Protection money. I.e., the madness of appeasement. Aethelred the Unready Alert: "Taleban tax: allied supply convoys pay their enemies for safe passage," by Tom Coghlan in the Times, December 12 (thanks to David):
The West is indirectly funding the insurgency in Afghanistan thanks to a system of payoffs to Taleban commanders who charge protection money to allow convoys of military supplies to reach Nato bases in the south of the country.Contracts to supply British bases and those of other Western forces with fuel, supplies and equipment are held by multinational companies.
However, the business of moving supplies from the Pakistani port of Karachi to British, US and other military contingents in the country is largely subcontracted to local trucking companies. These must run the gauntlet of the increasingly dangerous roads south of Kabul in convoys protected by hired gunmen from Afghan security companies.
The Times has learnt that it is in the outsourcing of convoys that payoffs amounting to millions of pounds, including money from British taxpayers, are given to the Taleban....
Read it all.
Asked whether his company paid money to Taleban commanders not to attack them, he said: “Everyone is hungry, everyone needs to eat. They are attacking the convoys because they have no jobs. They easily take money not to attack.” He said that until about 14 months ago, security companies had been able to protect convoys without paying. But since then, the attacks had become too severe not to pay groups controlling the route. Attacks on the Kandahar road have been an almost daily occurrence this year. On June 24 a 50-truck convoy of supplies was destroyed. Seven drivers were beheaded by the roadside. The situation now was so extreme that a rival company, working south of the city of Ghazni, had Taleban fighters to escort their convoys.
“I won't name the company, but they are from the Panjshir Valley [in north Afghanistan]. But they have a very good relation with the Taleban. The Taleban come and move with the convoy. They sit in the front vehicle of the convoy to ensure security,” said the company chief.
The Taleban are not the only ones making money from the trade; warlords, thieves, policemen and government officials are also taking a cut.
A transport company owner who runs convoys south on the notoriously dangerous Kabul to Kandahar highway said: “We pay taxes to both thieves and the Taleban to get our trucks through Ghazni province and there are several ways of paying. This goes to a very high level in the Afghan Government."
-- from the article above
Afghanistan is hopeless, and the more men, money, and materiel that is put in by the members of NATO, the more of a drain on Infidel resources, and attention, that might be better applied elsewhere, there will be. Do not spend money making Afghanistan a "better place" because what makes Afghanistan Afghanistan is, in the end, Islam itself. And until Islam is weakened -- and it cannot be weakened when the world's Infidels continue to offer huge amounts of aid that prevent even the dawning of dim recognition that Islam itself creates a climate in which despotism is natural, in which economic paralysis based on inshallah-fatalism is the order of the day, in which women of course will continue to be mistreated (build those schools for women, and those schools in the end will be burned down, and the women, or any who become prominent, will be killed, as so many have been). Put down the Infidel Man's Burden and recognize that unless and until the Camp of Islam is weakened, no progress, moral or mental or economic or political, will be made in Afghanistan, or Iraq, now reverting to coup d'etat type, as Maliki attempts to consolidate, figuring he's got what he can out of the Americans, and even now he can start to go after all his real or imagined domestic enemies.
How much more money will be wasted because our military leaders, and civilian leaders, will not still long enough to study enough, to assimilate, th understand, Islam, and then to connect the dots, from Karachi and Kandahar to Baghdad, all the way to London, Amsterdam, Madrid, Moscow, Paris, and of course New York, Washington, and Dearborn, Michigan. Connect the goddam dots. Get with it.
The story of America today seems to be the story of rule by those unwilling to perform Due Diligence. Not among the malefactors of great wealth, in the demurely-named "financial services industry," some of them now arrested, and some of them being handed hundreds of billions of government money without any attempt at clawbacks (a lovely word, and a splendid idea) or at capping executive pay the way it should be capped for all those on the -- let's face it -- government dole.
And there is a failure to do Due Diligence about anthropogenic climate change, about which there are things that might still be done, at this point only to make less horrendous what now cannot be avoided. But those who rule do not listen to those who understand.
And then there is the meaning, and menace, of Islam. It's a manageable problem. Just. But it has to be handled, the threat permanently contained, by those less sentimental, harder-headed, and much, much better informed -- about Islam, and about everything else.
Due diligence, damn it. Long-past-due diligence.
They way to supply an army is with trucks driven by soldiers and guarded by soldiers. If you don't wan't to spend enough to run a proper war, than don't go to war.
“Be what you would seem to be -- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”
Seems to me that the situation over there is about as confused as Alice was. Unfortunately, this is real and the west continues to pay money and worse, lives, in a foolhardy attempt to instill democracy among people that have no concept of equality, dignity or humanity.
"Pave paradise and put up a parking lot."
Ghazni province named after that thug Mohammad of Ghazni. Ask any Gujarati and they well tell you about this Mohammedan thug and robber who followed the foot steps of their thug in chief Mohammad. Ghazni built his coffers from robbing and looting Hindu temples which were basically unguarded. Mohammedans have no value for creativity and artistic treasures, like their sick ideology they destroy everything unislamic just like the Bhamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan. Thuggery, looting, rape, lies, murder, threats, misogyny, pedophilia is what they live for. Once in the west they being to do the same thing and parts of the west and other countries begin to deteriorate just like all Islamic countries into violence, misery and chaos.
Did the surge in Iraq work?
Some would argue that by the time the surge started, many Iraqi neighbourhoods had already been ethnically cleansed.
In Bagdad, many neighbourhoods have been made totally Sunni or Shia.
The strategy of General Petraus was partly to reinforce these neighbourhoods with Belfast-style peace walls.
Plus a certain amount of payments to militias to keep them quiet….call it Jizya if you want.
This relative stability may collapse when the Americans leave…. Or Iraq may become a proxy Iranian state.
But does anyone think my analysis of the surge is correct?
I would be interested to hear the opinion of JW readers, provided it is backed up by solid evidence.
Out sourcing military supply deliveries, especially to local Afghans, is lunacy...Allah must have arranged for it because no US military commander in his right mind would go for this.
What ever happened to 'air drops'?
This post from above is correct:
They way to supply an army is with trucks driven by soldiers and guarded by soldiers. If you don't wan't to spend enough to run a proper war, than don't go to war.
Strictly speaking, isn't this tribute rather than jizya? Remember the Barbary Wars: "Not one cent for tribute..."
Why not airdrop the vehicles in and the hell with Pakistan?
Perhaps this is a somewhat simplistic take on the event - but I was under the impression that the entire Western involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan was, in effect, merely some kind of Jizya or tribute? Is not the entire Western foreign aid budget to Islamic countries simply treated by them as Jizya?
Odysseus asks whether the surge in iraq worked. I am not familiar with the particulars regarding the situation on the ground in iraq both before and after the surge. But this much I do know: IED attacks on U.S. soldiers and the level of general mayhem both dropped at about the same time that bush toned down the rhetoric about iran's nuclear weapons program, stopped making overt threats, and seemed to acquiesce to the program, and hence to the development of the iranian nuclear bomb.
As for the "solid evidence" you require, I have none. But of course any such evidence would be a closely guarded secret. Perhaps when the bush years of misery finally end, iran, having nothing to lose and something to gain in humiliating bush even further (if that's possible), will publicly disclose the evidence once they have the bomb. My only evidence is the temporal coincidence of bush's apparent acceptance of the nuclear program and the relative peace that descended over iraq. The surge in troop levels was merely a cover story to provide a convenient explanation for this peace.