New Trump Towers To Be Built In Tbilisi, Georgia

Trump to build luxury apartments on Georgian Black Sea coast

This is how Trump Tower Batumi with adjacent marina is expected to look like according to the project’s master plan by New York-based architecture firm John Fotiadis Architect.–Civil Georgia,

By Khatia Psuturi, AP

U.S. business magnate Donald Trump, accompanied by Tbilisi mayor Gigi Ugulava, left, tours a medieval fortress in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Saturday.

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — U.S. real estate mogul Donald Trump has joined Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in unveiling plans to build a luxury apartment complex along the Black Sea coast.

The 47-story Trump Tower in Batumi is to be built by the Silk Road Group under a licensing agreement signed inNew York last year.

Saakashvili said during Sunday’s presentation in Batumi that the Georgian conglomerate expects to have the necessary funding by the end of this year, with construction slated to start in early 2013.

In welcoming Trump, Economy Minister Vera Kobalia said the project would encourage more foreign investment.

Saakashvili oversaw steady economic growth after becoming president in 2004, but the economy was hit in recent years by the global downturn and repercussions from the 2008 war with Russia.

The Unforgettable Image of Steel Girders Turning Into Dust

Imperialism writes a new political geography

by  Jayatilleke de Silva

nation.lk

Imperialism, Lenin said, is moribund capitalism. Nevertheless it retains its ruthless character. Outlining the principal characteristics of imperialism he spoke of the political and economic re-division of the World among various imperialist powers.

The aftermath of the Second World War saw the birth of two new phenomena. One was the expansion of the socialist system into all continents. The second was the victory of national liberation revolutions in almost all the colonies.
A new political geography was born. Imperialism never agreed with it and worked day and night without a respite to change it. By the middle of the 1990’s, it had accomplished one objective. That was rolling Communism back. The system of socialist states collapsed with the demise of the Soviet Union and European socialist states. This was not through war but by other means. It is not our intention here to debate whether it was due to imperialist manipulations and subversion or an implosion caused by mistakes of the rulers or both.

The attainment of the second objective was also very important for imperialism. It was the change of regimes in newly independent countries to carry on their earlier exploitation by new means. In other words, imperialism wanted to guarantee unfettered neo-colonial exploitation of the former colonies. If this was not possible due to rulers’ anti-imperialist positions, then regime change was considered as a legitimate exercise disregarding international norms of conduct. No means were spared, including covert and overt war.

Looking back a little over a decade, we see that the Middle East has been the area, which has earned the attention of imperialism to achieve this change. No wonder, since it contains the bulk of the world’s oil resources. Beginning with Iraq, regime change has been accomplished in several countries in the region by war. All these wars have been conducted either through the aegis of the United Nations or through coalitions of the willing comprising the United States and its NATO and other allies.
In this they have ignored the United Nations and International Law and resorted more and more to what is termed as R2P or Right to Protect, a policy, which authorizes external intervention in other countries under the pretext of safeguarding human rights. Thus Iraq was invaded to prevent it using ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ though no such weapons were found despite massive bombings and search operations. In Libya too it was the same pretext. The same methodology is being in operation in Syria and Iran.

War is not the only means used. Actually it is the finale in a series of operations beginning with disinformation, covert operations including the use of special forces deep inside the targeted countries and the use of fifth columns.
While President George W. Bush openly declared his intention of confronting by force some several dozen nations who were considered hostile, President Barack Obama promised a different approach of using American soft power to re-write international relations and earn the goodwill of the World to the United States. However, he has used both soft power and hard power to attain the same objectives.

It is also important to see that under President Obama, the United States have been using its NATO allies and friendly regimes in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members in its programme of regime change in selected countries.
For the same purposes it has also used all available means to contain the Arab Spring or the movement of mass uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. The United States have carried out a differentiated approach in the countries affected by the Arab Spring. While it went to open war in Iraq and did the same in Libya in a slightly different manner, it used the GCC in Bahrain and Yemen.

It is also important to understand the role played by the media in these operations. Media was an effective weapon in building up support for utilizing the R2P policy. The media monopoly in the service of imperialism was used shamelessly to spread absolute falsehoods. For example it said that Government forces in Libya bombed civilians but could not substantiate the charge despite visuals shown in TV. The same disinformation campaign is carried out now in Syria. Often bombings by Opposition forces are unreported or blamed on the Governments. Once the media spreads the lie, it is easy to legitimize aggression or intervention.

