Afghanistan Geological Survey | "In Afghanistan rare metals (lithium, caesium, tantalum and niobium) occur in three main deposit types: pegmatites, mineralised springs and playa-lake sediments" "Globally, rare metals are produced from deposits in these three settings, chiefly in Chile, Argentina, the USA and Turkey. ..
Lithium has many uses, for example in batteries, in the glass and ceramics industry, and in high performance alloys for aircraft. Most tantalum is used to produce capacitors that are used in laptop computers, mobile phones and digital cameras. Niobium is primarily used in specialist steels although it also shares some uses with tantalum since it has almost identical chemical properties.
Conclusions and potential
Afghanistan has considerable resources of rare metals in pegmatites, mineralised springs and lake-sediment salts. No systematic modern exploration has been carried out since the withdrawal of Soviet forces and many of the known localities warrant further investigation and exploration based on modern mineral deposit models and techniques." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In the unlikely - though possible event - that there was any confusion concerning why I deemed this article post-worthy
China mines over 95pc of the world’s rare earth minerals, mostly in Inner Mongolia. The move to hoard reserves is the clearest sign to date that the global struggle for diminishing resources is shifting into a new phase. Countries may find it hard to obtain key materials at any price.
Asia Times | It seems almost inevitable that Moscow and Tehran will join hands. In all likelihood, they may have already begun doing so. The Central Asian countries and China and India will also be closely watching the dynamics of this grim power struggle. They are interested parties insofar as they may have to suffer the collateral damage of the great game in Afghanistan. The US's "war on terror" in Afghanistan has already destabilized Pakistan. The debris threatens to fall on India, too.
Most certainly, the terrorist attack on Mumbai last month cannot be seen in isolation from the militancy radiating from the Afghan war. Even as the high-level Russian-Indian Working Group on terrorism met in Delhi on Tuesday and Wednesday, another top diplomat dealing with the Afghan problem arrived in the Indian capital for consultations - Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Mahdi Akhounjadeh.
Speaking in Moscow on Tuesday, chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, General Nikolai Makarov, just about lifted the veil on the geopolitics of the Afghan war to let the world know that the Bush administration was having one last fling at the great game in Central Asia. Makarov couldn't have spoken without Kremlin clearance. Moscow seems to be flagging its frustration to Obama's camp. Makarov revealed Moscow had information to the effect that the US was pushing for new military bases in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Coincidence or not, a spate of reports has begun appearing that Russia is about to transfer the S-300 missile defense system to Iran. S-300 is one of the most advanced surface-to-air missile systems capable of intercepting 100 ballistic missiles or aircraft at once, at low and high altitudes within a range of over 150 kilometers. As long-time Pentagon advisor Dan Goure put it, "If Tehran obtained the S-300, it would be a game-changer in military thinking for tackling Iran. This is a system that scares every Western air force."
It is hard to tell exactly what is going on, but Russia and Iran seem to be bracing for a countermove in the event of the Obama administration pressing ahead with the present US policy to isolate them or cut them out from their "near abroad".
BBCNews | "The malnutrition problem in Afghanistan, and especially Parwan province, is very bad. That's because of the years of fighting, the damage to our infrastructure and rising unemployment.
"It's all helped to make things worse," he said.
Deep discontent The statistics bear him out: officially, unemployment is about 40%, though it is probably far higher than that; of those who do have a job in Parwan, 45% earn less than $1 a day; chronic malnutrition for children under five across Afghanistan is 54%.
And perhaps most surprising of all, on a UN scale of human development indicators, Afghanistan has slipped from 117th in the world, to 181st - second from the bottom - since the Taliban were ousted.
Professor Sayed Massood, an economist from Kabul University, believes that backsliding is responsible for much of the deep discontent with the government, and growing support for the insurgency. Vegetables for sale at a market Even farm workers are suffering from malnutrition
He blames the crisis of public confidence on the policy of pouring billions of dollars in development aid into regions where the insurgency is strongest.
"Instead of the benefits [of aid] going to friends, they are going to enemies. We needed to spend money in the places where the people believe in democracy and work for the government.
"But instead only the enemies are getting rich," he said.
"We need to set examples of peaceful provinces that are also prosperous, but that's just not happening."
Prof Massood argues that the international community has adopted an aid policy that has been entirely counter-productive.
"They have politicised aid; they have tried to use their money to bring about political change in the frontline provinces - they have tried to bribe their enemies.
"But they don't understand that it works the other way around. If you improve the economics of the people, the politics will follow. If you don't, you will lose them."
That might explain why the insurgency appears to be spreading to parts of the country that until now have been relatively peaceful.
The stakes could not be higher: With a rapidly increasing population of more than 150 million -- larger than that of Russia -- Pakistan is also the world's only Muslim nuclear power. But since the fall of President Pervez Musharraf earlier this year, the bitter regional, social and religious disputes that have been building for decades have exploded in public. The current government of pro-American President Asif Ali Zardari is struggling to maintain any effective presence at all in the vast North-West Frontier Province, which covers one-quarter of the country.
If the government in Islamabad goes bankrupt, then the extreme Islamist forces spearheaded by the Taliban of Afghanistan, who already enjoy broad support among the Pashtun tribes of the NWFP, will have a far greater chance to turn the great cities of Pakistan, especially giant Karachi, into chaos.
