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?

Russian-led security organization may be ready to flex its muscle

News analysis by Martin Sieff

The Rapid Reaction Force of the Russian-led CSTO will conduct exercises next week

WASHINGTON, DC – Friday, October 22, 2010 -The Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) is preparing to carry out a series of large-scale military exercises next week. Up to now, the CSTO has been most noted for its failure to exert any direct military or security influence in Central Asia, but that is changing.

Former Soviet Eurasia, especially Central Asia, is now covered by a web of diplomatic and security alliances. But the CSTO is the only one that actually holds out any promise of bringing real support to fragile or threatened governments in the region.

The new exercises are the first coordinated testing of the CSTO’s long-delayed Collective Rapid Reaction Force. They will be carried out from this Monday to Friday at the Chebarkul training ground in Russia’s Urals region of Chelyabinsk.

Russia won the agreement of the other members of the CSTO in February 2009 to create the new Rapid Reaction Force. Kazakhstan, Tajikistan Armenia and Kyrgyzstan all approved the new Russian-led force. Belarus came later into the agreement.

Only Uzbekistan, which is wary of renewed Russian military and diplomatic power in Central Asia, still holds out among the seven alliance members. Uzbek President Islam Karimov pleaded ill health in August when he did not attend a CSTO informal summit in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, that approved the new Rapid Reaction Force plan.

Up to now, the CSTO has been notable only in its absence from Kyrgyzstan, the Central Asian nation that seems most in need of its support.

Russia and the CSTO stood back and did nothing when President Kurmanbek Bakiev was toppled by a nationwide wave of protests on April 7. And they also did nothing when the country was torn apart by the worst ethnic violence in its independent history against minority Uzbeks in the southern Kyrgyz cities of Osh and Jalalabad in mid-June.

However, General Nikolai Bordyuzha, the Russian prominent security expert who is the secretary-general of the CSTO, signaled Friday that this may be about to change.

BordyuzhaFriday told Susan Elliott, deputy assistant secretary (DAS) of the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs at the US State Department, that the CSTO was already sending support to the Kyrgyz government to maintain security in its borders, the RIA Novosti news agency reported from Moscow.

“The Collective Security Treaty Organization takes all necessary measures to support the Kyrgyz government in ensuring external and internal security, liquidation of consequences of mass disorders that occurred in the republic in June 2010,” Bordyuzha stated according to the report, which was also carried by the 24.kg news agency in Kyrgyzstan.

The Kremlin was happy to see pro-American President Bakiev toppled in Kyrgyzstan. And it was disappointed in the government of current President Roza Otunbayeva that took over the reins on April 8. Otunbayeva, like Bakiev, made clear she wanted the U.S. Air Force to continue operating out of the Manas air base near the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek.

However, the Kyrgyz parliamentary elections on October 10 saw the success of political parties which are both eager to strengthen ties with Russia and opposed to letting the United States continue to use the Manas air base. These parties look certain to play a major role in the country’s next government, which is now in process of being negotiated.

Therefore, Moscow seems to have given the CSTO, under Gen. Bordyuzha’s leadership, the go-ahead to actively support the new political leadership emerging in Kyrgyzstan.

That may also mean that the CSTO at last will actively begin carrying out significant military support and security functions for governments in the region that are friendly to Russia, but are also threatened by internal disorder.

Tajikistan is an obvious candidate for such support along with Kyrgyzstan. Tajikistan is now threatened by a revival of the bloody internal and Islamist-influenced civil war that cost between 50,000 and 100,000 lives between 1992 and 1997.

The rise of the CSTO at least will not lessen the significance of the Russian- and Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), or Shanghai Pact, in the region

The SCO has steered clear of intervening directly in the internal affairs of any of the four Central Asian nations (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) that are members of it.

No other military alliance based in Asia can match the potential military resources of the SCO nations, especially Russia and China.

But although the SCO describes its massive annual joint training operations as anti-terrorist exercises, in reality they are inter-operability maneuvers between the armed forces of Russia and China in case they ever have to work together in any full-scale war or military operation.

But China under President Hu Jintao does not want to get caught up in any expensive and messy peacekeeping operations in Central Asia that might alarm Central Asian governments. They are happy to let the Russians take care of those problems. And the Russians are eager to do so in order to try and reassert their traditional hegemonic role in the region.

That means we should expect the CSTO to be flexing its muscles and exerting its power quite a bit in the years ahead.

Democracy is Paralyzed by a Populace Too Fearful to Act

Weimar in Jerusalem: the rise of fascism in Israel

---

By  Uri Avnery

Uri Avnery warns that fascism will overwhelm Israel unless progressive forces “awake from the coma, understand what is happening and where it is leading to, protest and struggle by all available means … in order to arrest the fascist wave that is threatening to engulf us”.

