Afghanistan - Why Are We There Again?

(Credit: AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)

US WARNS AFGHAN LEADER'S COMMENTS THREATEN TROOPS

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan warned his troops to be ready for increased violence because of a series of anti-American statements by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, NATO said Thursday.
In an email to battlefield commanders, Gen. Joseph Dunford, said the remarks could spur more insider attacks, days after members of Afghan security forces killed two U.S. troops and a U.S. contractor in two separate shootings.
"We're at a rough point in the relationship," Dunford said in the email, according to a senior U.S. official, speaking anonymously to discuss the confidential communication.

So please remind me again - why are we still spending blood and treasure in this hell hole? Our "ally" threatens the welfare of America's finest - not acceptable.  I realize we can't pull out overnight but we should start getting out as quickly as possible.

There Was A Time In Afghanistan

Over at OTB Doug Mataconis links to a wonderful collection of photos that show a Kabul, Afghanistan actually joining the 20th century before the Soviet invasion.

Yes this is Kabul 60 years ago. Yes, Kabul looks like a city but it doesn't today.

Given the images people see on TV, many conclude Afghanistan never made it out of the Middle Ages,” writes Mohammad Qayoumi at Retronaut. “But that is not the Afghanistan I remember. I grew up in Kabul in the 1950s and ’60s. Stirred by the fact that news portrayals of the country’s history didn’t mesh with my own memories, I wanted to discover the truth.”
Qayoumi’s gallery of what the Graveyard of Empires looked like before it was brought into contemporary civilization by the Hippie Trail

Of course Kabul was an anomaly -  even while Kabul was becoming a modern society the rest of Afghanistan remained a middle ages tribal society.   There was there was the possibility that modernization could extend beyond Kabul but then the Russians invaded and attempted to occupy.  The Russians failed but opened the door for the Taliban.  The invasion and occupation  of the US and NATO only reinforced  the centuries old war between the Afghan people and the west.  So western innervation in Afghanistan ha once again set the country back.

   

Not Really Anything New

Pakistan to Talk With Militants, New Leaders Say

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Faced with a sharp escalation of suicide bombings in urban areas, the leaders of Pakistan’s new coalition government say they will negotiate with the militants believed to be orchestrating the attacks, and will use military force only as a last resort.

That talk has alarmed American officials, who fear it reflects a softening stance toward the militants just as President Pervez Musharraf has given the Bush administration a freer hand to strike at militants using pilotless Predator drones.

Many Pakistanis, however, are convinced that the surge in suicide bombings — 17 in the first 10 weeks of 2008 — is retaliation for three Predator strikes since the beginning of the year. The spike in attacks, combined with the crushing defeat of Mr. Musharraf’s party in February parliamentary elections, has brought demands for change in his American-backed policies.

Speaking in separate interviews, the leaders of Pakistan’s new government coalition — Asif Ali Zardari of the Pakistan Peoples Party and Nawaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League-N — tried to strike a more independent stance from Washington and repackage the conflict in a more palatable way for Pakistanis.

They said they were determined to set a different course from that of President Musharraf, who has received generous military financial help of more than $10 billion from Washington for his support.

Musharraf"s "support" in the war on terror was always largely an illusion. His government has been talking to the Taliban and al-Qaeda all along. Musharraf has said just enough of the right words to keep the money flowing in from the Bush administration. The only change is that the new leaders are less willing to say the right words.

David Ignatius gets it right for a change

I missed this but our good friend Bill in DC didn't. It's the latest by David Ignatius, The Fading Jihadists. Ignatius discusses a new book by a former CIA officer named Marc Sageman who looks at "terrorism" from a scientific point of view.

The heart of Sageman's message is that we have been scaring ourselves into exaggerating the terrorism threat -- and then by our unwise actions in Iraq making the problem worse. He attacks head-on the central thesis of the Bush administration, echoed increasingly by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, that, as McCain's Web site puts it, the United States is facing "a dangerous, relentless enemy in the War against Islamic Extremists" spawned by al-Qaeda.

Sageman says it's simply not so.

The numbers say otherwise, Sageman insists. The first wave of al-Qaeda leaders, who joined Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, is down to a few dozen people on the run in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. The second wave of terrorists, who trained in al-Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has also been devastated, with about 100 hiding out on the Pakistani frontier. These people are genuinely dangerous, says Sageman, and they must be captured or killed. But they do not pose an existential threat to America, much less a "clash of civilizations."

It's the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman's account, it's a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls "terrorist wannabes." Unlike the first two waves, whose members were well educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for thrills.

"It's more about hero worship than about religion," Sageman said in a presentation of his research last week at the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank here. Many of this third wave don't speak Arabic or read the Koran. Very few (13 percent of Sageman's sample) have attended radical madrassas. Nearly all join the movement because they know or are related to someone who's already in it. Those detained on terrorism charges are getting younger: In Sageman's 2003 sample, the average age was 26; among those arrested after 2006, it was down to about 20. They are disaffected, homicidal kids -- closer to urban gang members than to motivated Muslim fanatics.

