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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (77450)	6/22/2006 1:05:21 PM
From: sea_biscuit	Respond to of 81568

What a joke! The Taliban and the warlords rule the countryside. How do you think Afghanistan is having bumper opium crops (the revenues from which btw, fund insurgent and terrorist activities)? Do you think the US soldiers are helping Karzai grow all that opium?! :-) Karzai is virtually the mayor of a few zipcodes in Kabul. And he needs some 200 US soldiers to be around him just to keep him alive. He can't trust any Afghans to guard him because if he does, in the ever-shifting ethnic equation of Afghanistan, he will be toast within a matter of weeks. All Karzai does is eat and fart in his palace, which is what his idol, Dumbya, was doing in his pig farm in Texas after reading the memo that bin Laden was determined to attack the US in 2001.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (77450)	6/22/2006 3:31:40 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

>>Is the Taliban still running Afghanistan? Are there still 4 million Afghan refugees sitting in Pakistan? Is Al Qaeda still training tens of thousands of men a year in Afghanistan? No. Is your standard for US actions that either it work perfectly or it's "ineffective"? Afghanistan has a democracy, if not everywhere, and the Taliban is out of power, if not entirely in the south and their bases in Pakistani Waziristan. Afghan democracy is not up to Euro standards, but it's never going to be, given the nature of the place and the people. It's still a vast improvement from the pile of theocratic rubble it was five years ago, and people are voting with their feet to come back into the country.<< Nadine - I didn't say the invasion of Afghanistan was ineffective. In fact, I was using it as an example of an effective Bush move that was supported by a broad coalition of nations. I would say that it's clear that the lack of attention to the situation in Afghanistan since late 2002 hasn't been ideal. Obviously, nobody can know what would have happen if Bush had kept his promise to the Afghani people. He told them he would not desert them this time, then didn't include one penny for them in his very next budget. Must have been distracted by something else. BTW, as recently as the seventies, Afghanistan was quite a progressive and civilized place. So let's not use the people themselves as an excuse. - Allen

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (77450)	6/22/2006 4:09:53 PM
From: sea_biscuit	Respond to of 81568

Are there still 4 million Afghan refugees sitting in Pakistan? Very stale news. This is what the Chicago Tribune wrote later : "Many refugees still are returning to Afghanistan. Since the Taliban fell in late 2001, more than 4.5 million Afghans have returned. But many live in squalid refugee camps or sleep in abandoned buildings. And an increasing number say they want to leave Afghanistan because they just cannot live here anymore. The lines outside the Embassies of Iran and Pakistan have been growing longer in recent months." So whether or not there are Afghan refugees in Pakistan (there probably still are, given how sketchy the info is from those places), those who did return to Afghanistan believing that Dumbya will keep his promise, are now finding they have to get back to wherever they came from.