In Berlin, an exhibition entitled “Hitler and the Germans” has just opened. It examines the factors that caused the German people to bring Adolf Hitler to power and follow him to the very end…

[S]ince childhood, precisely this question has been troubling me. How did it happen that a civilized nation, which saw itself as the “people of poets and thinkers”, followed this man, much as the children of  Hamelin followed the pied piper to their doom.

This troubles me not only as a historical phenomenon, but as a warning for the future. If this happened to the Germans, can it happen to any people? Can it happen here, in Israel?

“This week, a new bill was tabled. It would prohibit non-citizens from acting as tourist guides in East Jerusalem… The bill is intended to deprive Arab Jerusalemites of the right to serve as tourist guides at their holy places in their city, since they are apt to deviate from the official propaganda line.”

As a nine-year old boy I was an eyewitness to the collapse of German democracy and the ascent of the Nazis to power. The pictures are engraved in my memory – the election campaigns following each other, the uniforms in the street, the debates around the table, the teacher who greeted us for the first time with “Heil Hitler”. I resurrected these memories in a book I wrote (in Hebrew) during the Eichmann trial, and which ended with a chapter entitled “Can it happen here?” I am returning to them these days, as I write my memoirs.

Fascism – no longer a taboo

I don’t know if the Berlin exhibition tries to answer these questions. Perhaps not. Even now, 77 years later, there is no final answer to the question: why did the German republic collapse?

This is an all-important question, because now people in Israel are asking, with growing concern: is the Israeli republic collapsing?

For the first time, this question is being asked in all seriousness. Throughout the years, we were careful not to mention the word fascism in public discourse. It raises memories which are too monstrous. Now this taboo has been broken.

Yitzhak Herzog, the minister of welfare in the Netanyahu government, a member of the Labour party, the grandson of a chief rabbi and the son of a president, said a few days ago that “fascism is touching the margins of our society”. He was wrong: fascism is not only touching the margins, it is touching the government in which he is serving, and the Knesset, of which he is a member.

Not a day – quite literally – passes without a group of Knesset members tabling a new racist bill. The country is still divided by the amendment to the law of citizenship, which will compel applicants to swear allegiance to “Israel as a Jewish and democratic state”. Now the ministers are discussing whether this will be demanded only of non-Jews (which doesn’t sound nice) or of Jews, too – as if this would change the racist content one bit.

This week, a new bill was tabled. It would prohibit non-citizens from acting as tourist guides in East Jerusalem. Non-citizens in this case means Arabs. Because, when East Jerusalem was annexed by force to Israel after the 1967 war, its Arab inhabitants were not granted citizenship. They were accorded only the status of “permanent residents”, as if they were recent newcomers and not scions of families that have lived in the city for centuries.

The bill is intended to deprive Arab Jerusalemites of the right to serve as tourist guides at their holy places in their city, since they are apt to deviate from the official propaganda line. Shocking? Incredible? Not in the eyes of the proponents, who include members of the Kadima Party. A Knesset member of the Meretz party also signed, but retracted, claiming that he was confused.

“The Knesset members act like sharks in a feeding frenzy. There is a wild competition between them to see who can devise the most racist bill.”

This proposal comes after dozens of bills of this kind have been tabled recently, and before dozens of others which are already on their way. The Knesset members act like sharks in a feeding frenzy. There is a wild competition between them to see who can devise the most racist bill.

It pays. After each such bill, the initiators are invited to TV studios to “explain” their purpose. Their pictures appear in the papers. For obscure MKs, whose names we have never heard of, that poses an irresistible temptation. The media are collaborating.

Israel’s place in the international club of fascists

This is not a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. All over Europe and America, overt fascists are raising their heads. The purveyors of hate, who until now have been spreading their poison at the margins of the political system, are now arriving at the centre.

In almost every country there are demagogues who build their careers on incitement against the weak and helpless, who advocate the expulsion of “foreigners” and the persecution of minorities. In the past they were easy to dismiss, as was Hitler at the beginning of his career. Now they must be taken seriously.

Only a few years ago, the world was shocked when Jörg Haider’s party was allowed Into the Austrian government coalition. Haider praised Hitler’s achievements. The Israeli government furiously recalled its ambassador to Vienna. Now the new Dutch government is dependent on the support of a declared racist, and fascist parties achieve impressive election gains in many countries. The “Tea Party” movement, which is blooming in the US, has some clearly fascist aspects. One of its candidates likes to go around wearing the uniform of the murderous Nazi Waffen-SS.

So we are in good company. We are no worse than the others. If they can do it, why not us?

But there is a big difference: Israel is not in the same situation as Holland or Sweden…

The German republic carried the name of Weimar, the town where the constituent assembly adopted its constitution after World War I. The Weimar of Bach and Goethe was one of the cradles of German culture.

