Bharat Rakshak

goutham wrote:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036789/vp/ ... 7#38411097


Brezinski being more paki than a paki. I cant believe him trying to distinguish between paki army and the ISI and essentially implicating India for all the mess in Afghanistan.

Engineer Nabeel is from Wardak and, according to Pajhwok News Agency, was born in 1968. He went to primary school in Kabul, then, after the Soviet invasion, to secondary school in exile in Peshawar. He also studied for a degree in engineering in Peshawar from a private university and then worked as an engineer with NGOs (reportedly in Peshawar and Jalalabad). By the late 1990s, he was working in Kabul for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), while Engineer Ibrahim was with UNHCR in Kandahar.

Is Nabeel up to the job? "He's certainly clever," was the conclusion of those AAN spoke to who knew him in the 1980s and 1990s. "He's not a bad man," was another comment on the man's character. He has received top-level security training from the Americans, has eight years of experience at the Palace and speaks the languages needed to deal not just with Afghans (Pashto and Dari), but also foreigners (English and Urdu). Crucially, he is a Karzai and Engineer Ibrahim partisan, promoted through their support. This is a very different background from Amrullah Saleh who was a protégé of Ahmad Shah Massoud and had risen up through the ranks of the Shura-e Nazar/Islamic State of Afghanistan intelligence agency. Indeed, one of Saleh's friends told to AAN, "President Karzai never trusted him regarding his personal security." Most importantly, the power behind the NDS throne -- as he is also at the NSC -- remains Engineer Ibrahim. Even though he apparently took a demotion, he has merely stepped back out of the limelight. This new appointment strengthens his hand considerably.

The man Nabeel will be working most closely with is his newly appointed deputy, General Hassamuddin Hassam, a Panjshiri who was working as a security advisor to the First Vice President, Marshal Fahim. Before that, Hassam was in charge of the military affairs department (riyasat-e ummur-e nezami) at the Ministry of Defense. He's from the pro-Fahim, rather than the pro-Dr Abdullah faction of Shura-e Nazar. General Hassam has replaced Qayyum Katawazai, who had only been in the job since April. Katawazai, who is from Paktika and is reportedly former PDPA, had been the governor of Paktika and before that, head of NDS in Kandahar and Ghazni (he had followed the now Minister of Borders and Tribal Affairs, Assadullah Khaled, as he moved about the country taking different governorships).

The appointment of Engineer Nabeel means that, apart from the four years of the Taliban regime, this is the first time in almost two decades that a Panjshiri from Shura-e Nazar has not been in charge of Afghanistan's intelligence agency.

President Barack Obama's pick to lead the U.S. military command overseeing operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere said on Tuesday he wanted top leaders of two major insurgent groups designated as terrorists.

The Quetta Shura and the Haqqani network oppose U.S. forces in Afghanistan and officially blacklisting their leaders could trigger punitive measures, like freezing assets. Advocates say it would also send a strong message to Pakistan, under pressure to go after insurgents inside its borders.

"Both those groups have engaged in terrorism and I believe the leaders of both groups should be placed on the State Department list," General James Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The more we try to do for our foreign protectorates, the more angry they get about what we try to do. As Congress passed $59 billion in additional war funding on Tuesday, not only are our wards not grateful, they’re disdainful.

Washington gave the Pakistanis billions, and, in return, they stabbed us in the back, pledging to fight the militants even as they secretly help the militants.

We keep getting played by people who are playing both sides.

The British Empire prided itself on discovering warrior races in places it conquered — Gurkhas, Sikhs, Pathans, as the Brits called Pashtuns. But why are they warrior cultures only until we need them to be warriors on our side? Then they’re untrainably lame, even when we spend $25 billion on building up the Afghan military and the National Police Force, dubbed “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight” by Newsweek.

As Thomas Barfield pointed out to me the other day, for most of its history Afghanistan has actually been the cradle of empires, not their grave. Barfield, an anthropologist at Boston University, has been studying Afghanistan since the early 1970s, and he has just published a book -- Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History -- that takes issue with the hoary stereotypes that continue to inform our understanding of the place.

One of those myths, for example, is that Afghanistan is inherently unconquerable thanks to the fierceness of its inhabitants and the formidable nature of its terrain. But this isn't at all borne out by the history. "Until 1840 Afghanistan was better known as a 'highway of conquest' rather than the 'graveyard of empires,'" Barfield points out. "For 2,500 years it was always part of somebody's empire, beginning with the Persian Empire in the fifth century B.C."

After the Persians it was Alexander the Great's turn. Some contend that Alexander met his match in the Afghans, since it was an Afghan archer who wounded him in the heel, ushering in a series of misfortunes that would end with the great conqueror's death. Ask anyone who believes this is why Greek coins keep cropping up in Afghan soil today -- in fact, Alexander's successors managed to keep the place under their control for another 200 years. Not too shabby, really. And there were plenty of empires that came after, thanks to Afghanistan's centrality to world trade in the era before European ocean fleets put an end to the Silk Road's transportation monopoly.

What about the popular accounts that insist, awe-struck, that even Genghis Khan was humbled by the Afghans? Poppycock, says Barfield. Genghis had "no trouble at all overrunning the place," and his descendants would build wide-ranging kingdoms using Afghanistan as a base. Timur (know to most of us as Tamerlane) ultimately shifted the capital of his empire from provincial Samarkand to cosmopolitan Herat, evidence of the role command over Afghanistan played in his calculations. Babur, who is buried in Kabul, used Afghanistan to launch his conquest of a sizable chunk of India and establish centuries of Muslim rule. Afghans seemed pretty happy to go along.

