In fact of the 121 districts cited as “key” to winning the war in the report, only 29 of those districts had populations seen as even sympathizing with the Karzai government.

One in every four combat soldiers quit the Afghan National Army (ANA) during the year ending in September, published data by the US Defense Department and the Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan reveals.
(...) As serious as the turnover rate was in 2009-2009, turnover in the first two or three years of the ANA was much worse. ANA recruitment and reenlistment figures show that 18,000 of the first 25,000 troops recruited from 2003 to 2005 deserted.

Most senior Afghan government officials and political figures are loath to discuss how Zahid Walid has won all these contracts -- at least publicly. On a recent visit to the Ministry of Commerce, I asked Noor Mohammed Wafa, the general director of oil products and liquid gas, about them. He promptly claimed that he had never even heard of the company. He then shot a glance at my Afghan assistant and said in Dari: "That's Marshal Fahim's company, isn't it?" When I asked whether the rules were different for powerful political figures -- as everyone in Kabul knows is the case -- Wafa politely denied any suggestion of favoritism in the awarding of import licenses.

"ghost wars," steve coll

central thesis: the trouble is, of course, that there really isn't one. the virtue of coll's book is its detail, no doubt--almost six hundred pages of dense narrative (sometimes tedious, sometimes thrilling) tracing the tumultuous relationship between the jihadis, the Saudis, the Pakistani gov't/ISI, and the Empire from the late 70s to the days before 9/11. in that sense, it is an invaluable reference book.

the pretext, though, that this intention to "story-tell"--to do no more than weave a narrative through events that haven't been told together--is somehow apolitical is laughable. and, in fact, as Coll moves closer and closer to 9/11, i found that the book became more and more insufferable. the latter part of the narrative concentrates almost entirely on the CIA's earnest attempts to assassinate Bin Laden in the run-up to 9/11. this resplendent, heroic mission is cast against the dark, seedy world of entangling alliances, diplomatic considerations, and even international law; the abiding impression is "if only"--if only the Pakistanis had been more attentive to terror, if only the Saudis weren't protectors of oil reserves and our strategic interests, if only the White House had let the CIA off the legal leash. and while that's instructive, i suppose, as an insight into the establishment, it's terribly difficult to wade through without becoming angry at Coll's willingness to distill the problem of terrorism through the framework of a Bond movie.

the book really lacks a serious willingness to come to terms with the aggressively offensive posture of Empire, which is--in a general sense--at the root of all the troubles documented here. there are harsh words reserved for the Pakistani intelligence and the Saudis, as there should be--but the book never really indicts the Americans for decades of more unforgivable forms of interference. nor, then, does it suggest that these threats to the homeland require a radical re-think of the premises of American foreign policy. this dovetails with another serious weakness of the nature of the narrative, I think, which is its obsessive focus with Bin Laden. while Coll, on reflection, would likely reject the silly notion that, were Bin Laden killed, America (and indeed, the world) would face no threat from these types of terrorists, reading his book imparts precisely this sort of urgency to the task of tackling UBL.

in sum, Coll's narrative really needs to be infused, again and again, with an appropriate political position. his current posture-less-ness merely masks the obvious fact that he is reading and telling this history through the red-white-and-blue prism of post-9/11 America.

--- important quotes/excerpts ---

(25): "because it had long cultivated ties to informal Islamic networks in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere, Jamaat-e-Islami found itself afloat during the 1970s on a swelling tide of what the French scholar Gilles Kepel would later term "petro dollar Islam"

(36): "by attacking the American embassy, Jamaat had far exceeded Zia's brief. Yet Zia felt he could not afford to repudiate his religious ally."

(40): uprising in Herat in 1979 led by "charismatic Afghan army captain named Ismail Khan"--air raids in response, killing "as many as twenty thousand of its own citizenry in Herat alone."

