Top Ten things that Could Derail Obama’s Afghanistan Plan

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment (Juancole.com)

1. Obama’s plan depends heavily on training 100,000 new soldiers and 100,000 new policemen over the next three years. It has taken 8 years to train the first 100,000 soldiers fairly well, and the same period for the Europeans to train a similar number of police badly. Can the pace really be more than doubled and quality results still obtained?

2. Obama’s plan assumes that there can be a truly national Afghan army. But the current one is disproportionately Tajik and signally lacks troops from the troubled Helmand and Qandahar provinces. Unless the ethnic tensions are eased, training a big army could well provoke an anti-Tajik backlash in Pashtun regions that feel occupied.

3. Obama’s goal to “break the Taliban’s momentum” may well fail. Only 20 percent of insurgencies in modern times are defeated in a decisive military manner.

Zelaya returns to Honduras

Mr Zelaya addressed his supporters from the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa

BBC News 9/22/09

It looks like the nightmare scenario for the coup leaders.

The Honduran authorities have imposed a round-the-clock curfew and shut down airports after the dramatic return of ousted President Manuel Zelaya.

Mr Zelaya has taken refuge in Brazil’s embassy in Tegucigalpa. Many of his supporters later gathered outside.

He said he had crossed mountains and rivers to return to the capital, where he said he was seeking dialogue.

In a televised address, interim leader Roberto Micheletti demanded that Brazil hand over Mr Zelaya to stand trial.

Mr Micheletti said Brazil would be held responsible for any violence.

“A call to the government of Brazil: respect the judicial order against Mr Zelaya and turn him in to Honduran authorities,” he said.

“The eyes of the world are on Brazil and Honduras.”

Brazil’s Foreign Minister, Celso Amorim, warned that any threat to Mr Zelaya or the Brazilian embassy would be a grave breach of international law.

Meet the Afghan Army – Is It a Figment of Washington’s Imagination?

By Ann Jones 9/20/09

The big Afghanistan debate in Washington is not over whether more troops are needed, but just who they should be: Americans or Afghans — Us or Them. Having just spent time in Afghanistan seeing how things stand, I wouldn’t bet on Them.

Frankly, I wouldn’t bet on Us either. In eight years, American troops have worn out their welcome. Their very presence now incites opposition, but that’s another story. It’s Them — the Afghans — I want to talk about.

Afghans are Afghans. They have their own history, their own culture, their own habitual ways of thinking and behaving, all complicated by a modern experience of decades of war, displacement, abject poverty, and incessant meddling by foreign governments near and far — of which the United States has been the most powerful and persistent. Afghans do not think or act like Americans. Yet Americans in power refuse to grasp that inconvenient point.

U.S. leads world in foreign weapons sales: report

By Jasmin Melvin Sep 6, 2009 Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States accounted for more than two-thirds of foreign weapons sales in 2008, a year in which global sales were at a three-year low, The New York Times reported on Sunday.Citing a congressional study released on Friday, the Times said the United States was involved in 68.4 percent of the global sales of arms.
U.S. weapons sales jumped nearly 50 percent in 2008 despite the global economic recession to $37.8 billion from $25.4 billion the year before.

Check out the trailer for Oliver Stone’s new movie – South of the Border

Ruling Conservatives Crushed In Historic Japan Election

Yukio Hatoyama, leader of Japan's main opposition Democratic Party of Japan,

ERIC TALMADGE, Huffington Post, 8/30/2009

TOKYO — Japan’s opposition swept to a historic victory in elections Sunday, crushing the ruling conservative party that has run the country for most of the postwar era and assuming the daunting task of pulling the economy out of its worst slump since World War II.

A grim-looking Prime Minister Taro Aso conceded defeat just a couple hours after polls had closed, suggesting he would quit as president of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled Japan for all but 11 months since 1955.

“The results are very severe,” Aso said. “There has been a deep dissatisfaction with our party.”

Unemployment and deflation – and an aging, shrinking population – have left families fearful of what the future holds.

Fed up with the LDP, voters turned overwhelmingly to the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, which ran a populist-leaning platform with plans for cash handouts to families with children and expanding the social safety net.

“This is a victory for the people,” said Yukio Hatoyama, leader of the Democrats and almost certainly Japan’s next prime minister. “We want to build a new government that hears the voices of the nation.”

SIREL Interview with Manuel Zelaya Rosales

At the end of a press conference by the constitutional president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya Rosales, at his country’s embassy in Managua, we caught up with Zelaya in his car, as he was leaving with his chief of staff, Enrique Flores Lanza, on their way to a meeting with international media. President Zelaya, who in just a few days or even hours, will again attempt the journey back to Honduras, agreed to give SIREL an exclusive interview.

-You have announced your intention of going back to Honduras at any cost. Is that a final decision?

-It’s not something aimed at destabilizing the country. On the contrary, it’s a way to stabilize the country. We believe this is the best path towards starting a national dialogue that will solve the conflict and will put an end to the repression that the Honduran people are suffering.

-A dialogue with whom?

