Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri urged people in Saudi Arabia to follow the example set by popular revolutions in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia and rise up.

The House endorsed the continued war in Afghanistan on Thursday despite acknowledgment from Republicans and Democrats that the American people are war-weary after more than a decade of conflict.
By a vote of 303-113, lawmakers rejected an amendment that would have swiftly ended combat operations in Afghanistan by limiting funds only to the "safe and orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops and military contractors from Afghanistan."

More than 10 years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, American public support for the overseas conflict has deteriorated. An Associated Press-GfK poll released last week showed that backing for the war has hit a new low and is on par with support for the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. Only 27 percent of Americans say they support the war effort, and 66 percent oppose it, according to the survey.

After signing a 10-year lease and spending more than $80 million on a site envisioned as the United States’ diplomatic hub in northern Afghanistan, American officials say they have abandoned their plans, deeming the location for the proposed compound too dangerous.

Eager to raise an American flag and open a consulate in a bustling downtown district of the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, officials in 2009 sought waivers to stringent State Department building rules and overlooked significant security problems at the site, documents show. The problems included relying on local building techniques that made the compound vulnerable to a car bombing, according to an assessment by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul that was obtained by The Washington Post.

It’s safe to say that foreign policy was not the strong suit of this year’s contenders for the GOP presidential nomination. Rick Perry labeled the Turkish government “Islamic terrorists.” Newt Gingrich referred to Palestinians as “invented” people. Herman Cain called Uzbekistan “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan” and memorably blanked when asked what he thought of NATO’s incursion into Libya. Michele Bachmann pledged to close the US embassy in Iran, which hasn’t existed since 1980. Rick Santorum gave a major foreign policy speech at a Jelly Belly factory in California.

Yet though the candidates and their views were often hard to take seriously, their statements on foreign policy reflected a more disturbing trend in the GOP. Despite facing a war-weary public, the candidates—with the exception of Ron Paul, an antiwar libertarian, and Jon Huntsman, a moderate internationalist—positioned themselves as unapologetic war hawks.

The true nature of the failure in Afghanistan is much worse than the report indicates, though. For example, the January National Intelligence Estimate concluded the war is still a “stalemate,” that the Taliban are still strong, that the government Washington has propped up is plagued by pervasive corruption and illiberal policies, etc.

This widespread failure in Afghanistan is part of why the U.S. won’t actually be leaving on the date constantly labeled the end of the war. A huge contingent of U.S. forces will remain in Afghanistan beyond 2014, perhaps until 2024, and operations like night raids and drone strikes into Pakistan will continue unabated. Instead of cutting America’s losses and quitting the lost war, Obama is continuing it for another decade.

Shamsuddin Tanwir quoted some prisoners as saying that 50 to 60 inmates had stitched their lips and could not be shown to rights campaigners.

Regarding complains of inmates, he said: "About 710 political prisoners are being kept in 30 rooms¸ which have only eight bathrooms." The prisoners also complained of poor and inadequate food, as well as torture at the hands of intelligence operatives and police.

Tanwir said torturing prisoners was against human values and asked the authorities to take serious steps for preventing it.

The office of Kapisa’s governor sits high on a hilltop overlooking the provincial capital, Mahmud Raqi. It has a beautiful view of the river below and the mountains, trees and fields that stretch into the distance.

Beneath the tranquil surface, however, lies a grim truth. Just outside town roadside bombs are planted to target NATO convoys.

This is one of Afghanistan’s forgotten battlegrounds, a place quietly unraveling as Washington debates the future of the war. Behind the calm facade is a strategically vital part of the country with a fragile security situation that shows every sign of worsening.

Kapisa is barely an hour’s drive north of Kabul, yet two of its seven districts have been in insurgent hands for years, according to local residents, politicians and officials. One is Tagab, where the Taliban stop and search vehicles, run a shadow judicial system and stage regular attacks on foreign and Afghan troops.

In Afghan fields the poppies grow.
Between the crosses.
Row on row.

In a striking omission to mainstream coverage of the Afghan massacre which took the lives of 17 Afghans including many children, one as young as two, the AP has reported that US soldiers came to their villages after a roadside bombing two days before and promised retaliation. The Pentagon has denied that any bombing took place, putting it in direct contradiction to the attorney for Sgt. Robert Bales, who alone is being accused of the rampage.

In a striking omission to mainstream coverage of the Afghan massacre which took the lives of 17 Afghans including many children, one as young as two, the AP has reported that US soldiers came to their villages after a roadside bombing two days before and promised retaliation. The Pentagon has denied that any bombing took place, putting it in direct contradiction to the attorney for Sgt. Robert Bales, who alone is being accused of the rampage.

He was there to join a protest about the plague of American ‘drones’ – the remote-controlled aircraft that have left a bloody trail of death and fury among the innocent villagers who struggle to earn a living in the unforgiving mountainous region.

I was there to distribute digital cameras so that the people from Waziristan could record the damage and death caused by the drones, as part of a campaign to prove that innocent civilians are dying.

