I know, I know, you think I'm pulling your leg - but I'm not:
According to public schedule just released @NYGovCuomo is in Afghanistan. No advance notice given.
— Capital Tonight (@CapitalTonight) September 27, 2014
While in Afghanistan, @NYGovCuomo will meet with NY troops, get security briefings, counterterrorism updates his office says.
— Capital Tonight (@CapitalTonight) September 27, 2014
After barely leaving New York State in his first term, he's now made two oversea trips in the past month or so - one to Israel, one to Afghanistan.
He's also held two press conferences with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to discuss the "unprecedented" cooperation and collaboration he and Christie are engaging in over anti-terrorism security in their respective states.
Dunno exactly when he decided to pivot from "The public workers unions are the biggest enemy facing the State of New York!" to "Must fight terrorism!", but it's pretty clear he's made that transition.
I wonder if he knows something about Hillary Clinton's decision on a 2016 run that the rest of us don't know.
Because given the frenzy with which he's tried to burnish his national security and foreign policy credentials in the last month or so, it's starting to look like he thinks he's running for president.
A spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, Master Sgt. Christopher DeWitt, said the authorities were aware of the episode and had sent a team to the district to investigate. He said ISAF had not previously issued a news release on the deaths.
Zalmai Ayoubi, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar, said that a NATO reconnaissance aircraft spotted five militants planting mines in the village of Siacha, in Zhare District on Wednesday. The plane targeted the insurgents, killing two and wounding a third, and then pursued the other two suspects as they carried their injured comrade away.
“The plane chased them, the insurgents entered a street where children were playing and as a result of its shooting, seven people have been killed, including six children, and two girls also have been injured,” Mr. Ayoubi said. The victims were members of two families.
Abdul Samad, an uncle of four of the children who were killed, disputed the government’s version of the attack. He said his relatives were working in fields near their village when they were attacked without warning by an aircraft.
His brother-in-law, Mohammad Rahim, 50, had his two sons and three daughters with him. They were between 4 and 12 years old and all were killed, except an 8-year-old daughter, who was badly wounded, Mr. Samad said.
“There were no Taliban in the field, this is a baseless allegation that the Taliban were planting mines,” Mr. Samad said. “I have been to the scene and haven’t found a single bit of evidence of bombs or any other weapons. The Americans did a serious crime against innocent children, they will never ever be forgiven.”
This guy won a Nobel Peace Prize?
What a joke.
Obama ought to be in a jail cell for war criminals, right next to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz and the rest.
You can imagine the names people would call any terrorist who was responsible for the killing of innocent American children.
But what do they call Obama, a man who is responsible for just that, sans the "American" part?
KABUL, Afghanistan — One of the principal owners of the Afghan bank at the center of an accelerating financial crisis here said depositors had withdrawn $180 million in the past two days. He predicted a “revolution” in the country’s financial system unless the Afghan government and the United States moved quickly to help stabilize the bank.
Khalilullah Frozi, one of the two largest shareholders of Kabul Bank, said reports indicating that the institution had lost as much as $300 million were overstated. But he predicted that if Afghan depositors continued to withdraw their money at the current rate, Kabul Bank would almost certainly collapse, undermining confidence in the nascent financial system the Afghans have been trying to build with American help.
“If this goes on, we won’t survive,” Mr. Frozi said in an interview. “If people lose trust in the banks, there will be a revolution in the financial system.”
Afghan leaders promised to guarantee deposits in an attempt to arrest the panic, which began earlier this week when the country’s top banking officials demanded the resignations of Mr. Frozi, the bank’s chief executive, and the bank’s chairman, Sherkhan Farnood.
Afghan and American officials say the two men presided over the bank in a reckless and freewheeling manner, doling out millions to allies of President Hamid Karzai and pouring money into risky investments that crashed.
The bank’s troubles — and the corruption associated with them — are posing a direct challenge to the country’s fledgling financial system, which was built under American guidance after the collapse of the Taliban government in 2001. Kabul Bank, which counts a brother of President Karzai among its politically connected shareholders, illustrates the intertwining of political and economic interests in Afghanistan. Afghan and American regulators said the bank’s political connections had shielded it from scrutiny until now.
