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Karzai: "American military should “stop harassing” the Afghan judiciary

An article in the Guardian of London headlined, "A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the U.S. an Afghan route for Caspian oil".

"The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism," wrote author George Monbiot in the Oct. 22, 2001, piece, "but it may also be a late colonial adventure."

He wrote that the U.S. oil company Unocal Corp. had been negotiating with the Taliban since 1995 to build "oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea."

To make things even smoother, the U.S. engineered the rise to power of two former Unocal employees: Hamid Karzai, the new interim president of Afghanistan, and Zalmay Khalizad, the Bush administration's Afghanistan envoy.

John Pilger in an Oct. 29 commentary in the British-based Mirror wrote, "Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth."

"Just as the Gulf War in 1991 was about oil, the new conflict in South and Central Asia is no less about access to the region's abundant petroleum resources," writes Ranjit Devraj in the Hong Kong-based Asia Times, a business- oriented publication.
 
Dittohead not! said:
I don't either, but I do remember them being about as successful with their venture as we are with ours.

Genghis Kahn wasn't trying to establish democracy either, and whatever he was trying to accomplish was also a failure.
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Genghis Kahn objective was rape and plunder.
 
MMC said:
Let the Saudis and the those Sunni Arabs.....run in to save the day. Get a little bit of that front line action on a grand scale. So they can taste whats its like. Rather than just talk and talk and talk and beg others to go and do the their dirty work for them.
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agreed. suppose we had left a presence in Iraq? we'd be combatting ISIS in Anbar province for sure.

Not our war, never was, just like AfPak, until we made it our business. Let the Saud do it; let the place go to hell. I do not care. just drone the AQ, but not the Taliban.
Pakistan isn't our war either.
 
grip said:
An article in the Guardian of London headlined, "A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the U.S. an Afghan route for Caspian oil".

"The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism," wrote author George Monbiot in the Oct. 22, 2001, piece, "but it may also be a late colonial adventure."

He wrote that the U.S. oil company Unocal Corp. had been negotiating with the Taliban since 1995 to build "oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea."

To make things even smoother, the U.S. engineered the rise to power of two former Unocal employees: Hamid Karzai, the new interim president of Afghanistan, and Zalmay Khalizad, the Bush administration's Afghanistan envoy.

John Pilger in an Oct. 29 commentary in the British-based Mirror wrote, "Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth."

"Just as the Gulf War in 1991 was about oil, the new conflict in South and Central Asia is no less about access to the region's abundant petroleum resources," writes Ranjit Devraj in the Hong Kong-based Asia Times, a business- oriented publication.
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"Pipelineistan" is the given name. I don't know if by now we could control the Caspian reserves, but it very well could have been a key motivation.

Extended AfPak War under Obama: Slouching towards Balkanization | Global Research

Khalilzad was a key player in setting up the Afghanistan-America Foundation in the mid-1990s, a lobby that during the Clinton administration became very influential because of its spinning of TAP, hyped as a key pipeline to bypass both Iran and Russia

Karzai has always denied – including to this correspondent – he was a minor Unocal employee plus entertainer of Taliban delegations visiting Houston and Washington in 1997.
Khalilzad’s relationship is less murky: he was a certified Unocal advisor. The “prize” – from president Bill Clinton to Bush and now Obama –
is still the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline, then known as TAP and now known as TAPI, with the inclusion of India (See Pipelineistan goes Af-Pak Asia Times Online, May 14, 2009).
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ecofarm said:
You have a time machine? Let me borrow it.
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I have a memory that goes back to the Vietnam War. Luckily for us, the North Vietnamese government didn't turn out to be nearly as "Communistic" as we supposed, and, as we now know, the so called "domino theory" was a lot of hoakum.

But, after more than two decades in that country, Nixon finally pulled the troops out and went home. To this day, the hawks maintain that the war could have been won had it not been for the "liberals" who pulled us out prematurely.
 
Dittohead not! said:
I have a memory that goes back to the Vietnam War. Luckily for us, the North Vietnamese government didn't turn out to be nearly as "Communistic" as we supposed, and, as we now know, the so called "domino theory" was a lot of hoakum.

But, after more than two decades in that country, Nixon finally pulled the troops out and went home. To this day, the hawks maintain that the war could have been won had it not been for the "liberals" who pulled us out prematurely.
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With Afghanistan we just need to get out and keep the drones and bombers handy. Back in the 1950’s when the domino theory was first envision, it was correct. Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, South Vietnam and Malaysia were ripe to fall. 15 years later Thailand had strengthen their national defense to where that country probably could stand on its own against the Vietnamese. But Laos and Cambodia just didn’t have the population or the will. Thailand did and those 15 years meant the domino theory would now stop at Thailand’s door whereas back in the late 50’s, Thailand was very weak, militarily and with the unity of the nation.

