Pepe Escobar: Taliban set to burn the Reichstag?
Don't be misled byPepe Escobar's irreverence and wit. He has a sharp insight intothe Talibans and provides counter thoughts to Syed Saleem Shahzad's ~~~t
This correspondent almost bumped into him (Hekmatyar) in Kunar province in 2002 - to the astonishment of US troops on the prowl. Then the - who else - ISI helped him to regroup. Karzai offered him a not meaty enough piece of the action in Kabul. Pakistan released his brother from custody. China invited some of his associates to Beijing. So everybody loves him - Karzai, Zardari, the ISI, the House of Saud, China and, sooner or later, the Obama administration.
He may even get an offer he can't refuse. But there's a problem: he also wants the US and NATO out. And he's clever enough to try to fight a united Taliban flush with opium money and ultra- energized against the Petraeus/Gates counter-insurgency tactics.
By the way, Hekmatyar was the pioneer of refining heroin inside Afghanistan, instead of just taxing opium. So what happens next? Well, the usual. The united Pakistani Taliban is helping to prepare the massive spring offensive directed by ... Mullah Omar against the surging US plus NATO in Afghanistan.
For public consumption Obama insists "we have no interest or aspiration" to be in Afghanistan "over the long term". He obviously forgot to ask the Pentagon. Their acronym-infested bible - the famous FM 3-05.202 (Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Operations) spells counter-insurgency lasting forever. Retired Lieutenant General David Barno, the former top military man in Afghanistan, even said the US will stay until 2025. Plenty of time to either find any "good" Taliban to talk to or, Allah forbid, helplessly watch them conquer Berlin singing The Ride of the Pashtun with the Berlin Philharmonic.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
This correspondent almost bumped into him (Hekmatyar) in Kunar province in 2002 - to the astonishment of US troops on the prowl. Then the - who else - ISI helped him to regroup. Karzai offered him a not meaty enough piece of the action in Kabul. Pakistan released his brother from custody. China invited some of his associates to Beijing. So everybody loves him - Karzai, Zardari, the ISI, the House of Saud, China and, sooner or later, the Obama administration.
He may even get an offer he can't refuse. But there's a problem: he also wants the US and NATO out. And he's clever enough to try to fight a united Taliban flush with opium money and ultra- energized against the Petraeus/Gates counter-insurgency tactics.
By the way, Hekmatyar was the pioneer of refining heroin inside Afghanistan, instead of just taxing opium. So what happens next? Well, the usual. The united Pakistani Taliban is helping to prepare the massive spring offensive directed by ... Mullah Omar against the surging US plus NATO in Afghanistan.
For public consumption Obama insists "we have no interest or aspiration" to be in Afghanistan "over the long term". He obviously forgot to ask the Pentagon. Their acronym-infested bible - the famous FM 3-05.202 (Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Operations) spells counter-insurgency lasting forever. Retired Lieutenant General David Barno, the former top military man in Afghanistan, even said the US will stay until 2025. Plenty of time to either find any "good" Taliban to talk to or, Allah forbid, helplessly watch them conquer Berlin singing The Ride of the Pashtun with the Berlin Philharmonic.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
posted by temporal at 3/13/2009
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home