but it is so ignorant.

usama bin laden had nothing to do with the events of 11/09/01.

if you can proffer any proof that bin laden or his fellows did what the usg said they did that day, put it up here.

never forget, bin laden is still not on any fbi list for any crimes against the usa. what does that tell you?

more to the point, consider the large number of bin ladens and other al-fresco financing saudis that the bushit regime allowed to leave the united states. i think that says that the usg knew damn well that ubl and al fresco was a notional enemy.

so afghanistan had no more to do with the events of 11/09/01 than did ubl and his associates. so, why the invasion of afghanistan? it was just another chapter in the great game for the control of hydrocarbons and heroin.

prior to the “stolen” election of 2000, the “oilies” had this belief that there were considerable quantities of hydrocarbons that could be extracted and transmitted across afghanistan into the new economic “tiger” – inja.

the taliban, though created by the cia and its surrogate, the isi, were not keen on that western disruption of their theocracy. they said no.

after the bushit invasion of afghanistan, a major exploratory drilling program commenced. it was intended to find and produce the hydrocarbons that the “proposed” pipeline was going to transmit.

guess what, those anticipated hydrocarbons weren’t there. the need for the pipeline had been nullified.

but then there was the opium. by 2001, the taliban had shut down virtually all of the opium poppy production in afghanistan. this was a very real hardship on the black budget of the us intell services[always involved in the traffic since 1947]. and for an acolyte of the russell trust[skull & bones], it was a considerable loss to that secret society and its members[not inconsequential controllers of the usa].

so, since the bushit invasion of afghanistan, what have we seen concerning opium cultivation? well, in 2001, the taliban had eliminated that crop, virtually.

but after the bushit regime’s invasion, everything seems to have changed. afghanistan’s opium harvests have climbed to a record level. and where does that opium go for refining to morphine base, then heroin?

this refining operation is not occurring in afghanistan. where is it occurring?

and how is the opium reaching the refineries?

us mercenary and military aircraft.

as i said before, for a purportedly erudite bunch of posters, you sure are ignorant.

As a Canadian, my respects to Trooper Pearce, and also his friends and family.

“To pull out now would be total anarchy.” Exactly.

The US can only bully weak and defenceless nations.Ask George Bush whether he would dare to attack Russia or China.The American people should have impeached this dangerous man. He is nothing but a hound dog.

The American, no matter how hard they tried, can never win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.They have succesfully wrecked two innocent nations.To pull out now would be total anarchy.

America, the aggressor, should pay war reparations to both countries.

Well, the tooth fairy is dead and that is one of the dumber ideas to which a senile War Department head has ever been attached. It did have great fans, though. I remember the official smirk position of Slate in 2002, when the neo-liberal/center/radical rightwing warmongers there were thumbsucking their way to approving pre-emptive war, was that things had gone just socko in Afghanistan and how silly those people were who had said there might be some problems there. This, of course, in the face of the fact that the sole reason for going into Afghanistan – getting Osama bin Laden – didn’t pan out. But in the smirky world of Slate (which really is a barometer of in-the-beltway stupidity – can you find a more miserable purveyor of DC orthodoxies than Saletan or Weisberg?), the sort of premise for a war, the bogus stuff told to the American public while the Pentagon issues the contract specs, is sort of dispensible. It is the new, confidence man theory of democracy: who cares about Osama or WMD once we are in the country? It is sort of date rape as a foreign policy.

The point is that the history of the funding in Afghanistan is related to the history of the failure in Afghanistan.

I had read that the 100 or so Arabs in al Qaeda were only tolerated by the Pashtun Taliban because of payments AQ made. The Arabs stood out among the Pashtun, Uzbeks, and Tajiks.

And as Katherine said: “thinking there were rules about invasion and extradition. Silly me…. Clearly vengeance and PR are actually the universal rules at play.”

I can’t think of any plausible explanations for what the US did.

Yes, the whole point of the Afghan adventure should have been to kill Osama. It´s vengeance, and it´s appalling, as Katherine says. But the international system is still a few centuries away from the point at which a major power can be attacked on its soil and a few heads don´t roll, messily.

They probably should have just bumped off the fucker and left, putting in place some generous aid program for the country under UN auspices, regardless of who was left in place in Afghanistan.