As American military analyst and UPI columnist William S. Lind has warned, Fourth Generation war -- 4GW -- non-state forces like al-Qaida benefit from undermining the structures of established states and can metastasize rapidly if a state structure collapses, especially in a vast nation like Pakistan.
The Taliban and their fellow Islamists, aided by al-Qaida, already have stepped up their guerrilla operations against the Pakistani army and police.
Also, if Zardari fell, the impact on Pakistan's relations with the United States and on Washington's ability to effectively prosecute the war on terror could be dire. Currently, U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan -- around 50,000 in number overall -- are supplied by air along transport corridors over Pakistani territory. If a future Pakistani government should close those corridors, the already embattled U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan would find their situation deteriorating rapidly.
Pakistan's leaders are also understandably reluctant to put their political future and their country's fate in the hands of the International Monetary Fund, for they realize that IMF aid is usually tied to draconian conditions requiring the slashing of government spending. In a country like Pakistan, that means cutting social programs to support the poor, including subsidizing food prices.
tomdispatch | Then came the attack of September 11th. Like the starting
gun of a race that no one knew he was to run, this explosion set the
pack of nations off in a single direction -- toward the trenches.
Although the attack was unaccompanied by any claim of authorship or
statement of political goals, the evidence almost immediately pointed to
al-Qaeda, the radical Islamist, terrorist network, which, though
stateless, was headquartered in Afghanistan and enjoyed the protection
of its fundamentalist Islamic government. In a tape that was soon shown
around the world, the group’s leader, Osama bin Laden, was seen at
dinner with his confederates in Afghanistan, rejoicing in the slaughter.
Historically, nations have responded to terrorist threats and attacks
with a combination of police action and political negotiation, while
military action has played only a minor role. Voices were raised in the
United States calling for a global cooperative effort of this kind to
combat al-Qaeda. President Bush opted instead for a policy that the
United States alone among nations could have conceivably undertaken:
global military action not only against al-Qaeda but against any regime
in the world that supported international terrorism.
The president announced to Congress that he would "make no
distinction between the terrorists who commit these acts and those who
harbor them." By calling the campaign a "war," the administration
summoned into action the immense, technically revolutionized, post-Cold
War American military machine, which had lacked any clear enemy for over
a decade. And by identifying the target as generic "terrorism," rather
than as al-Qaeda or any other group or list of groups, the
administration licensed military operations anywhere in the world.
In the ensuing months, the Bush administration continued to expand
the aims and means of the war. The overthrow of governments -- "regime
change" -- was established as a means for advancing the new policies.
The president divided regimes into two categories -- those "with us" and
those "against us." Vice President Cheney estimated that al-Qaeda was
active in 60 countries. The first regime to be targeted was of course
al-Qaeda’s host, the government of Afghanistan, which was overthrown in a
remarkably swift military operation conducted almost entirely from the
air and without American casualties.
Next, the administration proclaimed an additional war goal --
preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In his
State of the Union speech in January 2002, the president announced that
"the United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous
regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons." He
went on to name as an "axis of evil" Iraq, Iran, and North Korea --
three regimes seeking to build or already possessing weapons of mass
destruction. To stop them, he stated, the Cold War policy of deterrence
would not be enough -- "preemptive" military action would be required,
and preemption, the administration soon specified, could include the use
of nuclear weapons.
Beginning in the summer of 2002, the government intensified its
preparations for a war to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein in
Iraq, and in the fall, the president demanded and received a resolution
from the Security Council of the United Nations requiring Iraq to accept
the return of U.N. inspectors to search for weapons of mass destruction
or facilities for building them. Lists of other candidates for "regime
change" began to surface in the press.
The generals always knew that the public
admission of failure would not simply throw 20 years of graft and deceit
into sharp relief; such an admission would expose the four stars
themselves to serious scrutiny. To explain the rapid collapse of the
U.S.-backed Afghan state and the inexcusable waste of American blood and
treasure, the American people would discover the long process of moral
and professional decline in the senior ranks of the Army and the
Marines, their outdated doctrine, thinking, and organization for combat.
For the generals it was always better to preserve the façade in Kabul,
propping up the illusion of strength, than face the truth.
It was as if the Afghanistan debacle had finally ripped
the last scab off the military’s role in the failed enterprise. Suddenly
the superstar warrior/monk generals for whom the mainstream media had
written endless paeans, before which members of Congress had bowed and
scraped, were under the garish light of delayed circumspection.
As a result, there is plenty of talk about what went wrong
and what shape the military is in for the future. And certainly just
focusing on “the generals” would be shortsighted. This is about the
institution — for which America’s trust is actually plummeting.
So can the military really afford not to take stock of the cultural,
institutional — and yes, political — changes that have swept over it in
the last 20 years or more?
“My major concern is military effectiveness,” says (Ret.) Marine Corps. Capt. Dan Grazier, who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan in a tank battalion and is now a
military analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, “that in the
rare event where the military does need to be deployed that we can be
the most effective, lethal force possible when the situation calls for
it.”