(41): on the murder of political prsioners in Kabul, "Nur Muhammad Taraki once told his KGB handlers... 'Lenin taught us to be merciless towards the enemies of the revolution and millions of people had to be eliminated in order to secure the victory of the October Revolution'"

(45): KGB report put together by Yuri Andropov for Brezhnev: "The Afghan revolution was struggling because of 'economic backwardness, the small size of the working class,' and the weakness of the local Communist Party, as well as the selfishness of its Afghan leaders"

(49): decision to invade Afghanistan taken by Politburo on November 26, 1979

(56): interesting paragraph here about changing composition of CIA officers in post-Vietnam America. before, Coll is arguing, predominated by the JFK, Ivy-league types. but now these folk sought a career in Wall Street, especially given the beating taken by the civil service in the aftermath of the debacles of the 60s. "Instead of prep school grduates came men like Gary Schroen, working-class midwesterners who had enlisted in the army when others their age were protesting the Vietnam War."

(58): Karachi as a key hub in weapons supplied to mujahideen--"Langley secretly purchased hundreds of thousands of the .303 rifles from Greece, India and elsewhere, and shipped them to Karachi."

(59): more Empire, not less--"But the United Stateds did not own a subcontinental empire, as the British had a century before. If the CIA wanted to pump more and better weapons into Afghanistan, it had to negotiate access to the Afghan frontier through the sovereign nation of Pakistan."

(60): "...as the mujahedin resistance grew and stiffened, the agency's passivity about who led the Afghan rebels--who got the most guns, the most money, the most power--helped ensure that Zia-ul-Haq's political and religious agenda in Afghanistan gradually became the CIA's own."

(66-67): details re: weapons trade

(73): "As much as any individual, Prince Turki became an architect of Afghanistan's destiny--and of American engagements with Islamic radicalism--in the two decades after 1979. He picked winners and losers among Afghan commanders, he funded Islamic revolutionaries across the Middle East, he created alliances among these movements, and he paid large subsidies to the Pakistan intelligence service, aiding its rise as a kind of shadow government" [though much of the later narrative of this book details how much of the Saudi money is private, channeled through a madrassa- and charity-led network.]

(76): the strategy "employed by the Saudi royal family throughout the twentieth century: Threatened by Islamic radicalism, they embraced it, hoping to retain control. The al-Sauds' claims to power on the Arabian peninsula were weak and grew largely from conquests made by allied jihadists. They now ruled the holiest shrines in worldwide Islam. There seemed to them no plausible politics but strict official religiosity..." [see also pg. 230, "The proper and legal outlet for Islamic activism, the royal family made clear, lay not inside the kingdom but abroad, in aid of the global umma, or community of muslim believers."]

(79): "Saudi Arabia's five-year government budget from 1969-1974 was $9.2 billion. During the next five years it was $142 billion."

(86): "In spy lexicon, each of the major intelligence agencies working the Afghan jihad--GID, ISI, and the CIA--began to "compartment" their work, even as all three collaborated with one another through formal liasons. Working together they purchased and shipped to the Afghan rebels tens of thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition. Separately they spied on one another and pursued independent political agendas." [SUMMARY OF AGENDAS: (1) Saudis needed to outsource threat of radical Islamism, prove to their own population their Islamist credentials--Abdurrab Rasal Sayyaf received bulk of aid, but also a very significant private, non-official component to Saudi involvement. (2) Pakistan needed an allied Pashtun presence, which would give it "strategic depth" and stave off "Pashtunistan" (remember Daud Khan's attachment to that project)--it cultivated Hekmatyar and then the Taliban. (3) US wanted to give the Soviet Union its vietnam--it gave indiscriminately, not thinking enough about the future, and split once the USSR fell. it re-entered, aggrieved, as UBL became much more of a threat.]

(92): profile of William Casey, CIA chief--"most influential man in Reagan administration after the President." Committed anti-communist, fueled by evangelical zeal that made him more sympathetic to Islamists than secularists.

