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| Mes Aynak, Afghanistan, is the world's largest Buddhist archeological site; China owns the mineral rights and wants to raze the square-mile complex for its ore (zenpundit.com). |
The "ghost" soldiers of Afghanistan
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| Afghan Buddha (Gandhara) |
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Afghan forces are struggling to man the front lines against a resurgent [CIA-sponsored and US NGO-funded] Taliban, in part because of untold numbers of "ghost" troops who are paid salaries but only exist on paper.
The nationwide problem has been particularly severe in the southern Helmand province, where the Taliban have seized vast tracts of territory in the 12 months since the U.S. and NATO formally ended their combat mission and switched to training and support.
"At checkpoints where 20 soldiers should be present, there are only eight or 10," said Karim Atal, head of Helmand's provincial council. "It's because some people are getting paid a salary but not doing the job because they are related to someone important, like a local warlord."
In some cases, the "ghost" designation is more literal -- dead soldiers and police remain on the books, with senior police or army officials pocketing their salaries without replacing them, Atal said.
He estimates that some 40 percent of registered forces don't exist, and says the lack of manpower has helped the Taliban seize 65 percent of the province -- Afghanistan's largest -- and threaten the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. Those men who do serve face even greater danger because of the no-shows. In the last three months alone, some 700 police officers have been killed and 500 wounded, he said.
The province's former deputy police chief, Pacha Gul Bakhtiar, said Helmand has 31,000 police officers on the registers, "but in reality it is nowhere near that." Nearly 15 years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the Taliban, and despite billions of dollars in military and other aid, corruption remains rife in Afghanistan and local security forces have struggled to hold off insurgent advances across the country. Last year the Taliban seized the northern city of Kunduz for three days, marking their biggest foray into a major urban area since 2001.
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| Endless war milks American taxpayers to feed US war profiteers. Afghan security forces gather at site of a suicide attack after clashes with Taliban fighters in front of the Parliament in Kabul (AP). |
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| Untold (invisiblehistory.com) |
Pakistan will host four-nation talks Monday with Afghanistan, China, and the United States aimed at reviving peace talks with the Taliban, but even if those efforts succeed the insurgents are expected to stay on the offensive in order to gain land and leverage.
The Defense Ministry declined to comment on ghost security forces. Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi acknowledged the problem and said an investigation has been launched, the results of which should be made public in about a month.
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| Racist fears in US spur killings and abuse. |
He said investigators had checked police numbers and status in 200 districts, 30 of which could only be reached last week with the help of U.S. forces due to security problems. He said 86 percent of Afghanistan's 157,000 police were digitally registered and received their salaries through banks. The remaining 14 percent were in the 30 districts "where there are threats," and they are paid in cash by "trusted agents."
...Iraq has also struggled with the ghost soldier phenomenon, a factor in the Islamic State group's rapid conquest of much of the country's north and west in the summer of 2014. In December of that year, Iraqi officials said the payment of tens of millions of dollars in salaries to nonexistent forces had been halted. More
Funding the Enemy:
How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban
Funding the Enemy:
How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban
The longest U.S. war in history is also turning out to be our most disastrous. The nearly 11 year long American mission in Afghanistan, which was launched [on the pretext] of the 9/11 [false flag operation], was aimed at toppling the Taliban [the CIA created with Pakistan's secret police].
However, despite an easy invasion just weeks into the mission, after a few years, Afghanistan slipped back into the grip of what is considered today’s Taliban, or the Neo-Taliban...
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| Buddhas of Bamiyan the CIA's Taliban erased. |
[Phantom aid: "Beltway Bandits" siphon NGO money into their own pockets so that only a fraction gets to Afghanistan to do nothing there but justify administrative expenses here in the U.S. Over $60 billion has been spent with only 10% of that ever reaching Afghanistan.
War profiteering is, therefore, pulled from U.S. taxpayers to private corporations and the Pentagon, money in the billions, with little ever reaching Afghanistan. The country, now in ruins and run by the CIA to run opium for the heroin trade, is one of the poorest places on earth. But it was once a magnificent Buddhist kingdom, the land of the Shakyas, the Buddha's family clan]…More
Invisible History
Let's explore anomalies discovered by Fitzgerald and Gould while researching the causes of the recent Soviet and American invasions of Afghanistan.
We Have Failed Afghanistan Again and Again
Sonali Kolhatkar (truthdig.com, July 29, 2015)
The 2013 death of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, which was confirmed this week, should have marked the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. But the fates of the two main leaders identified as responsible for the 9/11 attacks -- Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar -- are only milestones. Thanks to the destructive nature of the U.S. war, many newer and more formidable enemies have emerged.
