US missile defence plans could spark EU-Nato tensions

With the US overstretched, the EU may turn to Turkey and Russia for a security agenda closer to its 21st-century needs

• • Simon Tisdall
  • guardian.co.uk

Closer co-operation with Russia and Turkey could offer the EU greater protection against a potential Iranian missile threat. Photograph: Shaigan/AFP/Getty Images

The Obama administration’s drive to persuade Nato countries to back itsrevamped missile defence plans is bringing longstanding tensions over European security into the open, to the potential advantage of Russia and Turkey, the maverick guardians of the EU’s eastern flank.

With a crucial Nato summit in Lisbon only a month away, the US is increasing pressure on Ankara. Defence secretary Robert Gates said this week that Washington would not ask Nato member Turkey to provide new bases for missile systems. “But we do look to Turkey to support Nato’s adoption at Lisbon of a territorial missile defence capability,” he said. Turkey worries the $280m missile upgrade will be seen to be targeted at next-door Iran – which is indeed its main purpose, in American eyes at least. “We do not perceive any threat from any neighbour countries and we do not think our neighbours form a threat to Nato,” said foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

As Turkey’s neo-Islamist government tries to juggle east and west, Hurriyet commentator Semih Idiz said “an increasingly apparent ideological divide is growing between Turkey and the US in particular, and Turkey and Europe to a lesser extent … Turkey could easily end up having to choose between the alliance and Iran”.

But analyst Sertac Aktan suggested Ankara could turn the situation to its advantage, offering limited co-operation in return for increased American pressure on France and Germany to unfreeze Turkey’s EU membership bid. “Deploy new missiles for the sake of Europe? The Europe we so much want to be in but just can’t get in?” Aktan asked. “Well, Washington thought about that too and that is why one of the top agenda items of the US-EU summit set to take place right after the Nato summit is going to be Turkey’s EU membership.”

Russia is also following the missile defence discussions closely, in the context of its desire for closer security co-operation with the EU. Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, spent the past two days in Deauville discussing this and other issues with French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel. Russia has expressed fears the missile shield could be used to neutralise its defences. But after receiving Franco-German assurances, Medvedev said on Tuesday that Moscow was interested in closer co-operation and that he planned to attend the Nato summit.

The price of Russia’s support may cause unease in Washington and London. Medvedev’s signature policy is his quest for new “European security architecture” that would inevitably reduce the American role on the continent, and potentially undermine Nato – a historical Russian goal.

France and Germany now appear to be seriously flirting with this idea amid talk of a joint economic and security co-operation zone with Russia and shared EU-Russia forums. To Britain, not invited to Deauville, and the US, this talk begins to sound like a revival of the 2003 French-German-Russian axis against the Iraq war. Though both seek improved ties with Russia, they put the transatlantic alliance first.

Mark Leonard, co-author of a new European council on foreign relations report entitled “The spectre of a multipolar Europe“, suggests enhanced co-operation between the EU, Turkey and Russia is both unavoidable and desirable. Current European security structures were dysfunctional, European capitals were pulling in different directions, and “the US is no longer focused on Europe’s internal security … and is no longer a European power”, he said.

The report argues that the American-directed post-cold war order is unravelling. It had failed to prevent wars in Georgia and Kosovo, disruption of Europe’s energy supplies, and ongoing instability on the EU’s eastern borders with the Black Sea and Caucasus regions. America was distracted by Iran, the Middle East and the rise of China. Thus the EU must seek new strategic partners.

“An informal ‘trialogue’ involving the EU, Turkey and Russia should be established,” Leonard said. Turkey was an emerging regional power. To keep Ankara on side, its EU membership application should be fast-forwarded.

At the same time. Europe should directly engage Moscow’s new “westpolitik”, he said. “A European security identity should be fostered by encouraging the involvement of Russia in projects like missile defence.”

Britain’s Conservative-led government is unlikely to support an enhanced role for the EU over Nato. But others may do so. In this way, it is argued, Europe may eventually replace the American-led security agenda with one of its own, more closely tailored to its 21st-century needs.

TX Tea Party Candidate Talks About Revolution

TX Tea Party Candidate Advocates Violent Overth…, posted with vodpod

Republican congressional candidate says violent overthrow of government is ‘on the table’

By MELANIE MASON / The Dallas Morning News

mmason@dallasnews.com

WASHINGTON – Republican congressional candidate Stephen Broden stunned his party Thursday, saying he would not rule out violent overthrow of the government if elections did not produce a change in leadership.In a rambling exchange during a TV interview, Broden, a South Dallaspastor, said a violent uprising “is not the first option,” but it is “on the table.” That drew a quick denunciation from the head of the Dallas County GOP, who called the remarks “inappropriate.”Broden, a first-time candidate, is challenging veteran incumbent Rep.Eddie Bernice Johnson in Dallas’ heavily Democratic 30th Congressional District. Johnson’s campaign declined to comment on Broden.In the interview, Brad Watson, political reporter for WFAA-TV (Channel 8), asked Broden about a tea party event last year in Fort Worth in which he described the nation’s government as tyrannical.”We have a constitutional remedy,” Broden said then. “And the Framers say if that don’t work, revolution.”Watson asked if his definition of revolution included violent overthrow of the government. In a prolonged back-and-forth, Broden at first declined to explicitly address insurrection, saying the first way to deal with a repressive government is to “alter it or abolish it.”"If the government is not producing the results or has become destructive to the ends of our liberties, we have a right to get rid of that government and to get rid of it by any means necessary,” Broden said, adding the nation was founded on a violent revolt againstBritain’s King George III.Watson asked if violence would be in option in 2010, under the current government.”The option is on the table. I don’t think that we should remove anything from the table as it relates to our liberties and our freedoms,” Broden said, without elaborating. “However, it is not the first option.”ReactionsJonathan Neerman, head of the Dallas County Republican Party, said he’s never heard Broden or other local Republican candidates advocate violence against the government.”It is a disappointing, isolated incident,” Neerman said. He said he plans to discuss the matter with Broden’s campaign.Ken Emanuelson, a Broden supporter and leading tea party organizer in Dallas, said he did not disagree with the “philosophical point” that people had the right to resist a tyrannical government.But, he said, “Do I see our government today anywhere close to that point? No, I don’t.”Emanuelson said he’s occasionally heard people call for direct action against the government, but that they typically do not get involved in electoral politics.That Broden is “engaged in the election and running for office shows he’s got faith in the system as it is,” Emanuelson said.Other statementsAlso in the interview, Broden backed away from other controversial statements he has made at rallies and on cable news appearances.In June 2009, he described the economic crash in the housing, banking and automotive industries as “contrived” and a “set up” by the Obama administration.Asked Thursday about the validity of these, Broden said they were “authentic crises facing this nation.”Broden also retreated from other remarks last year that chided Americans for not being more outraged over government intrusion, comparing them to Jews “walking into the furnaces” under the Nazi regime in Germany.”They are our enemies, and we must resist them,” he said of government leaders.Broden said Thursday that he wasn’t trying to compare President Barack Obama to Hitler and he mistakenly linked the U.S. in 2010 to Nazi Germany.In the uphill campaign against Johnson, Broden has sought to capitalize on her misuse of scholarship funds from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, a nonprofit entity.In late August, The Dallas Morning News reported that Johnson provided 23 scholarships over five years to two of her grandsons, two children of her nephew, and two children of her top aide in Dallas. None of those recipients were eligible under the foundation’s anti-nepotism rules or residency requirements. She has repaid the foundation more than $31,000.

 

Vive La Resistance! Thank God for France

Revolting France.

POSTED BY ALI.MOSTAQUE

France is the most popular country for tourists in the world. The country with its interesting mix of Latin, Celtic and Germanic people is world famous for its leisurely pace of life, “Joies de iavie“. 

Unfortunately it is experiencing a fundamental clash, as with many other nations between the Internationalist globalists banker class represented by Sarkozy (Mossad agent, put into power by the USA on a rabid anti-immigrant ticket) VERSES ordinary French people, and the fundamental way of doing things the French way. The issues being fought for is thus not just about retirement, and the little matter of 2 years more, but go far more deeper.

France was buffeted from the global recession partly because the government plays such a significant part in the national economy. 50% of the economy is taken up by the government, and there are 5 million state employees. Such state control protects the economy from the whims, crimes and fraud of the International bankers, which have afflicted other nations such as the USA. However it must be equally said that the International bankers are as keen to see their agenda imposed in France, the cultural power house of the West and a not inconsiderable economy, as they are else where from Haiti, Chile or Russia. To this end Mossad Sarkozy will do their bidding, and implement their programs, which of course ordinary Frenchmen will not like.

The crimes and fraud of the International Bankers centers around “The City” London and New York. These are two cities and countries where the “clever” financial schemes were deliberately cooked up and sold to the rest of the world, which has had such an adverse affect for the rest of us. For the crimes of the International bankers in the UK especially and also the USA, the ordinary public must pay, jobs must be lost, benefits must be cut, ‘Phantom” wars must be prosecuted in foreign countries, and the Bankers must be given their Kleenex to wipe away their debts and tears, together with PUBLIC bailout money. The Bankers control the governments in London and Washington, so no questions will be asked about the massive crime of fraud, instead the medicine will be presented to the people as fait a compli.