Tariq, a keen amateur photographer, was given one of the cameras before he left to return home.

Three days later he was dead. Like his cousin, who had died in April 2010 and whose identity card he clutched when we met, he was blown to pieces by a drone strike. The appalling irony of how his young life ended will stay with me for ever.

A new report Wednesday by a Kabul-based think tank accuses international forces of misleading the public by calling military operations "Afghan-led" even in cases where NATO or U.S. forces are the only troops on the ground.

The charge cuts to the heart of a public perception battle being waged in Afghanistan, where international troops are eager to showcase successes by Afghan forces and to downplay the role played by international soldiers as NATO draws down forces and hands over security to Afghan control.

A spokesman for the international coalition of forces in Afghanistan sought to create some distance on Tuesday from the remarks of a departing American general, who sternly criticized Pakistan for failing to cooperate on border security earlier in the week.

The spokesman's remarks come one day after Maj. Gen. John Toolan, who until last month was the top commander of international forces in Afghanistan's violent southwestern Helmand Province, faulted Pakistan for failing to take any action to stop the flow of drugs and militants across the border.

“I know for a fact that drugs are moving out [of Afghanistan] through Pakistan and lethal aid is coming in on a regular basis,” Toolan said in a speech on Monday at the Atlantic Council, in Washington, D.C.

The United States has swiftly condemned photos of soldiers posing with the mangled corpses of insurgents in Afghanistan, seeking to limit the fallout from the latest scandal involving US troops.

The photographs, which date back to 2010 but were published by the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, add to a string of damaging incidents that have ignited anti-Western feeling and complicated NATO efforts to withdraw most troops in 2014.

The Taliban on Thursday condemned the photographs as “inhuman” and vowed revenge.

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said those responsible would be punished but voiced “regret” that the LA Times had decided to publish the images against the Pentagon’s wishes, warning that they could prompt a violent backlash.

International law expert Francis Boyle said Congress passed a War Powers Resolution Authorization. Doing so gave Bush "blank check" power "to use military force against any individual, organization, or state" at his discretion.

International and constitutional law be damned. Waging war on Afghanistan "is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan."

It's also a lost cause. Pentagon commanders know it. So does Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis. In an unclassified report and more detailed classified one, he explained ongoing disastrous conditions.

Why then did the Obama administration commit itself to releasing more than $1 billion to a government that has challenged its attempt to bring to justice an alleged mastermind of cross-border terrorism?

The answer lies in what happened at two Pakistani border posts 1.5 miles from the Afghan frontier in the early hours of November 26, 2011. NATO fighter aircraft and helicopters based in Afghanistan carried out a two-hour-long raid on these posts, killing 24 soldiers. Enraged, Pakistan’s government shut the two border crossings through which the U.S. and NATO had until then sent a significant portion of their war supplies into Afghanistan.

It might seem an odd time for it, with most of the Afghan capital still cleaning up after a bloody 18-hour siege, but NATO officials are loudly cheering their “progress” in the war.

NATO’s attempts to spin the attack as vindication aren’t convincing everyone, however, and President Hamid Karzai faulted NATO both for its inability to predict such a huge attack and for reacting so slowly.

The U.S. military is readying itself for the Afghan insurgency’s annual blitz of increased violence for the spring months, calling what is clearly a defensive posture on the losing side an “offensive” against the Taliban.

Insurgents mounted spectacular coordinated attacks over the weekend that set off an 18-hour battle with NATO forces, an emphatic indication of their annual spring offensive and a public relations embarrassment for the U.S. at what seems to be the lowest point in the war.

Australia said Tuesday it will bring its troops home from Afghanistan a year earlier than planned with most soldiers withdrawn in 2013 after significant security gains over the past 18 months.

Canberra, a key coalition ally of the United States, has repeatedly said it intends to remain in the war-wracked nation until 2014 but Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Afghans would now be ready to take responsibility earlier.

She will take her pull-out timetable to a NATO summit in Chicago next month with her announcement coming a day ahead of NATO foreign and defence ministers meeting in Brussels to fine-tune their own troop withdrawals.

The career soldier is now a black sheep at the giant defence department building where he still works. The reason was his extraordinarily brave decision to accuse America’s military top brass of lying about the war in Afghanistan.

Davis pulled no punches. His report’s opening statement read: “Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognisable.”

Washington has relinquished control and final say over special operations night raids in Afghanistan to the Kabul government, but U.S. officials are quietly planning to ignore the agreement’s binding clauses.

While U.S. officials won’t say it explicitly, mindful of the delicate diplomatic process, the agreement will be largely ignored. “If there’s a threat to the homeland, the United States always reserves the ability to act unilaterally,” said Rick “Ozzie” Nelson, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The rhetoric may not line up with that, however, because we have the need for an agreement with the Afghan government beyond 2014,” when U.S. combat forces are scheduled to leave.

THEY are the wounds that cannot be seen – but they can be just as devastating and often harder to treat.

And the problem of British troops mentally scarred by their experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq is getting dramatically worse.

