[Austin-ghetto-list] Re: Emotions versus careful analysis bla bla

[telebob x]

Roger-
You make the mistake of thinking that merely because one is disposed to 
actually "do" something about what has happened, that the resulting acts 
will be "emotional" or "lashing out".  I think a lot of thought is going to 
go into how this worldgame is going to be played.  More money, intelligence, 
and committment are being put into play on this issue than we have seen in 
many years for anything.  And yes. we may agree W. is not the smartest prez 
we have had, but Rumsfeld and Powell et al are not stupid or overtly 
emotional people.  I do not necessarily see eye to eye with them, but I 
would never call them stupid. I think they are so far going about this 
process in a very orderly and reasoned way.

Did you know that almost every one of the perpetrators of the Munich 
Olympics massacres was captured and brought to justice? Do you think the 
world is now prepared to accept less than that for Bin Laden?

I am sorry that you feel that 'patriotism' is only a fashion. I think of it 
as an emotion of solidarity with people who are friends of mine and who 
share some basic values.  I do not like to see them dying, and I will not 
(emotionally at least) stand by and allow their needless deaths to go 
unanswered. You make it sound like 'patriotism' is some kind of nasty virus 
which we should be ashamed to have. I know the 'primitive' nature of the 
feeling, and it is a "feeling." But I also cry in movies, and I laugh at the 
funny parts. I think it has something to do with being human. "Loving" one's 
home is not a bad thing.

And, no, Bin Laden is not "the devil incarnate" but his ignorance, 
resentment and intolerance ARE.  He and his type must be brought to justice. 
Milosovec is in the dock, bin Laden is next. Too bad Pinochet got away.

I am not personally worried about us going in (militarily) to Afghanistan.  
The Taliban are not so tough  (see attached article by Micheal Rubin). Also, 
we should understand that the strongest fighters in Afghanistan (the 
Northern Alliance) are already on "our" side...or at least it appears we are 
going to help them, though we must be careful what kind of friends we make 
when we fight our enemies (see Blowback theories).  But I think we are 
making too much of how difficult it will be to extract Bin Laden from 
Afghanistan... I believe the Taliban are ready to give him up pretty quick, 
if there is something in it for them. (Particularly a promise of survival.) 
At the very least they are likely to tell us where he is and then stand back 
and let the "extraction teams" do their jobs.

Furthermore, if you do any reading on the Soviet war in Afghanistan...you 
will see the Russians pretty much defeated themselves and discredited 
themselves as a fighting force. So don't get so nervous about "the kids who 
can put together a rocket launcher before they can read." Wars (overt or 
covert)are won by those who have the desire to win. This time I think we 
("us"...uh, does that include you?) now have the determination born of anger 
and a desire to create a safer world tht will be necessary to shut this 
stuff down.  Remember it is a war of hearts first.

Finally, I have to tell you that I think the piece you sent positing the 
Iraqis as the possible culprits is really dumb, and that is all I will say.



telebob@hotmail.com
00 506 224 4858 Costa Rica
512 440 1862 Austin, TX



WHY THE TALIBAN ISN'T SO TOUGH
Weakest Link
by Michael Rubin

Post date 09.20.01 | Issue date 10.01.01

In the spring of 2000, I toured Afghanistan in an unusual way: freely. 
Normally, the Taliban tightly control foreign visitors. Journalists are 
quarantined in Kabul's former Inter-continental Hotel, forced to use 
government translators, and escorted by official guides. I was not. I had 
grown a beard and I can get by in Persian, which most Afghans understand. 
And one morning I simply checked out of the hotel, hopped in a taxi, and 
wandered for more than a week by myself, interviewing teachers, policemen, 
gravediggers, merchants, the unemployed, and the Taliban themselves. And I 
discovered something unexpected, something often overlooked in the 
strategizing of recent days: The Taliban are weak. They lack the military 
muscle, popular support, and internal cohesion to hold up under sustained 
attack.

Many Americans forget that the Taliban--unlike say, Saddam in 1990 or 
Milosevic in 1999--don't control their entire country. Despite the September 
9 assassination of its leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Northern 
Alliance--which controls a chunk of northeastern Afghanistan--remains a 
fierce foe. The Alliance shelled Kabul in the hours after the World Trade 
Center explosion. And it is common knowledge in Afghanistan that the 
Alliance--the only military force never to lose a battle to the 
Soviets--boasts the most experienced, and most loyal, troops in the country. 
In fact, fear of the Alliance is probably the chief reason the Taliban 
shelter Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden controls a military brigade of perhaps 
700 well-equipped fighters, and unlike most government troops, they can be 
relied on not to flee in the heat of battle.