But in France? Do the Bankers control the government, and through force can the government control the French people? Through a show of force as Interior minister, and water cannons Mossad Sarkozy came to power. Can he now win through using the same tactics against the whole of France?

_______________

Vive La Resistance!

Thank God for France

By MIKE WHITNEY

Thank God for France. While American liberals tremble at the idea of sending an angry e mail to congress for fear that their name will appear on the State Department’s list of terrorists, French workers are on the front lines choking on tear gas and fending off billyclubs in hand-to-hand combat with Sarkozy’s Gendarmerie. That’s because the French haven’t forgotten their class roots. When the government gets too big for its britches, people pour out onto to the streets and Paris becomes a warzone replete with overturned Mercedes Benzs, smashed storefront windows, and stacks of smoldering tires issuing pillars of black smoke. This is what democracy looks like when it hasn’t been emasculated by decades of propaganda and consumerism. Here’s a blurp from the trenches:

Headline:

“French Energy Sector Crippled by Nationwide Strike… French energy facilities are close to total disruption in the wake of nationwide strike against the raise of the retirement age…..France has been hit by numerous protests across the country against a controversial pension reform that would rise the retirement age to 62 from 60….On October 22 morning 80 protesters blockaded Grandpuits oil refinery outside Paris, key supplier for Charles de Gaulle and Orly international airport.” (The Financial)

Shut ‘em down.

Take note, Tea Party crybabies who moan about restoring “our freedoms” while stuffing the backyard bunker with seed corn and ammo. Glenn Beck won’t save you from the “mean old” gov’mint. Liberty isn’t free anymore. If you want it, get out of the barko-lounger and organize. The amount of freedom that any nation enjoys is directly proportionate to the amount of blood its people spilled fighting the state. No more, no less. The man who is willing to accept the blunt force of a cop’s truncheon on his back is infinitely more praiseworthy than the leftist/rightist scribe crooning from the bleachers. The state isn’t moved by lyrical editorials or prosaic manifestos. It responds to force alone, which is why it takes people who are willing to “throw themselves on the gears” of the apparatus and stop it from moving forward. Unfortunately, most of those people appear to live in France.

The resistance is steadily building in France. The budding rebellion is cropping up everywhere—”secondary schools, train stations, refineries and highways have been blockaded, there have been occupations of public buildings, workplaces, commercial centers, directed cuts of electricity, and ransacking of electoral institutions and town halls…” And the big unions are calling for more strikes, more agitation, more ferment.

For more than a week, transportation has been blocked across the France due to the protests by students and workers. Sarkozy’s popularity has plummeted. 65% of people surveyed don’t like the way the French president is handling the strikes. 79% of the people would like to see Sarkozy negotiate with the Union on terms and conditions, but he won’t budge. Thus, the cauldron continues to boil while the prospect of violence rises.

“STRIKE, BLOCKADE, SABOTAGE”

This is from an anonymous striker:

“In each city, these actions are intensifying the power struggle and demonstrate that many are no longer satisfied with the order imposed by the union leadership. In the Paris region, amongst the blockades of train stations and secondary schools, the strikes in the primary schools, the workers pickets in front of the factories, people create inter-professional meetings and collectives of struggle are founded to destroy categorical isolation and separation. Their starting point: self-organization to meet the need to take ownership over our struggles without the mediation of those who claim to speak for workers.

We decided Saturday to occupy the Opera Bastille. This was to disturb a presentation that was live on radio, to play the trouble makers in a place where the cultural merchandise circulates and to organize an assembly there. So we met with more than a thousand people at the “place de la nation”, with banners stating “the bosses understand only one language: Strike, blockade, sabotage.” (end of communique)

The action was met with predictable police violence and mass arrests.

The pension turmoil is not limited to France either. US pension funds are underfunded by nearly $3 trillion. Will US workers be as willing as their French counterparts to face the beatings (to defend “what’s theirs”) or will they throw up their hands and appeal to Obama for help?

There’s no question that Washington elites have joined with Wall Street to offload the massive debts from the financial meltdown onto workers and retirees. Nor is their any doubt that they will invoke (what Slavoj Zizek calls) a “permanent state of economic emergency” to justify their actions. That will allow them to move ahead with so-called “austerity measures” that are designed to impoverish workers and strip popular government programs of their funding. The trend towards “belt-tightening” merely masks the ongoing class war which is aimed at restoring a feudal system of royalty and serfs.

This is from an article by economist Mark Weisbrot:

“If the French want to keep the retirement age as is, there are plenty of ways to finance future pension costs without necessarily raising the retirement age. One of them, which has support among the French left – and which Sarkozy claims to support at the international level — would be a tax on financial transactions. Such a “speculation tax” could raise billions of dollars of revenue – as it currently does in the U.K. – while simultaneously discouraging speculative trading in financial assets and derivatives. The French unions and protesters are demanding that the government consider some of these more progressive alternatives.”

But the retirement age is not really the issue at all. This is about union busting and “putting people in their place.” It’s about “who will call-the-shots” and in whose interests will society be run.

The French are fighting back against this “oligarchy of racketeers” and the ripoff system they represent, while, namby-pamby Americans are neutralized by signing their umpteenth petition or venting their spleen at a Palin rally.

Vive la France. Vive la Résistance.

________________________________

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state and can be reached atfergiewhitney@msn.com

Cameron’s Risky Shock Therapy

[Britain's masters of psywar calculate that they can get away with this much economic punishment of the middle and lower classes without provoking the waiting revolution.  Whatever is planned for the American population is always tested-out on the Brits first (SEE: Britain is the Official Testing Ground for Global Police State).]

“As it stands, Osborne’s policy is nothing short of a massive political experiment, a high-stakes bet with an uncertain outcome. A senior official in the Treasury told the Financial Times that no one knows quite what will happen next.”

By Carsten Volkery in London

REUTERS

All eyes were on Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne on Wednesday as he announced the details of the government’s far-reaching package of spending cuts.

The British government announced the details of its spending cuts on Wednesday. Some half a million public sector jobs are to disappear, almost all ministries will see drastic budget reductions and even the Queen will have to become more parsimonious. Whether the measures will work remains to be seen.

The Queen has already cancelled the Christmas party at Buckingham Palace. Now she will now have to suffer further impertinences.

The British austerity measures announced on Wednesday envisage drastic cuts to public spending, including a sharp reduction of the royal budget. Great Britain is facing a “sober decade,” according to Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England.

The British newspapers have dubbed it “Axe Wednesday,” the day that Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne finally announced deep cuts to public finances. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition’s finance minister wants to reduce the gigantic British public deficit to as close to zero as possible over the next four years. And to achieve this everyone is going to have to bleed.

“Today is the day when Britain steps back from the brink, when we confront the bills from a decade of debt,” Osborne said when introducing the measures to the House of Commons. In June he had already outlined in broad strokes the measures he would take. Now came the details.

Ministerial budgets are to be cut by an average of 19 percent, the 39-year-old Tory politician announced. And 490,000 public sector jobs will disappear over the next four years. State expenditures will be slashed by 83 billion pounds (€94 billion, $131 billion), and taxes increased by 29 billion pounds (€32 billion, $45 billion.)

Toughest Cuts Since World War II

These are enormous figures, and it didn’t take long for the public outcry. The labor unions have mobilized their members to oppose the job cuts, while students have hit the streets to protest the increase to tuition fees. However, there is unlikely to be anything like the kind of public unrest currently underway in France. Despite all of the outrage that many groups are expressing, most British people have long since accepted their fate. According to opinion polls, the majority think the austerity measures are unavoidable.

The coalition has been preparing the public for this day since it took office last May. They warned to expect the toughest cuts since the World War II. Ministries were given the task of coming up with two savings scenarios, one with cuts of 25 percent and another with cuts of 40 percent. Only the Health and Development Ministries were exempt.

The cuts announced on Wednesday were “only” 19 percent — if there was any surprise at all, it was a positive one. And Osborne made every attempt to argue that the measures are fair. The government is even raising the child allowance for the poorest families.

Nevertheless, the shock is huge:

• The police budget will be cut by 16 percent in four years.
• The Interior, Justice and Foreign Ministries will see their budgets cut by 24 percent each.
• Spending on the economy, environment and culture will be reduced by at least 28 percent.
• The Defense and Education Ministries escaped relatively unscathed, with just 8 percent in cuts.
• Money for local councils will be cut by 7 percent.
• Social welfare payments, including child allowance and rent subsidies, will be capped at 18 billion pounds.
• Retirement age will be increased to 66 by 2020, six years earlier than previously planned.
• Train ticket prices will rise by 3 percent on top of increases for inflation.
• The Civil List, the royal family’s budget, is to by cut by 14 percent in 2012 and will be calculated differently from that point forward.

It took an hour for Osborne to get through his list. He said that the only alternative to his radical package of measures would be state bankruptcy. Indeed, Great Britain’s deficit is the highest in Europe and ratings agencies have repeatedly warned of a downgrading of the country’s credit rating.