A Mirror investigation has found a significant increase in the number of our service personnel being treated for mental health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

The massive anti-US protests in the wake of the organized book burning at Bagram Air Base were the result of “anti-American provocation” by the Iranian government, according to US officials familiar with the situation.

The Obama Administration’s strategy for the war in Afghanistan centers on a policy of securing an agreement with President Hamid Karzai to keep ground troops in the nation through 2024. At the same time, officials have to keep up the public pretense of an imminent drawdown.

The excuse now, it seems, is “anti-American” sentiment of Pakistan is making the withdrawal inconvenient.

There was a surprising well of political support for the United States in Pakistan, and it has taken over a decade for the Bush and Obama Administrations to successfully burn through it all. Now, the US is so politically untouchable that Pakistani MPs fear nothing so much as being branded an “ally” of the US.

Yalda Hakim of Australia’s SBS network is the first western journalist to visit the villages of Kandahar, Afghanistan, where 17 people were killed in a massacre this month.

Survivors of the attack allege that there was not simply one “rogue soldier”, US Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the story the mainstream media is peddling; instead, the survivors, some of whom are children, claim there were more soldiers present that bloody morning

“Do you know where your father is?” a voice off-screen asks.
“He died”, replies the small Afghan child.

“How did he die?”
“The Americans.”

The lawyer for Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, the U.S. soldier accused of killing 17 Afghan civilians, is accusing U.S. authorities of blocking his investigations into the incident. John Henry Browne says his team has been prevented from interviewing wounded civilian witnesses at a Kandahar hospital.

In the video, the children told Hakim that other Americans were present during the rampage, holding flashlights in the yard.

Noorbinak, 8, told Hakim that the shooter first shot her father’s dog. Then, Noorbinak said in the video, he shot her father in the foot and dragged her mother by the hair. When her father started screaming, he shot her father, the child says. Then he turned the gun on Noorbinak and shot her in the leg.

“One man entered the room and the others were standing in the yard, holding lights,” Noorbinak said in the video.

A brother of one victim told Hakim that his brother’s children mentioned more than one soldier wearing a headlamp. They also had lights at the end of their guns, he said.

U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan have assigned "guardian angels" — troops that watch over their comrades even as they sleep — and have ordered a series of other increased security measures to protect troops against possible attacks by rogue Afghans.

The added protections are part of a directive issued in recent weeks by Marine Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, to guard against insider threats, according to a senior military official. And they come in the wake of a spike in attacks on U.S. and coalition forces by Afghans, including the point-blank shooting deaths of two U.S. advisers in Afghanistan's Ministry of Interior.

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Tuesday a poll showing a big drop in public support for the war in Afghanistan would not alter Washington’s strategy, or efforts to battle Al-Qaeda.

“We cannot fight wars by polls — if we do that, we’re in deep trouble. We have to operate based on what we believe is the best strategy to achieve the mission that we have embarked on,” Panetta told reporters.

He said the objective of the United States and NATO was “to safeguard a country by ensuring that the Taliban and Al Qaeda never again find a safe haven in Afghanistan,” he explained, recalling the attacks of September 11, 2001.

But if there’s a silver lining to the clouds hanging over the American-led war effort here, it’s that the terrible recent events – the unintentional burning of Qurans by American forces and ensuing civil unrest, the revenge killings of US and other international forces by “friendly” Afghan soldiers, and the horrific murders of 17 Afghan villagers allegedly committed by a US Army sergeant – have provided a measure of Afghanistan’s progress, and of the importance of a continuing international commitment.

That’s the message of the US ambassador to Kabul, Ryan Crocker, who counters reports of doom for the US mission in Afghanistan with evidence of progress – even as he warns of the consequences for America’s national security of giving in to war fatigue and pulling out.

Murder anywhere is bad enough. Nuremberg chief prosecutor Robert Jackson called preemptive aggressive war killing "the supreme international crime against peace."

Convicted Nazi war criminals were hanged. American ones keep killing with impunity.

On March 11, up to 20 US Special Forces (trained killers) murdered 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children aged 2 - 12 while they slept. Two women were also raped before soldiers killed them. Bodies of all victims were then burned to conceal evidence.

It wasn't an isolated incident. It happens regularly in all US wars. Rarely is anyone held accountable, especially responsible parties up the chain of command to the top.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan on Thursday said he believes American troop withdrawals should stop in 2013, keeping at least 68,000 by 2014 in contradiction of Obama administration plans to have combat troops out by that year.

Marine Gen. John R. Allen said in congressional hearings in response to questions from pro-war Senator John McCain: “My opinion is that we will need significant combat power through the end of 2013. .?.?. Sixty-eight thousand is a good going-in number.”

“I owe the president some analysis on that,” Allen said, but that he would not prepare this recommendation for the Obama administration until after the September departure of 23,000 surge troops.

What is worrying is that the numerous reports coming out of Afghanistan of rampant war crimes committed by "rogue" soldiers – "kill teams" – indicates a complete breakdown of the US chain of command. At the top of the command structure, the grand strategists and theoreticians are constructing elaborate theories of counterinsurgency warfare designed to win over the populace and deny the Taliban a victory. However, by the time "clear, hold, and build" trickles down to the ranks in the field, it becomes "clear, hold, and kill."

