultivation of opium poppies in Afghanistan --
and bought the entire crop at premium prices -- they might
just break the link between the Taliban and the farmers.

JCT: Buying all their crops will make the U.S.-installed
Karzai government so attractive as to break the links to
their legitimate government? Sounds like Gwynne thinks they,
like most in the West, would forsake honor for money.
Somehow, I don't they're a buyable people.

GD: Store it, burn it, whatever, but stop destroying the
farmers' livelihoods and put a few billion dollars directly
into their pockets.

JCT: It's only knocking out competition from the small opium
farmers to the advantage of Karzai's CIA-supported big ones.

GD: Otherwise, the first Afghan cities will probably start
to fall into Taliban hands within the next year to 18
months.

JCT: But Canada's sending more kids and some Leopard tanks.
Could push it to 19 months. There was a great cartoon in the
Ottawa Citizen Sep 14 by CAM with one native Afghan
reading from his paper out loud: Oh, no! Canada is sending
up to 15 Leopard tanks... What are we going to do now?"
"Relax, we'll just put them next to our collection of Soviet
tanks" overlooking a Soviet tank cemetery. Sending our kids
into mountain warfare in tanks seems incredibly stupid,
doesn't it?

But Karzai just got a pledge out of our Prime Minister to
stay the course supporting his drug-running puppet
government.



--
Abolitionist Slave Leader John C."The Banking Systems Engineer" Turmel
for UNILETS interest-free time-based currency in U.N. resolution C6
to Governments in the http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration.htm
http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel 519-753-0645 USENET: can.politics