The principle of State sovereignty is undermined, and international law trampled under the heavy boots of imperialism. The result is a new political geography, one written again by imperialism. So far it is only North Africa and the Middle East. Other regions will also be not spared in future.

Western allies of MI6 ‘kept in dark’ over mosque sting plan

[Here, in a nutshell, we have an offhand explanation of the “al-Qaeda” phenomenon, as an idea that is hatched within the twisted minds of intelligence agencies and eventually matured into actual “Islamist” terrorists.  We have previously tried to explain the term “al-Qaeda” at various times, as a “database,” a terrorist cell of several thousand “Afghan Arabs,” or even as a non-entity, used as cover for covert spy actions.  The following admissions about previously disguised spy agency actions and interactions with known terrorists, reveal that the “Qaeda” has always been a work in progress.  If you speak about Qaeda, you must first be speaking to individuals who have a minimum idea about what Qaeda is, or they will not understand the connections between “good guys” and “bad guys.”   There could be no terrorist bad guys without some good guys standing behind them, handing them the explosives and the guns.

Behind every facade you will find that Qaeda is a contract, a meeting of minds between terrorists and their state sponsors and the paying of some sort of commission to ensure the fulfillment of that contract to commit terror against the “other side.”  Before the meeting of minds can take place, there must first be some sort of recruitment process, to locate extremists of the proper mindset.  That is exactly the process which is explained in the following article.  In this case, MI6 set-up a mosque to attract N. African extremists, where they connected with Libyan intelligence and N. African extremists who were recruited into “al-Q in Iraq,” from which they were later recruited to carry-out part of the “Qaeda” operation against Libya (who knows whether those called Qaeda in Libya were actually radical recruits or intelligence agents).  This information comes from documents recovered from Libyan govt. files, which related the recruitment facts quoted in the London Telegraph report.  The so-called “al-Qaeda” suspects described in the report never worked for bin Laden.   The military training and equipment which they received came from state sponsors.  

The US, Britain and all allied intelligence agencies create Qaeda in order to have someone to wage war against.]  

MI6 and Col Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan intelligence service set up a radical mosque in a Western European city in order to lure in al-Qaeda terrorists, it can be revealed.

Britain was encouraging Col Gaddafi to give up plans for weapons of mass destruction Photo: ALAMY

By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor

The joint operation, which was undertaken as Britain attempted to secure a deal with Col Gaddafi to reopen diplomatic relations, shows how closely Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service was prepared to work with his regime’s spies despite widespread allegations of human rights abuses.

At the time, Britain was encouraging Col Gaddafi to give up plans for weapons of mass destruction. Four months later, the dictator and Tony Blair, then prime minister, struck the 2004 “deal in the desert” which ended Libya’s pariah status.

The cooperation extended to recruiting an agent to infiltrate an al-Qaeda terrorist cell in the Western European city, which cannot be named for security reasons.

The double agent, codenamed Joseph, was closely connected to a senior al-Qaeda commander in Iraq and had been identified as a possible spy by the ESO, Libya’s external intelligence service, on a visit to Tripoli.

MI6 began recruiting the agent without telling its allies in the European country where he lived.

The agency agreed a narrative with the agent and the ESO to fool their allies about when and how the agent had been recruited and the operation launched.

Documents seen by The Sunday Telegraph, which were sent from MI6 headquarters in London to Moussa Koussa, the Libyan intelligence chief, give a detailed outline of this subterfuge, the agent’s recruitment and plans for the operation. The papers were left behind in Tripoli as Col Gaddafi’s regime crumbled.

The plan raises questions about the SIS, MI6’s close links with the Libyan regime and whether it was acting on government orders.

Last week it was disclosed that Jack Straw, the then foreign secretary, is facing legal action over claims he signed off the rendition to Tripoli in March 2004 of an alleged Libyan terrorist leader accused of links to Osama bin Laden, claims that had been previously denied in Parliament.

But now it can be disclosed that secret anti-terrorist operations in Europe involving MI6 and Libyan intelligence began four months earlier with a series of meetings in the UK.

In December 2003, “Joseph” and a Libyan intelligence officer were flown to meetings at British hotels to discuss setting up a mosque to attract North African Islamic extremists.

They hoped to gain “information on terrorist planning”. MI6 paid for one Libyan intelligence officer, who had previously worked under diplomatic cover in the UK, to stay in a five-star central London hotel and smoothed his passage through immigration at Heathrow to “avoid the problems he experienced on his previous visit”.