Speaking to Congress, top US commander in Afghanistan Gen. John Allen insisted that troops were making major progress and had taken the momentum away from the Taliban across the nation’s south.

Inevitably, Allen’s promises of success were followed up with predictions of impending doom, warning that the Pakistani government’s failure to secure the border with Afghanistan that “chances are very good” that more Afghan troops would need to be sent south.

Allen’s testimony typifies that of military leadership whenever it addresses Congress, offering vague promises of progress and following it up with myriad reasons that the war is going poorly and no drawdowns can be considered.

Pakistan's main religious parties, Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and Difa-e-Pakistani Council (DPC), have warned the country against reopening NATO supply routes into Afghanistan, Press TV reports.

The incongruous stories surrounding the March 11 massacre on Afghan civilians in two villages took another turn today, with reports from witnesses in Mokhoyan, one of the two villages targeted, that they were threatened by US troops just days before the massacre.

The witnesses say that troops rounded up all the men from the villages after a roadside bombing, lined them up against a wall, and told them they would “pay a price” for the attack.

If confirmed, the threats would also appear to support the Afghan probe’s version of the massacre, which had an organized group of over a dozen US troops carrying out the massacre, as opposed to a lone man, as the US maintains.

In a speech retired US Army General Wesley Clark gave in August of 2001, we are reminded that many wars and major military theater operations are planned years or sometimes even decades in advance and that the excuses to justify them are likely fabricated. In this short speech that General Clark gave more than 10 years ago, he stated that the US had already planned to invade Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Libya and Iran. We already know that Iraq has fallen, that Libya has been taken out, that there is a brutal ongoing war in Syria and in the Sudan now, that there has been ongoing war in Somalia since 2009, and that war in Iran now seems inevitable.

The Afghan parliamentary mission investigating the recent massacre of 16 civilians by US forces in Afghanistan says two women were raped during the deadly incident, Press TV reports.

Two members of the fact-finding mission, Hamidzi Lali and Shakila Hashemi, told the general meeting of Afghanistan’s parliament on Saturday that the American troopers raped two Afghan women before starting the massacre.

They said between 15 to 20 US soldiers were involved in the carnage.

The team of Afghan lawmakers has spent two days collating reports from witnesses, survivors and inhabitants of the villages where the tragedy took place.

“We are convinced that one soldier cannot kill so many people in two villages within one hour at the same time, and the 16 civilians, most of them children and women, have been killed by the two groups,” investigator Hamizai Lali told Afghan News.

Lali also said their investigations led them to believe 15 to 20 US soldiers had been involved in the killings. He appealed to the international community to ensure that the responsible parties were brought to justice, stressing the Afghan parliament would not rest until the killers were prosecuted.

Attached are pictures from when I/we were deployed to Kuwait at Camp Navistar. Not "good" ones, but it should give an idea of how gates
hard it would be to walk off a post. Those on guard duty should also be held accountable.

A parliamentary probe team on Thursday said up to 20 American troops were involved in Sunday’s killing of 16 civilians in southern Kandahar province.

Speaking today in a meeting with tribal elders and other top officials, Afghan President Hamid Karzai angrily condemned the US for its refusal to cooperate in the ongoing investigation into last weekend’s massacre of civilians in Kandahar Province.

“This has been going on for too long,” Karzai insisted, “this is by all means the end of the rope here.” The US has promised its own investigation of the attack, but has removed the accused from Afghanistan.

Karzai went on to say that his delegation rejected the current US narrative of a single shooter, and that “this was not carried out by one man and was a deliberate and intentional act.”

Taliban forces have launched a missile attack against a US airbase in Afghanistan following a failed assassination bid against US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

The United States said Thursday it has contributed $1 million to a United Nations program to help probe, arrest and prosecute drug traffickers working in Afghanistan and Central Asia.

The United States gave the funds Wednesday in Vienna to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) Regional Program for Promoting Counternarcotics Efforts in Afghanistan and Neighboring Countries, according to the State Department.

Pentagon chief says he is ‘confident’ that the United States and Afghanistan would work out a treaty allowing the US military to stay longer in the country beyond the withdrawal deadline of 2014.

A vehicle got on to the runway and burst into flames as Mr Panetta's plane landed in Afghanistan this morning.

The U.S. soldier who allegedly shot 16 Afghan villagers was caught on surveillance video that showed him walking up to his base, laying down his weapon and raising his arms in surrender, according to an Afghan official who viewed the footage.

The official said late Tuesday that U.S. authorities showed Afghan authorities the surveillance video to prove that only one perpetrator was involved in the Sunday shootings, which have further strained already shaky relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan.

Viktor Ivanov, Federal Drug Control Service Director, gave NATO a failing grade in its efforts to wean Afghan farmers away from poppy in favor of wheat production.

The Russian minister recently revealed that the heroin flow from Afghanistan has increased to dangerous levels.