After interviews with several infantry veterans who served in the post-9/11 wars, The American Spectator picked
up on a familiar theme as the main obstacle for rebuilding the forces
and the faith: leadership corrupted by careerism and influenced by
outside interests that don’t always coincide with the interests of the
national defense.
The forces aren’t healthy: whose fault?
To Grazier’s mind, after 20 years of
constant deployments the military is “going to naturally decay.” It’s
impossible to sustain systems on a tempo of that measure without
undergoing entropy. According to the most recent RAND Corporation study on deployments, 2.7 million
service members have served in 5.4 million deployments across the globe
since 2001. The National Guard and reserves account for about 35
percent of the total (as of 2015). In fact, thanks to COVID, wildfires, border patrol, and the extra security put on the nation’s capital in January, the Guard was used in 2020
more than any time since World War II. Missions peaked in June when
more than 120,000 of its 450,000 members were on duty here or abroad.
Gil Barndollar,
who served in Afghanistan with the Marines and is now a fellow with
Defense Priorities, says retention will be a concern. These “citizen
soldiers” have “become an operational reserve, not the strategic reserve they were originally intended to be,” he told the Spectator. “Manpower is a rollercoaster, the effects on recruiting and retention always have a lag after events and policy decisions.”
He laments that the Guard, of which he is currently a member, has been used to augment the active duty force so that it can maintain what has become protracted, unending overseas conflicts, often using resources and equipment that are needed stateside, particularly helicopters necessary to fight wildfires in western states.
“It hasn’t been just a long year, it’s been a long 20
years,” Army Maj. Gen. Bret Daugherty, commander of the Washington state
Guard, said back in January.
“I just want to focus on that. We’re all consumed with our domestic
operations right now, but it is simultaneous with our overseas
deployments, which have not let up one iota.”
Unfortunately, instead of pouring resources and energy
into maintaining readiness, much of Washington’s zeal today is about
throwing money at shiny new objects: big-ticket weapons systems, ships,
and aircraft that either take years to build, become obsolete, or don’t
work. A boon to the Beltway defense lobby, not so much for the fighting
forces.
“The military has gotten into a lot of bad habits over the
last 20 years. If you look at the amount of money that was thrown at
the Pentagon, it’s created a lack of discipline,” Grazier charges.
“After 9/11 the floodgates were opened wide. That played to the worst
tendencies of the military industrial congressional complex.”
It is an axiom of history that no government put in place by foreign troops, or needing to be maintained in place by them against internal opposition, can be considered a legitimate government.
The Taliban in Afghanistan are not the Russian army, overrunning Afghanistan with tanks and helicopters, or an invading British colonial army. If they were, the problem would be simple. They are Afghans, members of the 40-million strong Pathan (or Pushtoon) people, who make up the largest part of the Afghan population. If other Pathans, inside Afghanistan, who are not religious fundamentalists, and the Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks who make up the rest of the country’s population, do not wish to be ruled by Pathan religious reactionaries, they should not need 60 thousand NATO and U.S. troops to defend them. If they will not defend themselves, there is nothing the foreigners can do to save them from their countrymen.
The same is true of the Iraqis. The only foreign army that has invaded Iraq is the American army. The Iraq government is resisting long-term American extraterritorial presence in the country, and Iraqis are increasingly pressing the United States to get out. They are finding that the Pentagon and the White House have actually been planning to stay indefinitely (for 100 years?). This automatically will sooner or later produce a popular uprising against military occupation.
Then what will an Obama or McCain administration do? They might order the troops to pull out. They will be accused of surrendering America to forces of evil.
Or they might order the army and Marines to do again what was done to Falluja. They could forget about democracy and nation-building.
ianwalsh | There’s a lot of nonsense going around including talk of Russia
losing the war because less than 5 days into the war, they haven’t
conquered Ukraine.
The German blitz of Poland took 5 weeks. The conquest of France 6
weeks, and people were astonished. Ukraine is the largest country in
Europe except for Russia istself
The sources I respect say that Russia is taking losses, but the war
is not in question and they are advancing about as fast as the US did
into Iraq. Russia will win the war, though they may take more damage
than they expected (but since we have no idea what they expected, who
knows.) Ukraine is a modern equipped army: it isn’t Iraq with obsolete
equipment, or Libya or Afghanistan.
The question is not whether Russia wins the war, it is who wins the peace.
What the US and Europe want is to turn Ukraine into a guerilla
quagmire, like Afghanistan in the 80s, or Iraq and Afghanistan were for
the US.
What Russia wants is to turn Ukraine into a guaranteed neutral state
and withdraw its troops out of the country, minus Donbas and Luhansk.
The good result for the Ukraine, which most Westerners don’t seem to
get, is what the Russians want. Austria was neutral in the Cold War and
that was not horrid. A multi-year guerilla campaign will devastate
Ukraine in ways that will take generations to recover from, because if
the Russians have to fight an insurgency, they will be utterly brutal,
as they were (successfully) in Chechnya.
Moralist yapping about right to choose is off the board. The only
good result for Ukraine and Ukrainians is a negotiated settlement. The
West egged them on and left them to swing, as the smart people said they
would.
NYTimes | The Taliban didn’t wait long to test Barack Obama. On Tuesday, militants bombed a bridge in the Khyber Pass region in Pakistan, cutting off supply lines to NATO forces in neighboring Afghanistan. This poses a serious problem for President Obama, who has said that he wants more American troops in Afghanistan. But troops need supplies.