It was a shiningly democratic constitution. Under its wings, Germany saw an unprecedented intellectual and artistic bloom. So why did the republic collapse?

Generally, two causes are identified: humiliation and unemployment. When the republic was still in its infancy, it was forced to sign the Versailles peace treaty with the victors of World War I, a treaty that was but a humiliating act of surrender. When the republic fell behind with the payment of the huge indemnities levied on it, the French army invaded the industrial heartland of Germany in 1923, precipitating a galloping inflation – a trauma Germany has not recovered from to this day.

When the world economic crisis broke out in 1929, the German economy broke down. Millions of despairing unemployed sank into abject poverty and cried out for salvation. Hitler promised to wipe out both the humiliation of defeat and the unemployment, and fulfilled both promises: he gave work to the unemployed in the new arms industry and in public works, like the new autobahns, in preparation for war.

And there was a third reason for the collapse of the republic: the growing apathy of the democratic public. The political system of the republic just became loathsome. While the people were sinking into misery, the politicians went on playing their games. The public was longing for a strong leader, to impose order. The Nazis did not overthrow the republic. The republic imploded, the Nazis only filled the void.

In Israel there is no economic crisis. On the contrary, the economy is flourishing. Israel did not sign any humiliating agreement, like the Treaty of Versailles. On the contrary, it won all its wars. True, our fascists speak about the “Oslo criminals”, much as Hitler ranted against the “November criminals”, but the Oslo agreement was the opposite of the Versailles treaty, which was signed in November 1919.

If so, what does the profound crisis of Israeli society stem from? What causes millions of citizens to regard with complete apathy the doings of their leaders, contenting themselves with shaking their heads in front of the TV set? What causes them to ignore what’s happening in the occupied territories, half an hour’s drive from their home? Why do so many declare that they do not listen to the news or read newspapers anymore? What is the origin of the depression and despair, which leave open the road to fascism?

“… the genetic code of the Zionist movement is pushing towards the annexation of the whole of the historical country up to the Jordan River, and – directly or indirectly – the transfer of the Arab population.”

The state has arrived at a crossroads: peace or eternal war. Peace means the foundation of a Palestinian state and the evacuation of the settlements. But the genetic code of the Zionist movement is pushing towards the annexation of the whole of the historical country up to the Jordan River, and – directly or indirectly – the transfer of the Arab population. The majority of the people is evading a decision by claiming that “we have no partner for peace” anyhow. We are condemned to eternal war.

Democracy is suffering from a growing paralysis, because the different sectors of the people live in different worlds. The secular, the national-religious and the Orthodox receive totally different educations. Common ground between them is shrinking. Other rifts are gaping between the old Ashkenazi community, the Oriental Jews, the immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, and the Arab citizens, whose separation from the rest is increasing all the time.

For the second time in my life, I may have to witness the collapse of a republic. But that is not predestined. Israel is not the goose-stepping Germany of those days, 2010 is not 1933. The Israeli society can yet sober up in time and mobilize the democratic forces within itself.

But for that to happen, it must awake from the coma, understand what is happening and where it is leading to, protest and struggle by all available means (as long as that is still possible), in order to arrest the fascist wave that is threatening to engulf us.

US seeks wider CIA role to fight militants in Pakistan

Indo-Asian News Service

The US is pushing to expand the presence of its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers in Pakistan in order to help Islamabad target the safe havens of Al Qaeda and other militants more aggressively, a media report said. The push comes as the White House seeks ways to prod Islamabad into more aggressive action against groups allied with the Al Qaeda hiding in safe havens near the Afghan border, The Wall Street Journal said quoting senior government officials.

The US has asked Pakistan to allow additional CIA officers and special military trainers to enter the country as part of efforts to intensify pressure on militants. The requests have so far been rebuffed by Islamabad.

There are currently about 900 US military personnel in Pakistan, 600 of which are providing flood relief and 150 of which are assigned to the training mission.

The push for more forces reflects, in part, the increased need for intelligence to support the CIA’s drone programme that has killed hundreds of militants with missile strikes. The additional officers could help Pakistani forces reach targets drones can’t.

Officials have even said they were going to stop asking for Pakistani help with the US’s most difficult adversary in the region, the North Waziristan-based Haqqani network, because it was unproductive, the report said.

The current efforts to expand CIA presence are meant to expand intelligence collection and facilitate more aggressive Pakistani-led actions on the ground. Some US officials remain hopeful that Islamabad will allow a greater covert presence that could include CIA paramilitary forces.

Given Pakistan’s objections to US ground troops, using more CIA paramilitary forces could be a “viable option”, said a government official. “That gives them a little bit of cover,” the official added, referring to the Pakistanis.

