VETERANS TODAY ORGANIZIES "FACT BASED" ADVISORY GROUP

TOP MILITARY AND ACADEMIC EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON AFGHANISTAN

By Gordon Duff Senior Editor/Group Coordinator

An informal study group composed of research specialists and former senior military and intelligence officials, diplomats and government officials from the US, Britain and Pakistan and other interested countries is examining our combined understanding of the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  In combination with Opinion Maker in Pakistan and Defense of the Realm in Britain, we are examining how a cascade of errors and ill considered moves has brought about the dangerous situation facing the world today.

Putting aside political agenda's, we hope, will lead to an end to hostilities and increased international respect and understanding.  In the interim, here are some of the issues we are examining:

Paul's commentary and response to Slate reporter Kaplan were in reaction to our Special Report: Is the Army fixing recruitment goal numbers to justify SURGE in Afghanistan?

GRAFT, CORRUPTION AND CHEAP POLITICS IN AMERICA

WINNING THE WAR FOR THE TALIBAN

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Even if analysts existed who understood Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and the other countries of this region, their history, their people and why war and threat of war is a way of life, even if America's "decision makers" knew how ill conceived our policies are, how self defeating and how hopeless, we would make the same mistakes.  We have willed ourselves this fate.

Everyone is advising the US, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Great Britain, Israel and our European "allies."  Who is Congress, the Pentagon and the American people listening to?  They hear fiction driven by party politics, hate groups, defense contractors and the great lobbies, big oil and Israel that buy and sell Generals and members of Congress like spoiled food from a vending machine. 

“I am very confident that when I announce the decision, the American people will have a lot of clarity about what we’re doing, how we’re going to succeed, how much this thing is going to cost,” Mr. Obama told CNN in an interview at his hotel in Beijing. Most important, he said, is that he is asking “what’s the end game on this thing, which I think is something that unless you impose that kind of discipline, could end up leading to a multi-year occupation that won’t serve the interests of the United States.”

BRITISH PM CALLS FOR LONDON NATO SUMMIT ON AFGHAN WITHDRAWAL

By Dr. Richard North UK CORRESPONDENT, VETERANS TODAY

 ... in a move designed to address public fears that allied troops could become bogged down in Afghanistan for years to come," reports The Daily Telegraph (and others), Gordon Brown has announced that he plans to hold a summit for the Nato allies to discuss a timetable for withdrawal starting in 2010.

He is to offer London as a venue in January and wants the conference to chart a comprehensive political framework within which the military strategy can be accomplished. "It should identify a process for transferring district by district to full Afghan control and set a timetable for transfer starting in 2010," he has said.

  MEDIA REPORTING IN AMERICA:  FANTASY MEETS SUBVERSION

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Everyone in America agrees that getting honest and accurate news is impossible.  This is the understatement of all time.  We have no way of knowing what we get or don't get, no benchmark for truth.  We all thought the last election in the US was as bad as it could get.  We were wrong.  Let's look at some of our current stories.  We can start with Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh and his latest Pakistan fantasy.

According to his article in the New Yorker, US Special Forces from Dubai were planning on an invasion of Pakistan to steal the triggers from Pakistan's nukes.  Seymour's scenario, related in pages of rambling fabrications would be funny if it didn't threaten our relationship with a key ally.

US AFGHANISTAN STRATEGY STANDS BOGGED

By Sajjad Shaukat

After achieving a landmark victory in the Malakand-Swat operations, our armed forces which have dismantled the strongholds of the insurgents in South Waziristan by sacrificing their own lives for the common cause of Pakistan are still crushing the remaining resistance in a region comprising harsher terrain.

But it is most regrettable that since the military operation, “Rah-i-Nijat” (Path to Deliverance) was launched; a deliberate propaganda campaign has been intensified against Pakistan’s armed forces by our internal agents who are in collaboration with the foreign secret agencies and media.

By Aram Roston The Nation

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban's rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime's ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat's right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

by Jeff Gates, Staff Writer 

When waging war “by way of deception,” the motto of the Israeli Mossad, well-timed crises play a critical agenda-setting role by displacing facts with what a target population can be deceived to believe. Thus the force-multiplier effect when staged crises are reinforced with pre-staged intelligence. In combination, the two often prove persuasive.

That duplicity was on display when U.S. lawmakers were induced to invade Iraq in response to the mass murder of 9-11. That crisis alone, however, was insufficient. Military mobilization required a “consensus” belief in Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi mobile biological weapons, Iraqi meetings in Prague, and so forth. Though all were false, those “facts” proved sufficient to induce an invasion of Iraq.