A secret memo sent to Libyan intelligence in Tripoli details an early meeting with the apparently reluctant new agent in a city in the north of England.

“Our meeting in the UK on this occasion was to explore further with ‘Joseph’ just what he might be prepared to do,” it said.

Headed “Greetings from MI6 London” it says: “ ’Joseph’ was nervous. He had had a paranoid walk to the hotel across [UK city] with too much eye contact from passers-by that had unduly unnerved him.

“We reassured him by going over the cover story we had discussed when we met in Tripoli. We would not be seen together in public but, in the unlikely event that anyone saw us in the hotel, I would simply be his business contact. Furthermore, there was no link between the hotel booking and MI6.

“ ’Joseph’ agreed to work with SIS but still required reassurance. A second meeting took place a few days later when MI6 and Libyan officers met ‘Joseph’ at one five-star hotel and then travelled in separate taxis to” a second hotel to ensure they were not being watched.

The memo adds: “We told ‘Joseph’ that under no circumstances was he to tell the [European intelligence service of country where he lived and was planning to operate] of his involvement with us and the Libyans. We would do this when we were ready.”

The agent had, the note says, already been approached by this Western intelligence service but he was told to “stall his meeting” with them.

A strategy was agreed to keep the other Western intelligence service in the dark about the full extent of their contact with the agent.

It added that MI6’s allies would later be told the agent had been recruited “as a result of our ongoing counter terrorism relationship with ESO, [and we] sought to capitalise on the relationship struck up with ‘Joseph’.”

The operation was run behind the backs of Western allies in the chosen city. Critics are likely to question whether it could have backfired, with a terrorist cell launching an attack using the mosque as a base.

The disclosures come in the wake of the accusation that Mr Straw gave the green light to the plan to seize Abdelhakim Belhadj, one of the military commanders who helped to overthrow Gaddafi’s regime last year, and his pregnant wife and put them on a CIA flight.

Secret documents outlining the rendition plan, published by The Sunday Telegraph last February, showed how MI6 tipped off Libya that Mr Belhadj was being held by immigration officials in Malaysia and that the secret CIA flight was scheduled to refuel at an airbase on Diego Garcia, a British sovereign territory in the Indian Ocean.

Once Mr Belhadj was in custody in Libya, Sir Mark Allen, MI6’s then counter terrorism chief, sent a letter to Mr Koussa, saying: “This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built.”

The evidence contradicted government statements denying British involvements in renditions. Last week Mr Belhadj’s lawyers said they had issued legal proceedings against Colin Roberts, the Foreign Office official responsible for Diego Garcia.

U.S. and Afghanistan Reach Partnership Agreement

By ALISSA J. RUBIN  

KABUL, Afghanistan   — After months of negotiations, the United States and Afghanistan on Sunday finalized drafts of the strategic partnership agreement that pledges American support for Afghanistan for 10 years after the withdrawal of troops at the end of 2014.

The United States Ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, and Afghanistan’s national security adviser, Rangin Spanta, agreed on the wording of the draft, which will now be sent to President Hamid Karzai and to the Afghan Parliament for review and approval before it is signed by the presidents of the both countries, according to American and Afghan officials.

“We believe we have a final text which will be  presented to the president and also presented to Parliament for final consultation and approval before the signature by the two presidents,” said an Afghan official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official did not have permission to speak to the media.

“It covers the broad spectrum of the existing, broad-based, comprehensive partnership between the two countries with the view towards sustaining that for at least another decade beyond the end of transition in 2014,” the official said.

The document outlines the two countries future relationship rather than specifying exact amounts of support or programs, but officials from both countries have said they hope that it will send a signal to insurgents and other destabilizing forces here that the United States is not going to abandon Afghanistan as it did in the 1990s after the Soviets were driven out.  Rather American will continue to support the country in many areas.

Negotiations on the document started more than nine months ago but were delayed repeatedly over the sensitive issues of night raids by American troops and the American operation of detention facilities.

Ultimately negotiators agreed to craft detailed separate agreements on those two issues and signed a memorandum of understanding on the transfer of detention operations to the Afghan government in March and in April signed a companion memorandum handing final authority on night raids to Afghan security forces, who are now carrying out all raids unless American assistance is requested.

With those two issues completed, finalizing the strategic partnership moved quickly.  The document promises American economic development support for Afghanistan, help in fields like agriculture and education as well as security.  It does not include any specific commitment of foreign aid because that amount must be authorized and appropriated by the Congress and can not be committed by the executive branch.