In fact, Afghan self-rule is a relatively recent invention in the full sweep of the country's history, dating to the middle of the 18th century -- and it took another century for Afghanistan to earn its reputation as an empire-beater. That's when the Afghans trounced a British invasion force, destroying all but one of 16,000 troops sent to Kabul to teach the Afghan rulers a lesson.

But context is everything. Everyone tends to forget what happened after the rout of the British: In 1842 they invaded again, defeating every Afghan army sent out against them. True, they didn't necessarily achieve their aim of preventing Tzarist Russia from encroaching on Central Asia; that had to wait for the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880), when they succeeded in occupying much of the country and forcing its rulers to accept a treaty giving the British a veto over future Afghan foreign policy. Then there's the fact that First Anglo-Afghan War preceded the end of the British Empire by more than a century. London, it should be noted, never intended to make Afghanistan part of its empire. Britain's foreign-policy aim, which it ultimately achieved, was to ensure that Afghanistan remained a buffer state outside the influence of imperial competitors, such as the Russians.

ramana wrote:The Brits started with the Scottish Highlanders who were declared as martial and and recruited into the British Army. After the pacification of the Highlanders the experiment was repeated elsewhere.

Lalmohan wrote:the talibs were reported to have disembowelled the 9 captured french troops from a couple of years ago, the tales of what they did to the russians are very lurid, so the seal dude is in big trouble

Pranav wrote:Latest Time magazine cover:



http://www.time.com/time/world/article/ ... 38,00.html

Pratyush wrote:
But look at the bright side, if the female sex is to be weakened in that society then there ability to propogate them selves is also weakened.

The Afghan Government estimates that the floods have left several thousand individuals homeless in northeast Kapisa, central Ghazni, Laghman, Nangarhar, Kunar, Logar, Khost and northern Parwan provinces, where at least 2,500 houses have been destroyed.

An estimated 80 people have reportedly died in the floods, and much of the arable land, where crops were planted, has been inundated. The destruction of roads and bridges, as well as security considerations hindered response to the flood emergency, according to UNICEF.

Pranav wrote:Latest Time magazine cover:



http://www.time.com/time/world/article/ ... 38,00.html

Rajesh wrote:I make a request to the whole world, SAVE the Afghan Women.

All those countries who are concerned with this mutilation by barbarians, should form a group, "Friends of the Afghan Women"! This group should be active in Afghanistan and neighboring countries.

A woman who has faced such treatment, should be considered eligible for asylum in one of the member countries, where they can be cared for by other Afghan women counselors. There is a need for setting up the needed humanitarian infrastructure for this project in Afghanistan.

The Taliban barbarians would learn their lesson, and start treating women with respect, when the gender ratio would strongly tilt towards males, and women become a minority through asylum-based emigration.

This is the only way to stop this human rights abuse!

RajeshA wrote:Didn't I read somewhere that Pakjabi women force their Afghan servants to have sex with them, in order to get children with green eyes!!!

The two sides “agreed to coordinate our policies more closely on Afghanistan,” Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao told journalists after talks in Moscow.

Afghanistan and Pakistan dominated Indo-Russian Foreign Ministry consultations on Monday with New Delhi seeking reassurances from Moscow that the two countries were on the same page on the AfPak situation, as the United States presses ahead with the accommodation of the Taliban in the Afghan power structures.

India and Russia “share similar views on the evolving situation in Afghanistan,” Ms. Rao said. “Our cooperation on Afghanistan is well institutionalised and we have reconfirmed our commitment to work jointly for peace and stability in that country.”

A Taliban suicide squad armed with bombs and rockets attacked the largest US military base in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday. . . NATO confirmed the incident but said its initial assessment showed that eight insurgents had died and two had been wounded, while four American soldiers were also hurt.

India and Iran on Friday rounded off extensive discussions on Afghanistan, which included an Indo-Iranian initiative to develop a new trading route to the land locked country and a “regional approach” to bringing peace and stability.

Talks between visiting Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Ali Fathollahi and senior Foreign Office officials here also touched on the possibility of a trilateral meeting between India, Iran and Afghanistan, to discuss how the situation can be stabilised.

The talks appear to have further coordinated Indian and Iranian positions on national reconciliation in Afghanistan. Both countries agreed that the Afghan Constitution would be the “basis and pillar for any action,” Mr. Fathollahi said at a press conference.

Both sides want to accommodate only those militia groups that accept the suzerainty of Kabul in governing Afghanistan.

The issue of modernisation of Iranian port of Chabar, to give a fillip to economic activity in Afghanistan was also discussed in detail. “This issue is of great importance to the Indian side as well. The details of cooperation with India were discussed today. In future there will be fundamental developments regarding the position of Chabar,” he noted.

India has proposed expanding the capacity of the port, currently working at its full handling capacity of 2.5 million tonnes of cargo per year from two active berths, by five times and linking it to the Iranian town of Bam, on Afghan border, with a railway line. From there goods are proposed to be taken to Afganistan through the Zaranj-Delaram road, built by India, which in turn links up with the garland highway connecting all major Afghan cities.

As Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao recently noted, the Zaranj-Delaram road has already revived the economy in Nimroz province of Afghanistan. She is confident that the link up with Chabar would enable it to gain from transit of goods to Central Asia, in addition to the local economy benefiting from access to a sea port.