US officials also said a stronger US-Pakistan intelligence partnership would not be a substitute for closer working relationship with the military’s special operation forces.

While the Obama administration has been focused on North Waziristan, officials said there is a need for Pakistani operations in the southern city of Quetta and the surrounding province of Baluchistan.

The Pakistani government has in the past used its control over visas to express displeasure with US policy and limit the number of Americans who can work in the country.

A senior Pakistani official said if the Pakistani public became aware of US military forces conducting combat operations on Pakistani territory, it would wipe out popular support for fighting the militants in the tribal areas. Whether covert CIA forces would cross that line however, remains an open question.

How Many People Realize the Massive Tax Increases That Will Begin January 1?

[It would probably be better for all of us if Republicans Will Repeal Wall Street Rules]

Six Months to Go Until The Largest Tax Hikes in History

From Ryan Ellis

In just six months, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect.  They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2011:

(N.B. This version of the document contains even more tax hikes than the original version did)

First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief

In 2001 and 2003, the GOP Congress enacted several tax cuts for investors, small business owners, and families.  These will all expire on January 1, 2011:

Personal income tax rates will rise. The top income tax rate will rise from 35 to 39.6 percent (this is also the rate at which two-thirds of small business profits are taxed).  The lowest rate will rise from 10 to 15 percent.  All the rates in between will also rise.  Itemized deductions and personal exemptions will again phase out, which has the same mathematical effect as higher marginal tax rates.  The full list of marginal rate hikes is below:

- The 10% bracket rises to an expanded 15%
- The 25% bracket rises to 28%
- The 28% bracket rises to 31%
- The 33% bracket rises to 36%
- The 35% bracket rises to 39.6%

Higher taxes on marriage and family. The “marriage penalty” (narrower tax brackets for married couples) will return from the first dollar of income.  The child tax credit will be cut in half from $1000 to $500 per child.  The standard deduction will no longer be doubled for married couples relative to the single level.  The dependent care and adoption tax credits will be cut.

The return of the Death Tax. This year, there is no death tax.  For those dying on or after January 1 2011, there is a 55 percent top death tax rate on estates over $1 million.  A person leaving behind two homes and a retirement account could easily pass along a death tax bill to their loved ones.

Higher tax rates on savers and investors. The capital gains tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 20 percent in 2011.  The dividends tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 39.6 percent in 2011.  These rates will rise another 3.8 percent in 2013.

Second Wave: Obamacare

There are over twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare.  Several will first go into effect on January 1, 2011.  They include:

The Tanning Tax. This went into effect on July 1st of this year.  It imposes a new, 10% excise tax on getting a tan at a tanning salon.  There is no exemption for tanners making less than $250,000 per year.

The “Medicine Cabinet Tax” Thanks to Obamacare, Americans will no longer be able to use health savings account (HSA), flexible spending account (FSA), or health reimbursement (HRA) pre-tax dollars to purchase non-prescription, over-the-counter medicines (except insulin).

The HSA Withdrawal Tax Hike. This provision of Obamacare increases the additional tax on non-medical early withdrawals from an HSA from 10 to 20 percent, disadvantaging them relative to IRAs and other tax-advantaged accounts, which remain at 10 percent.

Brand Name Drug Tax. Starting next year, there will be a multi-billion dollar tax assessment imposed on name-brand drug manufacturers.  This tax, like all excise taxes, will raise the price of medicine, hurting everyone.
Economic Substance Doctrine. The IRS is now empowered to disallow perfectly-legal tax deductions and maneuvers merely because it judges that the deduction or action lacks “economic substance.”  This is obviously an arbitrary empowerment of IRS agents.

Employer Reporting of Health Insurance Costs on a W-2. This will start for W-2s in the 2011 tax year.  While not a tax increase in itself, it makes it very easy for Congress to tax employer-provided healthcare benefits later.

Third Wave: The Alternative Minimum Tax and Employer Tax Hikes

When Americans prepare to file their tax returns in January of 2011, they’ll be in for a nasty surprise—the AMT won’t be held harmless, and many tax relief provisions will have expired.  These major items include:

The AMT will ensnare over 28 million families, up from 4 million last year. According to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center, Congress’ failure to index the AMT will lead to an explosion of AMT taxpaying families—rising from 4 million last year to 28.5 million.  These families will have to calculate their tax burdens twice, and pay taxes at the higher level.  The AMT was created in 1969 to ensnare a handful of taxpayers.

Small business expensing will be slashed and 50% expensing will disappear. Small businesses can normally expense (rather than slowly-deduct, or “depreciate”) equipment purchases up to $250,000.  This will be cut all the way down to $25,000.  Larger businesses can expense half of their purchases of equipment.  In January of 2011, all of it will have to be “depreciated.”

Taxes will be raised on all types of businesses. There are literally scores of tax hikes on business that will take place.  The biggest is the loss of the “research and experimentation tax credit,” but there are many, many others.  Combining high marginal tax rates with the loss of this tax relief will cost jobs.

Tax Benefits for Education and Teaching Reduced. The deduction for tuition and fees will not be available.  Tax credits for education will be limited.  Teachers will no longer be able to deduct classroom expenses.  Coverdell Education Savings Accounts will be cut.  Employer-provided educational assistance is curtailed.  The student loan interest deduction will be disallowed for hundreds of thousands of families.

Charitable Contributions from IRAs no longer allowed. Under current law, a retired person with an IRA can contribute up to $100,000 per year directly to a charity from their IRA.  This contribution also counts toward an annual “required minimum distribution.”  This ability will no longer be there.

Russia complains U.S. not acting on Afghan drug labs

[Will 0% American cooperation on Russian anti-narcotics plans translate into 0% Russian cooperation on the northern supply network?]

A U.S. soldier walks through an opium field in Afghanistan, which produces most of the world’s opium.

Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Russia is complaining that the United States has not acted on information the top Russian anti-drug official provided about many narcotics laboratories in Afghanistan.

Victor Ivanov, the head of Russia’s federal drug control agency, says he provided U.S. officials in Kabul months ago the coordinates of 175 laboratories where heroin is processed. He says U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officials in Kabul have told him they are awaiting U.S. military approval to take down the labs.

“For some reason they are unable to carry out any operations to destroy these laboratories, because there is a delay from the military side,” Ivanov told The Associated Press through an interpreter Thursday.

Ivanov was in Washington for a meeting of a commission on drugs set up by the U.S. and Russian presidents to improve cooperation.

The U.S. DEA would not comment, saying it does not confirm or deny information shared by other nations.

Russia has long complained that the U.S. and NATO refusal to implement poppy eradication programs in Afghanistan is contributing to a flood of Afghan heroin into Russia. U.S. officials have argued that destruction of poppy fields would drive Afghan farmers into the arms of the Taliban.

Russia claims that drug production in Afghanistan has increased exponentially since the U.S.-led invasion that overthrew the Taliban government in 2001. It says smugglers freely transport Afghan heroin and opium north into Central Asia and Russia, and onward to Western Europe. Afghanistan is the world’s largest supplier of opium.

Ivanov has said that Russia has 2 million opium and heroin addicts.

NATO has urged Moscow to contribute to the war effort in Afghanistan by training more counternarcotics agents and providing helicopters to the Afghan government’s air force.

Ivanov said he also has suggested going after the major landlords in Afghanistan’s poppy growing region by submitting their names to the United Nations for sanctions.

“It wouldn’t be difficult to trace them,” he said.

Ivanov said he discussed the issue with U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke and other officials Thursday, then left frustrated that they provided no evidence that poppy eradication would strengthen the Taliban.

“It sounded not like constructive discussion but a manifestation of stubbornness,” he said. “I cannot say they are not listening. They are listening very carefully and attentively. But unfortunately, there are no results

Putin Visit Raises Speculation About Gas Deal To Merge Gazprom, Naftogaz

KIEV, Ukraine — Experts said Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin isn’t coming to Ukraine for nothing. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is coming to Kyiv, and once again he’s got gas on his mind.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin
Russia’s most powerful man will meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Mykola Azarov, during the seventh session of the Ukrainian-Russian intergovernmental committee on economic cooperation on Oct. 27.

And although the official visit has received hardly any hype, the last time the two men met, during the sixth session of the same committee in Sochi, Russia, last April, Putin shocked financial markets and foreign governments alike by proposing a merger of the countries’ state oil and natural gas companies.

This time, one of the subjects of talks will also be gas – in particular, changes to bilateral gas agreements, Russian Ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Zurabov told journalists.

Shortly after Azarov’s boss, the Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, came to power in February, Kyiv extended the Russian navy’s presence in Ukraine’s autonomous region of Crimea for another 25 years in exchange for a cheaper gas price, which nevertheless continues to climb.

Then Putin began proposing all kinds of far-reaching integration projects such as the unification of the two countries’ nuclear industries, aviation sectors and, most importantly, their state gas companies – Gazprom and Naftogaz Ukraine.

More recently, Azarov has publicly complained that Ukraine needs an even lower gas price from Gazprom, leading to speculation as to what Kyiv would offer Moscow in return next.

Ukraine depends on the Russian state-controlled gas giant Gazprom for the majority of the gas used by its export-oriented industry, some of which directly competes with Russian companies.

Since Putin came to power in Russia, first as president in 2000 and now as premier, the Kremlin has done little to conceal its use of gas and oil exports to control former satellite countries and influence individual governments of the European Union.