Troops targeted by crude, potent improvised bombs
by Kimberly Hefling - WASHINGTON – Far from winding down, the numbers of wounded U.S. soldiers coming home have continued to swell. The problem is especially acute among those who fought in Afghanistan, where nearly four times as many troops were injured in October as a year ago. Amputations, burns, brain injuries and shrapnel wounds proliferate in Afghanistan, due mostly to crude, increasingly potent improvised bombs targeting U.S. forces.                

National Security Adviser James Jones says, "Reports that President Obama has made a decision about Afghanistan are absolutely false." That’s maybe good news. It maybe means Obama is coming to his senses and is ready to pull the plug on this Af-Pak madness.

Various reports indicated that Obama was ready to go along with a re-re-re-escalation of up to 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, but Jones says that’s bun-ola. "[President Obama] has not received final options for his consideration, he has not reviewed those options with his national security team, and he has not made any decisions about resources," says Jones. "Any reports to the contrary are completely untrue and come from uninformed sources." I guess that’s that. Jones isn’t a joke smith, one hears.

As the US and NATO leadership struggle to find a way out of the Afghan quicksand, amid a growing concern caused by the mounting casualties and enhancing strength of Afghan resistance, the US rhetoric seems to be getting focused on the city of Quetta.  

According to US assessment, the city houses the top echelon of the Taliban leadership, the “Quetta Shura” who are not only providing the ideological orientation to the insurgency in Southern Afghanistan but also arranging for the logistical support for the fighters owing allegiance to Mullah Omar. Quetta Shura finds a mention on the assessment forwarded by General Stanley McChrystal to the US Government, duly ‘leaked’ to the Washington Post and now available to all and sundry on the internet.

We escalate and send in 30,000 more so the guys who hate us for our freedom will embrace democracy and listen to the newly non-corrupt untouchables in the regional police and Afghan Army units. Right. President Obama, how about we build, protect and serve right here in the United States of America.

By Dahr Jamail, Asia Times: The shooting tragedy at Fort Hood on Friday points to a much larger problem of combat stress and overdeployment in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By Richard Cohen The Washington Post

Between World War I and World War II, Britain fought all across the Islamic world, battling insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, to name just two, and usually losing. This caused a fair amount of worry, introspection, angst and the usual commissions to determine why history was being so unkind. What the British discovered was what Pogo could have told them: They had met the enemy and it was them.

By Neil Genzlinger The New York Times

It’s too bad Bob Hope isn’t part of the “Fox NFL Sunday” crew. He might have been able to do something with the odd incongruity of Sunday’s program, broadcast from Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan: a show glorifying fake warriors and their game, playing to a crowd of real warriors locked in an eight-year-old conflict.

You can imagine Hope — always so good at telegraphing that he knew the absurd discordance of bringing Hollywood glamour into a war zone — having a fine time.

By Sherwood Ross /Staff Writer

Washington has been negotiating secret, “highly sensitive understandings” to “provide added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis,” investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports.

“The secrecy surrounding the understandings was important because there is growing antipathy toward America in Pakistan, as well as a history of distrust,” Hersh writes in the November 16th issue of The New Yorker magazine.

EYE TO EYE, WE ARE READY

Robbie,

40 years ago, 3 of us at Veterans Today, Bill Eckard, Eddie Harris and I were in South Vietnam, serving with an elite Marine Special Landing Team, looking for "terrorists."  Decades later, our memories are less than clear.  It was 4 AM, 0400H, and we were searching a village.  Bill remembers finding an AK47 in one hut, I think it was a Garand. 

It's funny we all remember that morning, nothing outstanding about it.  I remember being acutely aware I was in someone else's home, uninvited.  This is how I was raised.  Bill and I remember trying to read the "friendship" ID card, written in Vietnamese that theoretically authorized the weapon we found.  Ed was uncovering a large cache of rice which had been supplying the "indigenous" forces we called the Viet Cong.

by Jonathan S. Landay, John Walcott and Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers -- Administration officials have told McClatchy that the decision is likely to include the dispatch of 23,000 combat and support troops, 7,000 troops for a new headquarters in Kandahar, and 4,000 additional trainers for the Afghan army.

Obama may not announce the decision for several weeks, as he talks with allies and it could change. The plan falls short of Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal's ultimate "low-risk" option of 80,000 more troops.