Escalation (and Patrick Cockburn kisses Pakistan goodbye)
The best clown in town. After seven years of US-NATO occupation the UN Security Council can affirm that in Afghanistan there is "not a security crisis": "There is undoubtedly a difficult security situation which is developing... but not a security crisis", said Italian ambassador Giulio Terzi, head of a UN Security Council team at the end of a three-day assessment tour.
Escalation. There are currently about 60,000 international troops in occupied Afghanistan and US President-elect Barack Obama and his war secretary Robert Gates are working to send 30,000 more.
Obama plans to redeploy most of the troops occupying Iraq into Afghanistan (note for the Western anti-war movement: trading one war for another doesn't make an anti-war president, an oxymoron per se) and is pushing many allies to contribute to this new escalation of death and destruction. A few European countries have already said, no, thank you! The British vassal is considering what to do while Australian PM said, "We believe we've got our numbers about right, we have no plans to increase them".
Robert Fisk wrote in the Independent the other day:
Partition is the one option that no one will discuss - giving the southern part of Afghanistan to the Taliban and keeping the rest - but that will only open another crisis with Pakistan because the Pashtuns, who form most of the Taliban, would want all of what they regard as "Pashtunistan"; and that would have to include much of Pakistan's own tribal territories. It will also be a return to the "Great Game" and the redrawing of borders in south-west Asia, something which - history shows - has always been accompanied by great bloodshed.With Zbigniew Brzezinski as Obama's eminence grise, you'd better get a copy of The Grand Chessboard. Meanwhile let's get ready to welcome some major ally in the region to get massively involved... I don't know, let's say, India? And with the economic recession and all this cheap obamania around someone could even think of some cool change, for instance the reintroduction of the military draft in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Yes, we can!
Postscript - While I was writing this little blog entry, the Independent published the latest Patrick Cockburn's fatigue, "Patrick Cockburn: Pakistan is the root of the problem". Once again, Cockburn does his best to help Washington and London's propaganda to sell the Western brainwashed public yet another war. We are used to the state-corporate media's irresponsibility and complicity with the empire and its adventures but Cockburn's article is shameful even for mainstream media's standards; just consider how many innocent lives Cockburn's article has already started to kill. As if that were not enough, both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers. Only an insane society can take seriously this kind of "journalism". posted by The Cat's Dream at 2:03 AM
www.thecatsdream.com/blog/2008/11/escalation.htm