Many of us have been saying all along that US policy is making terrorism worse and Sageman agrees.

Sageman's harshest judgment is that the United States is making the terrorism problem worse by its actions in Iraq. "Since 2003, the war in Iraq has without question fueled the process of radicalization worldwide, including the U.S. The data are crystal clear," he writes. We have taken a fire that would otherwise burn itself out and poured gasoline on it.

He goes onto say that "Islamic Terrorism" is inherently self-limiting and will only continue as long as the US and the west continue to throw gasoline on the fire.

I plan on picking up a copy of Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century. I only wish a few of the politicians would.

The real hub of the "axis of evil"

The hub of the Bush's axis of evil is not Iran, not even Pakistan. It's tyrannical regime of the Bush crime family's good friends the Saudis.
BAE: secret papers reveal threats from Saudi prince

Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.

Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.

Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.

He was accused in yesterday's high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family.

The threats halted the fraud inquiry, but triggered an international outcry, with allegations that Britain had broken international anti-bribery treaties.

Bryan over at Hot Air gets it right:

That’s a threat of war. And it’s not the freelance work of low-level hacks.

The Saudis are indeed the center of the Jihad against the west - both personalities and money. It is the home of the extremist Wahhabism, the creed upon which the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded. We have seen the enemy and it's not Iran, it's Saudi Arabia. And if you think that the Saudis are going to let an Iran friendly Shia government take hold in Iraq you truly are delusional.

Benazir Bhutto and the WOT

I was directed to this by Andrew C McCarty in the NRO by a commentor in the post below. Now I don't often agree with Mr McCarthy there are some things I think he gets right.

If you want to know what to make of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s murder today in Pakistan, ponder that.

There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.

Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.

The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.

The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.

The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.

In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.

And it's hard to disagree with this:

The transformation from Islamic society to true democracy is a long-term project. It would take decades if it can happen at all. Meanwhile, our obsessive insistence on popular referenda is naturally strengthening — and legitimizing — the people who are popular: the jihadists. Popular elections have not reformed Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon. Neither will they reform a place where Osama bin Laden wins popular opinion polls and where the would-be reformers are bombed and shot at until they die.

Here is where he makes the standard wingnut mistake:

We don’t have the political will to fight the war on terror every place where jihadists work feverishly to kill Americans. And, given the refusal of the richest, most spendthrift government in American history to grow our military to an appropriate war footing, we may not have the resources to do it.

But we should at least stop fooling ourselves. Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they’ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.

Shortly after 911 another person I rarely agree with, Pat Buchanan said something that I did agree with, "they (the jihadists) don't hate us because of who we are they hate us because of where we are. Osama bin Laden himself made it clear that the major reason for attacks on the US was the presence of US military forces in Saudi Arabia. US forces are not in the middle east to protect the US or it's citizens - they are there to protect the interests of multinational corporations. It's certainly not about bringing Democracy to the region. The Bush/Cheney administration's original goal for Iraq was to replace the tyrant, Saddam, with a US friendly tyrant, Chalabi. Since he turned out to be an Iranian spy perhaps it's best that didn't work out.

The best way to protect the US from the Jihadists in the middle east is to get our military out. It's time that the US military be used to protect the US not the interests of Exxon-Mobile and the other multinational corporations. In 2007 46 percent of the Pakistanis supported bin Laden. I would guess it was significantly less in 2001.

The wingers are enraged that Ron Paul would say;

Ron Paul blames the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on the “interventionist” policy of the United States, and says Al Qaeda is justified in being “annoyed” at us.

I don't agree with Dr Paul on much either but he sure gets that one right.

Hapless Kooks VS The Hapless DOJ

Hapless Kooks - that's what your government is trying to protect you from and they can't even do that. Paul Kiel reports:

The Miami "Seas of David" terror bust was such an important blow in the War on Terror that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales himself gave a press conference in July of 2006. Federal agents had stopped a plot to blow up the Sears Tower, he said. The group had planned to "accomplish attacks against America," the FBI's deputy director said at Gonzales side. "We pre-empted their plot."

But, as we wrote at the time, "the more we learn, the less this crew looks like they could have toppled a tree house, let alone the Sears Tower." The clique, adherents of a sect "that mixes Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Freemasonry, Gnosticism and Taoism," met in a windowless warehouse they called the "Temple." The leader of the group, Narseal Batiste, was described as a "'Moses-like figure' who would roam the streets in a cape or bathrobe, toting a crooked wooden cane and looking for young men to join his group." And when the group met in their Temple, the men "took turns standing guard outside the door, dressed up in makeshift military uniforms and combat boots. Sometimes they covered their faces with ski masks." Nobody ever charged them with being subtle.