America’s first post-9/11 war, launched in Afghanistan in October 2001, is a grand symbol of our foreign policy failure. Fourteen years ago, Afghans were caught between two brutal and fundamentalist factions, the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. Today they are caught between four: the Taliban, government warlords who morphed from the Northern Alliance, U.S. forces, and Islamic State.
But just a few months ago, Afghanistan’s first transition of power within an ostensibly democratic system took place, offering the promise of a better future under the U.S.-educated President Ashraf Ghani.
The U.S. was to withdraw its forces and NATO nations had already begun doing so. Government-sponsored peace talks with the Taliban were meant to herald a stable future for the war-weary nation. But that future never came and what appeared as progress was only a facade. More
Take a look at these statistics
December 8, 2015
The death toll from jihadist terrorism on American soil since the Sept. 11 attacks -- 45 people -- is about the same as the 48 killed in terrorist attacks motivated by white supremacist and other right-wing extremist ideologies, according to New America, a research organization in Washington. And both tolls are tiny compared with the tally of conventional murders, more than 200,000 over the same period. But the disproportionate focus they draw in the news media and their effect on public fear demand the attention of any administration. More
California attack has U.S. rethinking strategy on homegrown terror
Peter Baker and Eric Schmitt (NYTimes.com, Dec. 5, 2015)
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The day before Thanksgiving, Pres. Obama reassured Americans there was “no specific and credible intelligence indicating a plot on the homeland.” Seven days later came an explosion of gunfire and the deadliest terrorist attack in America since Sept. 11, 2001. More
From geopolitical journalism to mystical novel The Voice
Merry and Burl Hall Envision This! Media envisionthismedia.com
Sonali Kolhatkar (truthdig.com, July 29, 2015)
The 2013 death of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, which was confirmed this week, should have marked the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. But the fates of the two main leaders identified as responsible for the 9/11 attacks -- Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar -- are only milestones. Thanks to the destructive nature of the U.S. war, many newer and more formidable enemies have emerged.
America’s first post-9/11 war, launched in Afghanistan in October 2001, is a grand symbol of our foreign policy failure. Fourteen years ago, Afghans were caught between two brutal and fundamentalist factions, the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. Today they are caught between four: the Taliban, government warlords who morphed from the Northern Alliance, U.S. forces, and Islamic State.
But just a few months ago, Afghanistan’s first transition of power within an ostensibly democratic system took place, offering the promise of a better future under the U.S.-educated President Ashraf Ghani.
The U.S. was to withdraw its forces and NATO nations had already begun doing so. Government-sponsored peace talks with the Taliban were meant to herald a stable future for the war-weary nation. But that future never came and what appeared as progress was only a facade. More
Take a look at these statistics
December 8, 2015
The death toll from jihadist terrorism on American soil since the Sept. 11 attacks -- 45 people -- is about the same as the 48 killed in terrorist attacks motivated by white supremacist and other right-wing extremist ideologies, according to New America, a research organization in Washington. And both tolls are tiny compared with the tally of conventional murders, more than 200,000 over the same period. But the disproportionate focus they draw in the news media and their effect on public fear demand the attention of any administration. More
California attack has U.S. rethinking strategy on homegrown terror
Peter Baker and Eric Schmitt (NYTimes.com, Dec. 5, 2015)
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The day before Thanksgiving, Pres. Obama reassured Americans there was “no specific and credible intelligence indicating a plot on the homeland.” Seven days later came an explosion of gunfire and the deadliest terrorist attack in America since Sept. 11, 2001. More From geopolitical journalism to mystical novel The Voice
Merry and Burl Hall Envision This! Media envisionthismedia.com
America Pivots to Brzezinski’s delusion of Eurasian conquest
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould (Oct. 14, 2015)
“For the first time in my very long life…we are, and I don’t want to sound alarmist, but I am alarmed, closer to the actual possibility of war with Russia than we have ever been since the Cuban missile crisis. That’s how bad it’s been.” Stephen Cohen on the Thom Hartmann show April 2, 2015.
Retired Russia historian Stephen Cohen along with a small handful of academics, journalists, and former government officials (who believed the Cold War had ended and would never return) point their fingers at the Western Neocon establishment for America’s latest outbreak of what can only be referred to as late stage imperial dementia.