-With the people, because in a democracy it is the people who rule. The sectors in power that have taken up arms are repressive groups and must surrender the government to the people, who did not entrust them with that power.

-What has pained you most of this coup staged against you and your government staff?

-It pains me to see that my country is being torn apart, that society is suffering, that everything we’ve accomplished thanks to the efforts of many generations is now being threatened at gunpoint.

-The de facto government has been completely isolated by the international community and is facing a strong and unyielding resistance on the home front led by grassroots movements. But it continues firmly entrenched in an intransigent attitude. Have you asked yourself if this is just recklessness on its part, or if it is confident it has support from sectors abroad?

-They’re like beasts in the wild, desperately holding on to their prey. To them Honduras is like their own personal hacienda. They’re a group of ten families who want to consolidate their economic benefits and privileges. But they’re acting on baseless fears, because no one is threatening to touch their interests. Still, they see democratic development as harmful to them and they can’t stand democracy.

Support democracy in Honduras

Anti-coup protesters in Honduras face lines of cops, troops

 By Gary Grass and Babette Grunow
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 17, 2009
http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/50973492.html

After midnight on June 28, a masked squad ordered by Gen. Romeo Velazquez stormed with guns ablaze the residence of Honduras’ populist president, Manuel Zelaya, and sent him – still bedclothed – into exile. The country’s Supreme Court and elite institutions, dominated by a few wealthy families, cheered.

Millions of ordinary Hondurans reject the coup. A plurality rejected it in a CID-Gallup poll last week, and mass demonstrations denounced it. They resist, despite the government suspending the right to protest, meeting rallies with violence, killing at least five, arresting hundreds and charging many with sedition.

The full scale of the crackdown is unknown. The coup government has closed independent media outlets and arrested, expelled and killed journalists. The country is not awash in U.S. videocameras, and its protests are not centered within the middle-class Twitterverse. Visiting Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu called Honduras a “dark box” isolated from neutral information.

The Honduras Coup: Is Obama Innocent?

By Michael Parenti, July 8, 2009, CommonDreams.org

Is President Obama innocent of the events occurring in Honduras, specifically the coup launched by the Honduran military resulting in the abduction and forced deportation of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya? Obama has denounced the coup and demanded that the rules of democracy be honored. Still, several troubling questions remain.

First, almost all the senior Honduran military officers active in the coup are graduates of the Pentagon’s School of the Americas (known to many of us as “School of the Assassins”). The Honduran military is trained, advised, equipped, indoctrinated, and financed by the United States national security state. The generals would never have dared to move without tacit consent from the White House or the Pentagon and CIA.

Second, if Obama was not directly involved, then he should be faulted for having no firm command over those US operatives who were. The US military must have known about the plot and US military intelligence must have known and must have reported it back to Washington. Why did Obama’s people who had communicated with the coup leaders fail to blow the whistle on them? Why did they not expose and denounce the plot, thereby possibly foiling the entire venture? Instead the US kept quiet about it, a silence that in effect, even if not in intent, served as an act of complicity.

U.S. Faces Resentment in Afghan Region

An Afghan village elder rages and points his walking stick at U.S. soldiers after a recent raid killed 16 civilians in his village

They look at the coalition as the enemy, because they have not seen anything good from them in seven or eight years

CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times, July 2, 2009

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — The mood of the Afghan people has tipped into a popular revolt in some parts of southern Afghanistan, presenting incoming American forces with an even harder job than expected in reversing military losses to the Taliban and winning over the population.

Villagers in some districts have taken up arms against foreign troops to protect their homes or in anger after losing relatives in airstrikes, several community representatives interviewed said. Others have been moved to join the insurgents out of poverty or simply because the Taliban’s influence is so pervasive here.

Honduras: The Other 9/11 Has Returned To Stalk Latin America

The ugliest face of the Latin American oligarchy is now standing alone against the world, showing its contempt for democracy and for its own people.

Johann Hari
London Independent, July 2, 2009

The ghost of the other, deadlier 9/11 has returned to stalk Latin America. On Sunday morning, a battalion of soldiers rammed their way into the Presidential Palace in Honduras. They surrounded the bed where the democratically elected President, Manuel Zelaya, was sleeping, and jabbed their machine guns to his chest. They ordered him to get up and marched him onto a military plane. They dumped him in his pyjamas on a landing strip in Costa Rica and told him never to return to the country that freely chose him as their head of state.

Back home, the generals locked down the phone networks, the internet, and international TV channels, and announced their people were in charge now. Only sweet, empty music plays on the radio. Government ministers have been arrested and beaten. If you leave your home after 9pm, the population have been told, you risk being shot. Tanks and tear-gas are ranged against the protesters who have thronged onto the streets.

For the people of Latin America, this is a replay of their September 11th. On that day in Chile in 1973, Salvador Allende – a peaceful democratic socialist who was steadily redistributing wealth to the poor majority – was bombed from office and forced to commit suicide. He was replaced by a self-described “fascist”, General Augusto Pinochet, who went on to “disappear” tens of thousands of innocent people. The coup was plotted in Washington D.C., by Henry Kissinger.