So they went to trial and what happened?
Chicago bomb defendant is cleared

A jury in Miami has cleared one man of trying to blow up America's tallest building, the Sears Tower in Chicago, as part of a holy war.
The jury was unable to reach a verdict on six other defendants, and the judge declared a mistrial. Prosecutors say they plan to try them again next year.

The jury spent more than week considering their verdicts.

And how hapless were they?

The prosecution said they had hoped to forge an alliance with al-Qaeda to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and FBI offices in Miami and elsewhere.

But they succeeded only in contacting a paid FBI informant, rather than al-Qaeda itself.

And the defence argued that that they were in fact hapless figures who were either entrapped by the FBI or went along with the plot in order to con the FBI informant out of $50,000 (£25,000).

It said they wanted money to transform the warehouse in Liberty City where they met into a community gathering place.

I don't even want to think about how much money was spent to set these fools up and then bring them to trial all for the sake of some propaganda.

What if the sky really was falling?

Chicken Little meet the Bush Administration
FBI: Al Qaeda May Strike U.S. Shopping Malls in LA, Chicago

The FBI is warning that al Qaeda may be preparing a series of holiday attacks on U.S. shopping malls in Los Angeles and Chicago, according to an intelligence report distributed to law enforcement authorities across the country this morning.

The alert said al Qaeda "hoped to disrupt the U.S. economy and has been planning the attack for the past two years."

Law enforcement officials tell ABCNews.com that the FBI received the information in late September and declassified it yesterday for wide distribution.

The alert, like similar FBI and Department of Homeland Security terror alerts issued over the past five years at holiday times, raised questions about the credibility of the information.

Retailers are probably relieved that no one pays any attention to these alerts after so many years where the Bush administration has used such alerts for political purpose. As Joe Gandelman says:

There’s yet another warning about a planned Al Qaeda attack in the United States — and the danger is that the political contamination of the terrorism issue, the perceived use of it by the Bush administration in past elections, and a jaded public could mean a serious warning could be shrugged off when and if it comes.

As I have said here before that really is a problem - someday the sky really will be falling. I believe the FBI did the right thing in this case, law enforcement should be notified of a threat.

Musharraf does what Cheney (and Rudy) dream of

Musharraf Declares State of Emergency

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 3 — The Pakistani leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, declared a state of emergency on Saturday night, suspending the country’s Constitution, blacking out all independent television news reports and filling the streets of the capital with police officers and soldiers.

The move appeared to be an effort by General Musharraf to reassert his fading power in the face of growing opposition from the country’s Supreme Court, civilian political parties and hard-line Islamists. Pakistan’s Supreme Court was expected to rule within days on the legality of General Musharraf’s re-election last month as the country’s president, which opposition groups have said was improper.

The emergency declaration was in direct defiance of repeated calls this week from senior American officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, not to do so. A day earlier, the senior American military commander in the Middle East, Admiral William J. Fallon, told General Musharraf and his top generals in a meeting here that declaring emergency rule would jeopardize the extensive American financial support for the Pakistani military.

How long can Musharraf hang on and how long before the country splinters. Musharraf is under attack by both the Islamic extremists and the secular pro Democracy crowd. His only support is the military and that is full of Taliban supporters. I hope that the US and the west know where the nukes are - that is the real mushroom cloud threat not Iran. Just one more example of how the insane Bush/Cheney neocon policy has made the world a more dangerous place.

KGB Envy

The US and the west spent over half of my life, I'm 61, fighting the cold war to prevent the totalitarian Soviet Union from taking away our Democracy only to have the Bush/Cheney administration do exactly that over the last six years. Digby has an interesting, if disturbing, post up on this.

I agree with Greg Djerejian who responded:

It's really an appallingly strange time in our country. We have a singularly powerful Vice-President (compared to any of his predecessors)--openly quite enamored by the tactics employed by the Soviet Union--our former arch-foe whose human rights standards we derided. Indeed, we fought a decades-long Cold War so that Western style constitutional freedoms would trump Soviet authoritarianism. But yes, from this Sovietophile posture, use of torture and black-sites and detention without habeas corpus protections makes all the sense in the world, doesn't it? Because we have a Vice-President all but openly emulating and cheer-leading the tactics of the KGB, not in the wilds of Wyoming, but to a soi disant sophisticated audience in Washington DC.

It's almost as if the reason they hated" the totalitarians was because they could get away with doing what these guys could only fantasize about. It wasn't hatred at all, actually. It was envy.

But this is no longer an academic exercise, is it? Aside from the torture and black sites and detention without habeas (as if that's not enough) they've also been busily laying the legal groundwork for an authoritarian regime at home. It only awaits the next "crisis" for them to fully implement.