"The production of hard drugs such as heroin, opium, and hashish in Afghanistan remains at a high level. Opium production in Afghanistan went up 61 percent in 2011, while areas used for poppy production have increased by some 7 percent,” Ivanov said.

This indicates that the narcotic production infrastructure continues to grow stronger in Afghanistan, which leads to drug trafficking…in the direction of Russia, he added.

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Wednesday called the Koran burning and killing of 16 Afghans “deeply troubling” incidents that had challenged the war effort in Afghanistan.

Visiting Afghanistan just days after a shooting spree by a US soldier, he insisted that NATO and Afghan forces were making progress and had to stay focused on the mission to defeat Al-Qaeda and reverse a Taliban insurgency.

U.S. Marines and Afghan soldiers were ordered not to bring their weapons into a tent where Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta was speaking Wednesday.

The extra security precautions, apparently in response to the shooting Sunday of 16 Afghans, allegedly by a U.S. soldier, were announced abruptly as a crowd of several Marines awaited Panetta's arrival.

The world is used to bad news and always has been, but now and then there occurs something so brutal, so outside the normal limits of what used to be called man’s inhumanity to man, that you have to look away. Then you force yourself to look and see and only one thought is possible: This must stop now. You wonder, how can we do it? And your mind says, immediately: Whatever it takes.

With the weekend massacre of Afghan civilians bringing yet more anger at the US-led occupation forces, the White House today announced that it will not change any of its policies or objectives related to the conflict.

The Obama administration is discussing whether to reduce American forces in Afghanistan by at least an additional 20,000 troops by 2013, reflecting a growing belief within the White House that the mission there has now reached the point of diminishing returns.

The Obama administration is discussing whether to reduce American forces in Afghanistan by at least an additional 20,000 troops by 2013, reflecting a growing belief within the White House that the mission there has now reached the point of diminishing returns.

Lalai also rejected US officials' claims that the killings was executed by a single mentally unstable soldier since it was carried out five kilometers away from the US military base and he later returned to his base after the incident.

Another MP from Kandahar, Mullah Syed Mohammad Akhund, said that US troops intentionally carried out the attack.

hile U.S. officials rushed to draw a line between the rogue shooting and the ongoing efforts of a U.S. force of around 90,000, the incident is sure to further inflame Afghan anger triggered when U.S. soldiers burned copies of the Koran at a NATO base.

U.S. officials said an American staff sergeant from a unit based in Washington state was in custody after the attack on villagers in three houses. Multiple civilians were also wounded, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) coalition said

President Barack Obama called his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai promising to establish the facts quickly and "to hold fully accountable anyone responsible."

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week” program today, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R – SC) shrugged off the massacre of 16 Afghans in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province by an apparently drunken US soldier, insisting that “these things happen.”

“You just have to push through these things,” Graham insisted, adding that if the US kept occupying Afghanistan “we can win this thing” and that despite the massacre, progress was being made in the 11 year long occupation.

A U.S. soldier's shooting of 16 Afghan civilians deepened questions on Monday about what the United States can accomplish in Afghanistan before it withdraws, as Washington rushed to contain the damage from the startling rogue attack.

President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta spoke to Afghan President Hamid Karzai by telephone and offered condolences for the attack, in which a U.S. soldier left his base in southern Afghanistan and began a middle-of-the-night shooting spree that local officials said killed nine children, three women, and four men.

According to Afghan officials, a rampage and shooting spree was carried out by American soldiers who were laughing and appeared to be drunk.

One Afghan father who said his children were killed in the shooting spree accused soldiers of later burning the bodies.

There were conflicting reports of how many shooters were involved, with U.S. officials asserting that a lone soldier was responsible, in contrast to witnesses' accounts that several U.S. soldiers were present.

The campaign sugar daddy of Newt Gingrich (and soon, Romney) is Sheldon Adelson, a multibillionaire casino owner and hawkish Zionist who endorses Gingrich’s view that the Palestinians are “an invented people” who have no historic claim to a homeland. Gingrich told Aipac that “if an Israeli prime minister decides that he has to avoid the threat of a second Holocaust through pre-emptive measures, that I would require no advanced notice to understand why I would support the right of Israel to survive in a dangerous world.”

Afghans expressed doubt on Monday that a single US Army soldier could have shot and killed 16 civilians in houses over 2km apart and burned the bodies afterward. The killings in southern Afghanistan have reignited fury at the US presence following a wave of deadly protests over Americans burning Qurans.

The US military has said there is no indication that more than one soldier carried out the attacks in two villages in Kandahar province before dawn Sunday. The soldier blamed for the shootings is in custody. But villagers told Afghan officials they heard shots being fired from several directions.

Western forces shot dead 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children in southern Kandahar province on Sunday appeared to be drunk.

Western forces shot dead 16 civilians including nine children in southern Kandahar province on Sunday, Afghan officials said, in a rampage that witnesses said was carried out by American soldiers who were laughing and appeared drunk.

One Afghan father who said his children were killed in the shooting spree accused soldiers of later burning the bodies.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the rampage as "intentional murders" and demanded an explanation from the United States. His office said the dead included nine children and three women.