As for winning that war, we never had the will. We went into Vietnam with a goal of not winning, but with preserving the status quo, gaining a stalemate. There are days I wake up think, yes we could have won. Then there are others when I wake up and know there was no way. But I was too deeply involved to have a non-biased opinion on Vietnam.
 
Perotista said:
With Afghanistan we just need to get out and keep the drones and bombers handy. Back in the 1950’s when the domino theory was first envision, it was correct. Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, South Vietnam and Malaysia were ripe to fall. 15 years later Thailand had strengthen their national defense to where that country probably could stand on its own against the Vietnamese. But Laos and Cambodia just didn’t have the population or the will. Thailand did and those 15 years meant the domino theory would now stop at Thailand’s door whereas back in the late 50’s, Thailand was very weak, militarily and with the unity of the nation.

As for winning that war, we never had the will. We went into Vietnam with a goal of not winning, but with preserving the status quo, gaining a stalemate. There are days I wake up think, yes we could have won. Then there are others when I wake up and know there was no way. But I was too deeply involved to have a non-biased opinion on Vietnam.
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We went in not only with the goal of not winning, but with no vision of what winning would have even looked like. If the goal was status quo, why even get involved at all? Meanwhile, today we are in Afganistan with the goal of... what again? How do we know when we've won if there is no exit strategy?

And I, too, was too involved to have a non biased view of Vietnam. It just seems to me that there are parallels with Vietnam, Afganistan, and Iraq.
 
grip said:
An article in the Guardian of London headlined, "A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the U.S. an Afghan route for Caspian oil".

"The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism," wrote author George Monbiot in the Oct. 22, 2001, piece, "but it may also be a late colonial adventure."

He wrote that the U.S. oil company Unocal Corp. had been negotiating with the Taliban since 1995 to build "oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea."

To make things even smoother, the U.S. engineered the rise to power of two former Unocal employees: Hamid Karzai, the new interim president of Afghanistan, and Zalmay Khalizad, the Bush administration's Afghanistan envoy.

John Pilger in an Oct. 29 commentary in the British-based Mirror wrote, "Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth."

"Just as the Gulf War in 1991 was about oil, the new conflict in South and Central Asia is no less about access to the region's abundant petroleum resources," writes Ranjit Devraj in the Hong Kong-based Asia Times, a business- oriented publication.
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The War in Afghanistan was not about building a pipeline to the Caspian or the Indian Ocean. Good ****ing grief.
 
Dittohead not! said:
I don't either, but I do remember them being about as successful with their venture as we are with ours.

Genghis Kahn wasn't trying to establish democracy either, and whatever he was trying to accomplish was also a failure.
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How so? Khan despoiled Khwarezemia and dominated Afghanistan until it was in turn absorbed by the Timurids. Afghanistan has been conquered and subdued repeatedly throughout its history.
 
Sherman123 said:
How so? Khan despoiled Khwarezemia and dominated Afghanistan until it was in turn absorbed by the Timurids. Afghanistan has been conquered and subdued repeatedly throughout its history.
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I don't know about that.

I got to wondering agout the belief that Afganistan has really never been conquered, and looked it up. It seems it has, more or less:

Yahoo answers

Yes.

Alexander the Great conquered and pacified the region; even after his death,it was sufficiently under the thumb to be mentioned in both the Partition of Babylon (323 BC) and Partition of Triparadisus 321 BC), documents drawn up by Alexander's generals dividing his empire between them.

The fact that the Indian client king Porus was leading an army to the support of Eumenes against Antingonus in 317 BC, during the wars of the Diadochi, is further indication that Afghanistan was still controlled by Hellenistic satraps, as Porus would have to cross the area to reach Eumenes.

In 1842, British forces defeated an Afghan army and occupied Kabul, destroying all its fortifications and the Central Bazaar (centre of economic activity in the country). However, deciding that Afghanistan was both too dangerous and,more importantly,unprofitable, The East India Company decided to withdraw the British presence from Afghanistan permanently (this is clear from surviving correspondence of the Company with its London offices).
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So, maybe it's time to take a page from the East India Company's playbook. Afganistan is dangerous and unprofitable....

unless, of course, that pipeline from the Caspian Sea mentioned above is the real goal.
 
Dittohead not! said:
We went in not only with the goal of not winning, but with no vision of what winning would have even looked like. If the goal was status quo, why even get involved at all? Meanwhile, today we are in Afganistan with the goal of... what again? How do we know when we've won if there is no exit strategy?

And I, too, was too involved to have a non biased view of Vietnam. It just seems to me that there are parallels with Vietnam, Afganistan, and Iraq.
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I think you are right, there are some and yet they are different. We went into Vietnam and forced the Vietnamese to do away with their Mandarin style of government for democracy, we have done the same in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we had allowed the Afghani's to choose their own form of government instead of forcing ours on to them, we wouldn't be in the pickle we are today.
 
