Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Original Mad Dog who wrote (5259)	10/15/2001 1:00:07 PM
From: HG	Respond to of 281500

Indian troops shell Pak positions, destroy 11 Pak posts PTI Jammu, October 15 hindustantimes.com Indian troops on Monday night shelled Pakistani army positions breaking a ten-month lull, destroying at least 11 Pakistani posts, bunkers and fortifications across the Line of Control in Mendhar and Akhnoor sectors of Jammu and Kashmir, a Defence spokesman said here. *It gets more interesting !!!! I dunno what it means but I'd say its one those irritants....an armyman had an argument with his wife and decided to fire. Episodes like these keep happening on a daily basis and often go unreported. But it may well be symbolic of independent thinking on the eve of a visit by US officials. Either way, just a tantrum, nothing significant IMO. At least I hope so.

To: Original Mad Dog who wrote (5259)	10/15/2001 1:31:54 PM
From: HG	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

US war: a moral and political disaster dawn.com By Nick Cohen LONDON: The bombing of Afghanistan must stop. To say so is not to appease mass murderers by pretending they are misunderstood fighters against imperialism. You can think, that the sum of human happiness would inflate exponentially if the Taliban and their Arab allies were driven from power. You can believe that the atrocities of Sept 11 changed the world and made hitherto unthinkable expedients necessary. You can even fall in love with Tony Blair's mythical America which stood "side by side with us" in the Blitz of 1940, rather than staying out of the Second World War until 1941, and was "born out of the defeat of slavery", rather than a declaration of independence by, among others, slave owners. You can hold all these views simultaneously and still argue that this war is a moral and political disaster. Its worthwhile ends are unattainable. Its means are self-defeating. The choice before America and her supporters in Britain is to back off or inflict a famine on Afghanistan which will kill tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands and take the case for a just war with them. Tolerance of starvation is unconscionable. It dumps supporters of bombing in the same intellectual wastebasket as those who mutter that America "had it coming". Afghan peasants, like the workers in the World Trade Centre, are not strictly culpable, you understand. But if they are in the wrong place under the wrong government then, somehow, they deserve to die. Everyone in a government cannot be expected to be distracted by ethical arguments. Hardened socialists and pacifists make up the government. For all their fierce anti-Americanism, they were too filled with shock and sympathy on Sept 11 to match the seediness of the propagandist's cry: "Everyone else thinks the extermination of thousands is a problem! I see it as an opportunity!" New Labour is beginning to worry about the political 'collateral damage'. The formal war aim - the defeat of terrorism - is a fantasy. More realistically, we might have hoped war would do the world a favour by bringing justice of a kind to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban without creating the resentments which will breed further violence. Starvation in Afghanistan dashes modest hopes. It provides the inspiration for future suicide bombers while inflaming intelligent Muslim opinion. The Prime Minister's interviewer on al-Jazeera TV made a comparison we are going to hear many times in the coming months. Iraqis are still paying the price of the Gulf war of 1991, he said. "They are under sanctions and about one million Iraqi children died because of famine. Aren't you repeating the same thing in Afghanistan now?" Blair said, quite rightly, that hunger in Iraq was the fault of Saddam Hussein. He did not answer the Afghanistan question. Famine was coming anyway. aid-agency Oxfam warned before Sept 11 that drought and the economic consequences of a Taliban theocracy which could not create a civilization worth clashing with would leave 1.9 million Afghans hungry by the end of the year. Clare Short, UK secretary for International Development had been saying for months that Afghanistan was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Christian Aid spent the summer planning an Afghan appeal for Sept 15. The eradication of the means of life in Afghanistan did not therefore arrive out of a clear blue sky. The kamikaze attacks halted United Nations food deliveries for three weeks. They started, stopped again when the bombing began on Sunday, and then restarted. The UN had 9,200 metric tons of food inside Afghanistan on Saturday. Officials in the World Food Programme calculate the country needs 52,000 metric tons from outside a month. Their horrendous difficulty is not finding supplies. The Bush administration has belied its reputation for know-nothing callousness by being exceptionally generous in circumstances which might have induced parsimony, as, indeed, has Britain. There is plenty of food near the borders. But getting it in before winter closes the mountain roads next month is a nightmare. Afghanistan must have a five-month stockpile - 250,000 metric tons - in place within five weeks. If it does not, then voices as sober as Andrew Natsios, the administrator of Bush's US Agency for International Development, say 1.5 million Afghans risk starvation and seven million will face critical food shortages. America cannot define her enemies. If the Taliban are ejected, she does not know who should form the next government. Blair and Bush, however, are aware that they must convince the Muslim world that they are acting justly if they wish to escape a new generation of Osamas. Yet their war will exacerbate a famine which may further shred America's reputation in the region. -Dawn/The Observer News Service. *** Already ?