However, the United States is already anticipating that it will make a substantial contribution toward paying for Afghanistan’s security forces beyond 2014 and is searching for contributions from its NATO partners. The amount is not settled but a figure of $2.7 billion a year has been under discussion.  There would be additional foreign aid for civilian fields.

At some point, a security agreement will detail if and under what circumstances American troops will be positioned in the country in the post-2014 period, according to senior American officials.

Anxious to keep lid on Iraq, Obama woos Kurds

 By Alister Bull

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama, facing a damaging election-year problem if Iraq’s political crisis worsens, has launched an urgent behind-the-scenes push to ease tensions between the Baghdad central government and the Kurds.

Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurds’ semi-autonomous regional government, paid a quiet visit to the White House on April 4 and left with backing for two long-standing requests that could help build the worried Kurds’ confidence in U.S. support.

Barzani’s heated criticism last month of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has fanned concern the country could splinter, potentially setting off a fresh civil war.

Reuters has learned that to demonstrate U.S. support, the White House and Congress agreed to lift a designation that treats Kurdistan’s two main political parties as if they were terrorist groups, complicating members’ travel to the United States. In addition, the U.S. consulate in Arbil will begin issuing U.S. visas before the end of 2012.

Since withdrawing the last U.S. troops in December, Obama has, at least publicly, put little focus on Iraq, and critics view the latest gestures as not much more than damage control.

But Obama still has a lot at stake in Iraq. If violence explodes, it could tarnish Obama’s bragging rights with U.S. voters for concluding the unpopular war.

And worsening relations between the Shi’ite-led central government and semi-autonomous Kurdistan could thwart White House efforts to lower gasoline prices. The Kurds halted oil exports to Baghdad on April 1, citing a payment dispute.

CIVIL WAR

Barzani last month delivered a sharp denunciation of Maliki’s government and suggested he could seek a referendum of some kind on the Kurdish region’s relations with Baghdad – although he stopped far short of breaking a taboo by making explicit reference to independence.

Analysts say the probability of the Kurds declaring independence is low, although not zero.

“If Kurds were to declare independence in the near term there is a very high likelihood that that would provoke a war with Baghdad,” said Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst.

The White House promises to the Kurdish president “constitute useful takeaways for Barzani but they are probably about the absolute minimum that he would have found acceptable,” said Pollack, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

The goal of the Washington meetings in early April, both the White House and the Kurds said, was to re-commit to a relationship that both value. Obama dropped in on one of the meetings Vice President Joe Biden hosted for Barzani that day.

Biden assured Barzani of U.S. backing for the Kurds, but he also cautioned that Washington could not pick sides between Kurdistan and Baghdad, a senior administration official said.

“Neither relationship can come at the expense of the other relationship,” the official said. “A red line for us is that all this must be done in a way that is consistent with the (Iraqi) constitution.”

ENERGY SECURITY

Iraq boasts some of the world’s largest oil reserves and could provide essential extra production capacity to help stabilize world oil markets, at a moment when gasoline prices are one of the most pressing issues for U.S. voters.

And while foreign policy hasn’t yet been a major factor in the U.S. presidential campaign, both parties are likely to sharpen their focus on it ahead of the one-year anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s killing by U.S. commandos on May 2.

Qubad Talabani, son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and the representative for the Kurdistan Regional Government in Washington, said the Kurdish delegation was happy with Biden’s words of support to Barzani.

“The reaffirmation of the commitment to Kurdistan and the Kurdish people went down very well,” he said.

“For us, we’re naturally an insecure people, and given the history that we’ve had, we’re expecting at some point or another to be let down again,” he said.

The Kurds, severely persecuted under late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, have become increasingly nervous since U.S. troops left.

Indeed, the troop departure was followed almost immediately by a political crisis sparked by Maliki’s demand for the arrest of a Sunni Muslim vice president, who fled to Kurdistan, where Barzani defied the prime minister by granting him shelter.

SEE NO EVIL

Critics of Obama’s Iraq policy complain that the White House is primarily concerned on keeping a lid on events until after the November 6 U.S. election.

“I think the administration is of the mind-set of ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ and it wants Iraq to be invisible for the political debate in the United States,” said Ned Parker, a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

To encourage the Kurds to remain within Iraq’s political process, the administration is bowing to their long-standing plea to amend the status of the main political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). Under the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, members of the groups are deemed to be engaged in terrorist activity.

This is not as severe as being designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. But it means that members of these organizations must get a government exemption to visit or stay in the United States.

An aide to Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said Lieberman was working on legislation to remove the designation.

In addition, the U.S. decision to begin issuing visas from its consulate in Arbil from the end of 2012 will save Kurds who want to visit the United States the expense and hazard of journeying to Baghdad to get a visa or traveling to a U.S. consulate outside of Iraq.

State Department spokesman Michael Lavallee confirmed this move, which had been long sought by the Kurds, but stressed in a statement that it was part of a broader effort to “work with the government of Iraq to continue to normalize our consular services throughout the country.”

OIL SAFETY VALVE

U.S. officials also offered to help the Kurds in talks with Baghdad to resolve the oil payments dispute and get the exports flowing once again, the Kurds said.

The amounts involved are modest – around 50,000 barrels per day from Kurdistan compared with Iraq’s national output of some 2.6 million barrels, according to published 2011 estimates by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

But the dispute highlights the country’s ongoing failure to agree to a national oil law, potentially dampening the willingness of big foreign oil firms to make the investments necessary to exploit these resources.

The Kurds currently have no independent export route for their oil outside of the central government.

“They have a lot of potential,” said Ben Lando of the Iraq Oil Report. “There are substantial oil and gas reserves but there has not been a qualified number put on that and in many places exploration is still ongoing.”

(Editing By Warren Strobel and Eric Beech)

© Copyright 2012, Reuters

How Afghanistan Is Bringing Out Our Worst Side

By Dusty Rhoades

The Pilot

You know, I’ve never been to Afghanistan. I’ve never been in a firefight anywhere, although I have had a gun pointed at me, which is as close as I care to come, thank you very much.

But from some of the reporting coming out of there – such as Sebastian Junger’s harrowing book “War” and the accompanying documentary “Restrepo” – Afghanistan is to stress, fear and paranoia what Mount Everest is to rock formations. And it seems like we can’t go a month now without hearing about some of our soldiers (almost all of whom have been through multiple deployments) who have completely lost it under the stress.

From the Marine snipers photographed urinating on enemy corpses to the soldier who walked out of camp one night and started slaughtering civilians to the recently released photos of American troops posing with body parts and corpses, it’s just one image after another that makes you wonder if maybe we’ve finally stressed our military past its breaking point.

Now, desecrating the bodies of fallen enemies is not a new phenomenon by any means. In “The Iliad,” Homer describes how Achilles, maddened with grief by the death of his best friend, Patroclus, killed Hector, the Trojan crown prince responsible, then desecrated Hector’s body by dragging it behind his chariot for nine days during Patroclus’ funeral feast.

In the 15th century, the Wallachian prince known as Vlad the Impaler (later the inspiration for the blood-drinking Count Dracula) became well known for desecrating the bodies of vanquished enemies, mainly by sticking the bodies (and more than a few live prisoners) onto pointed stakes and leaving them for the invading Turks to find.

In the harrowing World War II memoir “With the Old Breed,” Marine John Sledge describes the mutilation of American corpses by the Japanese on the islands of Peleliu and Okinawa – and the corresponding looting (particularly of gold teeth) and taking of other “trophies” from dead Japanese by our own people. And so on.

What does seem to be new is the idea, particularly among the right, that this is either (a) no big deal or (b) actually a good thing.

Homer describes how Achilles repented from his act and returned Hector’s body after being confronted by Hector’s weeping father, King Priam, not to mention getting a stern warning from Zeus himself that he was “tempting the wrath of heaven” by his act of disrespect to a dead enemy.

Sledge describes how he was dissuaded from the act of stealing the gold teeth from a dead Japanese soldier by his friend, corpsman “Doc” Caswell, who admonishes him, “You don’t want to do that. What would your folks think?” And Vlad … well, as noted above, his major claim to fame is as the inspiration for one of literature’s greatest monsters.

In contrast, when those pictures surfaced of Marine snipers urinating on dead Taliban fighters, conservative radio host Dana Loesch turned gushing fangirl: “I’d drop trou and do it too. That’s me, though. I want a million cool points for these guys.” Anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller tweeted, “I don’t CAIR that these Marines wee wee’ed on murderous savages” (CAIR being the acronym for one of Geller’s favorite bogeymen, the Council on American Islamic Relations).

Fox commentator Ralph Peters went on the air nearly apoplectic with rage about how the recent photos of soldiers with dead and dismembered enemies were being used by people – including, according to Peters, their own commanders – to “trash our troops.”