If the loss of confidence spreads beyond Kabul Bank, it seems almost certain to strain the resources of the Afghan government — and make it more likely that the United States will be forced to intervene. There were no indications yet that the panic was spreading, but American and Afghan officials said other Afghan banks might face similar troubles.
It brings a tear to my eye to see that we have infused American free market values so quickly in Afghanistan.
Can charter schools run by the Taliban and Jihadis for Education Reform (JFER) be far behind?
As a candidate for President, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end. (Applause.) Shortly after taking office, I announced our new strategy for Iraq and for a transition to full Iraqi responsibility. And I made it clear that by August 31st, 2010, America’s combat mission in Iraq would end. (Applause.) And that is exactly what we are doing -- as promised and on schedule. (Applause.)
...
Today -- even as terrorists try to derail Iraq’s progress -- because of the sacrifices of our troops and their Iraqi partners, violence in Iraq continues to be near the lowest it’s been in years. And next month, we will change our military mission from combat to supporting and training Iraqi security forces. (Applause.) In fact, in many parts of the country, Iraqis have already taken the lead for security.
BAGHDAD — In one of the broadest assaults on Iraq’s security forces, insurgents unleashed a wave of roadside mines and a more than a dozen car bombings across Iraq on Wednesday, killing dozens, toppling a police station in the capital and sowing chaos and confusion among the soldiers and police officers who responded.
The withering two-hour assault in 13 towns and cities, from southernmost Basra to restive Mosul in the north, was as symbolic as it was deadly, coming a week before the United States declares the end of combat operations here. Wednesday was seemingly the insurgents’ reply: Despite suggestions otherwise, they proved their ability to launch coordinated attacks virtually anywhere in Iraq, capitalizing on the government’s dysfunction and perceptions of American vulnerability.
For weeks, there had been sense of inevitability to the assaults, which killed at least 51 people, many of them police officers. From the American military to residents here, virtually everyone seemed to expect insurgents to seek to demonstrate their prowess as the United States brings its number of troops below 50,000 here. But the anticipation did little to prepare security forces for the breadth of the assault. Iraqi soldiers and police officers brawled at the site of the biggest bombing in Baghdad, and residents heckled them for their impotence in stopping a blast that cut like a scythe through the neighborhood.
“A bloody day,” Khalil Ahmed, a 30-year-old engineer, said simply, as he stared at the cranes and bulldozers trying to rescue victims buried under the police station.
“From the day of the fall of Saddam until now, this is what we have — explosions, killing and looting,” he said. “This is our destiny. It’s already written for us.”
I'm not saying combat troops should stay or anything, but I'd go light on the "Iraqi security forces are up to the task" jive.
Iraq is a mess. It will be worse as we continue to disentangle from it. We caused that mess, we have made it worse over the course of the years we were there, and we are not taking moral responsibility for our actions.
Now President Accountability has no intention of doing anything about Iraq because he has staked HIS legacy on Afghanistan.
Unfortunately for President Accountability, the situation in Afghanistan is worsening even as he puts more troops and resources into that war.
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — As the Taliban spread their tentacles across the formerly peaceful north of Afghanistan, upcoming elections are proving a target for the insurgents.
Across the northern provinces of the war-torn country, Afghans doubt the country can hold free and fair parliamentary polls on September 18 in a rapidly deteriorating security situation.
Worst affected is Kunduz, in the northeast, though authorities in Balkh, Faryab and Jawzjan provinces noted the encroachment of Taliban insurgents who are trying to create a battleline marking their area of control.
According to people in the region, the Taliban are on the march.
"Taliban fighters are no longer just in limited numbers in our village, they are now in their hundreds," said Mohammad Feda, 22, from Boka village in Balkh.
Sitting in front of his shop on the Balkh-Jawzjan highway, Feda said Taliban numbers had grown so much in recent months they now had a visible presence in many villages in the area, day and night.
