What a hoot, his justifying why we just have to keeping fighting that war. What a JOKE.

Same as Bush and EXACTLY the SAME LIES.

How ORIGINAL!

Meanwhile illegal opiates on the street are cheaper than the legal stuff from a pharmacy.

Afghanistan might be the one place we *ought* to be fighting. Sure, bin Laden and friends are 'disrupted' now that we're sitting on them, but they're like cockroaches. Very difficult to eradicate, and determined. I'd be much happier if bin Laden were confirmed dead. As a focal point if nothing else, he'll never cease to be a danger.

Further, the "American Taliban" link is your opinion, and a divisive, ignorant one at that. If the law says you can be armed, you can go armed. Don't like that? Change the law. The Taliban arbitrarily drag people about, beat them, execute them, and generally *act* on people in demonstrably evil ways. People who peaceably go about their business openly armed have not earned and do not deserve that comparison. That you made it says more about you than them.

Note: I don't go about armed, and also don't know the people in question. I'd just prefer if the gun control nut rhetoric were less insidious and factually incorrect.

Guerrilla leader Gulbadin Hikmatyar, another old-time warlord who is now fighting the Karzai government and often is inaccurately lumped by Western observers together with the Taliban

Hekmaytr is a extremist mullah and a former mujahedin commander who got the lion's share of American funding during the Soviet-Afghan War.

I don't understand why Juan always feels it necessary to blur Hekmatyr's ties to American policy by writing him off as some generic "warlord."

Also, Hekmatyr has been an on-and-off ally of the Taliban since the Taliban first marched into Kabul back in the nineties.

It was Helkmatyr's decision to ally with the Taliban that drove his former mujahedin ally Massoud out of Kabul and into the Northern Alliance.

It didn't bother Hekmatyr to ally with the Taliban because Hekmatyr has been a violent enemy of women's rights in Afghanistan since the 1960s.

Hekmatyr should always be considered as a possible Taliban ally at any time.

He flips back and forth as he chooses depending on how the alliance benefits his own ability to exercise his own pathetic horrifying visions of how the world should be.

After fighting a grueling 10 year proxy war with the Soviets, giving birth to and nurturing the very same Mujahid culture that is ravaging the country today, turning a blind eye to a budding narco state, provoking the Soviets into killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and littering the whole country with mines that left a whole generation of children maimed you'd think the US would feel a little sense of responsibility? At least, you'd think Americans would have a memory that extends beyond the past 12 hour news cycle.

In principle, I agree with you: if the law says you can go armed, you can go armed. But in practice, what do you think would have happened to a protester who showed up armed at a Bush event, regardless of what local laws said?

If that rotten stinker of an extremist mullah Hekmatyr had not chosen to ally with the Taliban when they were coming to Kabul, if he had stuck with Massoud instead, and tried to make peace with the Northern Alliance, then the Taliban never would have been able to take Kabul, and 9/11 probably would not have happened.

So Hekmatyr is our enemy too, not just Karzai's.

In "The Kite Runner," the villainous Kabul rapist who buddies up to the Taliban in the end is based on Hekmatyr.

because there is nothing to "defend" in Afghanistan. But it is still important to discredit the premise because so many people - important people - believe it. So, well done. For your next question, try "What is Obama doing in Afghanistan?"

One minor quibble: Don't legitimize MilitarySpeak by repeating "highly kinetic military operations." Violent will do just fine.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, or that it isn't inconsiderate. When the President travels, Secret Service and Police forces have a challenging job of maintaining security, and walking around with a gun by necessity makes you a subject of interest for them. Furthermore, ready access to the weapon raises your threat potential.

They may have the legal right to run around like idiots making things tougher on the police and Secret Service (and, indirectly, jeopardizing those around them) but they should realize that if one of them makes a sudden move that is misinterpreted by an anxious member of law enforcement and gets gunned down, they qualify for a Darwin Award.

Does anyone know when and where the next MoveOn.org war protests are going to be taking place? They used to take place frequently when Bush was in office.

Also, does anyone know exactly when Dear Leader is going to close Guantanamo Bay? Just wondering.

I don't think groups like MoveOn.org raised a serious issue with A'stan; it was the war of choice in Iraq that got their hackles up.

Gitmo is due to be closed early next year. We'll all be looking closly at that issue.

Given the law that Karzai wiggled through, giving Shiite men the right to withold food and money from their wives if the wife denies the man sex, everyone should be questioning what the hell anyone is doing there.

re: It is the OPIUM, stupid.

Exactly.

From the preface to Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina by Peter Dale Scott:

--

This book explores ongoing causal patterns that have helped shape U.S. foreign policy, sometimes at a deeper level than was recognized even by bureaucrats in high places. Under pressure from interested outsiders, decisions were made by the United States, after World War II in Burma and again in Laos in 1959-1965, to back armies and governments that were supporting themselves through the drug traffic. This has led to a linked succession of wars, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, which have suited the purposes of international oil corporations and U.S. drug proxy allies, far more than those of either the U.S. government or its people. Those decisions were also major causes for the dramatic increase in drug trafficking over the last half century.

Today drug networks are important factors in the politics of every continent. The United States returns repeatedly to the posture of fighting wars in areas of petroleum reserves with the aid of drug-trafficking allies (or what I call drug proxies) with which it has a penchant to become involved. Surprisingly, this is true even in Colombia, where we are nominally fighting a war on drugs; yet the chief drug-trafficking faction, the paramilitaries, are allies of our allies, the Colombian army. Worse, they are the descendants of yet another clever CIA notion -- to train terrorists to fight the left -- which has once again come back to haunt us.

This is the situation that has recently engaged the United States in Afghanistan, a country through which until 1998 a U.S. oil company, UNOCAL, hoped to build oil and gas pipelines. The drug-trafficking network of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, a former CIA ally operating out of caves designed and paid for by the CIA, has just been defeated with the help of another drug proxy, the Afghan Northern Alliance. In the pursuit of bin Laden, the United States defeated his allies the Taliban (which in 2000 had enforced a total ban on opium cultivation in its area), with the aid of the Northern Alliance (which in the same period had overseen a trebling of opium cultivation in its area).

http://tinyurl.com/y69l5m