The attack was another reminder that the supply line through Pakistan is extremely vulnerable. This means that the Obama administration might have to consider alternative routes through Russia or other parts of the former Soviet Union. But the Russians were unhappy about the Bush administration’s willingness to include Ukraine and Georgia in NATO, and they will probably not want to help with American supply lines unless Mr. Obama changes that position.
Here is where Mr. Obama could use some European help. Unfortunately, that’s not likely to come soon. Many Europeans, particularly Germans, rely on Russia’s natural gas. In January, the Russians cut natural gas shipments to Ukraine. As much of the Russian natural gas that goes to Europe runs through Ukraine, the cutoff affected European supplies — in the middle of winter. Europeans can’t really afford to irritate the Russians, and it’s hard to imagine that the Germans will confront them over supply routes to Afghanistan. Pakistan, unfortunately, is hardly a reliable partner either.
Russia and China are the last major holdouts for national sovereignty. An attempt was made to subvert Russia by non-military means, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but thanks to Putin that effort finally failed. China jumped into the capitalist game, in terms of trade and exports, but it has maintained strict control over its domestic economy and it has been rapidly upgrading its military, employing the cost-effective doctrine of asymmetric warfare.
NYTimes | Obama administration officials face the same intractable problems that the Bush administration did in trying to prod Pakistan toward a different course. Pakistan still deploys the overwhelming majority of its troops along the Indian border, not the border with Afghanistan, and its intelligence agencies maintain shadowy links to the Taliban even as they take American funds to fight them.
Under standard policy for covert operations, the C.I.A. strikes inside Pakistan have not been publicly acknowledged either by the Obama administration or the Bush administration. Using Predators and the more heavily armed Reaper drones, the C.I.A. has carried out more than 30 strikes since last September, according to American and Pakistani officials.
The attacks have killed a number of senior Qaeda figures, including Abu Jihad al-Masri and Usama al-Kini, who is believed to have helped plan the 1998 American Embassy bombings in East Africa and last year’s bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad.
American Special Operations troops based in Afghanistan have also carried out a number of operations into Pakistan’s tribal areas since early September, when a commando raid that killed a number of militants was publicly condemned by Pakistani officials. According to a senior American military official, the commando missions since September have been primarily to gather intelligence.
The meetings hosted by the Obama administration next week will include senior officials from both Pakistan and Afghanistan; Mrs. Clinton is to hold a rare joint meeting on Thursday with foreign ministers from the two countries. Also, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army chief, will meet with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Lt. Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of Pakistan’s military spy service, will accompany General Kayani.
Independent | Back in 1980, the Soviet Union threw every Western journalist out of Afghanistan. Those of us who had been reporting the Russian invasion and its brutal aftermath could not re-enter the country – except with the mujahedin guerrillas. I received a letter from Charles Douglas-Hume, who was editor of the The Times – for which I then worked – making an important observation. "Now that we have no regular coverage from Afghanistan," he noted on 26 March that year, "I would be grateful if you could make sure that we do not miss any opportunity for reporting on reliable accounts of what is going on in that country. We must not let events in Afghanistan vanish from the paper simply because we have no correspondent there."
That the Israelis should use an old Soviet tactic to blind the world's vision of war may not be surprising. But the result is that Palestinian voices – as opposed to those of Western reporters – are now dominating the airwaves. The men and women who are under air and artillery attack by the Israelis are now telling their own story on television and radio and in the papers as they have never been able to tell it before, without the artificial "balance", which so much television journalism imposes on live reporting. Perhaps this will become a new form of coverage – letting the participants tell their own story. The flip side, of course, is that there is no Westerner in Gaza to cross-question Hamas's devious account of events: another victory for the Palestinian militia, handed to them on a plate by the Israelis.
But there is also a darker side. Israel's version of events has been given so much credence by the dying Bush administration that the ban on journalists entering Gaza may simply be of little importance to the Israeli army. By the time we investigate, whatever they are trying to hide will have been overtaken by another crisis in which they can claim to be in the "front line" in the "war on terror".
Antiwar | Usually, there is nothing more powerful than a personal story to pound home the cost of eight years of war overseas, but I think today there is something even more disturbing to bear.
As of Nov. 9, that’s how many American casualties there were in Iraq and Afghanistan since Oct. 7, 2001, when the Afghan war officially began. That includes a tire-screeching 75,134 dead, wounded-in-action, and medically evacuated due to illness, disease, or injury in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), and 14,323 and counting in Afghanistan, or Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF).
That it may sound incredible – even unreal – is understandable. Early attempts to effectively count casualties (outside of battlefield fatalities) had been in earnest, then erratic, but finally dead-ended, frustrated by the Department of Defense, which has always been loath to break down and publicize the data on a regular basis.
One stalwart has always been Veterans for Common Sense (VCS), a nonprofit advocacy group dedicated to advancing the health and readjustment of returning soldiers and veterans. They’ve been diligently aggregating the statistics over time, and thanks to their diligent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, they can provide casualty reports at a level of detail not currently seen on the DOD’s publicly accessible Web site, DefenseLink.mil.