The Afghan government has made progress in the last year in fighting drugs trafficking and cultivation, although the “gains remain fragile,” a US State Department report said Thursday.

“The overall counternarcotics effort this year was positive” in Afghanistan, which grows about 90 percent of the world’s opium, according to the March 2012 International Narcotics Control Strategy report.

It said the government has shown signs of greater “political will” and improved institutions to fight the scourge, while “eradication efforts increased significantly” in key provinces.

Karzai's backing of strict Islamic code (that allows men to beat their wives) 'is a giant step back for women's rights in Afghanistan'

Thanks to the ruthless decade-long war, children in Afghanistan suffer one of the highest levels of chronic malnutrition in the world, according to a report released Monday by the World Bank and the government.

Starvation of children is only one measure of the savage, unnecessary U.S. war in Afghanistan. Last month, Amnesty International found that an average of four hundred people are displaced in every day in Afghanistan, bringing the total displaced population to approximately 500,000.

Proud Pashtun Afghans can take just so much from unloved, often detested foreign "infidels" advisors before exploding and exacting revenge. This also happened during the Soviet era. But some Soviet officers at least had more refined cultural sensibilities in dealing with Afghan. US-Afghan relations are not going to flowers when American troops call the Afghans "sand niggers" and "towel heads." Many US GIs hail from the deep south.

Many Afghans have just had enough of their foreign occupiers. The Americans have lost their Afghan War. As the Imperial British used to say: you can only rent Afghans for so long. One day they will turn and cut your throat.

So to all those who went along with these wars because you believed it when Bush and Robertson, et. al. said this was God's will, you are all damned. Damned, damned, damned! Damned to hell. And there can be no redemption while the warmongers are still in power. There is no absolution if you know a war of conquest against an innocent people is going on and you do nothing at all to stop it. There is no absolution if you know torture of innocent people is going on and you do nothing at all to stop it. The priests cannot forgive your sins if they share those sins, no matter how expensive those beads are. Having worked so hard to trick you into sin, would they really be eager to get you out? Just whose side are they on? Which God is it they really serve?

The US military's top transport commander says overland cargo routes through Pakistan must be reopened to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for the United States to complete its pullout from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

As Afghan fury over Koran burning by US forces continues, a serving US army officer has said publicly that the US top brass are not telling the truth.

Lt Col Daniel Davis, said there was an "absence of success on virtually every level", despite political reassurances led by Washington that all was well.

He was speaking after a suicide car bomb killed nine people at a military airport in eastern Afghanistan.

Thirty people have been killed in six days of violent anti-US demonstrations.

Getting caught burning a number of religious texts and then facing massive protests wasn’t exactly NATO’s finest hour in its 11 year occupation of Afghanistan, but Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen sees it as vindication for the troops.

Comparing the ongoing death toll among protests to the hypothetical death toll if NATO troops had decided to crush the dissent militarily, Rasmussen insisted NATO troops were “showing great restraint.”

Opium production in Asia is set to rise, the International Narcotics Control Board warned in its annual report published Tuesday.

Hamid Ghose, president of the Vienna-based UN agency, pointed to several factors which he said "could lead to even further increases in production beyond 2011".

"The combination of spreading opium poppy cultivation in provinces in Afghanistan, a substantial increase in the farm-gate price of opium, and planned decreases in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)," were the factors cited in the report.

At a briefing today, Pentagon Press Secretary George Little insisted that the military leadership and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta remain “fully committed” to the current US strategy of occupation in Afghanistan, and that the nationwide riots aren’t going to change anything.

“We’re not going to let the events of the past week, which are regrettable and unfortunate and tragic, influence the long-horizon view,” Little insisted, adding that the “fundamentals of our strategy remain sound.”

Not since the Nazis have I seen a book-burning as flagrant as the one that brought out protestors over the U.S. military burning Qurans in a pile of garbage at a US military base in Afghanistan.

It’s reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which paper breaks into flame. Stacks of books from different homes were burned in Bradbury’s novel in suburban streets, a community book-burn.

The US air base in Bagram has become the site of mass protests after it was revealed that Americans had destroyed copies of the Muslim holy book, which prompted the president to extend apologies to the Afghan people. As America prepares to pull the plug on its length military operation in Afghanistan, the Koran burning could escalate hostilities aimed at a country that has already, to many Afghans, overstayed their welcome.

Gingrich responded to the president’s attempt to calm anti-American sentiment by insisting that Obama is in the wrong for trying to make peace with people whose religion has been ridiculed by US troops. Americans official are calling the Koran incident inadvertent, and, nonetheless, Gingrich says there is no point in the president saying he’s sorry.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said President Obama “surrendered” Thursday when he apologized to the Afghan government for the burning of several Korans at an American military base near Kabul.

Referring to the burning of “radical Islamic material” that included the Korans, the former House speaker said the situation had been “blown into a huge incident by various fanatics in Afghanistan.”

Half a million Afghans displaced by war have been left homeless and struggling to survive because of government and international neglect, Amnesty International said Thursday.