(99): "Casey and Zia emphasized that Soviet ambitions were spatial. For them, Soviet strategy echoed the colonial era's scrambles among European powers for natural resources, shipping lanes, and continental footholds... Zia used...to drive home his belief that Moscow had invaded Afghanistan in order to push toward the Middle East's oil. He displayed a regional map and then pulled out a red triangular celluloid template to illustrate the Soviets' continuing southwestern thrust toward warm water ports and energy resources."

(108-114): Coll's primer on Afghanistan.

(114): after Daud expelled Hekmatyar, Massoud, Rabbani, "Pakistan embraced them... General Naseerullah Babar and Hekmatyar, both ethnic Pashtuns, soon became confidants, and together they hatched a plan for an uprising against Daoud in 1975. They drafted Massoud to sneak back into the Panjshir and start the revolt from there. He did so reluctantly, and the episonde ended badly. Massoud fled to Pakistan... The failed uprising exacerbated a split among the Afghan exiles... Hekmatyar created his own organization, Hezb-e-Islami, composed primarily of ethnic Pashtuns, and he forged close relations with the ISI. Massoud struck by Rabbani in Jamaat-e-Islami, which was made up mostly of ethnic Tajiks. When massoud secretely returned to the Panjshir Valley once again in 1978, however, he did so on his own. He no longer trusted the other Afghan leaders... [REMEMBER: this is another of the book's undoubted weaknesses--it's overly generous portrayal of Massoud as the "lost hope" of Afghanistan, another one of the "if onlys."]

(119): [Massoud called a truce in 1983; ISI used it to say he ought to be cut-off]. "Hekmatyar emerged as the most powerful of ISI's Pakistan-based mujahideen clients just as Charlie Wilson and Bill Casey, along with Prince Turki, suddenly poured hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new and more lethal supplies into ISI warehouses."

(140): The CIA's Counterterrorist center was born on February 1, 1986 [at this stage, though, remember, they were concerned with Secular terrorism: "Secular leftist groups carried out the most visible terrorist strikes in 1985 and 1986."]

(144): "By early 1986, Brigardier Mohammed Yousaf [Afghan Bureau ISI 1983-1987] had constructed a large and sophisticated serious infrastructure along the Afghan frontier. Between sixteen thousand and eighteen thousand fresh recruits passed through his camps and training courses each year."

(150): filming a Blackhawk down scene, replace US pilot with Soviet, and reaches a gleeful Ronald Reagan, who preferred video briefings.

(151): funding accelerating in the second half of the decade--numbers here

(152): another fact about the late 1980s--"But for the first time came complaints from some Afghan fighters to the CIA about a rising force in their jihad: Arab volunteers"

(156): ISI's use of Arab money and cooperation, in particular, to construct a border infrastructure to wage jihad (roads, caves, warehouses, and camps) that would be safe from Soviet bombardment.

(157): " 'It was largely Arab money that saved the system' recalled Brigadier Yousuf"

(158-160): November 1986, Gorbachev sets the goal of withdrawal; furious to discover that no negotiated settlement is really on the table, Coll is writing.

(164): Brigadier Yousuf retires, Hamid Gul comes in; CIA-ISI ties, at this point, begin to strain. Brigardier Januja, ardent Islamist, takes over Afghan bureau.

(165): "...the massive weight of private Saudi and Arab funding that tilted the field toward the Islamists--up to $25 million a month by Bearden's own estimate. Nor did they account for the intimate tactical and strategic partnerships between Pakistani intelligence and the Afghan Islamists, especially along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. By the late 1980s the ISI had effetively eliminated all the secular, leftist, and royalist political parties that had first formed when Afghan refugees fled communist rule."

(175): "Zia felt this was only Pakistan's due: 'We have earned the right to have a power which is very friendly toward us. We have taken risks as a front-line state, and we will not permit a return to the prewar situation, marked by a large Indian and Soviet influence and Afghan claims on our territory. The new power willb e really Islamic, a part of the Islamic renaissance which, you will see, will someday extend itself to the Soviet Muslims."

(182): "Majrooh's independent Afghan Information Center had reported in a survey that 70 percent of Afghan refugees supported exiled King Zahir Shah rather than any of the Peshawar-based mujahedin leaders such as Hekmatyar."

(194): details re: failed attack on Jalalabad, after Soviet withdrawal

(201): in 1989, about four thousand Arab volunteers in Afghanistan, organized under Sayyaf's leadership. "He was in turn heavily supported by Saudi intelligence and Gulf charities."

(204): Azzam, who had wanted to concentrate on Afghanistan, killed. Osama takes power of his network, morphs into Al-Qaeda.

(221): Kashmir erupts in 1989; "inspired by their success against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence officers announced to Bhutto that they were prepared to use the same methods of covert jihad to drive India out of Kashmir."

(222-223): Osama and the Gulf War--turning point.

(233): "Afghan poppy farmers supplied heroin labs nestled in cities and along the lawless Afghanistan-Pakistan border. By 1992 hundreds of tons of refined heroin flowed from these labs east through Karachi's port or north through the new overland routes of the Russian mafia, destined for European cities."

(236-237): Battle for Kabul begins. "The first Afghan war was over. The second had begun."

(250-251): Ramzi Yousef's letter: "For a terrorist sermon composed by a graduate of Arab jihad training camps in Afghanistan, his letter struck remarkably secular political themes."

(273): Yousef, on capture, "said he took no thrill from killing American citizens and felt guilty about the civilian deaths he had caused. But his conscience was overridden by the strength of his desire to stop the killing of Arabs by Israeli troops."

(283): The Taliban laying claim to the Durrani legacy--"Much of this Taliban narrative was undoubtedly rooted in fact even if credible eyewitnesses to the most mythologized events of 1994, such as the hanging of notorious rapists from a tank barrel, proved stubbornly elusive. In the end, however, the facts may have matterd less than the narrative's claims on the past. The Taliban assembled their story so that pashtuns could recognize it as a revival of old glory. The Taliban connected popular, rural Islamic values with a grassroots Durrani Pasthun tribal rising. They emerged at a moment when important wealthy Pashtun leaders around Kandahar hungered for a unifying cause... [The Taliban] preached for a reborn alliance of Islamic piety and Pashtun might."

(287): Hamid Karzai contributed $50,000 to the Taliban "as they began to organize around Kandahar."

(289-291): Bhutto and Babar--Bhutto wants to keep the army "happy," and project into Central Asia, as well. Babar and Javed Ashraf Qazi (new head of ISI) author a break with Hekmatyar.

(293): "'I was horrified to learn that they [the Taliban] had emerged literally from the villages' recalled Qazi"

(296): "As the months passed, it became clear to both Turki and Badeeb that Pakistani intelligence had decided to back the Taliban at Hekmatyar's expense. Saudi intelligence had no objection to this betrayal. Hekmatyar had angered Turki by denouncing Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War."

(298): "As the Taliban swept west from Kandahar in sophisticated military formations, the US embassy reported that 'their use of tanks and helicopters strongly suggested Pakistani tutelage or direct control.'"

(302): details of "stranded gas" in Turkmenistan--pipelines oriented towards Russia, despite "bitter battles over how they should be used." hence the appeal of the T-A-P.

(332-333): the story of Kabul's fall--Taliban gets monetary assistance from UBL, ISI, and others; Hekmatyar's feigend alliance with Massoud, Massoud's retreat into the Panjshir.

(342): This is the narrative offered in this book, re: the "radicalization" of the Taliban--"Bin Laden had his own plan: He would convert the Taliban to his cause"

(346): Hekmatyar sent into exile in Iran upon Kabul's fall.

(352-353): in comes George Tenet, the "unsung hero" of this tale, in a sense. apolitical and fiercely committed. BORING.

(358): no better example of this book's unquestioning acceptance of imperial premises. Tenet opposed Gulf War; a political miscalculation because the war didn't take many American lives (oh, but it did take thousands of Iraqi lives, as Coll acknowledges)

(364): UNOCAL, 1997--Taliban stands to earn as much as $100 million a year, from pipeline.

(366): Taliban take pictures with the Christmas Tree, in Miller's house.

(386): winter 1998, Bill Richardson visits Taliban.

(411-413): Clinton's attack on the Somalia plant. NOT ONE MENTION OF THE ACTUAL FALL-OUT (Coll speaks only about the political controversy it caused, presumably regrettable).

(440): allegations of ties between Bin Laden and ISI in late 90s, united by anti-Massoud and Kashmir.

(448): "The UAE royal family had also been targeted by the Clinton administration's "buy American" campaign to win overseas contracts for weapons manufacturers and other corporations. And Sheikh Zayed had come through in a very big way: In May 1998, in a deal partially smoothed by Clarke, the UAE had agreed to an $8 billion multiyear contract to buy 80 F-16 military jets."

(458): mentioning Uzbekistan, and its "jowly, secular ex-communist autocrat named Islam Karimov," who in 1999 arrested 2,000 Islamic activists after an attempt on his life.

(461-462): 1999, murder of Abdul Haq's family and Hamid Karzai's father announce the beginnings of Pashtun opposition to Mullah Omar.

(478): no need to overstate "Islamization"--"Every Pakistani general, liberal or religious, believed in the jihadists by 1999"

(505): "By 2000 there were still a few analysts at the State Departments' Intelligence Bureau who argued for patient engagement with the Taliban. But most of Clinton's Cabinet now accepted that Al Qaeda had hijacked Mullah Omar."

(522): Richard Clarke on the Northern Alliance: [They're] "not a very good group of people to begin with. They're drug runners. They're human rights abusers. They're an ethnic minority. It's just not something that you're going to build a national government around."

(555-556): The American "beard census" of the Pakistani military--"Only two or three generals at the rank of lieutenant general or higher kept beards in 2001. The rate was less than 10% among graduates of the elite officers' schools."

(561): Ahmed Shah Massoud's anti-Taliban alliance: Karzai among Kandahar's Durrani, Ismail Khan in western Afghanistan, Karim Khalili among the Shiites, Haji Qadir around Kunar province, and Aburrashid Dostum among the Uzbeks in the North.

(572): to Karzai, after intensive lobbying--"'You're basically asking for the overthrow of the Taliban,' an incredulous midlevel State Department officer told Qayum Karzai in one meeting that August. 'I'm not sure if our government is prepared to do that.'

(576): Ahmed Shah Massoud, Coll is arguing, was the exception to the rule that modern Afghanistan had produced no nationalists. this is a critical and very weak point in his narrative.

(578): after already clarifying the strategic interests behind Pakistan's cultivation of the jihadists, for some reason he argues that the State is beholden to Al Qaeda. this is just silly.

It wasn't always this way. When U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government in November 2001, Afghans celebrated the downfall of a reviled and discredited regime. "We felt like dancing in the streets," one Kabuli told me. As U.S.-backed forces marched into Kabul, the Afghan capital, remnants of the old Taliban regime split into three groups. The first, including many Kabul-based bureaucrats and functionaries, simply surrendered to the Americans; some even joined the Karzai government. The second, comprised of the movement's senior leadership, including its leader Mullah Omar, fled across the border into Pakistan, where they remain to this day. The third and largest group -- foot soldiers, local commanders, and provincial officials -- quietly melted into the landscape, returning to their farms and villages to wait and see which way the wind blew.

In a brazen attack, Taliban fighters assaulted the main prison in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Friday night, blowing up the mud walls, killing 15 guards and freeing around 1,200 inmates. Among the escapees were about 350 Taliban members, including commanders, would-be suicide bombers and assassins, said Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of Kandahar’s provincial council and a brother of President Hamid Karzai.
(...) The prison was recently the scene of unrest, with some 400 prisoners staging a hunger strike in May to protest their long detention without trial. Some had been held for as long as two years without trial, and some were being refused the right to appeal very harsh sentences, they said. More than 40 of the prisoners stitched their lips together with needle and thread to demonstrate their determination. Some 300 women who came to protest outside the prison at the time said their relatives inside had been picked up by NATO and American military sweeps and were innocent but nevertheless held without trial for months and even years. Local elders and government officials negotiated an end to the protest and promised better conditions and justice. Yet, the jailbreak is likely to prove popular with many local families.

interview with ahmed rashid:
Well, the US has given something like $11 billion since 9/11 to Pakistan. About 80 percent of that has gone directly to the military. And with that money, Pakistan has bought over $7 billion to $8 billion worth of arms. Most of those arms have been bought for the Indian border. They’re heavy item numbers like jet fighters and artillery and stuff like that, not items that you need to fight a counterinsurgency that we are facing right now on our western borders. And so, a lot of this money has been wasted. There’s been growing resentment in Pakistan about this.
(...) But still, Pakistan is very much a basket case. It still needs a lot of money. Its economy is in a very bad way. And the problem is that, you know, with this military regime we’ve had for the last nine years, there’s really been very little serious investment in infrastructure, in new industry, new exports which would gain foreign exchange for the country, reducing poverty levels, providing more education which is desperately needed in order to counter this Islamic school madrasah culture that has taken root now in Pakistan. None of these issues are being met by US aid. Most of the US aid, unfortunately, is going to the military.
(...) And then the Americans ask you, “Well, you know, why are Pakistanis anti-American?” Well, what do you expect them to be? I mean, it’s complete—nobody can understand this, why Negroponte is going up every few weeks. He’s been in Pakistan literally about three or four times this year. His main aim has been to shore up Musharraf and to tell the civilian government, “Don’t impeach him. Don’t sack him. Don’t do anything to harm him.” And the Pakistanis can’t understand this. Don’t the Americans have any other agenda with the elected government, to strengthen the elected government and make it more functionable?
(...) the main thesis of my book is that the US failed to carry out effective reconstruction of Afghanistan after 2001. And having done—having been—and Iraq, of course, was the main reason for that. US money and resources were all moved to Iraq. Afghanistan was put on standby, as it were, literally. Nothing was done for over three to four years. And in that time, because there was no investment in agriculture, some two-and-a-half million refugees came back to Afghanistan from neighboring countries, poverty was endemic, farmers went back to growing the crop which didn’t need investment—it didn’t need water, it didn’t need fertilizer—and that was the poppy crop. If there had been investment in agriculture, even minimal investment in agriculture, I think we could have avoided this crisis.
(...) McCain, on the other hand, has said absolutely nothing about Afghanistan, and clearly he can’t, because if he criticizes Afghanistan, he’s criticizing the performance of his own Republican Party. And even though—if you saw this visit just recently—Laura Bush went to Afghanistan a couple of days ago painting a very rosy picture of development and women going to school and all the rest of it, the fact is that one-third of the country is in the grip of an insurgency. So, clearly the Bush administration will be trying to paint Afghanistan as a major success story. We’ve had Condi Rice writing in Foreign Affairs this week about how US policy towards Pakistan is a major success story for the Bush administration. So if McCain is going to be following that line, that Pakistan and Afghanistan are big success stories, frankly, I don’t see anyone buying it. The American people will find it difficult to swallow, when you’ve got reports out today like the RAND Corporation report, which is saying just the opposite.
(...) the Taliban fought back, and the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban fought back and gave the Pakistan army a bloody nose, prompting large-scale desertions from these paramilitary forces who were made up of Pashtun tribesmen. The Pashtun is the main ethnic group in Afghanistan and on the other side of the border in Pakistan. The tribes are divided by an artificial border created by the British. And the Pashtuns are the main recruiting base for the Taliban, and they’re also the main recruiting base for these paramilitary forces. So you had cousin fighting cousin, cousin on the Taliban side, another cousin on the Pakistan army side. And so, what happened was an enormous demoralization within these Pakistani paramilitary forces, desertions. They took heavy casualties. Up to a thousand Pakistanis have been killed in these offensives that they’ve launched in the tribal areas.