And judging by the hysterical reaction of the media and political elites the last time, I can only assume that they will succeed in persuading the country that all these things are necessary.(Recall that Sally Quinn spent the first few years after 9/11 giving terror-porn speeches all over Washington about how to prepare for the next attack, including whether your Shih Tzu can wear a gas mask.) The Nazis, (another former enemy no doubt richly admired for their efficient ways of dealing with internal dissent) never did an illegal thing according the German law. They just changed the laws. That's how the smart folks do things. Precedents, judges, new laws -- it all adds up to a new police state just waiting for the moment it's required.

Meanwhile, Cheney and the rest of his lunatic cohorts are sending clear, unambiguous signals that they are planning to attack Iran. Indeed, as Kevin Hayden pointed out yesterday, there is a coordinated product roll-out happening right before our eyes. First of all we have that Dick Cheney speech in which, as Greg Djerejian also points out, he repeatedly uses a phrase he and Bush used in the run-up to the Iraq war: "serious consequences.

The best way for would be tyrants to become the real thing is to scare the hell out of the population with the threat of an "external" enemy. Cheney and his psychopathic cohorts started laying the ground even before 911 - it just made things easier. They were going to make Saddam into a mortal threat without it. After 911 we saw the serious shredding of the Constitution begin. The press and the congress were cheerleaders - that includes many Democrats as well as most of the Republicans. The Bush/Cheney misadventure in Iraq and the War on terror are no longer enough, their credibility is now zero. They need a new threat - a new war. They will attack Iran. They don't even care if it is another cluster fuck as most predict. They will still use it as an excuse to take more power and discard the constitution.

We knew that!

Report says war on terror is fueling al Qaeda

LONDON (Reuters) - Six years after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the "war on terror" is failing and instead fueling an increase in support for extremist Islamist movements, a British think-tank said on Monday.

A report by the Oxford Research Group (ORG) said a "fundamental re-think is required" if the global terrorist network is to be rendered ineffective.

"If the al Qaeda movement is to be countered, then the roots of its support must be understood and systematically undercut," said Paul Rogers, the report's author and professor of global peace studies at Bradford University in northern England.

"Combined with conventional policing and security measures, al Qaeda can be contained and minimized but this will require a change in policy at every level."

He described the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as a "disastrous mistake" which had helped establish a "most valued jihadist combat training zone" for al Qaeda supporters.

The report -- Alternatives to the War on Terror -- recommended the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq coupled with intensive diplomatic engagement in the region, including with Iran and Syria.

In Afghanistan, Rogers also called for an immediate scaling down of military activities, an injection of more civil aid and negotiations with militia groups aimed at bringing them into the political process.

If such measures were adopted it would still take "at least 10 years to make up for the mistakes made since 9/11."

Are we safer today than we were on 9/10? The answer is obviously no. Iraq has gone from being an unfriendly place for al-Qaeda to a virtual graduate school. The Taliban and al-Qaeda are getting stronger in Afghanistan. The Taliban and al-Qaeda control even more of Pakistan. The US military is run down and bogged down and would be hard pressed to respond to another serious threat to the United States. World wide terrorism is up not down. This all a result of the Bush/Cheney cabals inept and ill conceived "war on terror".

Losing the WOT

While the Bush administration continues to spin it's wheels in the sands of Iraq and threaten Iran the real war against the real enemy, al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan.
Pakistan Seen Losing Fight Against Taliban And Al-Qaeda

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Pakistan's government is losing its war against emboldened insurgent forces, giving al-Qaeda and the Taliban more territory in which to operate and allowing the groups to plot increasingly ambitious attacks, according to Pakistani and Western security officials.

The depth of the problem has become clear only in recent months, as regional peace deals have collapsed and the government has deferred developing a new strategy to defeat insurgents until Pakistan's leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, can resolve a political crisis that threatens his presidency.

Meanwhile, radical Islamic fighters who were evicted from Afghanistan by the 2001 U.S.-led invasion have intensified a ruthless campaign that has consumed Pakistan's tribal areas and now affects its major cities. Military officials say the insurgents have enhanced their ability to threaten not only Pakistan but the United States and Europe as well.

"They've had a chance to regroup and reorganize," said a Western military official in Pakistan. "They're well equipped. They're clearly getting training from somewhere. And they're using more and more advanced tactics."

Pakistan's military, on the other hand, is considering pulling back from the fight -- at least partially -- in the face of mounting losses, the official said.

While the Iraq war creates more enemies daily the real 9/11 enemy is regrouping and becoming an even greater threat to the US and the world. The occupation of Iraq and the saber rattling towards Iran are not only foolish but treasonous.

