Aid Winds Up In Taliban Hands

What people in our government?

 

It started with the Bush administration.

 

Stablizing Afghanistan is going to required making sure that the Taliban have a legitimate place in the government there.

Winning the hearts of the Afghan people is going to require us helping them - not killing them.

 

I agree with you.

Watch out, someone will call you a liberal if you say people should be helped. :laugh:

 

In other words, you mean two things:
1) stop giving the money to the Afghan government officials, who in turn gave the money to Taliban representatives, because the Afghan government officials knew they'd have to include the Taliban in order to stabilize things; and

2) "take care of the legistics ourselves" - I presume you mean "logistics." In other words, we should be doing the job of their government for them. Which, in turn, means that we basically run their government for them. Is that actually what you intend?

 

We need to look at this within the context of "winning" the war in Afghanistan

This is how I see a win:

1. A stable democratic government that reflects the will of the people of Afghanistan

2. A government that can stand after we leave

3. A government that rejects terrorism

4. An friend to the U.S.

In order to acheive the above we are going to have to include the Taliban - there is just no way around this.

The Taliban are not Al-queda (spelling).

The Taliban don't want to destroy the U.S. - they just want our troops out of their country.

 

The only way to have a stable government in Afghanistan is to install a ruthless puppet dictator and arm him to the teeth.

We did it in Iran and we can do it in again in Afghanistan.

Only this time take away their power to print their own money and offer cheap easy credit. Keep em in debt so far over their heads they won't know what's going on untill they are as hopelessly enslaved to the global bankers and corprations as we are.

That's how we "win" in Afghanistan.

The one "fly in the ointment" I see in that plan is the Afghans probably know our history much better than we do so they might not fall for it.

I just can't imagine why anyone would want foreign occupiers out of their country.

 

How do you propose to make that happen?

Here's the military situation: American advisors are there now, have been for years. They sit with their Afghan counterparts, who say, "I have to have this amount of money to purchase this infrastructure, or let out this contract to have buildings and roads constructed, etc., etc." The advisors typically work the requests with them; if the Afghans can't make it happen through their budget, the advisors take it back to their leadership and present it through a review process. Once the review process authorizes it, the procurement documents are submitted to the financial office(s). The financial offices then work the release of the funds. Once the Afghan system receives the funding, the Afghans are then free to use the funds as intended...or not.

The part of the process that totally refutes what you propose is the review process. The Afghans don't ask for money for almonds and dried peas; they ask for operationally related items. Whether those funds are used for what was originally asked for...well....

Your next question or observation should be: the advisors should be reporting whether the money is used correctly or not. They do; that is, the ones that know what they're doing do. A lot of our military folks receive very little advisor training, especially in the area of financial management. Not to mention, how to read Pashtun or Dari, so that you can verify that what your Afghan counterpart is showing you is the same as what he's telling you.

But that doesn't even help, because he's showing you his paper records, which justify every little penny you just helped him get; doesn't mean that that's actually what he bought, or that that's how much he actually paid. In other words, the advisors are in a position where they have to trust what they see and observe, until such a time that they're given evidence to the contrary.

IN OTHER WORDS: Their process isn't much different than ours. Our own American companies put forth bids, knowing full well that they've underbid the project, and know that government organizations will pay for the cost overruns. Some of them pad the costs of pieces of the project, thereby increasing the company profit margin (or worst case, pocketing the difference). Just like the Afghans, they pay who they need to in order to complete the project.

People are pretty much the same everywhere, ya know?

If it makes you feel any better: me and my crew were responsible for supplying radio equipment. I had an exceptional Canadian officer who did a reconciliation for all radio equipment back to around 2006. We subsequently related to the Afghan officer in charge of communications for the Afghan army that we would not order any replacment radios until the Afghan Corps communications chiefs could account for every radio ever issued to them. I'm happy to say that my crew never ordered replacement radios during our time there; we only ordered new equipment to meet expanding requirements. I can also safely assure you that that funding was spent through American processes to an American-based company which built and shipped the radios. I can't tell you that any additional funds for "emergency requirements" (i.e., need to buy 900 cheap handheld radios now, to meet a requirement within a month) weren't fully expended on the subject item; not being able to read Pashtun or Dari, and speaking little of it, I was reliant on a translator and the financial documents that were provided by my Afghan counterparts.

 

Comfortable? Not hardly. Simply explaining the facts of life. What I've provided above points to where the problem lies; that's where the changes must occur.

The only thing "cutting them off" will fix, is the outpouring of money from our economy that doesn't go back into our economy.

 

What else would be fixed?

 

The Taliban weren't always our enemy. At one point they were considered to be "a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia".

Problem. The oil and gas reserves in Afghanistan were under the control of Russia.

Solution. Buy off the Taliban.

Problem. It didn't work.

Solution. Invasion.

Problem. The American people wouldn't stand for their military being used in an "imperial" fashion. * See The Grand Chessboard

Solution. 9/11/01

In the beginning of August, the Bush Administration and its Big Oil cohorts delivered what amounted to an ultimatum to the Taliban.

The Taliban representatives were reportedly told by Bush/Big Oil: Accept our offer of "a carpet of gold or you'll get a carpet of bombs."

That's a DIRECT quote, according to French authors Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, who've just written a thoroughly-researched and heavily-documented book about the entire extraordinary business titled "Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth".

ALSO revealed in the book is the fact that BUSH HIMSELF directly ordered the FBI and other U.S. law enforcement groups to BACK OFF on TERRORIST-RELATED INVESTIGATIONS while the oil pipeline negotiations were underway!

In FACT, the FBI's Deputy Director John O'Neill resigned in July in protest over this outrageous and intolerable obstruction. And by the way: the whereabouts of one OSAMA BIN LADEN, then already firmly entrenched at the very top of the US's "most-wanted terrorist" list during the entire course of these pipeline negotiations, was NEVER an issue with the Bush cartel.

Never ONCE were the Taliban urged to hand bin Laden over for all those OTHER horrendous crimes Feds maintain bin Laden has been charged with committing over the years.

And SO: barely a MONTH after the Bush administration sabotaged the negotiations with the Taliban regarding running the Caspian Sea oil pipeline through Afghanistan, the World Trade Center towers are bombed into oblivion, bringing about the currently ongoing UNDECLARED (and therefore illegal) "war on terrorism" ... that just HAPPENS to be directed at the Taliban in Afghanistan. SOURCE

Problem. The carpet of bombs failed to defeat the Taliban and now they walk on the promised golden carpet while we ourselves slide ever closer to depression.

Ain't our "foreign policy" great?

 

So you are saying that the U.S. government staged the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in order to invade Afghanistan?