But even that grim scenario could never have been more than a pipe dream. It soon became clear that the whole adventure was going to go beyond basic action-movie-script revenge. Afghanistan was to be a PR stepping-stone to launch further wars in the Greater Middle East, a route to circumvent Iran in the supply of Central Asian energy to India, an excuse to extend the Pentagon´s “footprint” to Russia and China´s backyard.

In the meantime, the war has become unwinnable by whichever definition of “success” you care to come up with, Afghanistan is—more than ever—the fulcrum of global opium trade, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation has asserted itself in Central Asia (and both Iran and India have approached it), and the Europeans are stuck in because Afghanistan was a where-we-can-show-that-we-are-America´s-allies-in-spite ofthe-spat-over-Iraq kinda place.

Another fuckup, which anybody should have walked away from at a pretty early stage.

The justification was that it was the Taliban wot dun 9/11. Or at least they tacitlly supported Osama Bin Laden. Or actually that they refused to extradite him when given an ultimatum (because ultimatums are how you deal with extradition issues). Is that seriously the “justification”? That a country that does immediately acquiese to a US demand to hand over someone for extradition gets invaded? Lordy. And there was I thinking there were rules about invasion and extradition and whatnot. Silly me. Clearly vengeance and PR are actually the universal rules at play.

“Betraying”? After the Russians were driven out? The Russians, as usual, installed a regime what would, given a chance, achieve full women’s liberation, 100% literacy, decent healthcare, and lousy economic system. I don’t know about the West, but the US organized, financed and armed the most reactionary force there – most reactionary in the world, probably – created the Taliban and Al Qaeda and propelled them to power.

But – in spite of the neo-con empire groupies – I don’t think even the Bush white house, which would like to keep its claws in Iraq forever, wants that kind of arrangement with Afghanistan. What I think it wants is a photo op place to show women being liberated from Islamo-fascism, the white bwana coming in and touching the colored peoples and setting them free, and other such nonsense, licked up of course by the press. Although the Bushies continually harp on how everything changed on 9/11, they are, charactistically, still mired in a pre-9/11 mindset, still looking for state sponsors of terrorism, still unable to contemplate that 19 guys carrying at most a homemade bomb among them took down the WTC and crashed into the Pentagon, even as the airforce responded in Cold war style by assuming stations in the atmosphere above the Atlantic, looking for those oncoming fictitious attack planes. The problem with low intensity warfare is there really is no money in it. You can send billions to various dubious, GOP contributing enterprises, things that really get the road rage guys all in a sweat, if you pretend that you want the most sophisticated anti-terrorism module, fully equipped to ward off those fictitious guys carrying their nuclear bombs in suitcases, ever, but if you really want to ward off guys with exacto knives, you just have to do simple things that aren’t going to make the merchants of death a lot of money. And that’s no fun.

I always think that the true spirit of the Bush administration came through after the campaign of the winter of 2001, that succeeded in freeing Osama from his cage in Afghanistan and plopping him in Pakistan while giving Bush an opportunity to be reported on by journalists, drawing lines through Al Qaeda Honchos (so tough! already Mr. Mission Accomplished), in the 2002 budget. After giving a speech in which Bush proposed a Marshall plan for Afghanistan, he submitted an official budget that alloted zero dollars to Afghanistan. Even the servile Congress was shocked by this. It is a pretty good indication of what they really think at the White House. You cannot think of these people too scornfully, for as degraded, debased, stupid and venal as you may imagine them – they are even more degraded, debased, stupid and venal.

If so, you have me confused with someone else – I didn’t post on that thread.

To be fair, it’s not impossible I did make some kind of bet like that, though I can’t see me using the word ‘secular’. I think I did make a bet here on the Niger yellowcake thing, which is a step too far off-topic. Unfortunately, the only other reference search here or google can find is this:

http://www.crossplay.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&printertopic=1&t=1010&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

which doesn’t seem that relevant. If anyone can find something, paying up probably would be in order.

Today’s lesson: someone saying something is impossible/inevitable for a bogus reason doesn’t actually make that thing any more, or any less, likely to happen.

Whatever duuuuuuudddddddeeeee

100% wrong.

Alexander successfully pacified Afghanistan and there was a greek cultural presence in Afghanistan for over 100 years afterwards.

Afghanistan HAS been successfully invaded before – including by the freaking muslims. They didn’t convert from Hinduism & Buddhism to Islam peacefully.