A common purpose, not a common enemy

Now I don't know if Thomas Friedman has suddenly become enlightened or if he just sees which way the wind is blowing, but he is for once on the right track and even admits that he not always was. In essence what he is saying in 9/11 Is Over is that thanks to the fear mongering of the Bush administration, the neocons and the Republican Party al-Qaeda was successful on 9/11 - they made us forget who we are.

Not long ago, the satirical newspaper The Onion ran a fake news story that began like this:

“At a well-attended rally in front of his new ground zero headquarters Monday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani officially announced his plan to run for president of 9/11. ‘My fellow citizens of 9/11, today I will make you a promise,’ said Giuliani during his 18-minute announcement speech in front of a charred and torn American flag. ‘As president of 9/11, I will usher in a bold new 9/11 for all.’ If elected, Giuliani would inherit the duties of current 9/11 President George W. Bush, including making grim facial expressions, seeing the world’s conflicts in terms of good and evil, and carrying a bullhorn at all state functions.”

Like all good satire, the story made me both laugh and cry, because it reflected something so true — how much, since 9/11, we’ve become “The United States of Fighting Terrorism.” Times columnists are not allowed to endorse candidates, but there’s no rule against saying who will not get my vote: I will not vote for any candidate running on 9/11. We don’t need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12. I will only vote for the 9/12 candidate.

What does that mean? This: 9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.

While this was a direct hit at Rudy Giuliani the sad truth is it could apply to Hillary Clinton and nearly everyone else seeking the presidential nomination. The two possible exceptions are Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.

Of course Tom Friedman's 9/12 is not my 9/12 - his concern is largely about the impact on his absurd "flat earth". But his basic observations are correct, we have lost sight of who and what America represents.

Update
As one would expect the wingers are outraged and even more outraged.

Many on the left are not as willing to forgive as Libby and I.

So How Goes That Global War On Terror

We saw yesterday that General Pretaeus would not or could not answer John Warner's question "Do you feel that [Iraq war] is making America safer"? . Of course it hasn't, in fact it has made us less safe by creating new recruits for the group that was actually responsible for 911 ans inflaming much of the Muslim world. One indication of that can be found here:
Poll: Bin Laden tops Musharraf in Pakistan

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf -- a key U.S. ally -- is less popular in his own country than al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to a poll of Pakistanis conducted last month by an anti-terrorism organization.

Additionally, nearly three-fourths of poll respondents said they oppose U.S. military action against al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan, according to results from the poll conducted by the independent polling organization Terror Free Tomorrow.

"We have conducted 23 polls all over the Muslim world, and this is the most disturbing one we have conducted," said Ken Ballen, the group's head. "Pakistan is the one Muslim nation that has nuclear weapons, and the people who want to use them against us -- like the Taliban and al Qaeda -- are more popular there than our allies like Musharraf."

The poll was conducted for Terror Free Tomorrow by D3 Systems of Vienna, Virginia., and the Pakistan Institute for Public Opinion. Interviews were conducted August 18-29, face-to-face with 1,044 Pakistanis across 105 urban and rural sampling points in all four provinces across the nation. Households were randomly selected.

According to poll results, bin Laden has a 46 percent approval rating. Musharraf's support is 38 percent. U.S. President George W. Bush's approval: 9 percent.

Al-Qaeda may have decentralized but it is stronger and more dangerous than ever. Worldwide terrorist attacks have increased significantly since the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And what about those good Bush friends, the Saudis.
U.S.: Saudis Still Filling Al Qaeda's Coffers

Despite six years of promises, U.S. officials say Saudi Arabia continues to look the other way at wealthy individuals identified as sending millions of dollars to al Qaeda.

"If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia," Stuart Levey, the under secretary of the Treasury in charge of tracking terror financing, told ABC News.

Despite some efforts as a U.S. ally in the war on terror, Levey says Saudi Arabia has dropped the ball. Not one person identified by the United States and the United Nations as a terror financier has been prosecuted by the Saudis, Levey says.

The invasion of Iraq was never about making the US or the world safe. It was always about Dick Cheney's lust for hegemony over the oil rich middle east.

Good for the Germans

German Police Arrest 3 in Imminent Terrorist Plot

FRANKFURT, Sept. 5 — The police in Germany have arrested three Islamic militants suspected of planning major terrorist attacks against several sites frequented by Americans, including the busy United States air base at Ramstein and the Frankfurt international airport.

The suspects — two German citizens and a Turkish resident of Germany — were in advanced stages of plotting bombing attacks that could have been deadlier than the terrorist strikes that killed dozens in London and Madrid, police and security officials said Wednesday.

“They were planning massive attacks,” the German federal prosecutor, Monika Harms, said at a news conference, outlining a vast six-month investigation. She said that the suspects had amassed huge amounts of hydrogen peroxide, the main chemical used to manufacture the explosives used in the suicide bombings in London in July 2005.