I look at those images of young Americans, truly our best and brightest, behaving this way, and my heart breaks for them. I don’t know if they’ll ever make it back to sanity from that. I don’t know if any person could.

Then I think of the passage from Sledge’s book where he talks about Doc Caswell, the man who dissuaded him from desecrating enemy bodies: “He was a good friend and a fine, genuine person whose sensitivity hadn’t been crushed out by the war. He was merely trying to help me retain some of mine and not become completely callous and harsh.”

I compare that with the “callous and harsh” and downright barbaric statements from some of the Chairborne Rangers of 24-hour news TV and I wonder if we, as a country, will ever make it back from the abyss they’re pushing us toward.

Dusty Rhoades lives, writes and practices law in Carthage. Contact him at dustyr@nc.rr.com

Brinkley: Afghan war success ‘political fiction’

Joel Brinkley

San Francisco Chronicle

Sabawoon Amarkhil / AFP/Getty Images

A U.S. soldier (left) and an Afghan policeman patrol a building Monday that Taliban fighters, some disguised in burqas, used to launch an attack.

American support for the Afghan war has collapsed. Several new surveys show that even most Republicans, from the party that is home to the nation’s hawks, now oppose the 10-year-old conflict. And it’s no wonder. The U.S. military has been deceiving the nation for years.

Listen to Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, who spent the past year working in Afghanistan.

“I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops” across the nation, he wrote in the Armed Forces Journal last month. “What I saw bore no resemblance to the rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.” Instead, he added, “I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.”

Not surprisingly, his is a dissenting voice in the U.S. military. But the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, representing hundreds of nongovernmental organizations working there, offered similar observations in its most recent status report. The number of violent incidents they counted from their stations in almost every province was 14 percent higher last year than in 2010, while the official military count showed a 3 percent decline.

“We find their suggestion that the insurgency is waning to be dangerous political fiction,” the report said.

In fact, attacks on the NGOs themselves increased by 20 percent. Compare that to the saccharine quote a Pentagon spokesman offered just after 40 people died in protests over the accidental burning of those Qurans on a U.S. base in late February.

Senior officers “believe we have achieved significant progress in reversing the Taliban’s momentum and in developing the Afghan security forces,” he said. A few weeks later, a NATO-trained Afghan soldier shot and killed two British troops, and on the same day a police officer killed a NATO soldier. That brought the total number of Western forces that Afghan soldiers have killed – green on blue killings, as they’re now called – to 80.

As a result, the Afghan National Security Directorate is sending intelligence officers to infiltrate its own military and spy on the soldiers to ensure they are not Taliban traitors intent on killing Western allies. The army also ordered all of its several thousand soldiers whose homes and families are in Pakistan to move to Afghanistan or leave the force – understandably afraid they are likely traitors.

But then there’s a question about how competent those efforts will be.

“There is a systematic level of incompetence inside the Ministry of Defense that has gone on for so long that it has become a culture,” Andrew Mackay, a British major general, told the Sunday Telegraph. He, too, just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan.

For example, the ministry hasn’t been able – or willing – to stop Afghan Air Force pilots, flying aircraft paid for by the United States, from using them for drug-trafficking flights. And no one has explained why nearly a dozen fully armed suicide vests were found inside the ministry building late last month.

All of this and more has led 66 percent of Americans to decide that the war is no longer worth fighting, a new Washington Post-ABC News survey found. Late last month, a New York Times-CBS News poll came to a similar conclusion: 69 percent said they believed the United States should end the war. Other surveys, by Gallup, the Pew Research Center and others, offered consistent findings.

That leaves Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney facing a quandary, particularly because most people in his own party now oppose the war. He has repeatedly said the nation’s goal should be to defeat the Taliban on the battlefield.

No one knows what finally pushed so many Americans to turn decisively against the war. Perhaps some of them heard Lt. Col. Davis on “Democracy Now” radio, saying: “Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable.”

One major problem is that measuring success in this war is virtually impossible. What are the metrics? Unfortunately, that has led to a resumption of the much-maligned “body count” strategy – counting insurgent attacks and enemy dead.

Western forces have become “hopelessly mired in body count as a measure of success,” Mackay said. “The history of Vietnam tells us that’s a terrible way of doing it. But we’ve still gotten into: ‘Oh, we’ve killed 300 Taliban on this tour.’ ”

As the NGO report put it, “The only coherent strategy the international community ever had in Afghanistan was the one to leave.”

© 2012 Joel Brinkley Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times. To comment, go to sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1.