If we could access the data more easily, more people would know that 196 servicemembers took their own lives while serving in Iraq between March 2003 and Oct. 31, 2009, and there were 35 such suicides in Afghanistan. (These figures, of course, do not include the skyrocketing cases of suicides among all active-duty soldiers and veterans and cases of self-inflicted injury outside both war zones.)
Culture Change | America's energy consumption patterns are deeply insecure, and in a new report by Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), Powering America's Defense, authored by several military officials, perspectives from the vested interests of the military are revealed. The paradigm remains the rigidly the same, that the military is 'necessity', and access to the world's resources will remain their priority and so-called 'right', largely for their benefit.
Consider the mentality of consumers of the large vehicles produced by the automobile companies in the last few decades -- basically ego-satisfying toys. Huge pickup trucks with no load in the back, façades of 'power' and 'status', and big family cars for big families who in their superiority-complex personalities have forgotten to consider the fate of their brothers and sisters around the world struggling to simply survive.
Steve LeVine, from BusinessWeek, points out the wastefulness in the military's actions:
In a long report, these former officers detail how long, vulnerable fuel supply lines have hobbled troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; how each soldier in Afghanistan is weighed down by 26 pounds of batteries; and how just 10% of the fuel used in Iraq goes for actual fighting vehicles — the rest just gets the fuel to the battlefield and protects it.
It appears that the U.S. military is following the rest of the world's lead on many of these issues, and seem to have had its head in the sand of their desertified paradigm.
LeVine also reveals the enormous subsidy to oil prices, arriving at a truer cost than the nominal price:
Reliance on oil, however, is the report's focus. It estimates that refueling military jets in flight raises the cost of each gallon of fuel to $42; on the ground the cost ranges from $15 a gallon to as much as hundreds of dollars a gallon depending on how much security and logistics are required to get the fuel to where it needs to be. ... In Iraq, just 10% of fuel used for ground forces went to heavy vehicles such as tanks and amphibious vehicles delivering lethal force; the other 90% was consumed by Humvees and other vehicles delivering and protecting the fuel and forces. "This is the antithesis of efficiency," the report says.
Bryan Bender, writing for the Boston Globe, summarizes:
In World War II, the United States consumed about a gallon of fuel per soldier per day, according to the report. In the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, about 4 gallons of fuel per soldier was consumed per day. In 2006, the US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan burned about 16 gallons of fuel per soldier on average per day, almost twice as much as the year before.
lobster | In the last three decades, three important
facts have emerged about the international drug traffic. The first is that it
is both huge and growing.
Narcotics are
estimated to be worth between $500 billion and $1 trillion a year, an amount,
according to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in remarks to a United Nations
General Assembly session in June 2003, that is greater than the global oil and
gas industry, and twice as large as the overall automobile industry.[2]
The second is that it is both worldwide and
above all "highly integrated."[3]
At global drug summits such as the one in Armenia
in 1993, representatives of the Sicilian Mafia, the Brighton Beach
Organizatsiya, and Colombian drug
lords, have worked out a common modus
operandi, with the laundering of dirty money entrusted chiefly to the
lawless Russian banks.[4]
The third important fact, undeniable since
the 1980 U.S. intervention
in Afghanistan,
is that governments with global pretensions will avail themselves, in pursuit
of their own political ends, of the resources, both financial and political, of
the drug traffic. It was striking in the 1980s that the CIA, in its choice of
Afghan mujahedin leaders to back against the Soviet Union,
passed over those with indigenous support in favor of those, notably Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, who dominated the heroin trade. The result was to enhance
Hekmatyar's power until he became a leading heroin trafficker, not just in Afghanistan
but in the world.[5]
Three more important features of the global
drug traffic have been less noticed; thus although I regard them as facts I
shall refer to them not as facts but as propositions to be tested against
evidence. The first proposition is that the highly integrated drug traffic
industry, in addition to serving the political ends of world powers, has its
own political as well as economic objectives. It requires that in major growing
areas there must be limited state control, a condition most easily reached by
fostering regional rebellion and warfare, often fought by its own private
armies. This is the on-going situation of designed violence in every major
growing area, from Lebanon
to Myanmar, Colombia to Afghanistan.
Once the local power of drug armies was
enough in itself to neutralize the imposition of state authority. But today
there are increasing signs that those at the highest level of the drug traffic
will plot with the leaders of major states to ensure, or even to stage,
violence that serves the power of the state and the industry alike.
Thanks to extensive research in Russia,
we now have initial evidence of a second and even more significant proposition:
There exists on the global level a drug meta-group, able to manipulate the
resources of the drug traffic for its own political and business ends, without
being at risk for actual trafficking. These ends include the creation of
designed violence to serve the purposes of cabals in political power – most
conspicuously in the case of the Yeltsin "family" in the Kremlin, but allegedly,
according to Russian sources, also for those currently in power in the United States.
One piece of evidence for this consists in
a meeting which took place in July 1999 in southern France near Nice, at the villa in
Beaulieu of Adnan Khashoggi, once called "the richest man in the world." Those at
the meeting included a member of the Yeltsin cabal in the Kremlin and four representatives
from the meta-group, with passports from Venezuela,
Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Germany. Between them they
allegedly enjoyed excellent relations with:
1) Ayman al-Zawahiri, the acknowledged mastermind
of 9/11 and senior mentor to Osama bin Laden.