Despite fears that Gazprom, which accounted for 17 percent of world gas production in 2008, would swallow up its much smaller Ukrainian counterpart Naftogaz, officials in Kyiv have denied any intention of allowing this to happen.

Instead, most of the statements coming out of Kyiv since Putin’s April proposal have suggested the creation of an “international” consortium to manage and invest in Ukraine’s international pipeline, which delivers about 80 percent of Russian gas exports to Europe.

When asked for more details about Putin’s Oct. 26 visit to Kyiv, Naftogaz spokesperson Olena Yurieva said she could neither confirm nor deny whether any agreements were to be signed.

A top official at Ukraine’s Energy Ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity, said no new gas deal would be announced.

However, more than one Kyiv-based gas analyst told the Kyiv Post that Putin was not coming to Ukraine for nothing.

Volodymyr Omelchenko, a gas analyst at the Kyiv-based think tank Razumkov Center, said there is a 50 percent chance that Putin and Azarov will announce some kind of a deal.

“The most realistic scenario is some kind of a joint venture to control Ukraine’s pipelines,” he said. Some kind of European entity would likely be involved to deflect criticism of a Russian takeover, he added.

But the current authorities in Kyiv are divided in their attitudes toward greater Russian involvement in Ukraine’s gas sector.

“If Azarov had his way, a merger deal would have already been signed,” Omelchenko said. But there are also the industrialists like [billionaire Rinat] Akhmetov and others who don’t want the Kremlin monopolizing pricing, and the gas-sector wing like [businessman Dmytro] Firtash and [Energy Ministry Yuriy] Boyko, who want to maintain control over sales and distribution,” Omelchenko said.

Mykhailo Gonchar, a Ukrainian gas analyst, said more likely is a protocol of some kind being signed: “It wouldn’t have any legal force but it would be one step further than the unilateral declaration made following the last session in April.”

As evidence that something is brewing, Gonchar noted that Gazprom has been on the prowl for a public relations company in Kyiv to promote the impending deal.

“The Ukrainian public still feels negative about the idea of Gazprom controlling its gas pipelines, so the idea is to soften this position through PR,” he said.

Serhiy Pashinsky, an opposition lawmaker who sits on parliament’s fuel and energy committee, said he doesn’t expect anything on Oct. 27 except more hype: “I think what we’re going to see is another witch-doctor dance by Putin intended to dispel all the evil spirits from Ukrainian-Russian relations.”

The West Bank Failure of UN, “the World’s Best Hope”

[The broad failure of international governance in the face of widespread Jewish penetration, for the sake of undermining government decisions in favor of Israel, is most clearly demonstrated in the existence of these "colonies" (settlements) of the Jewish state in the middle of the shrinking Palestinian state.  The very existence of these colonies on Palestinian land is the result of a long-running covert criminal conspiracy by mostly Russian "Jews" (Khazars) to actively steal another people's land, while doing business as usual with the governments of the world.  Our president's farcical "peace offensive," cannot proceed unless these settlers are removed to the other side of the river Jordan, and everyone involved knows that, yet they pretend that the impossible is possible, in order to create the temporary illusion that Obama is a great "peacemaker."  In the end, there will be a massive war to sweep one group of people off the banks of the Jordan River.  Guess which group that will be.]

Israeli presence on Palestinian land ‘irreversible’

By Barbara Plett

BBC

Israel’s refusal to extend a freeze on settlement construction has derailed peace talks

A UN human rights rapporteur has said continued settlement construction will probably make Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land irreversible.

Richard Falk said the peace process aimed at creating an independent, sovereign Palestinian state therefore appeared to be based on an illusion.

He said the UN, the US and Israel had failed to uphold Palestinians’ rights.

Israeli officials said Mr Falk’s report on the Palestinian territories was biased and served a political agenda.

Nearly half a million Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They are held to be illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

‘De-facto annexation’

In a report for the UN General Assembly, Mr Falk said Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem had become so extensive it amounted to de-facto annexation of Palestinian land.

He said this undercut assumptions behind UN Security Council resolutions which said Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory in 1967 was temporary and reversible.

Such assumptions are the basis for the current peace process aimed at creating an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

This now appears to be an illusion, said Mr Falk.

Israel said the report was utterly biased and served a political agenda, criticising its author for making no mention of what it called Palestinian terrorist attacks.

Mr Falk told journalists that his mandate was to report on the Israeli occupation, not on the rights and wrongs of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He said he based his conclusion not only on the deepening expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but on the eviction of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, and the demolition of their homes.

Israel’s refusal to extend a partial 10-month freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank has derailed peace negotiations sponsored by the United States. Washington wants them resumed.

But Mr Falk said both governments and the United Nations had failed to uphold Palestinian rights.