To: Original Mad Dog who wrote (5259)	10/15/2001 1:34:28 PM
From: HG	Respond to of 281500

Interesting story from Khaleej Times, the leading newspaper of UAE. I think we had a discussion on these food drops when they started out ? You never should have stopped chanting MIAR ! khaleejtimes.co.ae US military food airdrops condemned as "catastrophe": UN official GENEVA - A UN-appointed official dealing with hunger on Monday condemned US airdrops of food rations in Afghanistan as a catastrophe for humanitarian aid and warned that the US was effectively feeding Taliban fighters. Jean Ziegler, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said the airdrops of food by the same military force dropping bombs on Afghanistan undermined the credibility of humanitarian aid. He said aid deliveries needed to be supervised on the ground. "As special rapporteur I must condemn with the last ounce of energy this operation called snowdropping, it is totally catastrophic for humanitarian aid, for all the extraordinary work that UN agencies and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) are doing," Ziegler told journalists. US military transport aircraft have been dropping thousands of rations over Afghanistan while separate bombing raids continue, amid warnings that millions of Afghans are short of food. The practice is known in the humanitarian community as "snowdropping", because it scatters indvidual packages over a relatively wide area. Ziegler, who was appointed by the UN human rights commission to examine the impact of hunger on human rights said: "If there is no one to receive it on the ground, to distribute or to do the humanitarian work, it's obvious that the man with gun picks it up. So Americans are feeding the Taliban every night," he added. - AFP

To: Original Mad Dog who wrote (5259)	10/15/2001 1:50:49 PM
From: HG	Respond to of 281500

Loyalty for sale..... US commandos may enter Afghanistan this week' WASHINGTON - US special forces may enter Afghanistan as early as this week to gather intelligence about suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network, Newsweek magazine reported in its issue due out today. However, killing or capturing Osama bin Laden is unlikely to be the goal of the operation, the magazine reported, citing senior military officials. According to the report, some US military and intelligence officials believe that one of the best ways to find Bin Laden may be a well-placed bribe. It was said by the Brits that money was one of the things that could move the Taleban tribal leaders, Newsweek quoted a former high-ranking Pakistani military official as saying. Therefore, the CIA is reportedly trying to pay off local warlords to turn them against the Taleban and guide the Americans to Bin Laden's lair, the report said. However, the pursuit is complicated by the fact that some Afghan tribal leaders are demanding positions in Afghanistan's future administration along with cash, Newsweek said, citing a diplomatic source with intimate knowledge of Afghan affairs. If Bin Laden is spotted, small units of highly-trained special forces can be moved from positions in nearby countries. But some Pentagon officials said they are concerned that the Al Qaeda leader is not hiding in a cave but in the squalid slums of a city like Kandahar. - AFP *Its interesting to know that Pakistan supported Afghan invasion of Kashmir, (back when Kashmir was an independent state, before it chose to become a unit of India) could have been successful but for the fact that the two armies were dazzled by the riches, and forgot their objectives, ie to take over the palace. They started looting and plundering instead, terrorising the locals into handing over the their gold and diamonds. This delayed their progress and provided required time for Indian army to reach Kashmir and protect the palace, the royal family and repel the attack.