Many observers, however, say that a more leisurely debt reduction would have been enough. The former Labour government had envisioned halving the deficit within four years rather than balancing it. Financial markets likely would have been satisfied with such a path.

A Pretext

As it stands, Osborne’s policy is nothing short of a massive political experiment, a high-stakes bet with an uncertain outcome. A senior official in the Treasury told the Financial Times that no one knows quite what will happen next. The Labour opposition has accused the Tories of using the debt crisis as a pretext to push through their vision of a smaller national government.

Numerous economists have warned of a relapse into recession. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote in the Guardian on Tuesday that “austerity is a gamble which Britain can ill afford.” He says that the measures could slow or stop the country’s economic recovery. Martin Wolf, a columnist for the Financial Times, estimates that the savings measures could dampen growth by one to two percentage points a year.

There are reasons for concern. Early economic indicators are worse than they were just six months ago. Real estate prices are weak and consumption, both private and commercial, is cautious. Just how economically damaging drastic savings measures can be has been seen recently in the case of Britain’s neighbor Ireland.

‘Worth the Pain’

All the British government can do now is cross their fingers and hope that their plan succeeds. The hope is that the British economy will follow the model of Canada, which saw solid growth following deep spending cuts in the 1990s. Prime Minister David Cameron and his Liberal deputy Nick Clegg hope that the immediate pain caused by the budget cuts will be forgotten by the time Britons next go to the polls five years from now. If all goes well, they hope that the budget will be healthy enough by then to make room for tax cuts.

Cameron is aided by the fact that he has the backing of some of the country’s most influential newspapers. “It’ll hurt,” wrote Britain’s largest circulation tabloidThe Sun. “But the prize is worth the pain.”

And at least the British can take comfort from the fact that watching television won’t be getting any more expensive. Licence fees for the BBC aren’t to be raised for the next six years.

British Budget Cuts ‘A Dangerous Experiment’

AP

Thousands of people marched in London to protest against proposed spending cuts.

British Prime Minister David Cameron is embarking on a painful period of austerity. Some economists say his savings plan is dangerous. Some German columnists agree.

A day after revealing deep and far-reaching spending cuts — the country’s largest since World War II — Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has been busy defending the plan on Thursday. Interviewed on BBC Radio Four, Osborne said that he would not back track on his “harsh but fair” plan for the country to come to terms with its overspending ways.

There is hardly an aspect of British life that has been left untouched by the cuts. Ministerial budgets have been slashed by an average of 19 percent. Almost half a million public sector jobs will disappear over the next four years. State expenditures will plunge by 83 billion pounds (€94 billion, $131 billion) and taxes increased by 29 billion pounds (€32 billion, $45 billion). The retirement age is also set to rise.The hope in London is that the massive cuts will ultimately trigger a long period of growth. Many economists, however, have their doubts, arguing that state spending is needed to spur the economy rather than cuts which, they say, could put a stop to any growth impulses.

German commentators on Thursday take a closer look at Prime Minister David Cameron’s plan.

The Financial Times Deutschland writes:

“That Britain must save is indisputable. The government’s plan to slim down the overweight public sector is absolutely correct in principle. However Prime Minister David Cameron and Finance Minister George Osborne want too much at once.”

“It may make good political sense to be this brutal when the next elections are so far off. But from an economic point of view, it would have made more sense to enact this savings package more gradually. The British economy has only just started to emerge from the recession. In such a situation, if politicians dampen demand to the degree that the savings package is suspected to do so, then it becomes a dangerous experiment. It could stifle the upturn, and by doing so, diminish the tax revenues that the government needs so badly.”

“There is no pressure from the financial markets to institute such drastic measures. The UK’s financial situation is much better than either Greece’s or Ireland’s…. The British government should consider all this. Nobody will be forcing them to enact the savings package as quickly as they promised on Wednesday. The only reason for the new coalition to hurry is to fulfill their election promise to consolidate the budget. But the political gains they make from that are not worth the economic risk that the whole of Great Britain must now face.”

The right-wing Die Welt writes:

“The British have now received the bill for more than a decade’s worth of irresponsible housekeeping. And it wasn’t just the government which lived well beyond its means during the allegedly never-ending boom. The €170 billion hole into which the country is now staring is just a mirror image of the spending culture engaged in by households across the country.”

“One could accuse the former Labour government of sending the false signals, or encouraging people to go into debt due to expectations of continuous economic growth. But the man on the street knows better. He makes his own luck — or his own misfortune. Perhaps it is this knowledge which explains the stoicism with which the British public now look at the sacrifices they must make.”

“Of course, not all Britons will react so calmly. Trade unions have already threatened strikes. But England is not like France. British union legislation is strict. And the strikers don’t get as much public sympathy as they are in France at the moment.”

“Last but not least the British coalition government, made up of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, is standing together, unflinching. They are an exemplary picture of discipline. The EU should follow their example in solving its own economic misery.”

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:”Anyone that wants to strike almost half a million jobs from the public sector, cut social benefits, raise the pension age and make tertiary education more expensive, is only too pleased about other ideas for saving, that won’t cause half the country to take to the barricades.”

“The fact that the diplomatic service will have to cut jobs and that the royal family will have to do without a seventh of their budget is unlikely to get violent mobs protesting on Downing Street. And those living on Downing Street will be even more relaxed at the outcry from the (German) states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony which have to cope with the earlier-than-expected withdrawal of British troops from the Rhine area.”

Afghanistan’s a lost cause, so Pakistan’s next

• Leon Wieseltier
• From:The Australian

MEANWHILE, back at the war.

“This is how you end these kinds of insurgencies,” US general David Petraeus said recently, referring to the fact senior Taliban officials had “sought to reach out” to members of the Karzai government in Kabul.

Pardon the impudence, but this is four-star spin. Petraeus’s doctrine of counter-insurgency, now the intellectual foundation of the US-led war in Afghanistan, holds that the conflict will finish when the people, or most of them, have been persuaded by political, economic and social development, backed by military force, that their future lies not with the insurgency but with the government, which the West, owing to its commitment to such development, is protecting.

The role of the US-led forces is to create space on the ground for a local process of reform. But the incipient negotiations between the Karzai government and the Taliban — the Americans and Europeans have both facilitated the contacts — can hardly answer to such a description.

This is not hearts and minds; this is just a deal. Nor is it “reconciliation”, except insofar as Kabul and the Taliban stronghold of Quetta have reconciled to their shared interest in controlling the post-war era in Afghanistan.

President Hamid Karzai’s commitment to democracy and honest governance is a proven farce: he and his regime, or rather he and his politically empowered family, care only for their own influence and enrichment.

And Mullah Omar in Quetta is worried that his distance from the scene of the political action is making him and his Taliban establishment irrelevant, so he wants a way back in.

This is not a history-minded peace, it is a bargain, struck over the heads of the Afghan people, for the survival of the secularly corrupt and the religiously murderous. You hear happy talk about a “younger generation” of “pragmatic” Taliban leaders, but it is little comfort that they are better at calculating their own interests, since their interests include theocratic tyranny.

Petraeus would have us believe the Taliban leaders are being brought to the table by the success of the military campaign, that they are “reaching out” because they feel they are losing. But I am not persuaded — the military news out of Afghanistan is not breathtaking, and it is just as likely the Taliban are “reaching out” because they feel they are winning. And who can seriously consider the Taliban’s participation in government in Kabul would be anything but the beginning of the restoration of Taliban national power?

The Yeatsian nightmare about the best and the worst applies: this is their second coming, this is their pragmatism. And it is the consequence of Barack Obama’s setting of a date to end the military presence in Afghanistan. The US President’s calendar undid the general’s concept. Hearts and minds take time, and time is what Obama was not prepared to give.

For this reason, the US has been incoherent. But not any more: the policy objective is for the US to be out by next northern summer, so Washington welcomes the deal. The Obama administration is right that there is no military solution to the conflict, but a union of Karzai and the Taliban is hardly the political solution for which we have been struggling — it is the abandonment of Afghanistan.

And is this so awful from the standpoint of the US?

Here things get nastily complicated, and no moral satisfaction is to be had. We are in Afghanistan, we have been there for almost a decade, for the sake of our safety — to destroy al-Qa’ida and the other terrorist groups that plan violence against us. The overthrow of the Taliban was the ennobling corollary of a security policy; it was collateral humanitarianism. But why cling to the corollary when the central premise is no longer valid?

Everybody agrees the threat to our security no longer comes from Afghanistan. The war drove the West’s enemies into Pakistan, which is unwilling to regard them as its enemies.

They have a new haven across the border. So we have been carrying our war there. Where does this leave the rationale for our presence in Afghanistan?

The humanitarianism is all that remains. If the World Trade Centre were still standing, would I support the US invasion of Afghanistan to liberate its people from the Taliban? I am not sure.

Perhaps the second reason for the invasion should become its primary rationale, as it did in Iraq. When it was clear there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — that George W. Bush took the US into a major war on the basis of misinformation — our goal in Iraq became its democratisation.

Some people adopted the new goal cynically, others with integrity. Why not do the same in Afghanistan? It is sickening to contemplate the prospect of a Taliban restoration, and our complicity in it.