It sounds like this may have been a real one - unlike the phony ones the US has been able to "break up". And they managed to do it with out ignoring 800 years of legal tradition and turning their country into a police state.

Kevin Hayden has more.

The real threat to the United States

Updated Below
Is there a threat more dangerous to the US form of government than al-Qaeda? The answer might be yes and it's even closer to home in the form of authoritarian wingnuts. While those on the right, like Ed Morrissey, have been correctly critical of Hugo Chavez's attempt to become President for life....

Hugo Chavez will push through an end to term limits on an elected office in Venezuela, not coincidentally his own. The change will allow Venezuelans the pleasure of electing him indefinitely, which he sees as critical to his nation's "happiness", if not his own:

....we have this (via Digby) from Family Security Matters.
Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy
By Philip Atkinson

President George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States. He was sworn in for a second term on January 20, 2005 after being chosen by the majority of citizens in America to be president.



Yet in 2007 he is generally despised, with many citizens of Western civilization expressing contempt for his person and his policies, sentiments which now abound on the Internet. This rage at President Bush is an inevitable result of the system of government demanded by the people, which is Democracy.



The inadequacy of Democracy, rule by the majority, is undeniable – for it demands adopting ideas because they are popular, rather than because they are wise. This means that any man chosen to act as an agent of the people is placed in an invidious position: if he commits folly because it is popular, then he will be held responsible for the inevitable result. If he refuses to commit folly, then he will be detested by most citizens because he is frustrating their demands.



When faced with the possible threat that the Iraqis might be amassing terrible weapons that could be used to slay millions of citizens of Western Civilization, President Bush took the only action prudence demanded and the electorate allowed: he conquered Iraq with an army.



This dangerous and expensive act did destroy the Iraqi regime, but left an American army without any clear purpose in a hostile country and subject to attack. If the Army merely returns to its home, then the threat it ended would simply return.



The wisest course would have been for President Bush to use his nuclear weapons to slaughter Iraqis until they complied with his demands, or until they were all dead. Then there would be little risk or expense and no American army would be left exposed. But if he did this, his cowardly electorate would have instantly ended his term of office, if not his freedom or his life.



The simple truth that modern weapons now mean a nation must practice genocide or commit suicide. Israel provides the perfect example. If the Israelis do not raze Iran, the Iranians will fulfill their boast and wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Yet Israel is not popular, and so is denied permission to defend itself. In the same vein, President Bush cannot do what is necessary for the survival of Americans. He cannot use the nation's powerful weapons. All he can do is try and discover a result that will be popular with Americans.



As there appears to be no sensible result of the invasion of Iraq that will be popular with his countrymen other than retreat, President Bush is reviled; he has become another victim of Democracy.



By elevating popular fancy over truth, Democracy is clearly an enemy of not just truth, but duty and justice, which makes it the worst form of government. President Bush must overcome not just the situation in Iraq, but democratic government.



However, President Bush has a valuable historical example that he could choose to follow.



When the ancient Roman general Julius Caesar was struggling to conquer ancient Gaul, he not only had to defeat the Gauls, but he also had to defeat his political enemies in Rome who would destroy him the moment his tenure as consul (president) ended.



Caesar pacified Gaul by mass slaughter; he then used his successful army to crush all political opposition at home and establish himself as permanent ruler of ancient Rome. This brilliant action not only ended the personal threat to Caesar, but ended the civil chaos that was threatening anarchy in ancient Rome – thus marking the start of the ancient Roman Empire that gave peace and prosperity to the known world.



If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.



He could then follow Caesar's example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.



President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become “President-for-Life” Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.

This article has been deleted from their site but digby found this in the Google Cache. A fringe organization you say. Digby explains not so!

I've been getting a lot of emails about this group Family Security Matters which boasts such right wing luminaries as Barbara Comstock, Monica Crowley, Frank Gaffney, Laura Ingraham and James Woolsey among others on its board of directors. It seems like they are just another of the dozens of wingnut welfare programs devoted to throwing good money after bad keeping conservative operatives gainfully employed.

The emails I'm getting say they are busily scrubbing articles all over the place. When you look at what they've left up you have to wonder what could possibly be so bad they have to scrub it.

Perhaps those on the right who are not cultists like Ed should join the rest of us in looking a little closer to home for threats to our way of life.

Update
Dave Neiwert has more

Update II
Mark Kleiman thinks it's a hoax. I must admit that I wondered about that as well. Philip Atkinson is a genuine lunatic. He really does say and write this stuff. Dave Neiwert had some of his other writings at Family Security Matters that are still in the Google cache. I will give FSM the benifit of the doubt and assume they may have let this really crazy man in the door and then scrubbed his stuff and kicked him out. As for the members; I doubt that James Woolsey would go along with this but I can't say the same for Frank Gaffney and Laura Ingraham. They are just as nuts as Mr Atkinson. A "hoax", no. A mistake by some overzealous members, perhaps.