Around 400 people join makeshift shelters around the country every day, Amnesty said in a report entitled “Fleeing war, finding misery”, based on three years of research.

The Afghan government estimates that more than 40 people froze to death this winter, the harshest in 15 years, with at least 28 children dying in camps around Kabul.

The government is “not only looking the other way but even preventing help from reaching them” in an attempt to avoid making the settlements permanent, Amnesty researcher Horia Mosaic said.

Instead of handing over the main detention center in Afghanistan to Kabul’s control, the U.S. is expanding the facility and keeping it under Washington’s control.

U.S. officials have promised for years to give jurisdiction for various U.S.-run prisons to the Afghan government, but after stalling time and time again those promises seem to have been abandoned. Up to $35 million has been allocated for the detention facility at Parwan on the outskirts of Bagram Air Field to expand it to house 2,000 detainees, according to Wired’s Danger Room.

The West is losing the heroin war in Afghanistan – ten years after Tony Blair pledged that wiping out the drug was one of the main reasons for invading the country.

Despite spending £18billion and a conflict which has so far cost the lives of almost 400 British troops, production of the class-A drug by Afghan farmers rose between 2001 and 2011 from just 185 tons to a staggering 5,800 tons.

It increased by 61 per cent last year alone.

The horrors of Syria, which Washington so loudly denounces, should not blind us to the fact that American policy in the Middle East is itself a reason for the turmoil throughout the region.

I did not like to hear our race called sheep, and said I did not think they were.

"Still, it is true, lamb," said Satan. "Look at you in war -- what mutton you are, and how ridiculous!"

"In war? How?"

The air strike took place last Wednesday near the village of Giawa, in eastern Kapisa province, and followed similar bombings that have stoked tension between the government and NATO over a civilian death toll that has risen annually for five years.

NATO aircraft and ground forces attacked insurgents on open ground in the Najrab district of Kapisa, said Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson, a spokesman for NATO's 130,000-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

"Following the engagement additional casualties were discovered and these casualties were young Afghans of varying ages," Jacobson told reporters.

Earlier this week, the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified report, as well as a classified report, offering his assessment of the decade-long war. That assessment is essentially that the war has been a disaster and the military's top brass has not leveled with the American public about just how badly it’s been going. "How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?" Davis boldly asks in an article summarizing his views in The Armed Forces Journal.

The Marine Corps on Thursday once again did damage control after a photograph surfaced of a sniper team in Afghanistan posing in front of a flag with a logo resembling that of the notorious Nazi SS — a special unit that murdered millions of Jews, gypsies and others.

They’ve got to sell it to you like it’s good, that’s why they call themselves ‘pro-democracy’ groups, but as this clip lays bare, so-called pro-democracy groups don’t always promote democracy.
*
In fact, stirring the pot in favor of the U.S. government is, more often than not, far from promoting democracy and more akin to stirring up trouble…

CIA drone strikes tend to be reported on a case-by-case basis. Yet it became clear to the Bureau that a number of specific tactics were being deployed. These included multiple attacks by drones on rescuers attempting to aid victims of previous strikes. There were also a number of credible reports of funerals and mourners being attacked by CIA drones.

With the aid of Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai in Peshawar, the Bureau has spent four months working with independent researchers in Waziristan seeking to validate the reports. Villagers, militants and local officials have been questioned, and attempts made to identify those killed in the strikes.

Findings

Words by Mark Twain

Illustrations by the United States Government

A dirty and deadly secret of the war in Afghanistan is that some of the so-called Taliban attacks on civilians have really been attacks aimed at NATO forces who drive unmarked civilian vehicles and wear “nonstandard uniforms,” which is Pentagon-speak for civilian clothes.

US President Barack Obama has confirmed that the United States has used non-UN-sanctioned CIA assassination drones to strike targets in the northwestern tribal belt of Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan.

As our roads crumble, and our schools close, and our quality of life collapses, still the attention of the nation's leaders remains focused on war and killing. They love it, They are entranced by it. The glory in it. Death excites them, and the more horrible it is, the more orgasmic they are to contemplate it! No amount of other people's money is too great to spend, No number of other people's children too many to sacrifice. There is nothing but greed in our leaders' domestic policy; their hearts are in their weapons! Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia; on and on and on, without pause, without satiation! In their minds they are gods incarnate, able to bring death to whole cities with the flick of a finger.

Do you see how it works now? Do you see why we are always at war? Do you understand that as long as private central bankers control the economies of nations that wars murdering millions of innocents are inevitable?

So here is the deal. Some of the people walking around Palestine, Gaza, and the West Bank are blood relatives of Jesus. Distant blood relatives, but still blood relatives. Given 2000 years, it is possible that the vast majority of present day Palestinians are remote relatives of Jesus.

Israel is killing them.

And YOU are paying for it, which means you share the guilt. YOU are paying for the weapons used to kill the modern day family of Jesus. The moment you sign that 1040 form, you sign a confession, admitting before all the world that you are an accessory in the murder.