But should our revulsion justify our war?

Considered from the standpoint of democratisation, Afghanistan is nowhere as promising as Iraq, which still poses its own massive challenges. Kabul’s neglect by George W. Bush notwithstanding, is what we see in Afghanistan really all that the Afghans could have done for themselves in a decade?

What hope is there for liberal ideas in this hardened realm of Pashtun rule and sharia law? What if it cannot be done? Democratisers must think of this, or they are mere dreamers.

Anyway, our time in Afghanistan is running out. We will soon be “drawing down” our forces.

Even if democracy were a reason for us to stay, we will not.

The locals are taking the play into their own hands, in their own way, with our approval.

Our business is now in Pakistan. Which is to say, we may soon miss Afghanistan.

THE NEW REPUBLIC

Afghan warlords prepare to rearm as Taliban arrive for peace talks in Kabul

Hopes of a peace process have risen after Taliban emissaries arrived in Kabul, but fears have grown that angry northern leaders are preparing for war again.

By Ben Farmer in Kabul
Published: 8:00AM BST 24 Oct 2010

Afghan President Hamid Karzai meets with elders after a conference on rural development.Photo: GETTY

Afghanistan’s northern warlords are preparing to rearm their old militias out of fear that their Taliban enemies are on the brink of a return to power in Kabul, former gunmen and commanders have told The Sunday Telegraph.

Anger is growing in the north of Afghanistan at the prospect of a deal with President Hamid Karzai after emissaries from the rebel group were escorted to Kabul for talks last week.

Northerners whose homes were destroyed in fighting during the 1990s fear that Afghanistan stands at the beginning of a peace process that could erode their own power and eventually return Taliban supporters to the heart of government – a prospect that fills many with dread.

Earlier this month Mr Karzai inaugurated a hand-picked “peace council” of former warlords, tribal elders and clerics amid reports the Taliban’s high command and its feared Haqqani network allies had already opened embryonic negotiation channels.

Last week it emerged that Afghan and American officials have been holding secret discussions with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the second ranking figure in the Taliban, in the firmest indication yet that substantive peace talks will soon begin.

Baradar, the Taliban’s overall military commander until he was arrested in Karachi last February, was recently released from Pakistani custody and travelled with three senior lieutenants to Afghanistan under Nato guard.

Gen David Petraeus, the commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, disclosed that Taliban figures had been granted safe passage to talks in Afghanistan.

Mr Karzai’s 68-member peace council has a mandate to pursue talks with the insurgents as the Nato-led war in Afghanistan enters its 10th year.

However any deal which shared power with Taliban leaders would greatly alarm Afghanistan’s smaller ethnic groups, which fought for five years against the movement in the late 1990s, their leaders have said.

“If people are not actually digging up their old guns, they are at least locating them and putting a little marker on them,” one diplomat in Kabul told The Sunday Telegraph.

In the district of Jabal Saraj, 60 miles north of the capital, the largely Tajik residents remember a savage, scorched-earth war of conquest by the Taliban, who came in convoys of pick-up trucks during the late 1990s.

The area changed hands three times as the Taliban, whose fighters are ethnically Pashtun from the south of Afghanistan, fought the Northern Alliance of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras – the same alliance that eventually joined forces with the US-led coalition to drive the Taliban from power after 9/11.

Villagers said that Taliban fighters carried notes from their leaders promising an acre of the region’s fertile farmland to each family after they had driven the Tajiks out.

Commander Naqibullah, a Tajik who led 500 men in desperate fighting at the time, said many felt the current attempt at a peace process was a plot by Mr Karzai – himself a Pashtun – to extend Pashtun influence.

“My own opinion is it is not a peace process, it is a private deal,” he said. “The Karzai family are like a mafia.

“The Taliban attacked Jabal Saraj three times and we had to flee into the mountains. When I came back, I saw the situation of the people.

“We saw the Taliban had beaten civilians around the head with iron bars, I saw they had killed six like that. When you have seen things like that, should we accept the peace process or not?”

Sitting cross-legged beneath an almond tree in the fields where he fought a decade ago, he said his men had given up their assault rifles and grenade launchers.

“But when we handed in our weapons to the government for money, many people bought cows,” he said. “If they need to, they will sell their cows for guns again.”

Lt Ahmad Jawad, a gangly 26-year-old who now wears the black beret and blotchy camouflage of the Afghan border police, was in his early teens when the Taliban arrived. His brother had an arm torn off at the elbow by a Taliban air raid and he was himself soon recruited as radio operator for a Northern Alliance commander.

“They destroyed houses, they burnt all our trees, they burnt all our crops, they burnt everything,” he said. “If they are really now looking for peace for Afghanistan, we are happy, but I don’t think they are.”

Mr Karzai’s appointment of senior northern leaders to the peace council, has failed to ease fears of concessions to the Taliban. “Many in the north think this is just a Pashtun power grab,” warned another foreign diplomat in Kabul. “They have not done enough at all in my opinion to bring the north along.”

The growing friendship between Pakistan and Mr Karzai underpins much of the worry. The Taliban swept northward in the mid-1990s with money and arms from Islamabad, while the Northern Alliance was left looking to Iran, Russia and India for help.

Until recently the Afghan president still railed against the Pakistani military’s continuing support for the Taliban. His realisation the West wants to leave Afghanistan has now forced him to reassess his long term friends, diplomats say. Relations with Islamabad have thawed.

Visitors to Pakistan’s embassy in Kabul are now presented with a slim, recently-published work by the ambassador, Mohammad Sadiq, entitled Pakistan-Afghanistan: The conjoined twins.

Saleh Registani, a former MP from the Panjshir Valley north of Jabal Saraj said Mr Karzai was playing a dangerous game and his negotiation was a threat to non-Pashtuns.

“It’s not very clear what this negotiation is, how it is going on, who are the negotiators and what are the limits. No one knows except Mr Karzai.”

The difficulty of reconciling the Taliban with their former enemies has led some to suggest Afghanistan cannot survive as a single, centralised country.

Robert Blackwill, a former American ambassador to Delhi and national security adviser to the White House, has argued for a de facto partition. He says the Taliban will inevitably regain control of the Pashtun south and east, and Nato forces should withdraw to the north and west from where they could continue to launch attacks on al-Qaeda targets.

In July, a delegation of US congressmen met Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek leaders in Berlin to discuss their desires for a more federal Afghanistan. Mohammed Mohaqiq, a Hazara former warlord, who has long called for a federal Afghanistan, was among those present.

Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California who led the delegation, told The Sunday Telegraph that northern Afghans were “not going to just sit by as authority is given to the Taliban to basically control their lives”.

He said: “If Karzai tries to bring the Taliban back into the government and our Pakistani friends start trying to muscle their way into a position of dominance in Afghanistan, then I think there will have to be acceptance that the Northern Alliance will try to protect themselves.”

However many in Kabul argue that federalisation or partition would be a disaster, triggering ethnic war between the two halves of Afghanistan and destabilising neighbouring countries.

Andrey Avetisyan, Russian envoy to Kabul, said: “Frankly this is the most stupid idea I have ever heard of and it is extremely dangerous for Afghanistan, for its neighbours and for the region and for the whole world,” he said. “We must go absolutely the opposite way, strengthening a united Afghanistan.”

Dealing with Taliban Forcing Revival of Northern Alliance Forces

[Obama's asinine policies are setting the stage for the full-blown Indian mobilization of their former allies in the north.  We are seeing Afghanistan returning to the state it was in right before its last civil war, only there are far more weapons in country now than then.]

Afghan north to fight any deal with Taliban warlords

BY BEN FARMER, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH OCTOBER 24, 2010

Kabul Afghanistan’s northern warlords are preparing to rearm their former militias because they fear that their Taliban enemies are on the brink of a return to power in Kabul.

Anger is growing in the north of Afghanistan at the prospect of a deal with President Hamid Karzai after emissaries from the rebel group were escorted to Kabul for talks last week.

Northerners whose homes were destroyed in fighting during the 1990s fear that Afghanistan stands at the beginning of a peace process that could erode their own power and eventually return Taliban supporters to the heart of government — a prospect that fills many with dread.

Earlier this month, Karzai inaugurated a hand-picked “peace council” of former warlords, tribal elders and clerics amid reports that the Taliban’s high command and its feared Haqqani network of allies had already opened embryonic negotiation channels.

It emerged last week that Afghan and U.S. officials have been holding secret discussions with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the second-ranking figure in the Taliban, in the firmest indication yet that substantive peace talks will soon begin.

Baradar, the Taliban’s overall military commander until his arrest in Karachi last February, was recently released from Pakistani custody and travelled with three senior lieutenants to Afghanistan under NATO guard.

Karzai’s 68-member peace council has a mandate to pursue talks with the insurgents as the NATO-led war enters its 10th year. However, any deal which shared power with Taliban leaders would greatly alarm Afghanistan’s smaller ethnic groups, which fought for five years against the movement, their leaders have said.

“If people are not actually digging up their old guns, they are at least locating them and putting a little marker on them,” one diplomat told The Sunday Telegraph.

© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal

American Military Incompetence Fueling Afghan Occupation

[We should be talking about the abject failure of the strategy designed by America's top brass, in particular, Gen. Petraeus.   His strategy is neutralized by basic human nature, causing the spread of the insurgency, instead of its systematic defeat.   The operation against the Taliban has overlooked the effects it would have on the Afghan people, the same effects it would have had upon the American people, if military forces were hunting and killing our local leaders.  The Afghans do not roll over and surrender, just as we wouldn't.   If our leaders were killed, it would simply inspire the rest of us to rise-up and follow in their great example.  An Afghan martyr ("shaheed") inspires countless more young men to stand on their own two feet and fight like men, just as it would if it was happening to us.  And these stinking generals have always known this.  They continue multiplying the militants for their own reasons.

It is sheer idiocy that propels this foolish fight to defeat the Afghan insurgency by hunting the mid-level leadership of the Taliban like animals.  It is simple logic, that if you kill off the older, more mature leadership, then the "young bucks" will only grow stronger and more determined to assert their places in the tribe.  If we had a real national media in this country that was committed to the truth and not to corporate cheerleading, then these idiotic national war policies of Petraeus and friends would be dissected and exposed for what they really are--WRONG.]

An Afghan Taliban commander feels NATO’s heat, but it could backfire

The Western alliance’s effort to end the Afghan conflict centers on devastating the Taliban command structure while wooing leaders to bargain. Observers say this could breathe life in the insurgency.

By Laura King, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan —

Commander H. is nervous.

He rarely sleeps twice in the same place, and tosses away his cellphones almost as often as he changes houses. He can’t stay in close contact with the foot soldiers who report to him. And he wonders, sometimes uneasily, whether his leaders are looking to cut a deal with the people who are trying to kill him.

Midlevel Taliban field operatives such as Commander H., who leads a cell of fighters outside the southern city of Kandahar, are acutely aware that they are being hunted more intensely than ever before: The NATO-led force in Afghanistan says that in the last three months, it has killed or captured hundreds of insurgent commanders and thousands of lower-level fighters.

Increasingly, the Western alliance’s effort to find a way out of the deadlocked conflict in Afghanistan centers on a two-track approach: seeking to devastate the Taliban field-command structure while trying to woo the movement’s leaders to the bargaining table. But some analysts, officials, diplomats and other observers say this strategy could backfire, perhaps even providing the insurgency with fresh impetus, stronger motivation and more recruits.

They point out that the loose and decentralized nature of the insurgency means that many of those on the battlefield have no real pipeline to the upper echelon. And it is not at all clear that the Taliban fighters on the ground feel it’s time to make a deal.

Commander H., for example, insists that his troops are ready to continue the battle, and says that he himself could be readily replaced if he were killed or captured.

He succeeded an older cousin who was killed last year, and said avenging that death and other killings and destruction of property guides his belief that the fight must go on until all foreign troops have left Afghan soil.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force routinely reports the capture or death of several Taliban “leaders” a day, wording that suggests they are senior figures, with a role in shaping the movement’s overall aims. But Commander H., answering questions through an intermediary, described his role in the fighting in almost workaday terms.

He and others like him, he said, are men who organize the planting of roadside bombs, the Taliban’s signature weapon. They move arms from one place to another; they keep Western troops in their district under close surveillance; they stage occasional ambushes, often merely to give the impression that their own numbers are greater than they actually are.

Western officials contend that the high-tempo campaign of targeted strikes on operatives such as Commander H. is sowing doubt and disarray in the ranks of the Taliban. And that, they believe, is key to “softening up” the insurgency, making its leaders more receptive to peace overtures.

More explicitly than at any point in the 9-year-old war, senior U.S. and other Western officials are describing a negotiated settlement with the Taliban as not only necessary but perhaps inevitable. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has disclosed that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force had gone so far as to ensure safe passage for high-level Taliban figures to informal meetings between them and associates of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

But the Afghan government’s much-touted effort to lure insurgents from the battlefield with financial and other incentives has largely foundered, despite Western encouragement and cash commitments. When asked about the government “reconciliation” program, Commander H. laughed.

He also suggested that he and fellow fighters, facing heavy pressure from the large-scale Western offensive in Kandahar province, would fall back on a favored tactic: melting away in the face of superior force, then reinfiltrating when it suited them.

“We have long experience in this,” he said. “We can change our location, we can come and go, we can leave behind land mines that will kill them. Yes, they are many, but with only a few, we can make great problems for them.”

Western and Afghan officials are increasingly touting their success against the Taliban command structure, especially in the south.

“Their networks have been shattered,” Col. Nasrullah Garumsir, a senior police official in Kandahar, told reporters last week.

Those familiar with the Taliban’s inner workings acknowledge that the effects of NATO’s campaign against the Islamic movement’s field leaders are being felt, but doubted that battle fatigue or losses in the lower command ranks alone would bring the militants to the bargaining table.

“Of course it makes it more difficult to fight, to stay organized, when commanders are getting killed,” said Waheed Mojda, a member of the Taliban government that was ousted in 2001. “But experience shows they can always find new ones.”

Taliban leaders believe they have made significant gains, both in territorial terms and their ability to bloody the NATO force. They point with satisfaction to Western combat deaths, which are running at their highest levels since the start of the war, and the fact that they have been able to push into more parts of the country during the last two years, even as the Western force was doubling in size.

Observers also point out that one of the Taliban movement’s hallmarks is its ability to regenerate itself. It bounced back, after all, from the devastating blow of the U.S.-led invasion, steadily gaining strength over the last several years.

“In 2006, officials were estimating that the Taliban were as low as a few thousand strong, and today [the NATO force] estimates the Taliban as 35,000 to 40,000,” said Matthew Waldman, an analyst who recently wrote a report on the prospect of negotiations. “One of the points we have to bear in mind is they have a very large pool of recruits inside Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Furthermore, as Waldman and others point out, the emerging commanders are younger and in many cases more hard-line than their pragmatic elder brothers, the ones being killed and captured. The average age of midlevel commanders is thought to have dropped from the mid-30s to the mid-20s.

But strong Taliban denials that contacts are taking place suggest that the leadership is worried about a loss of morale in the ranks if preliminary talks turn into real negotiations.

“We hope this is not the truth, that this talk of negotiations is propaganda and rumors,” said Commander H. “Because the infidels are still here in the land.”

laura.king@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

Ohio Democratic Governor and Indigent Mental Health Care–Reflections of Reagan

‘An illusion of treatment’

A 1988 state law designed to move people out of institutions and into community-based care has never been properly funded. The looming budget deficit may further decimate the system.

By Alan Johnson and Catherine C

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

CHRIS RUSSELL | DISPATCH

With no home for the night, a client of Southeast Inc., a mental-health and recovery agency, sleeps outside its Downtown offices.

Mental-health care in Ohio

‘An illusion of treatment’
1988 act worked well, for a few years
Son’s lonely ride through mental illness ends
Clients easily fall through safety net
Ohio’s mental-health system, once a national model, is on the verge of collapse as the state careens toward the biggest budget crisis in memory.

Thousands have been slashed from the mental-health-care rolls. Others might have to wait months to see a psychiatrist. State funding for mental-health services has been decimated, Medicaid is gobbling up scarce local dollars, and hundreds of small group homes for the mentally ill have closed.

Prisons, nursing facilities and homeless shelters are the new homes for thousands of mentally ill Ohioans, advocates say.

“Our state leaders have washed their hands of Ohioans who are suffering from mental illness,” said Terry Russell, a veteran of 37 years at the local and state level in Ohio’s mental-health system. “If we are to be judged by how we treat the sickest in our society, we should all be ashamed.”

There is no shortage of blame. Some is aimed at Gov. Ted Strickland, a former prison psychologist and Methodist minister. His budget, approved by the legislature, cut funding to mental-health programs by 35 percent in the past three years as the state grappled with plummeting revenue.

But Ohio’s history of broken promises stretches back much further than the current governor:

• The Mental Health Act of 1988, designed to move people out of state hospitals and into a community-based system of care, was never adequately funded. Money did not follow patients home as former Gov. Richard F. Celeste and others promised.

• Medicaid, the state and federal health-care program for the poor and disabled, has grown dramatically. Ohio’s share of those costs has swollen to the point that Medicaid consumes nearly all local mental-health funds.

• Those in need of services who are uninsured and do not qualify for Medicaid are finding it increasingly difficult and often impossible to get help.

The plight of Ohio’s mentally ill is expected to get worse next year as state officials face a projected $8 billion budget shortfall.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness estimates 418,000 Ohioans – including 124,000 children, suffer from serious mental illness (major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder). Fewer than one in four are receiving services.

Last month, the advocacy group listed Ohio among the 10 worst states for mental-health budget cuts.

“We’re in trouble. … The mental-health system is on the verge of collapse,” said Cheri L. Walter, chief executive officer of the Ohio Association of County Behavioral Health Authorities. “The mentally ill in Ohio are homeless, living on the streets, and in jail.”

While services are being provided to larger numbers of Ohioans, Walter calls it “an illusion of treatment.”

“People may get an assessment and a visit, but need more. If they get services, it will take them longer. If they are part of the working poor, they may or may not get services at all,” she said.