2) Soviet military intelligence.
3) the FARC, the Colombian revolutionary
group that has become increasingly involved in the drug traffic.
4) the Kosovo Liberation Army, a similarly
involved group.
5) (according to a well-informed Russian
source) the CIA.
The third important proposition is that a
meta-group of this scale does not just help government agencies make history. I
hope to show that it, and its predecessors, are powerful enough to help make
history themselves. However they do not do so overtly, but as a hidden Force X
whose presence is not normally acknowledged in the polite discourse of academic
political scientists. On the contrary, as we shall see, references to it are
usually suppressed.
theweek | Our infamous drone war has largely faded from the headlines. Aside from one strike that went horribly wrong
during the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan, there has been vanishingly
little coverage of what's going on with the signature American tactic
of the war on terror: remote-controlled death robots.
So I was
rather taken aback to discover President Biden has almost totally halted
drone strikes, and airstrikes in general, around the world. It's a
remarkable foreign policy reform, but also a remarkable failure of both
government communication and media coverage. A hugely significant change
in foreign policy has happened — and almost nobody is paying attention.
Not long ago, the drone war was subject to fierce public debate. It started under former President George W. Bush, then became a favored tactic of former President Barack Obama.
He'd come to power on the strength of his record opposing the Iraq War
but was, at bottom, a devoted imperial chauvinist. Obama wanted to avoid
being bogged down in new overseas occupations (except in Afghanistan,
where he idiotically boosted troop levels to no positive effect) but
never truly questioned U.S. global imperialism or the
military-industrial complex.
The drone strike was thus the perfect
tool for his presidency: a cheap, high-tech, and supposedly
super-accurate method of fighting terrorism (and extending U.S. military
hegemony) at no risk to American soldiers. (U.S. airstrikes with human
pilots increasingly operate in similar safety, rarely flying over
targets with anti-aircraft defenses.) "Turns out I'm really good at
killing people," Obama told aides in 2011. "Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine."
FoxNews | President Biden took another swipe at supporters of the Second Amendment during his speech in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.
Biden
appeared in the battleground state to tout his latest "Safer America"
agenda to promote efforts to support law enforcement and deter crime.
Biden: "He used to go down in the East Side, what they call the bucket. Highest crime rate in the country. Theres a place where I was the only white guy that worked, was a lifeguard down in that area.... you could always tell where the best basketball in the state is." pic.twitter.com/Hl3o3ZwTe3
Although his speech was primarily focused on his policies, Biden later
turned his attention towards his political opponents, attacking Republicans for opposing actions on gun control.
Specifically,
he attacked defenders of the Second Amendment who argue that the right
is necessary for self-defense against foreign enemies and a tyrannical
government.
"For
those brave right-wing Americans who say it’s all about keeping America
independent and safe, if you want to fight against the country, you
need an F-15. You need something more than a gun," Biden said.
Social media users attacked the comment for being tone-deaf and
criticizing American citizens. Others pointed out that this claim
followed the one-year anniversary of Biden’s Afghanistan pullout, where
several weapons, including F-15s, were left behind for Taliban forces.
"The
only F-15s the Taliban had when they fought against our country were
the ones Biden left in Afghanistan for them," X Strategies senior
digital strategist Greg Price tweeted.
"The president has been
saying this for years but it's less and less congruent with how even his
own administration has played out. How many F-15s did the Taliban have
when Biden decided to surrender Afghanistan to them?" The Reload founder
Stephen Gutowski wrote.
Red State deputy managing editor Brandon Morse joked, "I'd say he's
ignoring the Eric Holder ‘Fast and Furious’ scandal but it's Biden and
it's very likely that he actually forgot."
A Russian Kinzhal missile at 12,000 kilometers per hour, 10 times faster than sound, was, reportedly, used today to destroy a Ukrainian weapons depot 136 meters underground. (Listen to the astonishment of the American reporter when he suddenly saw this). via @Dmitry65smolspic.twitter.com/hbP4BsmFlb
thecradle | A key node of the International North South Transportation Corridor
(INTSC) is now in play, linking northwest Russia to the Persian Gulf via
the Caspian Sea and Iran. The transportation time between St.
Petersburg and Indian ports is 25 days.
This logistical corridor with multimodal transportation carries an
enormous geopolitical significance for two BRICs members and a
prospective member of the “new G8” because it opens a key alternative
route to the usual cargo trail from Asia to Europe via the Suez canal.
The International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC)
The INSTC corridor is a classic South-South integration project: a
7,200-km-long multimodal network of ship, rail, and road routes
interlinking India, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran, Azerbaijan and
Russia all the way to Finland in the Baltic Sea.
Technically, picture a set of containers going overland from St.
Petersburg to Astrakhan. Then the cargo sails via the Caspian to the
Iranian port of Bandar Anzeli. Then it’s transported overland to the
port of Bandar Abbas. And then overseas to Nava Sheva, the largest
seaport in India. The key operator is Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping
Lines (the IRISL group), which has branches in both Russia and India.
And that brings us to what wars from now will be fought about: transportation corridors – and not territorial conquest.