Think you are going to get into heaven after an insult like that?

In Afghan fields the poppies grow.Between the crosses.Row on row.

So, who is the danger to world peace?

We all need to be Joe Wilson right now. We need to stand up and scream, "LIAR!" at every politician and every talking media moron that is pushing this war in Iran. And we need to keep dong it until they get the message that we will not be deceived any more.

Israel wants to send your kids off to die in Iran, and YOU are the only one that can stop them.

fter an Afghan soldier turned on French troops, killing four, Sarkozy has doubt about efficacy of NATO mission.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Friday that he was suspending training operations in Afghanistan after an Afghan soldier killed four French soldiers and wounded a dozen more in a shoot out.

France suspended its training operations in Afghanistan and threatened to withdraw its entire force from the country early, after an Afghan wearing an army uniform shot and killed four French troops Friday and wounded others.

U.S. Defense officials have confirmed that six Hawaii-based Marines died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan on Thursday.

According to officials, the six Kaneohe-based Marines were part of the Lucky Red Lions helicopter squadron HMH-363.

The unit deployed late last August to southern Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. They are set to return home in March.

don’t necessarily have much to do with fighting terrorism. See this, this and this.

They are, in reality, about oil.

And protecting Israel (and read the section entitled “Securing the Realm” here).

But as AFP reports today, there is another major motivation for the expanding wars:

The latest round of American sanctions are aimed at shutting down Iran’s central bank, a senior US official said Thursday, spelling out that intention directly for the first time.

“We do need to close down the Central Bank of Iran (CBI),” the official told reporters on condition of anonymity, while adding that the United States is moving quickly to implement the sanctions, signed into law last month.

A curious glance at the current crop of presidential candidates makes it clear that Ron Paul stands alone when it comes to the issue of US engagement in foreign wars. He stands with George Washington against foreign entanglements while the rest of the candidates stand with Teddy Roosevelt and the attempted creation of America’s first empire one hundred and twelve years ago.

Mark Twain responded to that effort by creating the Anti-imperialist society while he caustically satirized the effort in his depiction of the massacre of the Moros in the Philippines. Now we have more massacres, using drones instead of canons, on equally hapless civilians who are caught unawares or hiding from the wrath of America’s righteousness as we drive to bring virtue to a primitive world.

Revenue from opium production in Afghanistan soared by 133 percent last year to about $1.4 billion, or about one-tenth of the country's GDP, according to a United Nations report received Friday.

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said the price rise was due to a plant disease that wiped out much of the opium crop in 2010. Although yields returned to pre-blight levels in 2011, the prices have remained high, the survey said.

Definitive statistics are hard to obtain in Afghanistan, but the survey said the value of the crop may now be the equivalent of nine percent of the country's GDP.

"Nice one, the Semper Fi bunch, pissing on the dead Taliban, doncha think?

Idiots. Semper Fi my entire ass."

And, I then continued:

"But, then, upon immediate second thought, the second one bursting inside
the initial thought, came this:

But, hey -- this is what we expect them to do, figuratively -- they just
took it literally."

No, seriously, how much would you charge me to let me kill your kid? I'll make up a whole batch of comfortable lies about it so you can assuage your guilt when your kid comes home in a cheap box with a cheaper flag draped over it, but, c'mon, let's talk money here. How much?

No?

Ummm, okay, how much will you charge me to let someone else's kids get killed? Better deal, huh? You don't have to know them, and I'll try to make sure you don't have to see them.

...

A video posted on YouTube shows four combat Marines urinating on the corpses of three dead men in Afghanistan, a U.S. military official told NBC News on Wednesday.

'The dog returns to its vomit, and the sow returns to her mire/ And the burnt fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire." Kipling was right. Britain is out of Iraq and desperate to get out of Afghanistan. So why gird ourselves for a fight with Iran, a proud country of 75 million people with whom we cannot go to war without taking leave of our senses?

Afghanistan on Wednesday signed an oil deal with China which could earn the war-torn country $7 billion over 25 years.

Afghanistan’s first major oil exploration contract will see state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation develop three oil fields in the relatively peaceful north of the country along the Amu Darya river.

Under the deal, signed in Kabul by Afghan mining minister Waheedullah Shahrani and CNPC president Lu Gong Xun, Afghanistan will take 70 percent of the net profits, and the Chinese oil giant will pay 15 percent corporation tax.

"Our delegation found that a child who went up a tree to collect leaves for sheep was killed in the bombing by the NATO chopper without any pre-coordination with the Kandahar administration," Safi said. "The child's father rushed to the bombing site with other family members as another chopper of the international forces dropped other bombs," he added. The advisor said the child's father, Abdul Rahim, along with his four relatives, had all died immediately, while his daughter was injured. Three other children from the same village also died.

'Afghan civilians killed for no reason'

President Obama's order to withdraw 10,000 American troops from Afghanistan this year has been accomplished, a little more than a week before the year-end deadline, military officials said Thursday.

The drawdown is the first step in the plan to wind down the war, transition security to Afghan forces and end the combat role for international troops by the end of 2014.