Archives: 2007 April

Shades of the Vietnam War. The body count as a sign of measuring progress in a war is back.

This time it’s the Nato as well as the American commanders who are being stupid. According to a coalition statement Nato-led forces, including American and Afghan troops, have killed scores of Taliban fighters in the western province of Herat. The latest report is that more than one hundred Taliban fighters have been killed.

Oh really? And how do we know they were all Taliban? Don’t those people dress pretty much all the same? And there is another unpleasant problem. People who have been hit by 500 pound bombs are rather hard to identify even if you find a few scattered body parts.

Well, there are conflicting reports. According to an Afghani protester “the people they have killed are not Taliban, they are civilians”. Probably the truth is that some were Taliban and some were civilians who were hiding in their homes at the time a precision bombing raid precisely dropped a bomb on top of their heads.

Interestingly enough while the Nato forces press release says that Afghan police and military units took part in the combat operations the Afghans deny that they were involved.

And why is this?

The answer is simple. The Afghans understand their culture while the Nato and American commanders do not. They are not stupid like the foreigners who like to brag about their body counts and consider a high body count as a sign of progress in winning the war.

The Afghans do not want the certain retribution for the Taliban and civilian deaths to fall upon their heads. No thank you. They wisely insist that they had nothing to do with this operation.

The UN is often criticized as being corrupt, inefficient, ineffective, and at times by the Bush White House as no longer relevant.

While some of the criticism may well be justified here is one UN project among many that provides real benefits to poor people living in developing countries. The pilot project was developed in India where more than 100.000 rural Indian families have benefited from an innovative loan scheme that helps families buy home solar power systems.

The power systems only cost from $300 to $500 each but even that amount is too much for the rural poor to pay without innovation financing. The UN Environment Program has set up a loan guarantee program that guarantees loans made to poor families by Indian banks. With the guarantees in place the banks are able to offer loans at low interest rates and with extended terms that makes the monthly payments affordable.

The solar systems replace polluting kerosene lamps which are still commonly used throughout India and in other developing countries around the world. The kerosene lamps do not provide very good light and are not good for ones health as they expose those who use them to harmful particles emitted by the lamps.

The use of the solar powered lighting systems are credited as not only improving the health of the families who use them but as giving school children’s grades a boost by providing enough light so that they can better study at night. The solar powered energy systems have also been of benefit to cottage industries throughout India as small appliances can now be run in the home factories which help to boost production. Workers can also work more efficiently at night.

One reason I like Wordpress as much as I do is that there are a ton and a half of neat and useful plugins readily available. The plugins are usually easy to install and add a wide range of additional functions to your Wordpress driven blog.

Over the past few days I have added several Wordpress plugins to Article Discovery Politics. If you look in the right sidebar under Categories you will see one of them, the Top Commentators plugin, at work. This plugin encourages comments by listing the name of the commentator.

More importantly it rewards the commentators, if they wish, by providing a free link back to their blog or website. For now I have the plugin set for a 30 day reset so new commentators will have a better chance of coming in at the top of the list after a reset.

Your backlink will be from a fairly new blog, only 105 days old, that has just obtained an initial Google PR3 rank and, thanks to Maki’s Dosh Dosh Technorati experiment, is listed as number 79 in the Technorati Top Favorites rankings. Article Discovery Politics also has a Technorati ranking of 50,038 and an Alexa rank of 150,265 so is beginning to receive a bit of traffic.

I encourage you to put this new feature to work. Your comments are welcome.

All I ask is that you make a thoughtful, relevant comment. Comments like “that’s nice, or “cool” or “your nuts” will not escape the comment delete button. No problem if you make a comment that totally disagrees with the point made in the post.

This is a freedom of speech blog, although I would appreciate your keeping your comments civil in tone.

While the Taliban were truly repressive regressive bad guys one thing they did manage to achieve in Afghanistan prior to the US lead invasion five years ago was the near elimination of poppy growth and the resulting opium production.

Since the Taliban were removed from full control of Afghanistan, with the US, British, and Nato forces moving in, the poppy fields are growing poppies at record levels and opium production has soared. What kind of “victory” is this?

Since being “liberated” Afghanistan has become the world’s first fully Narco State with an estimated 60% of its gross national product coming from the drug trade. This makes Columbia look like an also ran second rate amateur by comparison.

In an effort to win the “hearts and minds” of the Afghan farmers coalition forces have been reluctant to take an active role in eradicating opium production. The result? Poppy fields are producing more gum to be used in opium production than ever before.

Now with the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, being ever pragmatic, the Taliban have changed their altitude towards opium production. The Taliban are working in cooperation with the farmers and warlords as they use profits from opium production and drug sales in the West to finance their war against the “infidels”.

Hamid Karzai and his main supporters spend most of their time hiding away in Kabul or wearing fancy tribal robes touring about the world seeking more financial aid. His government has not focused on reducing the country’s high employment rate and has failed to provide even basic services to the majority of the improvised population.

Karzai’s efforts to secure financial aid are understandable. Additional aid is badly needed as many earlier pledges of aid were never honored. Tremendous resources have been diverted by the US and other nations to fight the ridiculous and prolonged war in Iraq rather than properly taking care of business in Afghanistan.

It is rare that an officer serving on active duty will openly criticize the way the Iraq war effort has and is being conducted by his superior officers. When senior active duty officers who have served in Iraq begin speaking out publicly conditions in Iraq must be beyond hope and repair.

In what is likely a career ending statement Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling said US generals had failed to prepare their troops properly and had misled Congress about the resources needed for the war.

Lieutenant Colonel Yingling has a first hand on the job view of conditions in Iraq. He has served two tours of duty. His remarks received widespread distribution as they were published in the Armed Forces Journal.

Yingling said the US had repeated the mistakes of Vietnam and so faced defeat in Iraq. He criticized the generals for failing to estimate the strength of the enemy, for under estimating the resources needed to successfully fight the war, and for misleading congress about on the ground conditions in Iraq.

Unfortunately it seems to me that the generals, from the current commander, General David Petraeus, to all of the senior officers responsible for present and past operations in Iraq, have been squeezed by the altitude of the Bush administration. The Bushies only want to hear their own delusional views as to what is going on in Iraq.

They thought the war could be fought and won on the cheap. Generals were encouraged to come up with rosy forecasts of the needed resources. You may recall that initial estimates of the number of the insurgents were that they numbered only 2,000 or so.

While no one knows the exact number it appears that initial estimates were ridiculously low. Either that or the greatest fighting force in the world has been and continues to be incapable of putting down a small insurgency.