It is worth reading analysis of Afghanistan after US withdrawal. It is in two Parts and link to each part is at the bottom of excerpts of each part. ( F. Sheikh )

“Seen from Kabul, there are good reasons to fear that the US will negotiate some sort of deal with the Taliban and quit Afghanistan entirely. According to unofficial statements from the White House reported in The New York Times, the option of complete withdrawal is one that President Obama is now actively considering. This would be in stark contrast to what had been hitherto planned—keeping bases, aircraft, drones, special forces, and advisers in place until at least 2024 to support the Afghan National Army and continue strikes against Al Qaeda targets in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Until now, the total withdrawal option has been ruled out largely out of the fear that it would repeat the experience of South Vietnam following the complete US pull out in 1973—where the local state left behind lasted barely two years before North Vietnamese victory. And of course, the latest suggestions from the White House are by no means an indication that the existing strategy will definitely be changed. Indeed, US officials have made it clear that floating the idea of total withdrawal is in significant part an attempt to put pressure on the Karzai administration to engage in the American-led peace effort. It also appears to be a strong warning to Karzai not to attempt to rewrite the Afghan constitution and somehow stay in power after his second term expires.”

“But the prospect of Afghanistan becoming an Indian client state is also the greatest nightmare for Pakistan, the other regional power whose strategies and interests are critical to any Afghan peace process. If the US pulls out completely and India pours in arms, money, and advisers to prop up the Afghan National Army (ANA), then it seems certain that Pakistan would ramp up its support for the Taliban accordingly.”

“The desire in parts of the Indian security establishment to play a much bigger part in Afghanistan is owed in part to a belief that Pakistan’s Afghan strategy remains that of the 1990s: to back the Afghan Taliban to complete victory, in order to create a Pakistani client state. The real picture however has become much more complicated, precisely as a result of the catastrophic failure of Pakistan’s earlier strategy, and the Islamist revolt now unfolding within Pakistan itself”

Part II

What Pakistan  Wants?

To understand Pakistan’s position in the conundrum of Afghanistan’s future, it is necessary to understand that in certain respects, Pakistan and Afghanistan have long blended into each other, via the population of around 35 million Pashtuns that straddles both sides of the border between them (a border drawn by the British which Afghanistan has never recognized). Pashtuns have always regarded themselves as the core of Afghanistan, where they form a plurality of the population (Afghan is indeed simply the old Farsi word for Pashtun); yet around two thirds of Pashtuns actually live in Pakistan, where they form the backbone of the present Islamist revolt against the state.

In the 1980s, the US encouraged this merger of Afghan and Pakistani Pashtun sentiment in order to strengthen support of Pakistani Pashtuns for the Afghan Mujahedin. In the 2000s, this came back to haunt America, since most Pakistani Pashtuns with whom I have spoken over the years regard the Taliban fight against the US and its Afghan allies in very much the same light that they regarded the Mujahedin fight against the USSR and its Afghan allies.

Pakistan’s Afghan policy today is essentially an attempt to reconcile the following perceptions and imperatives:

• The need to appease Pakistani Pashtun opinion and prevent more Pashtuns joining the Islamist revolt within Pakistan;

• The fear that if the Afghan Taliban come to full power, they will support the Pakistani Taliban and try to recreate the old Afghan dream of recovering the Pashtun irredenta—the Pashtun areas of Pakistan—but this time led by the Taliban and under the banner of jihad;

• The belief that the Taliban are by far the most powerful force among Afghan Pashtuns;

• The belief that Pakistan needs powerful allies within Afghanistan to combat Indian influence and that the Afghan Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami are the only ones available;

• The assumption that sooner or later the present US-backed state and army in Afghanistan will break down, most probably along ethnic lines;

• Pakistan’s economic dependence on the USA and on the World Bank and IMF;

• Pakistan’s strategic dependence on China, which regards Pakistan as an important ally, but which has also acquired potentially very large economic assets of its own in Afghanistan, and which certainly does not favor Islamist extremism.

If as a result of all this Pakistani strategy has often looked confused, contradictory, ambiguous, and two-faced—well, it would be, wouldn’t it?

Link to Part I

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jul/14/afghanistan-war-after-war/

Link to Part II

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jul/15/Afghanistan-what-pakistan-wants/

A worth reading article. Security Industrial Complex has become a big business and it needs hysteria and fear of terrorism to survive. James Madison said ” If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy”  Same is true about our Military industrial complex. Without a war, this large complex cannot survive. Dwight Eisenhower said “”In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”  Have we already reached that point?  (F. Sheikh)

Excerpt from article;

On Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano resigned to take up a post running California’s university system. With her departure, there are now 15 vacant positions at the top of the department. That suggests it would be a particularly humane moment to shut the whole thing down. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was a panicked reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks. It owes its continued existence to a vastly exaggerated assessment of the threat of terrorism. The department is also responsible for some of the least cost-effective spending in the U.S. government. It’s time to admit that creating it was a mistake.

In 2002 the George W. Bush administration presented a budget request for massively increased spending on homeland security, at that point coordinated out of the Office of Homeland Security. “A new wave of terrorism, involving new weapons, looms in America’s future,” the White House said. “It is a challenge unlike any ever faced by our nation.” In proposing a new cabinet-level agency, Bush said, “The changing nature of the threats facing America requires a new government structure to protect against invisible enemies that can strike with a wide variety of weapons.” Because of “experience gained since Sept. 11 and new information we have learned about our enemies while fighting a war,” the president concluded that “our nation needs a more unified homeland security structure.”