Beijing’s fast-paced BRI is seen as an existential threat to the
‘rules-based international order.’ It develops along six overland
corridors across Eurasia, plus the Maritime Silk Road from the South
China Sea, and the Indian Ocean, all the way to Europe.
One of the key targets of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine is to interrupt
BRI corridors across Russia. The Empire will go all out to interrupt
not only BRI but also INSTC nodes. Afghanistan under US occupation was
prevented from become a node for either BRI or INSTC.
With full access to the Sea of Azov – now a “Russian lake” – and
arguably the whole Black Sea coastline further on down the road, Moscow
will hugely increase its sea trading prospects (Putin: “The Black Sea
was historically Russian territory”).
For the past two decades, energy corridors have been heavily politicized and are at the center of unforgiving global pipeline competitions
– from BTC and South Stream to Nord Stream 1 and 2, and the
never-ending soap operas, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India
(TAPI) and Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipelines.
Then there’s the Northern Sea Route alongside the Russian coastline
all the way to the Barents Sea. China and India are very much focused on
the Northern Sea Route, not by accident also discussed in detail in St. Petersburg.
The contrast between the St. Petersburg debates on a possible
re-wiring of our world – and the Three Stooges Taking a Train to Nowhere
to tell a mediocre Ukrainian comedian to calm down and negotiate his
surrender (as confirmed by German intelligence) – could not be starker.
Almost imperceptibly – just as it re-incorporated Crimea and entered
the Syrian theater – Russia as a military-energy superpower now shows it
is potentially capable of driving a great deal of the industrialized
west back into the Stone Age. The western elites are just helpless. If
only they could ride a corridor on the Eurasian high-speed train, they
might learn something.
AsiaTimes | In the Orient, offspring don't rebuke parents, even if the latter are at fault - especially in the post-Soviet space where Marxian formalism continues to prevail as political culture. The sort of stern public rebuke bordering on short shrift that Ashgabat administered to Moscow is extraordinary.
But then, Moscow tested Turkmen patience by trying to create confusion about Ashgabat's policy of positive "neutrality" - building energy bridges to the West alongside its thriving cooperation with Russia and China.
On Thursday, the Turkmen Foreign Ministry bluntly rejected any role for Russia in the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project, commonly known as TAPI. Ashgabat alleged that Moscow is spreading calumnies and expressed the hope that "future statements by Russian officials will be guided by a sense of responsibility and reality".
The reference was to a friendly and seemingly helpful statement by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin (who accompanied President Dmitry Medvedev to the Turkmen capital last weekend) that Russian participation in the TAPI figured in the latest Russian-Turkmen summit talks and "Gazprom may participate in this project in any capacity - builder, designer, participant, etc ... If Gazprom becomes a participant, then we will study possibilities of working in gas sales."
The Turkmen Foreign Ministry said, "Turkmenistan views such statements as an attempt to hamper the normal course of our country's cooperation in the energy sector and call into question its obligations to its partners." It added that there was "no agreement whatsoever" regarding Russian participation in the TAPI.
The TAPI presents a knot of paradoxes and the Russians who hold the pulse of the Central Asian energy scene would have sensed by now that Uncle Sam is close to untying the knot, finally, after a decade-and-a-half of sheer perseverance. The TAPI falls within the first circle of the Caspian great game. When it appears that Russia all but checkmated the United States and the European Union's plans to advance trans-Caspian energy projects bypassing Russia, a thrust appears from the south and east opening up stunning possibilities for the West.
Russia promptly began slouching toward the TAPI - which, incidentally, was originally a Soviet idea but was appropriated by the United States no sooner than the USSR disintegrated - against the backdrop of renewed interest in the project recently among regional powers amid the growing possibility that Afghan peace talks might reconcile the Taliban and that despite the Kashmir problem, Pakistan and India wouldn't mind tangoing.
The TAPI pipeline runs on a roughly 1,600-kilometer route along the ancient Silk Road from Turkmenistan's fabulous Dauletabad gas fields on the Afghan border to Herat in western Afghanistan, then onto Helmand and Kandahar, entering Pakistan's Quetta and turning east toward Multan, and ending up in Fazilka on the Indian side of Pakistan's eastern border. An updated Asian Development Bank (ADB) estimate of 2008 put the project cost for the pipeline with an output of 33 bcm annually at $7.6 billion.
The signals from Ashgabat, Kabul, Islamabad and New Delhi in recent weeks uniformly underscored that the TAPI is in the final stage of take-off. India unambiguously signed up in August. On Wednesday, the Pakistan government gave approval to the project at a cabinet meeting in Islamabad. The ADB is open to financing the project and is expected to be the project's "secretariat".
As things stand, there could be a meeting of the political leaderships of the four participating countries in December to formally kick-start the TAPI.
tomdispatch | In his message to the troops prior to the July 4th weekend, Secretary
of Defense Lloyd Austin offered high praise indeed. “We have the
greatest fighting force in human history,” he tweeted, connecting that
claim to the U.S. having patriots of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds
“who bravely volunteer to defend our country and our values.”
As a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel from a working-class
background who volunteered to serve more than four decades ago, who am I
to argue with Austin? Shouldn’t I just bask in the glow of his praise
for today’s troops, reflecting on my own honorable service near the end
of what now must be thought of as the First Cold War?
