British Envoy Says Mission in Afghanistan is Doomed, According to Leaked Memo
October 1, 2008: A leaked report that the British Ambassador in Kabul believes that US strategy is wrong and the war is as good as lost. The potentially explosive views were published by Le Canard Enchaîné, a respected French weekly, which said that they were direct quotations from a diplomatic cable written by François Fitou, the French Deputy Ambassador in Kabul."
Mr Fitou reported to President Sarkozy's office and his own Foreign Ministry that Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador, believed that "American strategy is destined to fail" in Afghanistan, according to the newspaper. "The current situation is bad. The security situation is getting worse. So is corruption and the Government has lost all trust. Our public statements should not delude us over the fact that the insurrection, while incapable of winning a military victory, nevertheless has the capacity to make life increasingly difficult, including in the capital. "The presence - especially the military presence - of the coalition is part of the problem, not the solution. The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime which would collapse without them. In doing so, they are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis (which, moreover, will probably be dramatic)." Sir Sherard, 53, was also quoted as saying that while Britain had no alternative to supporting the United States, the Americans should be told to change strategy. Reinforcing the military presence against the Taleban insurrection would be counter-productive, he said, according to Le Canard. "It would identify us even more clearly as an occupying force and it would multiply the number of targets (for the insurgents), The allied governments should start preparing public opinion to accept that the only realistic solution for Afghanistan was to be ruled by "an acceptable dictator". "In the short term we should dissuade the American presidential candidates from getting more bogged down in Afghanistan,
We should begin our disengagement from Afghanistan at once.
On Wednesday, September 24, right in the middle of the fight over
billions of taxpayer dollars slated to bail out Wall Street, the House
of Representatives passed a $612 billion defense authorization bill for
2009 without a murmur of public protest or any meaningful press comment at all. (The New York Times gave the matter only three short paragraphs buried in a story about another appropriations measure.)
The defense bill includes $68.6 billion to pursue the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, which is only a down payment on the full yearly cost of
these wars. (The rest will be raised through future supplementary
bills.) It also included a 3.9 percent pay raise for military personnel, and $5 billion in pork-barrel projects not even requested by the administration or the Secretary of Defense. It also fully funds the Pentagon's request for a radar site in the Czech Republic, a harebrained scheme sure to infuriate the Russians just as much as a Russian missile base in Cuba once infuriated us. The whole bill passed by a vote of 392-39 and will fly through the Senate, where a similar bill has already been approved.
We would better respect our armed forces by bringing the futile and
misbegotten wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to an end.
We should begin our disengagement from Afghanistan at once. We dislike the Taliban's fundamentalist religious values, but the Afghan public, with its desperate desire for a return of law and order and the curbing of corruption, knows that the Taliban is the only political force in the country that has ever brought the opium trade under control. The
Pakistanis and their effective army can defend their country from
Taliban domination
America's defense budget is now larger in inflation-adjusted dollars
than at any point since the end of World War II, and yet our Army has
fewer combat brigades than at any point in that period; our Navy has
fewer combat ships; and the Air Force has fewer combat aircraft. Our
major equipment inventories for these major forces are older on average
than any point since 1946--or in some cases, in our entire history.
What is the national debt of Israel?
Bank accounts of the Countries of the World.
China: $ 360,700,000,
Japan: $ 212,800,000,
Germany: $ 185,000,000,
Saudi Arabia: $ 100,800,000,
Russia: $ 76,600,000,000
Israel: $ 4,993,000,000
USA: $ -738,600,000,
United Kindom: $ -136,200,000,
Corporate-Controlle
A foundation populated by the giants of business, banking, government and military wants to "vet" websites and limit the spread of information that it says creates "conspiracy theories".
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) says it is worried about the way the web has been "used to spread disinformation"
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web, said in his BBC News interview:
"The internet needs a way to help people separate rumor from real science. On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues find a formula which is very believable. A conspiracy theory of sorts, and one which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging."
What is so deeply disturbing about this though is that he, along with his consortium members, believe they have a monopoly on neutral and truthful information; that somehow some "entity" should decide for you what's "bunkum" and what's not, rather than letting you make up your own mind.
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