One reason the government's troops aren't battle-tested is that, for the 
most part, the Taliban didn't take Afghanistan by force of arms. The 
movement did win one early battle, taking Kandahar in 1994, probably with 
the help of the Pakistani Interservice Intelligence (ISI) agency. But its 
subsequent victories resulted largely from co-opting the opposition: 
promising warlords, exhausted by years of fighting, positions in the new 
government if they turned over their territories without resistance. I was 
lecturing at Balkh University in Mazar-e Sharif in northern Afghanistan in 
May 1997 when the Taliban marched on the city. Up until I was evacuated, a 
few hours ahead of the Taliban troops, no shot had been fired. The Taliban 
simply bought the support of a neighboring military commander--reportedly 
promising he could keep his fiefdom so long as he adopted basic Taliban 
ideology and acknowledged the party's overall supremacy.

One reason the warlords proved so pliant is that the Taliban enjoyed 
widespread, popular support when they took over. During the civil war, the 
pitted and potholed road from Jalalabad to Kabul was the scene of 
extortions, rapes, and murders by more than a dozen warlords. And the 
Taliban promised to end the anarchy. As one merchant in Ghazni, a large town 
between Kabul and Kandahar, recalled, "We thought, ‘How bad could a bunch of 
religious students be?'"

But five years later, the Taliban have not ended the civil war, and they 
have not ensured security. Residents of Kabul told me that members of the 
Taliban burglarize homes at night and steal residents' life savings. Last 
year party guards allegedly cleaned out hundreds of thousands of dollars 
from locked stalls in the money changer's section of the Kabul bazaar. As a 
result, support for the movement among ordinary Afghans has waned 
dramatically.

As political disillusionment has grown, it has fueled ethnic resentment as 
well. Most of the Taliban are Pushtun, an ethnic group that makes up 38 
percent of Afghanistan and which is also well represented in Pakistan. And 
the party's radical interpretation of Islam is heavily influenced by the 
Pushtunwali, the austere Pushtun social code. By contrast, most residents of 
northern and western Afghanistan, as well as Kabul, speak a dialect of 
Persian. In the capital, the cultural tension is clear. Not only do Persian 
speakers have greater cultural ties to Iran and its partially pre-Islamic 
culture, but two centuries of interaction with Europeans have made Kabul a 
relatively cosmopolitan city. Partly as a result, the Taliban have singled 
out the capital for harsh treatment. One day while I was drinking tea with 
friends in a Kabul merchant's shop, the Taliban came roaring down the street 
in pickup trucks, ordering everyone to mosque. The shopkeeper calmly locked 
the door, closed the shades, and cursed the "Pakistanis." He explained that 
the local religious students are not bad--"they know how to respect their 
elders"--but the Pushtun Taliban are arrogant and hard to deal with.

Even the Taliban themselves are not united. Afghans in Kabul and Kandahar 
estimate that only 10 percent of the movement are hard-line followers of the 
group's spiritual leader, Mullah Omar (though this faction, with the 
dynamiting of the Buddhas at Bamiyan earlier this year, may be resurgent). 
Perhaps an additional 30 percent believe in Mullah Omar's message--a return 
to the austere Islam they think was practiced in the time of Mohammad--but 
realize that its implementation requires compromise, for instance, on the 
question of women's schooling. The rest of the Taliban, Afghans say, do not 
strongly support the regime, but have pledged loyalty, and grown beards, to 
keep their jobs. And that is within the party. The vast majority of Afghans 
are not members of the Taliban at all.

So it's not terribly surprising that, in the last couple of years, 
anti-government resistance has grown. In February 2000, well-armed locals 
rose up near Khost, a town in the southwestern Taliban heartland not far 
from the August 1998 U.S. cruise missile strike. The locals were upset by 
the Taliban's decision to appoint a governor who was foreign to the region, 
and the party quickly appointed a new candidate. Later that year the Taliban 
narrowly averted a similar uprising in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, by 
firing an overbearing governor. Opposition has traditionally been strongest 
in the north, but last year an opposition commander escaped from a Taliban 
prison and set up another pocket of resistance, reportedly in the 
southwestern province of Nimruz, near the Iranian border. When Mullah Omar 
preached last year in Kandahar that Afghanistan's ruinous drought was God's 
punishment for too little faith, many Afghans later commented that perhaps 
the drought was punishment for Mullah Omar.