“We’re at a 10-year high for suicides, and murder-suicides have exploded. With the economy being in the state it is, more and more people are extremely stressed.”

Susan Ackerman, a fellow at the Cleveland-based Center for Community Solutions, said the lack of investment in mental-health services is leading to higher costs elsewhere.

“Failure to meet the needs of people with mental illness in a community setting has resulted in increased hospitalizations, nursing-home placements and incarceration,” Ackerman wrote in a recent report. “Not only are these alternatives inappropriate – and in many cases inhumane – but they also are significantly more expensive.”

Ohio now houses more mentally ill people in nursing homes than in state psychiatric hospitals.

“People are falling through the cracks,” said Carolyn Givens, executive director of the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation.

Ohio’s mental-health system, she said, is dying a “death by 1,000 paper cuts.”

The Act

The state Mental Health Act of 1988 was intended as a seismic change, shifting the focus from institutional care to community-based services. The law expanded the role of Ohio’s 53 county boards of mental health or combined alcohol, drug-addiction and mental-health boards, which rely on federal, state and local funding to provide services in hospitals and through community agencies.

The idea was to encourage local treatment, which is less expensive and allows counties to maximize their funding. The law did succeed in downsizing state psychiatric hospitals, from an average daily population of 3,823 patients in 1988 to about 1,000 today.

But more money was needed to meet growing demand for community services. Instead, the state, facing a devastating shortfall of money, cut funding by more than $100 million over the past three years.

Ohio’s next governor, either Strickland, the incumbent Democrat, or John Kasich, his Republican challenger, will decide the fate of the failing system. Both told The Dispatch that mental health will be a high priority.

“Some of the decisions I’ve had to make are really painful to me,” said Strickland, who privately has told friends he has lost sleep over the fate of mentally ill Ohioans.

“I wish we could have given more money to mental health. That’s my field, and it’s been painful to me as I’ve traveled around Ohio and I’ve bumped into people who used to be my friends complaining to me that they feel like they haven’t gotten what they needed, and I understand that.”

Kasich doesn’t talk specifically about his plans, but has said he feels strongly about maintaining “programs that affect people who have no where else to go – the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled.”

Kasich has first-hand experience with the issue. His younger brother, Rick, has struggled for years with mental-health problems.

Fear and anger inside

County officials struggling to provide care, such as David A. Royer, chief executive officer of the Franklin County Alcohol Drug and Mental Health Board, say the state is failing to meet its obligation and undermining the Mental Health Act.

In a harshly worded letter to state Mental Health Director Sandra Stephenson this year, Royer wrote: “The governor and you are effectively dismantling the act. This decision is a decision that I believe will be a bitter legacy for years to come for people with mental illness and the system that supports them and their families.”

By December – only halfway through the state’s fiscal year – Franklin County expects to exhaust its state aid, along with $4 million in local levy revenue, on Medicaid costs. Royer said he won’t use more local dollars because he needs money to serve the 35 percent of patients who are not covered by Medicaid. Non-Medicaid services, he said, already have been cut by $14 million since October 2008.

“Mental-health services are more than state hospitals and Medicaid,” Royer said in an interview. “To succeed you need the local, state and federal governments, but what we’ve witnessed is that the state is failing to meet its base obligation.”

Stephenson took the helm of the state agency in 2007 after 20 years in the trenches as director of Southeast Inc., a mental-health-care agency in Franklin County. She had to make drastic cuts to the agency she had just left and others across the state.

She acknowledged that the Mental Health Act was “not funded properly from the beginning” but stressed that more people are being served. Statistics support that, but critics say numbers don’t show the kind of services being provided.

The state has agreed to provide additional funds to Franklin County and also is propping up three other agencies in danger of collapse, Stephenson said.

While she doesn’t agree that the whole system is on the verge of collapse, she said there is “unevenness” in services across the state.

Where are they?

Most people who have insurance and can afford counseling and medications can live stable lives at home. Not so those who fall through the cracks: They end up in nursing homes, homeless shelters, jails and prisons.

At least 1,683 individuals with serious mental illness (out of a total of 9,400) living in nursing homes in Ohio could be served in less restrictive and expensive ways, officials say.

Then there is the price tag for the thousands locked up.

In Franklin County jails, one in four inmates is on medication for mental illness, said Chief Deputy Sheriff Mark J. Barrett. Last year, the sheriff’s office spent nearly $1 million on medication and additional money for psychiatrists, counselors and liaisons to help the mentally ill.

“It’s a never-ending cycle for many of these people,” he said. “We have one guy, we call him our frequent flier because he has been in our jail 230 times over the last 10 years.”

Barrett said many of those jailed with mental illness live on the street and act out after they stop taking their medications. Their families often are frustrated and have given up on them.

In state prisons, about one in five inmates suffers from mental illness. Roughly 4,700 are diagnosed with serious mental illnesses and nearly 7,700 inmates are on anti-psychotic or other mental-health medications.

The tab for taxpayers: $5.2million in the fiscal year that ended June 30.

Some former hospital patients live in small group homes, “mom and pop” operations such as the one Bertha Powell runs on Sunbury Road. She gets $27 a day to house and feed each of eight male residents.

Powell, in her 70s, pulled a bubbling casserole from the oven one day recently and sliced two tomatoes from her garden for a salad. It was nearly noon and she knew the men would be hungry.

“They like to eat,” she chuckled.

Powell has spent most of her life cooking, cleaning and doing laundry for somebody. She cared for her five brothers and sisters after her mother died and later raised seven children and a grandchild while working for the Postal Service.

She retired in 1999 and then, after praying about it, decided to do “something Christ-like” by converting the two-story house where she raised her family to a home for mentally ill men. She lives next door.

“We’re like family,” she said. “We sit down together. We eat together. I know when someone isn’t feeling well.”

Frank Herrera, 60, a resident at Powell’s home, is a Lorain native who is diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. He served 11 years in prison for assault before coming to Columbus. During the winter of 2004, his “home” was the woods not far from Nationwide Arena.

“It was like living in hell,” Herrera said. “I had to survive looking in Dumpsters for food and sleeping in layers of clothing. I didn’t have nowhere to go.

“I found plastic. I found blankets. I felt miserable. Nobody cared. I was out on my own.”

Fortunately for Herrera, he was picked up by the police and taken to the Franklin County jail. He was sent to a halfway house and eventually landed at Powell’s home.

“I got a place to live. The food is hot. They treat me real good. I get along with everybody,” he said. “I love it. It beats living on the streets.”

In an older home not far from the Ohio State University campus, Johanna Queck has been running a similar group home since 1985. Cuts in state funding limit her to five people instead of the eight she once had.

“I just don’t know how much longer I can stay open with five people,” she said. “We didn’t get a raise. The electric goes up. The gas goes up. The groceries go up. We get nothing.

“I don’t want to close. I don’t want to put these people out on the streets. … We are their family. We take care of them. … But if I lose another one, I won’t have any choice.”

One resident, Mary Brown, 58, was in a state hospital before coming to Queck’s group home.

“This in reality is the only place I really like.” At other places, she said, “they treated me bad. … It was like being in jail. I hated it.”

She added: “This house makes me feel more free. Without this place, I’d be lost.”

Dispatch reporter Mark Niquette contributed to this story

ajohnson@dispatch.com

ccandisky@dispatch.com

Hiding the Fact that the CIA is a Subversive, Incompetent Organization Leading the Terror War

“90 percent of CIA employees are stationed within the United States.”

Shutting up the spies

Intelligence agencies want to hide their dirty linen

By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The CIA suffered one of its biggest setbacks on Dec. 20, 2009, when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the agency’s Afghanistan headquarters in Khost, along with four CIA officers, three security contractors and a Jordanian intelligence officer.

Among those killed were the CIA station chief and an analyst from headquarters in Langley, Va., who reportedly was the agency’s foremost expert on al-Qaida. Six other CIA officers were injured in the blast.

The suicide bomber was Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor who the CIA thought was an informant for them, but who was really an agent of Tehrik i Taliban Pakistan, the main Pakistani Taliban group.

Mr. Balawi’s “penetration of the CIA was less like the product of an insurgency than an operation carried out by a national intelligence service,” wrote George Friedman of STRATFOR, a private intelligence service. “The operation was by all accounts a masterful piece of tradecraft beyond the known abilities of a group like the [Pakistani Taliban].”

On Tuesday, CIA Director Leon Panetta told selected reporters an internal review found the CIA has been warned Mr. Balawi’s loyalties were suspect, but the warnings were ignored. The body count was so high because security procedures at the base in Khost also were ignored.

The main takeaway for me from Mr. Panetta’s briefing was his declaration that no one would be held accountable for the failures. It was deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra might say.

In my opinion, the biggest of the many mistakes made by President George W. Bush was his failure to clean out CIA headquarters after 9/11, the most egregious intelligence failure in CIA history.

“Agency employees expected the axe of accountability to fall at any moment,” wrote “Ishmael Jones,” a former deep cover CIA officer, in his 2008 book, “The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture.”

“Talk at HQ was that the seventh floor, where the CIA’s top mandarins dwelt, would be swept clean,” Ishmael said.