Yet I confess to having doubts. I’ve heard it all before.
The hype. The hyperbole. I still remember how, soon after the 9/11
attacks, President George W. Bush boasted that this country had “the greatest force
for human liberation the world has ever known.” I also remember how, in
a pep talk given to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010, President
Barack Obama declared them “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” And yet, 15 years ago at TomDispatch, I was already wondering
when Americans had first become so proud of, and insistent upon,
declaring our military the world’s absolute best, a force beyond
compare, and what that meant for a republic that once had viewed large
standing armies and constant warfare as anathemas to freedom.
In retrospect, the answer is all too straightforward: we need something to boast about, don’t we? In the once-upon-a-time “exceptional nation,” what else is there to praise to the skies or consider our pride and joy these days except our heroes?
After all, this country can no longer boast of having anything like the
world’s best educational outcomes, or healthcare system, or the most
advanced and safest infrastructure, or the best democratic politics, so
we better damn well be able to boast about having “the greatest fighting
force” ever.
Leaving that boast aside, Americans could certainly brag about one thing this country has beyond compare: the most expensive
military around and possibly ever. No country even comes close to our
commitment of funds to wars, weapons (including nuclear ones at the
Department of Energy), and global dominance. Indeed, the Pentagon’s
budget for “defense” in 2023 exceeds that of the next 10 countries (mostly allies!) combined.
And from all of this, it seems to me, two questions arise: Are we
truly getting what we pay so dearly for — the bestest, finest, most
exceptional military ever? And even if we are, should a self-proclaimed
democracy really want such a thing?
The answer to both those questions is, of course, no. After all,
America hasn’t won a war in a convincing fashion since 1945. If this
country keeps losing wars routinely and often enough catastrophically,
as it has in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, how can we
honestly say that we possess the world’s greatest fighting force? And if
we nevertheless persist in such a boast, doesn’t that echo the rhetoric
of militaristic empires of the past? (Remember when we used to think
that only unhinged dictators like Adolf Hitler boasted of having
peerless warriors in a megalomaniacal pursuit of global domination?)
Actually, I do believe the United States has the most exceptional
military, just not in the way its boosters and cheerleaders like Austin,
Bush, and Obama claimed. How is the U.S. military truly “exceptional”?
Let me count the ways.
The Pentagon as a Budgetary Black Hole
In so many ways, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional. Let’s begin
with its budget. At this very moment, Congress is debating a colossal
“defense” budget of $886 billion for FY2024 (and all the debate is about issues
that have little to do with the military). That defense spending bill,
you may recall, was “only” $740 billion when President Joe Biden took
office three years ago. In 2021, Biden withdrew U.S. forces from the
disastrous war in Afghanistan, theoretically saving the taxpayer nearly
$50 billion a year. Yet, in place of any sort of peace dividend,
American taxpayers simply got an even higher bill as the Pentagon budget
continued to soar.
Recall that, in his four years in office, Donald Trump increased
military spending by 20%. Biden is now poised to achieve a similar 20%
increase in just three years
in office. And that increase largely doesn’t even include the cost of
supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia — so far, somewhere between $120 billion and $200 billion and still rising.
Counterpunch | And Osama? What about Osama bin Laden? Now we know that the US knew of his whereabouts; they knew of the trail, they asked Leigh and Keller to remove relevant references. Why didn’t they capture him or kill him earlier?
OBL’s organisation did what the US authorities wanted to be done. They fought the Russians and ruined Afghanistan. They conspired and fought against Hezbollah, slaughtered Shias in Iraq, undermined Qaddafi, hated Hamas and Iran. They supported ethnic cleansing of ‘infidels’ in Chechnya and in the Balkans. They never ever attacked Israel: they preserved their vigor for Sayyed Nasrallah. Like a dreadful beast nurtured in the CIA secret labs, only once they reportedly rebelled against their merciless creator - on 9/11. Osama was greater than, but similar to such American friends as Jonas Savimbi of Angola or Shamil Basayev of Chechnya, and hopefully after his death his organization will vanish like Unita and Basayev did.
The Guantanamo files reveal utter wretchedness of Osama’s unlucky followers. With exception of a few dozen close associates, the rest of the prisoners made a wrong choice ever listening to him. They (especially foreigners) were idealists, who wanted to establish the Kingdom of God upon the earth; they were encouraged by the US to flock to Afghanistan to fight the Commies. The majority of them never even had a chance to hold the gun. They, the foreigners in Afghanistan and Pakistan were sold for bounty to the Americans as fast as possible. They paid for this by years of torture. And now they are about to learn that their supreme chief was safeguarded by the same Americans who tortured them!
But in the mind of the Muslim masses OBL will be remembered (justly or not) as the architect of the only successful response of the oppressed to the Empire on its own soil. And that ensured him greatness of his own and a place in history.
Begrudgingly Acknowledged Country Bangers
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April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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Afghanistan Geological Survey | "In Afghanistan rare metals (lithium, caesium, tantalum and niobium) occur in three main deposit types: pegmatites, mineralised springs and playa-lake sediments" "Globally, rare metals are produced from deposits in these three settings, chiefly in Chile, Argentina, the USA and Turkey. ..