Neocons Robert Kagan and wife Victoria Nuland have certainly done their share of the heavy lifting to make Ukraine the staging ground for what increasingly appears to be a NATO blitzkrieg on Moscow. As columnist William Pfaff wrote in one of his final articles (April 1, 2015 Putin and the Neo-Conservatives) “The energy behind the coup in Ukraine and the proposals to deploy Western arms and re-launch the crisis is generally and I think correctly, recognized as the work of the neoconservative alliance in Washington to which Pres. Obama seems to have sub-leased his European policy.”
But whatever the determination of the neocon plot to forge ahead with a further destabilization of Russia’s borders, they are only the barking dogs of the master imperialist whose grand design has been slowly creeping over the globe since he stepped into the Oval office as National Security Advisor to Pres. Jimmy Carter in 1977.
Love him or hate him, Zbigniew Brzezinski stands apart as the inspiration for the Ukraine crisis. His 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives lays out the blueprint for how American primacists should feel towards drawing Ukraine away from Russia. (p. 46)
“Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire,” he writes.
“Without Ukraine, Russia…would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state, more likely to be drawn into debilitating conflicts with aroused Central Asians, who would then be resentful of the loss of their recent independence and would be supported by their fellow Islamic states to the south.” More
The Spiritual Roots of Russian-American Conflict
Kerry R Bolton (Foreign Policy Journal)
Whatever Russia is called outwardly, there is an inner eternal Russia whose embryonic character places her on an antithetical course to that of the USA.
The rivalry between the USA and Russia is something more than geopolitics or economics. These are reflections of antithetical worldviews of a spiritual character. The German conservative historian-philosopher Oswald Spengler, who wrote of the morphology of cultures as having organic life-cycles, in his epochal book The Decline of The West had much to say about Russia that is too easily mistaken as being of a Russophobic nature.
That is not the case, and Spengler wrote of Russia in similar terms to that of the "Slavophils." Spengler, Dostoyevski, Berdyaev, and Solzhenistyn have much of relevance to say in analyzing the conflict between the USA and Russia. Considering the differences as fundamentally "spiritual" explains why this conflict will continue and why the optimism among Western political circles at the prospect of a compliant Russia, fully integrated into the "world community," was so short-lived.
Of the religious character of this confrontation, an American analyst, Paul Coyer, has written:
Amidst the geopolitical confrontation between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the US and its allies, little attention has been paid to the role played by religion either as a shaper of Russian domestic politics or as a means of understanding Putin’s international actions.
The role of religion has long tended to get short thrift in the study of statecraft (although it has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance of late), yet nowhere has it played a more prominent role -- and perhaps nowhere has its importance been more unrecognized -- than in its role in supporting the Russian state and Russia’s current place in world affairs.
Russia’s ‘Soul’
Spengler regarded Russians as formed by the vastness of the land-plain, as innately antagonistic to the Machine, as rooted in the soil, irrepressibly peasant, religious, and "primitive." More
Whatever Russia is called outwardly, there is an inner eternal Russia whose embryonic character places her on an antithetical course to that of the USA.
The rivalry between the USA and Russia is something more than geopolitics or economics. These are reflections of antithetical worldviews of a spiritual character. The German conservative historian-philosopher Oswald Spengler, who wrote of the morphology of cultures as having organic life-cycles, in his epochal book The Decline of The West had much to say about Russia that is too easily mistaken as being of a Russophobic nature.
That is not the case, and Spengler wrote of Russia in similar terms to that of the "Slavophils." Spengler, Dostoyevski, Berdyaev, and Solzhenistyn have much of relevance to say in analyzing the conflict between the USA and Russia. Considering the differences as fundamentally "spiritual" explains why this conflict will continue and why the optimism among Western political circles at the prospect of a compliant Russia, fully integrated into the "world community," was so short-lived.
Of the religious character of this confrontation, an American analyst, Paul Coyer, has written:
Amidst the geopolitical confrontation between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the US and its allies, little attention has been paid to the role played by religion either as a shaper of Russian domestic politics or as a means of understanding Putin’s international actions.
The role of religion has long tended to get short thrift in the study of statecraft (although it has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance of late), yet nowhere has it played a more prominent role -- and perhaps nowhere has its importance been more unrecognized -- than in its role in supporting the Russian state and Russia’s current place in world affairs.
Russia’s ‘Soul’
Spengler regarded Russians as formed by the vastness of the land-plain, as innately antagonistic to the Machine, as rooted in the soil, irrepressibly peasant, religious, and "primitive." More
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