Instead, Mr. Bush threw money at the agency, most of which, according to Ishmael, has been wasted.

“In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Congress gave the CIA more than $3 billion to increase its deep cover capabilities overseas,” Ishmael said. “The CIA was not able to field a single additional effective deep cover case officer overseas. The money was swallowed up into higher pay packages, expensive boondoggles, the enrichment of contracting companies run by former CIA employees and the expansion of CIA offices within the United States.”

About 90 percent of CIA employees are stationed within the United States, Ishmael said. This seems odd for an organization whose job is collecting foreign intelligence.

Though Mr. Panetta is unwilling to discipline those whose blunders have endangered the security of the United States, he is moving with alacrity to shut up Ishmael. The Washington Times reported Monday that the CIA is suing him for publishing his book without the agency’s permission.

“Ordering the lawsuit was a way for [Mr. Panetta] to curry favor with the CIA’s senior bureaucrats,” Ishmael said. “Panetta is beleaguered at the CIA and is in over his head. He’s been Stockholmed by CIA bureaucracy and has become another failed Obama appointee.”

The CIA isn’t the only intelligence agency to use intimidation to silence whistleblowers. Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer was the Defense Intelligence Agency’s liaison to Able Danger, an Army data mining project which, according to Mr. Shaffer and others who worked on the project, had identified Muhammad Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, as an al-Qaida operative long before he was permitted to enter the United States.

Able Danger was denied permission to share what it had discovered with other agencies, Mr. Shaffer said. After he told this to the staff of the 9/11 Commission, the DIA fired him. The reasons for the firing, the DIA said, were Mr. Shaffer’s “misuse of a government telephone” in the amount of $67; “filing a false travel voucher” in the amount of $180, and his admission years before that as a teenager, he’d stolen a box of pens from the U.S. embassy in Portugal.

If Republicans take the House after Nov. 2 — or if the Democrats remain in control, for that matter — an investigation of our intelligence agencies and their efforts to silence whistleblowers should be undertaken. “Ishmael Jones” and Lt. Col. Shaffer would make excellent witnesses.

Jack Kelly is a columnist for the Post-Gazette and The (Toledo) Blade (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412 263-1476). More articles by this author

American Demands–To Hell With Pakistan’s Concerns

Af-Pak or Indo-Pak?

By Huma Yusuf

Pakistan’s Defense Minister Ahmad Mukhtar (L), US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (2nd-L), Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani and US Admiral Michael Mullen listen as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (not in picture) speaks during the US-Pakistan Dialogue Plenary Session at the State Department in Washington, DC, on October 22, 2010. – AFP

Three days, 13 working groups, countless delegates. They came from across Pakistan to Washington to strengthen the bilateral relationship. They came to talk of water, energy, women’s empowerment, and much else. What they really discussed — whether inadvertently, or inevitably — was India.

The headlines have focused on the new security assistance package and joint counter-terrorism efforts. But the week’s strategic dialogue between Pakistan and the US was to some extent hijacked by Islamabad — and Rawalpindi’s — concerns about New Delhi.

Most of these concerns were addressed at an explicit level. On Tuesday before the dialogue kicked off, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, speaking at an event at Harvard University, asked the US to do “everything in its power” to help Pakistan and India resolve the Kashmir dispute. The request was reiterated on Friday, when Qureshi bluntly suggested that US President Barack Obama intervene in the Kashmir issue during his November visit to India (even though the US has defined the territorial dispute as a bilateral issue between Pakistan and India).

During his talk at Harvard, Qureshi also emphasised Pakistan’s continuing desire for a civilian nuclear deal with the US, akin to the one inked between Washington and New Delhi. Not surprisingly, the US entertained little public discussion on this issue, and instead asked the Pakistani delegation for more details about its civilian nuclear development pact with China.

And then there was the touchy topic of Obama paying a visit to Pakistan to balance out his scheduled trip to India. On this point alone did the Pakistanis leave the White House satisfied: on day one of the dialogue, Obama promised to visit Pakistan in 2011, and even extended an invitation to President Zardari for good measure. If the goal of this overture was to quash further talk of how the US might ease discriminatory treatment of Islamabad vis-à-vis New Delhi, it didn’t work.

Quid pro quo demands aside, an India complex permeated other aspects of the dialogue, albeit on an implicit level. Take, for instance, our delegation’s push for maximising trade opportunities for Pakistan (as an aside, allow me to compliment the rhyming propensities of Qureshi’s speechwriter, who had our foreign minister asking for trade, not aid; viability, not dependency; MOUs, not IOUs). The call for free-trade agreements and Reconstruction Opportunity Zones can be read as an effort by Islamabad to have Washington (and thus the international community) view Pakistan through something other than a security lens. It is a plea to treat Pakistan as a viable, rather than failing state; an appeal to invest in the country on the basis that it is emerging, not imploding. In other words, it is an endeavour to have Pakistan treated more like India than Afghanistan.

In recent years, Pakistanis have complained about the fallout our nation’s re-hyphenation, from Indo-Pak to Af-Pak. In the former construction, we were a nation with potential — an aspiring global player that could, if properly harnessed, give India a run for its money. Reconstrued as the better half of Afghanistan, Pakistan has been rebranded as a rogue state, a pariah on the fringe of the community of nations. By prioritising our economy in high-level engagements with the US, we are asking to be re-hyphenated yet again.

If this reading seems over-analytical, consider the repeated mentions during the dialogue of the recently established transit trade agreement between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which is expected to generate $2bn for the two countries. The agreement was touted as an example of Pakistan’s openness to bilateral trade, mutual prosperity and eventually, lasting regional peace (ironically, India was shut out of this agreement on Pakistan’s insistence). In this context, the question arising from the dialogue is, why is India back in the forefront of Pakistan’s discussions with the US? The obvious answer is that Obama’s upcoming trip to India has Islamabad concerned about retaining the love of its old ally even as Washington tries to woo a reluctant New Delhi.

Moreover, India has become the wild card that both Islamabad and Washington toss on the table when they disagree about counter-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan. When the US tells Pakistan to ‘do more,’ Pakistan tells the US to ‘do more’ to rein in Indian aspirations.

In recent days, for example, the US made tough demands on Pakistan: crack down on the Haqqani group, launch military operations in North Waziristan and Balochistan, allow US Special Forces more flexibility to target militants, and halt terror attacks in India. In turn, the US has assured Pakistan a role in settling the Afghan dispute, indicating that our authorities will participate in negotiations with the Taliban, thereby shaping the ruling order of a post-US Afghanistan.

This is necessarily at the expense of India’s growing economic and political influence in Afghanistan. It also adversely impacts US-India relations: India has rejected Pakistan’s involvement in reconciliation efforts — New Delhi fears the plan will backfire, and that the Indian administration will be left to deal with the blowback once the US withdraws.

But the flipside applies here too. If Pakistan fails to uphold its side of the bargain (again), the US has expressed a willingness to use its own India card. This idea was clearly expressed by Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He recommends that if Pakistan fails to honour its commitments, the US should strengthen its alliance with India by allowing New Delhi to invest in Afghanistan’s stability.

All told, here’s the takeaway from this strategic dialogue: to ensure peace and stability in South Asia, Pakistan should send high-level delegations to New Delhi, not Washington.

huma.yusuf@gmail.com

U.S. wants peace under its terms: ex-Taliban envoy

U.S. wants peace under its terms: ex-Taliban envoy

By Sayed Salahuddin

KABUL

(Reuters) – Washington wants security and peace in Afghanistan under its own terms as it eyes a long-term regional presence and only backs talks between Kabul and the Taliban to spread confusion among insurgents, an ex-Taliban diplomat said.

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who once served as ambassador for the ousted Taliban government, said comments by NATO and U.S. officials that militants had recently opened contacts with Kabul were merely propaganda to divide Taliban leaders.

His remarks echo those from Taliban commanders who have dismissed negotiations and underscore the difficulty of bringing insurgents to the talks table while they stand by their long-held demand that foreign troops must leave Afghanistan.

“The fundamental problem, the basic problem is the … occupation of Afghanistan. This is the real problem and the Americans want to ignore that,” said Zaeef, the Taliban’s envoy to Pakistan until the militants were removed in 2001.

“They are interested in peace on their own condition. To be safe, to be here … and tell other countries ‘do that’ and they should do it,” he said in an interview in his Kabul house.

With rising casualties among the foreign forces and sagging support in Western nations as the Afghan war enters its 10th year, Washington says it backs President Hamid Karzai’s latest efforts to reach out to the Taliban commanders.

As its conditions or “red lines” for any peace talks, Washington says it wants the Taliban to renounce violence, cut ties with al Qaeda and accept Afghanistan’s new constitution.

But analysts, former and current Taliban see those terms as tantamount to surrender to the United States, which leads the Afghan war and forms the bulk of the 150,000 foreign troops deployed in Afghanistan.

Zaeef said he believed the United States sought to secure its own interests in a mineral-rich region where China is rising as an economic power, Russia is re-emerging as a key actor and Iran is chafing against U.S. pressure over its nuclear program.