afghanistan: fear, disillusion, and despair:
In the seventh year after the fall of the first incarnation of the Taliban, two Afghanistans exist. The first is defined by international effort in the country - civil and military - whose story is told in battles won and reconstruction projects brought successfully to fruition. It is largely told through the prism of foreigners, diplomats and soldiers, British, Canadian and American. It emphasises good news, most recently a claim - that would surprise Afghans - that foreign forces were ‘routing’ the Taliban. The other Afghanistan is largely ignored. This has 30 million people in whose name the war is being fought. Its themes are disappointment, bitterness and pessimism: a conviction that the vast intervention to rebuild the world’s fourth poorest country has benefited only a small handful, and Afghanistan is heading for a new crisis. As even some Western diplomats are beginning to acknowledge, the prevailing fear is that the war is in danger not of being lost or won in Helmand province, but in the perceptions of Afghans.
(...) What optimism that there was after the fall of the Taliban has largely dissipated. With 40 per cent unemployment, and faced with drought, rocketing food prices and vast amounts of aid money squandered, the international community’s promises to transform Afghanistan - six years on - ring increasingly hollow.
(...) The accumulating crisis is building around both the failure of governance and the Taliban’s renewed insurgency. Despite national elections in 2004 and 2005, democracy has failed to gain any real traction. Karzai’s Western-backed government, in trying to buy off rival warlords and factions who were once powerful, has created a charmed inner circle. The warlords have found themselves new jobs in the Interior Ministry or police, where they continue to protect drug traffickers. Some of those accused are among Karzai’s closest associates - including his brother Wali. When asked, the unemployed who gather at the roundabouts, the tribal leaders, and the women activists, the journalists and the housewives list the same complaints. Karzai, they say, is ‘weak’. Security is disintegrating. His cabinet is corrupt, the country is in danger again of descending into warlordism.
(...) A UN ‘accessibility’ map shows a very different picture from the official one: a nation sliced in two, much of it hostile for aid workers. Where it is red - classified ‘extreme’ - is where the opium poppies are. Much of the south is red. In the centre of this zone is Kandahar, the Taliban’s first capital in the south. At first glance it seems much like Kabul, a bustling and busy place. Small groups of men pray on the rooftop mosques, silhouetted against the sky. But Kandahar’s differences exist in a hidden geography, in such places as Loyah Wallah, the ‘Big Canal’ district, towards the city university where the Taliban discreetly hold sway. Officially the government says it controls the city. But local people tell a different story. And what people only fear in Kabul, in Kandahar exists as reality.
(...) It is left to a lorry driver from Lashkar Gah to say: ‘There are no jobs.’ And he complains that there is too little security despite the British base. ‘We are all thinking about who will be the next ruler of Afghanistan. If foreign troops go, the Taliban will come. Then there will be resistance and chaos, like there was before. For now there is no peace, no security, no central government. During the time of the Taliban I was left in peace. ‘There is an old Pashto proverb,’ he adds ruefully. ‘The old thieves were better than the new.’

fisk on "palestine":
How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.
(...) No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over?
(...) And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority".
(...) Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people
(...) All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province). We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal. We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair's recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose "democracy" is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the "war on terror". Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn't like our coverage of what he quaintly calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the "Middle East" would be to control.
(...) If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don't behave like us civilised Westerners.
(...) So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love.