Prohibition Redux

The US experiment to prohibit the sail and use of alcohol was by any measure a grand failure. The only thing it succeeded in doing was to create rich and powerful criminal elements. It was eventually recognized as the failure it was bu even those who had supported it and abandoned. The "war on drugs" has also been a a very similar failure but is still going strong. In early 2006 I wrote the following:

While the war in Iraq may outrageous there is another war that is equally outrageous and is truly bi-partisan, the war on drugs. Like the war in Iraq it has accomplished nothing positive, consumed vast sums of the nations wealth and ruined lives. The reasons for the war on drugs are similar to the reasons for the war in Iraq.

• Political Power


• Corporate Wealth and Power


• Religious Zealotry

Like the "war on drugs" the "war on terror" is a metaphorical war. In an excellent article in the Washington Post, The Lost War, Misha Glenny reports that it is not only as big a failure as prohibition in the 1930's the criminal elements it is supporting are the very ones we are allegedly fighting in the "war on terror".

Thirty-six years and hundreds of billions of dollars after President Richard M. Nixon launched the war on drugs, consumers worldwide are taking more narcotics and criminals are making fatter profits than ever before. The syndicates that control narcotics production and distribution reap the profits from an annual turnover of $400 billion to $500 billion. And terrorist organizations such as the Taliban are using this money to expand their operations and buy ever more sophisticated weapons, threatening Western security.

In the past two years, the drug war has become the Taliban's most effective recruiter in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's Muslim extremists have reinvigorated themselves by supporting and taxing the countless peasants who are dependent one way or another on the opium trade, their only reliable source of income. The Taliban is becoming richer and stronger by the day, especially in the east and south of the country. The "War on Drugs" is defeating the "war on terror."

Go read the entire well written piece.

More on the "War on Drugs" can be found here.

The Padilla Post

I don't know if Jose Padilla was really a threat or if it was a PR stunt. Unfortunately no one will ever know. What we do know is that after three years of solitary confinement and probably some torture the guy is bat shit crazy and would have to be locked up forever, guilty or innocent. John Cole has some thoughts on the entire debacle and while you should read the entire thing here is the meat.

I guess where I stand is as follows- I still do not understand why it was necessary to keep this guy in solitary confinement until he was basically a grunting vegetable. I just don’t. Why was it necessary to violate his rights as a citizen? Why keep him from a lawyer? Why?

[.....]

Don’t get me wrong- if Padilla is in fact a threat, I want him locked up, too. You can throw him next to the Unabomber and John Walker Lindh and Eric Rudolph and other traitors, if in fact he is a terrorist. I just think the way this all went down, all of us were deprived of ever knowing if he really was a threat.

That bothers me, and it doesn’t inspire confidence in the way our government works.

And You Think It's Bad Now!

I think that although they won't admit it nearly everyone knows the US will be leaving Iraq with with it's tail between it's legs. Those who have supported this war are simply now waiting until they can find someone else to blame fro their failure. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges explains that the helicopter on the roof moment in Iraq is likely to come sooner rather than later.
Beyond Disaster

The war in Iraq is about to get worse—much worse. The Democrats’ decision to let the war run its course, while they frantically wash their hands of responsibility, means that it will sputter and stagger forward until the mission collapses. This will be sudden. The security of the Green Zone, our imperial city, will be increasingly breached. Command and control will disintegrate. And we will back out of Iraq humiliated and defeated. But this will not be the end of the conflict. It will, in fact, signal a phase of the war far deadlier and more dangerous to American interests.

As we have discussed here before Iraq was never a country except to the map makers in Europe and the US. It was a collection of tribes, sects and ethnicity's held together by assorted tyrants the last of which was of course Saddam.

Remember all those visions of a democratic Iraq, visions peddled by the White House and fatuous pundits like Thomas Friedman and the gravel-voiced morons who pollute our airwaves on CNN and Fox News? They assured us that the war would be a cakewalk. We would be greeted as liberators. Democracy would seep out over the borders of Iraq to usher in a new Middle East. Now, struggling to salvage their own credibility, they blame the debacle on poor planning and mismanagement.

There are probably about 10,000 Arabists in the United States—people who have lived for prolonged periods in the Middle East and speak Arabic. At the inception of the war you could not have rounded up more than about a dozen who thought this was a good idea. And I include all the Arabists in the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence community. Anyone who had spent significant time in Iraq knew this would not work. The war was not doomed because Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz did not do sufficient planning for the occupation. The war was doomed, period. It never had a chance. And even a cursory knowledge of Iraqi history and politics made this apparent.