People in Balkh, Chimtal, Chahar Bolak and Sholgara districts in Balkh province told AFP the Taliban were regrouping ahead of the elections, causing concern about how safe they will be in casting their votes.
"Elections can't be held, no one can go to polling stations because the Taliban have warned people not to participate," said an official in Chahar Bolak with the Independent Election Commission (IEC), which oversees the polls.
"I have lived in Chahar Bolak all my life, but now sometimes I cannot go there due to the insecurity," he said, speaking on condition he not be named.
Yeah, heckuva job you're doing with YOUR war, Barack.
Sounds almost as bad as the one your running from in Iraq.
Can you write how the rest of the war plays out?
I can.
Obama and company stay in Afghanistan for as long as they can politically, then point to some jive ass propaganda as "proof" of stability and announce a slow withdrawal.
And the next day insurgents will kill and maim hundreds of people.
"Afghanistan is not lost, but for several years it has moved backwards," the president said. "There is no imminent threat of the government being overthrown, but the Taliban has gained momentum. Al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same numbers as before 9/11, but they retain their safe-havens along the border....In short: the status quo is not sustainable."
(SIDENOTE: If you substitute "public schools" for Afghanistan and "teachers unions" for "Taliban" and "Al Qaeda", the ed deform rhetoric he uses is interchangeable boilerplate from the war rhetoric.)
Obama hasn't been as unrealistic in his public assessments of the conditions in Afghanistan as Bush was in his public assessments of the war in Iraq, but we learned last night from leaked documents published in the NY Times, the Guardian, and Der Speigal that both the Bush and the Obama administrations have been involved in some major deceptions about the war. To wit:
A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.
The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.
The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.
The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.
...
The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:
• The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
• Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.
• The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.
• The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.
Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. But in some cases the documents show that the American military made misleading public statements — attributing the downing of a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles or giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by Special Operations commandos.
Wow - there's some change we can believe in here in these documents.
Obama has stepped up assassination squads that target insurgent leaders but, oops, sometimes kill the wrong (i.e., innocent) people.
Oh, well, it's all for the good.
What's a couple of hundreds innocent murders a week when we're talking about being all big and manly and strutting and showing how tough we are in the conduct of this war.
Except that of course none of this shit is working.
None of it.
And we will leave this country just the way the Russians left it before - with billions spent, hundreds of thousands of innocents dead, thousands of soldiers injured, maimed or dead, and the place still a mess.
I hate to keep coming back to the Obama education policy, but the comparison is apt.
President Accountability hits on a strategy and will brook no dissent from his viewpoint.
He's like that with education.
Only firing teachers, firing principals, closing schools and reopening them as for-profit charters will fix the ills of the system.
Who cares how long it takes or what it costs or how many people die...
But it's clear from these documents - and the group that leaked them, WikiLeaks, says more are coming soon - that the war is NOT going well, that to WIN this war (whatever win means) will take another ten years and lots more cash and lives.
And to what end? The Taliban and Al Qaeda operate with impunity in Pakistan, so if Obama is doing this because he's going after Bin Laden ("Dead or Alive," Barack?) or he thinks he can permanently diminish the power of the Taliban, try moving the fucking war to Pakistan.
Nope, I don't think he's got such rational reasons for the way he has doubled down on the war with very Bush-like actions (i.e., assassination squads, lying about the actions of "our Afghanis," etc.)
No, I think this war comes down to another example of the BIGGER DICK FOREIGN POLICY in action, as elucidated by George Carlin:
That video of Carlin is old, but it remains as important and accurate an assessment of Obama's foreign policy today as it was of Daddy Bush's conduct of the Persian Gulf war in the 90's, Clinton's various little wars, and Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Change we can believe in?
Nope - just more lying bullshit from an asshole president/war criminal who conducts assassination squads in secret, covers up the real state of the war (and the war crimes the U.S. is engaging in to "win" it) and pursues an unwinnable war for his own egomaniacal ends.
