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[Antemedius - Liberally Critical Thinking] The Afghan Pipe Dream | Antemedius: But one Osama bin Laden - as in an opium dream - still ghostly roams across the Hindu Kush, eight years after the 9/11 fact. A vision or a waking dream, he may be playing Return of the Living Dead in "Pak", not "Af" - so why all these extra marines frantically canvassing Afghan lands?

[Global News Blog] Global News Blog » Blog Archive » Who is funding the Afghan ...: The new feeling is that less than half of the Taliban’s war chest comes from poppy, with a variety of sources, including private contributions from Persian Gulf states, accounting for much of the rest. Holbrooke told reporters that he would add a member of the Treasury Department to his staff to pursue the question of Taliban funding.

[Voices] Washington's double standard: The elections in Iran and Afghanistan: Top US officials on the spot, including Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, General Stanley McChrystal, the top military commander, and Richard Holbrooke, chief US envoy to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, all chimed in with endorsements of the basic legitimacy of the vote, suggesting the widespread reports of irregularities were merely the growing pains of democracy.

[GlobalPost] Funding the Afghan Taliban | GlobalPost: The new feeling is that less than half of the Taliban’s war chest comes from poppy, with a variety of sources, including private contributions from Persian Gulf states, accounting for much of the rest. Holbrooke told reporters that he would add a member of the Treasury Department to his staff to pursue the question of Taliban funding.

[::News4u::] ::News4u:: » Most Taliban funds come from Gulf countries: Holbrooke: “We do have to transition over time from a combat-driven operational effort to a situation which the Afghan security forces can take care of their own security while we continue to help them rebuild their country, which has been torn apart by 30 years of war since the Soviet invasion in 1978,” the US envoy said.

[Dprogram.net] MSM: Who is funding the Afghan Taliban? You don't want to know ...: The new feeling is that less than half of the Taliban’s war chest comes from poppy, with a variety of sources, including private contributions from Persian Gulf states, accounting for much of the rest. Holbrooke told reporters that he would add a member of the Treasury Department to his staff to pursue the question of Taliban funding.

[Breaking News] Pakistan fears America's southern Afghan offensive could cause ...: KANDAHAR - Taliban fighters are using recently acquired voter identification cards as makeshift passports to smooth border crossings from Pakistan and ease travel between cities in Afghanistan's southern provinces, reports the Globe and Mail. When produced, the voter registration cards give fighters an appearance of legitimacy, they say, and help them "trick" Afghan security and international forces into allowing them to sail through police and army checkpoints set up to limit the militants' mobility.

[MoJo Blog Posts: kevin drum] Afghanistan and the Taliban | Mother Jones: Don't forget, the Taliban may not have a superpower sponsor, but they clearly ARE getting voluminous support from the Pakistani ISI as well as private believers: and the Russians poured in copious volumes of men and equipment, greatly in excess of anything that NATO (haha) has put in the field - if the alliance were to put a serious fighting force in the field, the Taliban would be relatively readily defeated.

[GlobalResearch.ca] Afghan War: NATO Builds History's First Global Army: In late July the Afghan ambassador to the U.S. also revealed that any hopes for an imminent deescalation of the war in his country, not to mention its eventual end, were non-existent by revealing that "NATO countries will provide 8,000 to 10,000 additional troops to allow Afghans to vote securely" [8] in this month's national elections. The official explanation by the U.S. and NATO for their increased deployment of troops to Afghanistan is that it is an ad hoc effort to insure the elections there proceed without interruption, but past elections have occurred and the fighting has increased with the introduction of more and yet more Western soldiers, tanks and other armor, attack helicopters, warplanes and large-scale military offensives.

[Enterprise Resilience Management Blog] Enterprise Resilience Management Blog: Development and the Future ...: Chandrasekaran reports that one man who wanted to do more than talk about getting farmers to raise different crops was Yosuf Mir, an Afghan American who lives in Fairfax County, Virginia. He approached a company working in Afghanistan called, Chemonics "with what he thought was a no-lose solution to wean thousands of farmers off poppy cultivation: cotton, a crop widely grown in southern Afghanistan until the Soviet invasion in 1979."

Newshoggers.com: - this ghostly, immaterial entity - may start getting less cash from their former Pakistani intelligence masters; but pious, Salafi Persian Gulf potentates will still make sure they more than balance their budget - unlike certain Western powers.

[Breaking News] Air Force Gen.: Warplanes may buzz enemy before bombing under new ...: Pakistan : 'Do not panic' over Taliban advancesKABUL ”” Pakistan's foreign minister asked U.S. officials Monday not to panic over Taliban advances along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan ”” a region British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called a "crucible of terrorism."Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said Pakistan has sent militants in its tribal areas a "clear signal" that they must lay down arms, as he sought to quell Western fears raised by a recent peace deal between militants and the government.

[The Washington Note] Guest Post by Katherine Tiedemann: Holbrooke on Success -- "We'll ...: Anybody who thinks we have an obligation to "fix" Afghanistan because we "broke it" has a concurrent obligation to define an achievable objective, and propose a realistic plan for achieving that objective. I take it the objective should be a little more grounded than, "no more bad people in Afghanistan." A vague and self-indulgent sense of moral obligation to do good, accompanied by haphazard and disorganized groping, is no substitute for a well-conceived plan to actually do some good.

Reflected tags on Technorati: Blog, Persian Gulf, Iran Reviews