NO TO PEACE COUNCIL SEAT

Zaeef spent several years in the U.S. jail in Guantanamo Bay after the fall of the Taliban. He has refused to sit on the 70-member High Peace Council appointed by Karzai for talks with the Taliban, partly because of conditions set on negotiations.

Wearing a black turban, like many of the Taliban, Zaeef said he has told Western diplomats and officials that he believes Afghanistan and the region at large do not want a U.S. presence in the country.

“Who will pay the price? The Afghans will be the casualties. This is the real problem. We don’t want to be sacrificed for others,” he said.

Zaeef, who has remained in touch with his former comrades in the past by telephone, said comments by NATO and U.S. officials about Taliban contacts were untrue and Washington wanted to use them to show to the world that it was interested in Afghan peace.

Secrecy was fundamental to any form of talks and revealing details in the initial phase could risk destroying the whole peace process, he said.

“I am sure… nothing has happened and just they want to confuse the Taliban, confuse the nation and create problems among the people,” Zaeef asid. “This is just some kind of propaganda.”

(Editing by Patrick Markey and Ron Popeski)

New Wikileaks Just Another File Dump of Useless Half-Truths

HO HUM, MORE WIKILEAKS “CHICKENFEED”

LAMEST WIKILEAK SO FAR…IS ISRAEL BEHIND IT?

By Gordon Duff

The new Wikileaks claims the US undereported by 15,000, the deaths of Iraqi “civilians.”  With the numbers listed by the military as little as 10% or less of the actual deaths, bumping up the numbers must be a joke.  More leaks about torture and killings, Iraqi torture and the US “looking away?”  More idiocy.  With the US sending “suspects” around the world on rendition flights, sent to secret prisons and obvious to anyone with a brain, to shallow graves, this Wikileak is simply another sideshow, more “chickenfeed.”

Things have already come apart in Iraq.  Why leak this now?  Regular news stories are actually going much further than these “leaks.”  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the agenda here, an agenda with absolutely nothing to do with enlightening the world.

What does it prove, any of it?  For sure, we see one thing.  Everything leaked is carefully screened to have nothing of real value.  With Mossad running around Mosul, operating out of Erbil, supplying and advising the terrorist PKK, not a word is mentioned.  Instead, poor Iranians are swimming the Euphrates with explosives strapped to their chests.

Get real.

Thousands of tons of explosives were “mislaid” in Iraq.  The US failed to secure Saddam’s weapons depots which were looted.  These stockpiles were vast.  The idea that anyone would need to bring weapons into Iraq is insane, simply another Israeli ploy to pre-stage an attack on Iran.  Any fool can see this in seconds.

In fact, there are more assault rifles in Iraq than people.

While trying to blame Iran, is Wikileaks reporting the hundreds of thousands of weapons bought by the US that simply disappeared in Iraq?  It is easier to buy an assault rifle or RPG in Iraq than to get potato chips.  This need to blame Iran, the idea that “secret agents” are smuggling ordnance into Iraq, a country loaded with explosives, is insane.  Who would believe it?  The idiotic controlled press?

What will we see if we watch the stories coming out?  Where will the press be told to manipulate the public to look?

THE LIES BEGIN…

“Iran’s Training for Iraqi Militants Outlined in Leaked Pentagon Documents”

Bloomberg and The Guardian start the ball rolling.  Imagine Iraq, a country with the 3rd largest military force in the world, needing “trainers” from Iran.  Iraq with its elite Republican Guard and one million man army has more people with military training that Britain, a fact The Guardian seems oblivious to.  One minute, Iraq is building nuclear weapons and threatening the region with SCUD missiles, the next it is having to turn to “Iranian experts” to build pipe bombs.  Has any nation ever suffered such a case of collective amnesia in the area of weapons technology before?

As the days pass, we can expect more and more fanciful accounts of Iranian spies, trainers, kidnappers and terrorists, each story more sensational and fictitious than the last.

There is a more insidious aspect to Wikleaks.  Through representing itself as “anti-war” and “public spirited,” it carries forward a globalist agenda, promoting war, promoting regional strife, coincidentally all directly tied to Israel’s “hit list,”  the nations Israel openly advocates someone else destroys.

One could easily describe Wikileaks as a Mossad PsyOp.

Thus, Wikileaks is very effective in derailing genuine dialog and meaningful dissent.

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALES TOLD US TORTURE WAS GOOD FOR US

Americans proved long ago that they were immune to guilt about torture and killing.  In fact, polls show that the more religious an American, the more willing they are to accept brutality, and few countries are as “religious’ as America.  No other country in recent times as killed as many people as America, even overshadowing the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and Bosnia or the “situation” in Israel.

As with the earlier “leak,” Wikileaks has the ability to go through hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, carefully eliminating any blackmarket dealings, drug running or, as with Iraq, the massive corruption and theft of oil.

There are dozens of subjects that seem to be carefully screened from any Wikileak.  Even the Department of Defense, not so secretly, thanks Wikileaks for holding back really embarrassing information.  “Held back” information is, of course, blackmail.

Who is Wikileaks?

Is Wikileaks Israel?

Only Israel has the penetration of the Department of Defense that would allow this kind of spying.  Not only can they do it, they also have so many spies in the American chain of command, they could easily prevent it.  Who has the facilities to gather and filter this much data?  Who would want to?

With the biggest story in Iraq the falsified intelligence on “weapons of mass destruction,” why didn’t Wikileaks get us documents on this?  We know that the military had orders to try to falsify documents showing that they found fully operating nuclear, biological and chemical warfare facilities.  These would have made good reading along with the thousands of pages of reports about how these stories would be fabricated.  Even the “controlled press” wouldn’t touch them although they are still out there.

The lies.

Exposing this real Iraq scandal would so some good, except for one thing, friends of Israel inside the Pentagon were the creators of this program.  Is this why Wikileaks dodges the real issues?  Is it because the trail for much of what happened in Iraq heads directly to Tel Aviv?

Who even cares about Iraq this many years later?

Look at the watered down reports about American support of Al Qaeda.  The US is blamed for accidentally helping Al Qaeda by organizing the Sons of Iraq.  In truth, the US actually reorganized the Baathists, something far worse than the imaginary construct “Al Qaeda.”  Not a word is said about this.

One of the biggest scams of the Iraq “experience” was the looting of oil resources.  Most easily verified is the theft of oil from the Kirkuk fields through the Kirkuk/Ceyhan pipeline, which goes to the Mediterranean through Turkey.  Ships that load oil are shown on locator sights run by insurance companies and even the US Coast Guard.  Their tonnage is available, how many ships, how long.  When doing the math, how much oil is loaded compared to how much is paid for, billions and billions of dollars of oil is missing.

When Americans were paying $4 a gallon for gas, how many knew the oil that made the gasoline was “free” to the oil companies?  Who spit the take on this?  Who was paid?  How much was stolen through Basra?  Were the British involved?

Then we have Fallujah.  We are told America “carpet bombed” civilians and “ethnically cleansed” the area, as we are now informed, for no reason.  The version the Army told is being debunked along with the phony stories of the “embedded” press.  Nothing on this hit Wikileaks either.

We are also noting high levels of radiation there and a health crisis that can only be described as shocking.  Where is wikileaks on this REAL story?

There is little doubt that Wikileaks is a “sideshow’ run by an intelligence agency with dozens of agents inside the Department of Defense.  Only Israel has this capability, having penetrated Defense to such a degree they run it as their own.  What is the agenda of Wikileaks?  Is it revealing the truth?  If so, why is the truth censored and watered down to such a degree as to be “non-news” as the earlier leak had been.  In fact, most stories about leaks are simply speculation and most “leaks” are little than “chickenfeed.”

The last leak was an attack on Pakistan.  Wikileaks tried to make a case for Pakistan running the Taliban in Afghanistan.  However, the Taliban are Pashtun and don’t care much for Pakistan, they are “blood enemies.”  Because of this, Israel and India have found them useful allies against Pakistan, the only Islamic nuclear power.  Aid of all kinds gets to the Taliban from the Mossad and RAW, something Wikileaks worked hard to keep secret.

Real leaks by former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds proved that documents exist showing that rendition flights were used to ferry terrorists around, move drugs and tons of cash.  With bales of cash leaving Afghanistan every day, why is it that not one page, not one word of any of this, things we know are in American files, hit Wikileaks?

Why does Wikileaks spend more time hiding things than revealing them?  When the story dies down, are the Julian Assange rape allegations going to be dragged out again to give the story more play?  Last time they “double dipped” on that one, first charges, then no charges, then charges.  It was like a badly written “soap opera.”  We have just received reports of Julian Assange fleeing Pentagon death squads.  We are told he has virtually disappeared off the face of the planet.  We also have a schedule of public appearances and interviews for Assange, who will mysteriously re-materialize when needed.  Ah, to have powers such as those.

What about this new “leak?”

This one may be aimed at Iran.

Anyone surprised or shocked to find that Iraqi security forces killed or tortured people is living on their own private planet.  These were Saddam’s killers and torturers first.  Then they became ours.  What do killers and torturers do?

There was one reason for the invasion of Iraq with all the lies, all the killing, all the corruption.  Israel wanted Iraq destroyed.  Will Wikileaks ever get to something real?