More than a decade later, it’s increasingly clear that the danger to Americans posed by terrorism remains smaller than that of myriad other threats, from infectious disease to gun violence to drunk driving. Even in 2001, considerably more Americans died of drowning than from terror attacks. Since then, the odds of an American beingkilled in a terrorist attack in the U.S. or abroad have been about one in 20 million. The Boston marathon bombing was evil and tragic, but it’s worth comparing the three deaths in that attack to a list of the number of people in the U.S. killed by guns since the December 2012 massacre in Newtown, Conn., which stood at 6,078 as of June.

This low risk isn’t evidence that homeland security spending has worked: It’s evidence that the terror threat was never as great as we thought. A rather pathetic Heritage Foundation list of 50 terrorist plots against the U.S. foiled since Sept. 11 includes such incidents as a plan to use a blowtorch to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and “allegedly lying about attending a terrorist training center”—but nothing involving weapons of mass destruction. Further, these are alleged plots. The list of plausible plots, let alone actual crimes, is considerably smaller. From 2005 to 2010, federal attorneys declined(PDF) to bring any charges against 67 percent of alleged terrorism-related cases referred to them from law enforcement agencies.

That hasn’t stopped a bonanza of spending. Homeland security agencies got about $20 billion in the 2002 budget. That rose to about $60 billion (PDF) this year. Given that spending is motivated by such an elusive threat, it’s no surprise a lot is wasted. The grants made by DHS to states and cities to improve preparedness are notorious for being distributed with little attention to either risk or effectiveness. As an example, economist Veronique de Rugy has highlighted the $557,400 given to North Pole, Alaska, (population 1,570), for homeland security rescue and communications equipment. “If power companies invested in infrastructure the way DHS and Congress fight terrorism, a New Yorker wouldn’t be able to run a hair dryer, but everyone in Bozeman, Mont., could light up a stadium,” de Rugy complained.

Or take the U.S. Coast Guard—which recently got in hot water with the U.S. Government Accountability Office because it was 10 years into a 25-year, $24 billion overhaul to build or upgrade its 250 vessels, had spent $7 billion on the project, and had only two new ships in the water to show for it. Reassuringly, the head of the Coast Guard admitted, “We weren’t prepared to start spending this money and supervising a project this big. Click link for full article;

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-15/the-case-for-abolishing-the-dhs

Shared by Junaid Dar

I was just reading the following article I thought it would be good to share with our TF and get some comments/feedback on the situation.  Can you please share. Thanks Junaid.

*** To The Gradualist Brotherhood —
Will You Do Things a Better Way? ***
Soon, the Muslim Brotherhood will
come to the same realization as others Gradualists (in the revival of Islam)
like the FIS (Algeria) and the Rafah Party (Turkey). One does not simply use
the post-colonial political system in Muslim countries against itself. It is
backed up, and underwritten, by the very foreign powers who created it as a
cage over us.
This is like walking into a Casino,
and using your money to play the gambling games, hoping that you’ll win enough
to buy the casino, and close it down. In reality, you’ve just wasted your money
and made the casino richer, because ‘The House Always Wins’.

The U.S. government realizes that
‘Islamist’ parties are popular – representing the people’s desire for a Islamic
system. However, they realized that though they cannot prevent such parties
coming to power now, the situation is not outside some means of control.
Namely, the U.S. merely has to allow these parties to get into a very limited
role of power, then ‘shut all the doors’ on them to make them appear to fail in
the people’s eyes. Since Morsi wasn’t willing, or able, to really change the
system – he and his party will be publicly hanged by it (as a warning to others).
Now the Muslim Brotherhood cries
foul, and demands that people respect democracy (i.e. that Morsi is an
legitimate elected leader). But they don’t understand why Liberals use
Democracy. Liberalism doesn’t exist to serve Democracy. Democracy exists to serve
Liberalism. This is why the U.S. constitution was created, because the founding
fathers of America didn’t trust the rule of the majority. The Constitution
defines the essential laws and rights, and people only elect leaders to
implement that Liberal constitution, or make laws WITHIN its limits [btw the
American public was not given a choice on the US constitution]. Does Morsi not
see that if Democracy doesn’t produce the result the Liberals want, they have
no problem with becoming violent to protect Liberalism, and ignoring democracy.
This fact should have been apparent from anyone who studied history.
The Brotherhood should have changed
the system, not just played games within it, hoping the system would allow them
to overturn it. Morsi tried to appease the USA and ISRAEL by shutting off Gaza
ever more than Mubarak did. He begged for foreign interest loans – even though
he should of confiscated the ill-gotten property of the Egyptian Military
industrial complex, and re-distributed to the poor. He could have changed the
economy of cotton production (for export to Western countries) into food
production for his own people. He tried to appease the Secularists by making
Egypt fall well short of a Islamic State – content to apply a Islamic
flavoring. But now he’ll find out that the two billion dollars the USA pays to
the mercenary Egyptian Generals, is not without strings. And the Egyptian
Military are the real kingmakers of Egypt – and they were only waiting until
the people turned against the Muslim Brotherhood, to depose them, or at least
render their power negligible in a ‘unity government’ (composed of the
pro-secular but electoral losers).
So instead of pushing towards the
goal of the re-establishment of Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood were the
unwitting pawns of a game designed to make Islamic movements look incompetent –
pushing back the work for revival back by decades.
However, now is not the time for
people to say ‘I told you so’ to the Gradualists, but to say ‘now, will you do
things a better way?’
It’s time for us to liberate our
‘kingmakers’ – then we will be free to submit our nations to Al Maalik (SWT).
[By Abdullah Al Andalusi]