He urged the UN to support civil society initiatives, such as campaigns to sanction or boycott Israel for alleged violations of international law.

Shaitan Offering Bait to 125 Pakistani Journalists

[The US Office of Public Diplomacy has always served as a front group for the American ultra-right.  I would hope that Pakistanis were intelligent enough not to fall for this CIA penetration operation, but judging by the number of similar Pakistani journalists that have already been groomed by the US, I know that this is a golden fish hook which ordinary human beings have little chance to resist.]

US to offer 125 scholarships to Pakistani journalists in 2011

WASHINGTON: The US has agreed to offer 125 scholarships to Pakistani journalists during 2011 as part of public diplomacy and capacity building cooperation, Federal Information and Broadcasting Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira said after leading discussions with senior American officials on public diplomacy. The scholarships will be extended to journalists both in the private and public sectors, officials said as Pakistan and the US began their three-day Strategic Dialogue. Besides, the US will also offer training to 80 public administrators to help build capacity of Pakistani officers. The training will be offered to information officers from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority and media-affiliated public organisations, officials said. Kaira was assisted in the discussions by Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani and Federal Information Secretary Mansur Sohail. Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Judith Michael led the US side. Kaira told journalists, the two sides also discussed the project of national data centre for e-governance to facilitate public access to information.

Soviet Era Toxic Time-Bombs Ticking In Ukraine

KIEV, Ukraine — The devastation left by the toxic sluge spill in neighboring Hungary is a stark reminder that Ukraine is home to dozens of potentially larger ecological disasters.

Built hastily in 1986 to prevent further escape of radioactivity into the environment and to protect personnel working on the site, the Chornobyl shelter isn’t considered a permanent solution to containing 200 tons of nuclear fuel. Already there are defects in the structure and the possibility of collapse cannot be excluded, a 2006 International Atomic Energy Agency report states. Recently, an American concern was commissioned to finish building a new containment unit whose construction was first started by a French concern in 2003.
The toxic sludge that has killed nine and injured 120 in Hungary and left large-scale environmental damage in its wake has reached the Danube River delta in Ukraine’s Odesa Oblast.

The good news for Ukraine is that Hungary appears to have contained the harm of the orange-red alkaline spill before it reached far down the waterway.

But the devastation left by the industrial pollution comes as a stark warning that Ukraine is home to dozens of potentially larger ecological disasters, many of which have not been properly addressed.

“A hazardous situation could erupt in just about any oblast,” said Dmytro Skrylnikov of the Bureau of Environmental Investigation, a Lviv-based nongovernmental organization.

The Hungarian disaster erupted on Oct. 4 when 757 million liters of sludge burst through a crack in the wall of a 10-hectare storage reservoir at an aluminum plant 160 kilometers southwest of Hungary’s capital of Budapest.

This is the same amount of crude oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the British Petroleum crisis that lasted four months until it was capped on July 15.

The caustic mass – an aluminum production by-product – in Hungary has coated 50 square kilometers in red slurry wiping out fish, microorganisms and wildlife along its path, and also destroying 300 homes and properties.

Crop production for human consumption will not be seen for quite a while.

The spill, described by officials as a man-made accident triggered by negligence, is now considered Hungary’s worst-ever environmental disaster.

But experts say the challenges facing Hungary with this accident are miniscule compared to the scale, risks and aftermath Ukraine would face in dozens of potential environmental tragedies.

Toxic dumping ground

The accident is a wake-up call about the region’s legacy of crumbling Soviet-era heavy industry. In Ukraine’s case, it’s also a reminder about the nation having been the toxic dumping ground of the Soviet Union.

Though Ukraine’s surface area made up 3 percent of the total area of the former Soviet Union, it possessed 25 percent of its industrial potential and, therefore, a quarter of its industrial pollution, according to the Environment and Security Initiative, a joint effort of international organizations.

Under the Soviet system, the economy of Ukraine used 1.3-1.5 billion tons of raw materials every year.

Most of which returned into the environment as waste. By 1991, 17 billion tons of waste had accumulated in Ukraine on a surface area of 53,000 hectares, according to the Environment and Security Initiative.

A study conducted by the World Health Organization released in 2007 rated Ukraine 47 out of 53 European countries in the number of deaths caused by environmental factors – 155,000 deaths per year.

Ukraine placed ahead of Belarus and Russia in the study, the latter having placed last.

According to the environmental protection ministry, more than 2.6 billion tons of hazardous waste was present in Ukraine in 2009. Approximately 35 billion tons of accumulated waste occupies 165,000 hectares of land.

The majority of hazardous waste is located in three oblasts: Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhya all of which have behemoth, Soviet-era heavy industrial plants and factories.

As of Jan. 1, there was approximately 20,500 tons of pesticides requiring disposal. The environmental ministry said this was an approximate figure since there could be other unknown pesticide storage sites.