This is not to deny the stupidity of the occupation. The disbanding of the Iraqi army; the ham-fisted attempt to install the crook and, it now turns out, Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi in power; the firing of all Baathist public officials, including university professors, primary school teachers, nurses and doctors; the failure to secure Baghdad and the vast weapons depots from looters; allowing heavily armed American units to blast their way through densely populated neighborhoods, giving the insurgency its most potent recruiting tool—all ensured a swift descent into chaos. But Iraq would not have held together even if we had been spared the gross incompetence of the Bush administration. Saddam Hussein, like the more benign dictator Josip Broz Tito in the former Yugoslavia, understood that the glue that held the country together was the secret police.

Not satisfied with a failure in Iraq.

The neoconservatives—and the liberal interventionists, who still serve as the neocons’ useful idiots when it comes to Iran—have learned nothing. They talk about hitting Iran and maybe even Pakistan with airstrikes. Strikes on Iran would ensure a regional conflict. Such an action has the potential of drawing Israel into war—especially if Iran retaliates for any airstrikes by hitting Israel, as I would expect Tehran to do. There are still many in the U.S. who cling to the doctrine of pre-emptive war, a doctrine that the post-World War II Nuremberg laws define as a criminal “war of aggression.”

The occupation of Iraq, along with the Afghanistan occupation, has only furthered the spread of failed states and increased authoritarianism, savage violence, instability and anarchy. It has swelled the ranks of our real enemies—the Islamic terrorists—and opened up voids of lawlessness where they can operate and plot against us. It has scuttled the art of diplomacy. It has left us an outlaw state intent on creating more outlaw states. It has empowered Iran, as well as Russia and China, which sit on the sidelines gleefully watching our self-immolation. This is what George W. Bush and all those “reluctant hawks” who supported him have bequeathed us.

What is terrifying is not that the architects and numerous apologists of the Iraq war have learned nothing, but that they may not yet be finished.

Is it time to attack Saudi Arabia?

While the Bush administration and the neocons are rattling their sabers at Iran and Syria it appears that most of the foreign fighters are from Saudi Arabia.
Saudis' role in Iraq insurgency outlined
Sunni extremists from Saudi Arabia make up half the foreign fighters in Iraq, many suicide bombers, a U.S. official says.

BAGHDAD — Although Bush administration officials have frequently lashed out at Syria and Iran, accusing it of helping insurgents and militias here, the largest number of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq come from a third neighbor, Saudi Arabia, according to a senior U.S. military officer and Iraqi lawmakers.

About 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia; 15% are from Syria and Lebanon; and 10% are from North Africa, according to official U.S. military figures made available to The Times by the senior officer. Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis, he said.

Fighters from Saudi Arabia are thought to have carried out more suicide bombings than those of any other nationality, said the senior U.S. officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity. It is apparently the first time a U.S. official has given such a breakdown on the role played by Saudi nationals in Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgency.

He said 50% of all Saudi fighters in Iraq come here as suicide bombers. In the last six months, such bombings have killed or injured 4,000 Iraqis.

And what about our friends the Saudis?

The situation has left the U.S. military in the awkward position of battling an enemy whose top source of foreign fighters is a key ally that at best has not been able to prevent its citizens from undertaking bloody attacks in Iraq, and at worst shares complicity in sending extremists to commit attacks against U.S. forces, Iraqi civilians and the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.

Saudi leaders in early February undercut U.S. diplomacy in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute by brokering, in Mecca, an agreement to form a Fatah-Hamas "unity" government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And King Abdullah took Americans by surprise by declaring at an Arab League gathering that the U.S. presence in Iraq was illegitimate.

U.S. officials remain sensitive about the relationship. Asked why U.S. officials in Iraq had not publicly criticized Saudi Arabia the way they had Iran or Syria, the senior military officer said, "Ask the State Department. This is a political juggernaut."

This has resulted in Professor Bainbridge asking a very serious question or two.

It makes one wonder whether the case for regime change in Saudi Arabia was (and is) a lot stronger than the one for regime chane in Iraq. Certainly, it suggests that countering Wahhabism should have been Bush's first priority. It'll also add fuel to the fire of conspiracy theories, like this one:

Both then-president Bush and the current president have had personal and deep financial ties with the Saudi royal family. Author and journalist Craig Unger documents $1.4 billion that has “made its way” from the Saudi royal family to “entities tied” to the Bush family, according to Unger’s controversial book "House of Bush, House of Saud.”

Unger contends that the documented oil holdings and affiliations of both Bush presidents has led to a policy of inaction in the post-Sept. 11 world.

“There is a fundamental piece of logic missing in the American conversation ... the Saudis played a big role in terrorism, that the Bushes have very, very close to the Saudis both in business terms, personal terms, and in public policy. And it has a resulted in a non-cracking down in the Saudi role on terror,” said Unger, who lives only blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood.

Update
As my friend and partner The Gun Toting Liberal points out even some of the wingnuts are upset with Bush over this.