Dittohead not! said:
I have a memory that goes back to the Vietnam War. Luckily for us, the North Vietnamese government didn't turn out to be nearly as "Communistic" as we supposed, and, as we now know, the so called "domino theory" was a lot of hoakum.
Click to expand...

Vietnam, today, is a pile of ****. It would not be had it maintained ties with the West and pursued democracy, human rights and development.
 
Montecresto said:
What are you suggesting Juanita? Karzai is going, and there will be elections, its just a matter of whether or not Karzai gets his man in there.
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Take him out and put our own handpicked guy in.....
 
Andalublue said:
If it was a fair election, how could you be sure that the Taliban wouldn't win? Ban them from standing and you just made it unfair.
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We could buy the election--put our own guy in...
 
annata said:
interesting, haven't thought about the elections -found this:

Will Afghanistan Survive The Aftermath Of Its 2014 Presidential Elections? Will A Former Warlord Or Pro-Western Technocrat Replace Karzai?

This year’s elections will see 11 candidates, ranging from Western-educated technocrats to former warlords with bloody histories.
Afghanistan’s economy is largely dependent on international assistance as well as the presence of coalition forces in the country, which generates demand for goods and services.

In 2010 to 2011 the civilian and security-related assistance was the equivalent to 98 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP, and with the transition Afghanistan will have to rely more on domestic revenue generation to meet its budgetary needs.
This year’s presidential election can provide a critical opportunity for a renewal of legitimacy, a boost in confidence and a start to correcting the ineffective and corrupt governance that characterizes Afghanistan,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow with the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, a non-partisan Washington think tank, said.
But Brown warned the election could trigger “extensive violence, a prolonged political crisis that paralyzes governance and the collapse of international support,” which could strengthen the Taliban.
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Well, we sure don't want to do anything to strengthen the Taliban... We need some smart people on this one...
 
Juanita said:
We could buy the election--put our own guy in...
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Mornin' Juanita.
hat.gif
How do we do that when we don't have any in the Taliban that will be taking control. They have refused all negotiations with us.
 
MMC said:
Let the Saudis and the those Sunni Arabs.....run in to save the day. Get a little bit of that front line action on a grand scale. So they can taste whats its like. Rather than just talk and talk and talk and beg others to go and do the their dirty work for them.
Click to expand...

Yeah but, are you saying that we should still have soldiers getting killed in Iraq. Americans that voted for Obama in 08' were done, finished with Iraq and wanted exactly a clean break. Iraq was a mistake to begin with, why should it be perpetuated. I mean I realize Powell told Bush, "if you break it, you own it" (and of course Bush broke it) but Americans don't want to own it anymore.
 
Dittohead not! said:
Right. And when the USA leaves, which they must sooner or later, and Afganistan returns to an authoritarian hell hole once again, then the cry will be that we could have won if the liberals hadn't made us pull out.
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Who gives a **** what they have on the books right. Lets see what they have in practice once the last soldiers gone. These supporters of ****ed up US foreign policy in the ME are just amazing. Besides, was any of that the reason we even went there? I thought we went to destroy the people responsible for 9/11, they're stronger now too! There has been as much success at our efforts as the USSR had at there's, just like you stated to begin with! Oh, and poppies are at peak production!!
 
grip said:
An article in the Guardian of London headlined, "A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the U.S. an Afghan route for Caspian oil".

"The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism," wrote author George Monbiot in the Oct. 22, 2001, piece, "but it may also be a late colonial adventure."

He wrote that the U.S. oil company Unocal Corp. had been negotiating with the Taliban since 1995 to build "oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea."

To make things even smoother, the U.S. engineered the rise to power of two former Unocal employees: Hamid Karzai, the new interim president of Afghanistan, and Zalmay Khalizad, the Bush administration's Afghanistan envoy.

John Pilger in an Oct. 29 commentary in the British-based Mirror wrote, "Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth."

"Just as the Gulf War in 1991 was about oil, the new conflict in South and Central Asia is no less about access to the region's abundant petroleum resources," writes Ranjit Devraj in the Hong Kong-based Asia Times, a business- oriented publication.
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And the only ones surprised is the pro-war crowd.
 
Juanita said:
Take him out and put our own handpicked guy in.....
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Kill him! And then "put" our own guy in. I thought we wanted a democracy in A-Stan? I'll accept that your joking anyway.:)
 
ecofarm said:
Vietnam, today, is a pile of ****. It would not be had it maintained ties with the West and pursued democracy, human rights and development.
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Not according to people who have visited there recently, but I haven't been so all I know is what people have told me.

Have you been there? What did you see that led you to believe it was so terrible?
 
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