By comparison, Hungary generated a little over 1 million tons of hazardous waste in 2007, whereas Ukraine generated more than 2.5 million tons of hazardous waste.

Skrylnikov from the Bureau of Environmental Investigation warned that significant dangers exist across the country.

“This is because proper control isn’t exercised over the outer parts of reservoirs and equipment, negligence in assessing the impact of new sites as well as corruption when issuing permits, during privatization or bankruptcy proceedings of enterprises. The new owners use any means to acquire valuable sites and land while leaving local governments with sites containing industrial waste,” he added.

The risk is considered high enough for First Deputy Prime Minister Andriy Klyuyev to sign an order on Oct. 8 that formed a government commission charged with inspecting potential environmental hot spots in Ukraine to prevent a catastrophe.

Local hot spots

Ukraine’s environmental ministry and the Bureau of Environmental Investigation have named two plants whose industrial waste ponds, if breached, could cause a disaster similar to the one in Hungary: Mykolayiv Alumina Plant and Zaporizhya Aluminum Plant.

They have a combined 25 million cubic meters of waste in storage.

The environment ministry confirmed that it has started inspecting industrial, hazardous and toxic waste storage sites across the nation.

In 2008, a pipeline that pumped waste byproduct sludge burst at the Zaporizhya plant and ended up flooding four streets. The cause of the pipeline burst was human error.

A giant potassium salt mine in Kalush, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast is also a disaster waiting to happen, environmentalists warn. More than 40 years ago a factory was built there to mine the deposits of potassium salt and produce fertilizers.

The factory has three mines, a mine pit, two industrial waste dams and a mining waste dump, all of which negatively impacts the environment and which are hazardous facilities.

The industrial waste dams are close to overflowing, which could wreak havoc on the regional waterways – one of them has cracks already.

“The water contains practically every element in the periodic table, including radioactive heavy metals,” said Skrylnikov.

Former President Viktor Yushchenko designated the site an environmental disaster zone in February. Recently, the Ukrainian government has started removing toxic waste from the dump, Europe’s largest site of hexachlorobenzene, a hazardous chemical. It plans to remove 8,500 tons of it by the end of 2010. Altogether there’s 11,400 tons of it underground.

The total cost to prevent an environmental catastrophe in this area alone, is estimated at Hr 3.5 billion, or more than $400 million.

The carcinogens located underground had eroded the steel barrels in which they were stored and have been seeping into the ground water. They’ve been “underground” for 30 years.

The waste is being taken to an Odesa port where it is treated and then shipped to the United Kingdom for further utilization.

Acidic sludge has been seeping into local water reservoirs just 10 kilometers outside of Lviv city from a lubricant factory for 30 years, the environmental ministry said.

The ministry said it needs to immediately assess the environmental situation at the bankrupt factory to avert an environmental catastrophe. Local villagers in the area have been suffering from polluted water wells and air.

Prydniprovsky Chemical Plant in Dniprodzerzhynsk on the Dnipro River also doesn’t meet environmental safety standards, according to environmentalists.

Processing enriched uranium from 1949 to 1991, the plant has accumulated seven tailing ponds containing industrial and radioactive waste in an area of 2.43 million square meters, 250,000 square meters of which has uranium waste.

All seven of the tailing ponds are considered to be in unsatisfactory condition.

But the largest tailing pond along Ukraine’s section of the Dnipro Basin is a 73-hectare pond containing 12 million cubic meters of non-radioactive and radioactive waste, which is located just one kilometer from the right bank of the Dnipro Reservoir.

The dam lacks proper filters, security and safety checks, among other bare necessities.

Another site requiring immediate clean-up action is the Stebnytsky Potassium Plant in Lviv Oblast. Mining has halted, but it still remains one of Ukraine’s largest deposits of potassium salts.

The plant isn’t in operation because of an environmental disaster in 1983 when a dam burst at the reservoir. As a result, more than 5 million cubic meters of salt solution entered the Dnister River, Ukraine’s second largest.

The Chornobyl zone still poses a threat and contains several potential radiological hot spots, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Not officially closed until 2000, Chornobyl still leaks to this day.

Construction of a confinement shelter over the ruins of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant’s containment unit finally re-started this year, after 25 years.

The current shelter isn’t seen as a permanent solution but for years Ukraine and international donors mulled an implementation plan.

Enough money was finally raised and an American company was given the go-ahead to build a 108-meter tall sliding arch structure, which will take five years to build and which is expected to last for 100 years and cost $1.4 billion.

Until the structure is built, it is at risk of leaking radioactive fuel. Five million people, including the residents of Ukraine’s capital and largest city, Kyiv, live nearby. If a big leak breaks out, the entire region could be contaminated.

Source: Kyiv Post