In fact, much of the reason the Taliban stay afloat is external--in 
particular, support from Pakistan. In 2000 Afghanistan produced 
three-quarters of the world's opium, much of which it then exported into 
neighboring Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Iran. The smuggling of other 
commodities is also vital to the Taliban economy--for instance, hardwood 
harvested from northern Pakistan's old growth forests and destined for 
villas in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. As the wood travels through Afghanistan, 
the Taliban extract tolls. The Taliban also receive weapons and money from 
Pakistan's ISI agency, which hopes that by engaging the Taliban it can blunt 
Afghan support for ethnic separatism in Pakistan's predominantly Pushtun 
Northwest Frontier Province. Pakistan also fears that if it surrenders its 
influence in Afghanistan, regional rival Iran may fill the vacuum.

But although the government in Islamabad cannot fully control the ISI, its 
support for the Taliban looks set to substantially diminish. In the coming 
weeks, Pakistan will likely open its airspace to the United States, break 
off its relations with the Taliban, and at least make a show of sealing its 
border with Afghanistan. (While Pakistan sometimes complains that sealing 
such a long border is impossible, the country's campaign against wheat 
smuggling has proved otherwise: Islamabad's 1999 crackdown on the 
cross-border trade sent bread prices skyrocketing in Kabul, demonstrating 
that control of the rugged frontier is possible.)

Pakistan's moves will weaken the Taliban. And a massive U.S. bombardment 
could weaken it further--perhaps prompting the Northern Alliance to march on 
Kabul and to pressure former Afghan warlords and government officials, now 
in exile in Iran and Uzbekistan, to reopen new pockets of resistance in 
other parts of the country. In 1999, when the United States devastated 
Belgrade and humiliated Milosevic, the Serbs eventually ousted him. In 1991, 
when the United States devastated Baghdad and humiliated Saddam, the Kurds 
and Shiites rose up, and might have toppled the regime had the United States 
not abandoned them. Historical parallels, of course, are never perfect. But 
the Taliban are no stronger than those two previous U.S. foes; in fact, they 
are probably weaker. And, needless to say, toppling them would be every bit 
as worthwhile.

MICHAEL RUBIN is a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East 
Policy.





>From: Roger Baker <rcbaker@infohiwy.net>
>Reply-To: rcbaker@eden.infohwy.com
>To: austin-ghetto-list@pairlist.net
>Subject: [Austin-ghetto-list] Emotions versus careful analysis
>Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 13:37:59 -0500
>
>teleb:
>
>Well Roger…please do not put me merely “in the Bush camp”…. but do put
>me in
>the camp of those who do not believe that pacifist rhetoric or marching
>in a
>peace parade is going to help our situation.  Osama bin Laden wants us
>dead,
>including you, pal.  You may be willing to roll over for it, but I am not.
>
>The difference between these guys and the Viet Nam conflict is huge…so
>don’t
>get the knee-jerk, ‘blame America first’ shirt on too fast.  Muhammed
>Ali
>once said…”No Viet Cong ever attacked me.” Well that is not true of Al
>Quaida.  They have attacked you and me, and they killed more people on
>9/11
>than died at Normandy on D-Day.  That’s all the urging I need that you
>won’t
>be finding any peacenik tie-dye on my back..."
>
>
>        ***********************
>
>
>OK, those are indeed in tune with the kind of patriotic sentiments in
>lastest fashion nowadays. The first part of change is getting the
>subject's attention. The American public is now alert and focused and
>ready to follow Bush's military orders, possibly, now that a world
>depression is a real possibility. They're frightened.
>
>But will declaring bin Laden to be the devil incarnate plus lashing out
>at Afganistan militarily actually lead to anything good? As the
>following piece indicates, bin Laden might not even be the right target.
>If so, this troublesome fact will likely become known in the Arab world
>-- and the effect will not be welcome to Americans.
>
>But assuming that bin Laden was indeed the mastermind, the
>inadvisability of a military response in Afganistan, a land which
>defeated the nearby Soviets, has become a matter of such nearly
>universal comment within recent days that this argument fly on its own
>without my help.
>
>I have been reading a book by a British conservative, False dawn, by
>John Gray, highly recommended by billionaire financier George Soros. He
>spells out quite plausible reasons why the global economy is likely to
>splinter apart, without any help from oil shortages or an islamic Jehad 
>either.
>
>If the United States is going to come out of the current array of
>plausible problems looking good, it seems like we need to study the
>current big picture situation calmly and objectively before we take off
>on our new crusade. -- Roger
>
>

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp