Graphically, why the situation in Afghanistan is so dire

if this doesn't tell the story, i don't know what does...


USAID and Department of Defense Overall Spending in Afghanistan

you wanna talk about an imbalance...? this visual representation of u.s. development vs. defense spending in afghanistan, to me at least, makes it staggeringly clear why afghanistan is such a goddam mess... of all the money that goes for defense in that country, you can be 100% sure that virtually none of it ends up in the pockets of those in most desperate need... it goes primarily to the u.s., afghanistan and third-country defense contractors whose lips are firmly attached to the u.s. money tit... meanwhile, the "just folks" afghans continue to scramble for even the tiniest crust of bread and soiled rags to feed and clothe their families...

however, hillary does make a point...

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, during last week's marathon set of hearings on President Obama's new strategy in that war, gave two examples of forthrightness that are worth further examination: a discussion of trouble with expanding the workforce of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Afghanistan, and a tough look at how U.S. aid money is being slipped into the hands of the Taliban.

yes, hillary, i'm well aware that even the pathetically small amount that gets spent on development often doesn't go where it's most needed either, but you can bet that if more were spent on development and less on defense, it would increase the odds that at least SOME of it would get where it needs to go...

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Aid to Afghanistan... I'm sure Hillary is talking about attacking the symptoms rather than the disease...

i read this as i sit here in kabul, working for a "civilian" aid program...

The billions of dollars spent in U.S. aid to Afghanistan over the past seven years have been largely wasted, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday.

"For those of you who have been on the ground in Afghanistan, you have seen with your own eyes that a lot of these aid programs don't work," she said. "There are so many problems with them. There are problems of design, there are problems of staffing, there are problems of implementation, there are problems of accountability. You just go down the line."

[...]

Since 2006, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent more than $5 billion in Afghanistan, according to figures on the agency's Web site. Clinton oversees USAID, which has boasted a number of success stories, including building hundreds of schools, distributing 60 million textbooks and vaccinating 90 percent of children against polio. But a report by Oxfam last week charged that much of the U.S. aid in Afghanistan is wasted on consulting costs, subcontractor fees and duplication.

Clinton's blunt comments on past aid programs -- which appeared to also indict the broader international effort -- will probably raise the bar for the administration's aid programs. "We are scrubbing every single civilian program," she said. "This is part of my mission as secretary of state. We are looking at every single dollar as to how it's spent and where it's going and trying to track the outcomes. We want to see real results."

i would be the very last person to argue that aid programs in afghanistan have been a resounding success... far, far from it... however, i would also be the last one to voice one iota of confidence that those in washington have any ability whatsoever to discriminate between the aid programs that have added value and those that haven't... so, what hillary says means to me is that they're going to jump in and "scrub" programs wholesale in the time-honored tradition of attacking the symptoms rather than the disease...

also, it's definitely worth noting that she doesn't mention the much more staggering sums "wasted" on military expenditures...

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"Kill everyone who refuses to be made into a slave!"

i hate reading these articulate summaries of reality, not because i hate to face reality, but because i hate to be reminded of just exactly what is taking place in my country...

i just came from a meeting at the kabul version of baghdad's "green zone," where u.s. embassy and usaid staff all hunker down in a highly fortified compound inside their well-appointed, u.s.-style offices (albeit in trailers and temporary buildings, a big contrast with the obscene palace that we built in iraq), ensconced in their bureaucratic bubble, comfortable in the thought that the u.s. is THE world power to be reckoned with... all hail the united states of america...!

yet, sadly, this is the sad truth about the current reality in my country...

If the people can be aroused to perform their patriotic duty to restrain their government from destroying the world, before it crosses the nuclear threshold, then peaceful change is still possible. The lunatic-in-chief and his supporters in both the political parties are prepared to use nuclear weapons against vast civilian populations, if We the People are unwilling to stop them. This new phase in the war that is allegedly being fought in America's defense will represent the final transmutation of that war into a totally new war, fought to prevent alleged nuclear weapons construction, by unleashing actual nuclear destruction. Strangelove's "wet dream," a nuclear free fire zone.

The disaster unfolding in Washington is like nothing the earth has ever seen. The highest form of government ever produced by man is putting the final stages of planning on freedom's demise, and yet the freest people in the history of the world believe that they are powerless to change anything, as they watch excitedly from the sidelines, screaming patriotic hymns to Clinton and McCain. The planners and their stooges ultimately believe in their own ability to carry forward the grand "success" stories of Iraq and Afghanistan into the rest of the Muslim world. The illusion that they can destroy select areas of the rest of the world without destroying us, helps to calm the delirious worry-free psyches of an immoral society, ready to kill the world to save their own sorry asses.

The war on terrorism uses our beliefs against us. It has been exposed as a holy war between Christianity and Islam, at least that is evidently what the Jewish neocon authors of the war want it to be. It is only a matter of time before it becomes obvious to everyone that the war of the new world order is a war against all religion. Religious belief and basic human morality must be allowed to serve as the basis for the fight against this war, because it is a war on life itself. The inherent evil of the whole operation must become the rallying point for the people to oppose the war. It is nothing less than an egotistical human attempt to overthrow the moral basis of international law, replacing it with the inhumane law of parasitic capitalist Darwinism. Kill everyone who refuses to be made into a slave!

don't get me wrong... a lot of the people in that well-guarded compound in kabul, a mile or so from where i'm sitting typing this, are good, decent people, doing what they think is right, much as i am doing... for, after all, am i not implicitly enabling the imperialistic aims of my country by being here...? i won't try to rationalize my way out of that, but i do think i am offering a degree of white light where perhaps it hasn't shown brightly before... and, then again, maybe i'm only deluding myself like so many of my fellow citizens...

p.s. sitting not 15 feet from me is one of my afghan islamic counterparts, a highly intelligent, eager-to-learn young man with whom i have struck up a friendship... he's very much interested in leadership and management and i'm giving him informal tutorials once or twice a week that he's positively eating up... he's getting the opportunity to pick my brain and i'm getting the opportunity to see and learn about afghanistan through his eyes... now THAT'S a win-win...

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U.S. aid money was being used to fix Pakistani elections in favor of Musharraf

let's see if THIS story from mcclatchy has any legs...

The day she was assassinated last Thursday, Benazir Bhutto had planned to reveal new evidence alleging the involvement of Pakistan's intelligence agencies in rigging the country's upcoming elections, an aide said Monday.

Bhutto had been due to meet U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., to hand over a report charging that the military Inter-Services Intelligence agency was planning to fix the polls in the favor of President Pervez Musharraf.

Safraz Khan Lashari, a member of the Pakistan People's Party election monitoring unit, said the report was "very sensitive" and that the party wanted to initially share it with trusted American politicians rather than the Bush administration, which is seen here as strongly backing Musharraf.

[...]

It names as the head of the unit a brigadier general recently retired from the ISI, who was secretly assigned to run the rigging operation, Lashari said. It charges that he was working in tandem with the head of a civilian intelligence agency. Before her return to Pakistan, Bhutto, in a letter to Musharraf, had named the intelligence official as one of the men she accused of plotting to kill her.

Lashari said the report claimed that U.S. aid money was being used to fix the elections. Ballots stamped in favor of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, which supports Musharraf, were to be produced by the intelligence agencies in about 100 parliamentary constituencies.

"They diverted money from aid activities. We had evidence of where they were spending the money," Lashari said.

[...]

Bhutto was due to meet Specter and Kennedy after dinner last Thursday. She was shot as she left an election rally in Rawalpindi early that evening. Pakistan's government claims instead that she was thrown against the lever of her car's sunroof, fracturing her skull.

tell me, please, why anyone would think that the u.s. WOULDN'T be involved in helping musharraf fix the election... let me just say that i hope they put good solid evidence on the table and let's get this show on the road...

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More dragnet intelligence gathering, this time on non-U.S. NGO's

i've had the good fortune to become familiar with a number of ngo's (non-governmental organizations, or what we in the u.s. commonly call non-profits) that operate in other countries... just like in the u.s., they are set up for a myriad of purposes, but, usually, also like in the u.s., to accomplish something for the greater good of the community/city/province/region/nation that wouldn't or couldn't be done by either government or the private sector... yes, i am sure there are those organizations that are there for nefarious purposes, but i don't think that dictator bush's plan to find out which are which is the way to go...

The Bush administration plans to screen thousands of people who work with charities and nonprofit organizations that receive U.S. Agency for International Development funds to ensure they are not connected with individuals or groups associated with terrorism, according to a recent Federal Register notice.

The plan would require the organizations to give the government detailed information about key personnel, including phone numbers, birth dates and e-mail addresses. But the government plans to shroud its use of that information in secrecy and does not intend to tell groups deemed unacceptable why they are rejected.

The plan has aroused concern and debate among some of the larger U.S. charitable organizations and recipients of AID funding. Officials of InterAction, representing 165 foreign aid groups, said last week that the plan would impose undue burdens and has no statutory basis. The organization requested that it be withdrawn.

"We don't know who will do the vetting, what the standards are and whether we could answer any allegation," said an executive for a major nongovernmental organization that would be subject to the new requirements and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to harm his organization's relations with the government.

i'll tell ya what this sounds like to me... it's smack-dab in the same category as data-mining and warrantless domestic wiretapping - vacuuming up as much personal data as possible on as many people as possible, and then seeing what you've got and how you can use it against them, the same kind of bullshit that's happening inside the u.s., with airline passenger data in europe, etc., etc., ad nauseam...

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Still more on Fore

the more you know...

A Wellesley College trustee’s remark that blacks preferred pushing drugs to working in a factory has precipitated an emotional debate on this bucolic campus already grappling with charges of racial insensitivity

The trustee, Henrietta Holsman, a 1970 graduate of Wellesley who runs a manufacturing concern in Los Angeles, resigned from the board last weekend after apologizing for her comments, which also cast aspersions on the work ethic of Hispanic and white employees. But in a letter to the college newspaper, Ms. Holsman reiterated her statement that she had trouble keeping black assembly-line workers from going “back to the street to earn more money” selling drugs

In her lecture, Ms. Holsman also said she had found Hispanic workers to be lazy, white workers resentful of having to work with machines, and Asians, while very productive, likely to move on to professional or management jobs.

she-eeeeee-it... you gotta believe it takes some damn hard work to come up with people like this...

(thanks to think progress...)

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More on Fore - oopsies, she's pro-choice!

aw, geeez... don't anybody go tell dobson, falwell, robertson, or tony perkins...

Federal Election Commission records show that Fore gave $3,500 to the group WISH List from 1998-2000. The WISH List describes itself on its website as an organization that works to "raise money to identify, train, support and elect more Republican women leaders to public office at all levels of government. WISH is America's largest fundraising network for pro-choice Republican women candidates!"

uh-oh, henrietta... you got a lot o'splainin' to do...

FAQs About The WISH List

What is The WISH List?

The WISH List -- which stands for Women In the Senate and House® -- raises money to identify, train, support and elect more Republican women leaders to public office at all levels of government. WISH is America's largest fundraising network for pro-choice Republican women candidates!

How does WISH work?

• WISH identifies promising pro-choice Republican women candidates.
• We examine each candidate, campaign organization and race.
• Viable contenders are introduced to our members through profiles.
• WISH members are urged to contribute to at least two WISH-endorsed candidates per election cycle.
• WISH holds events -- from small "living room groups" to large receptions throughout the U.S.-- to benefit The WISH List and its candidates.
• WISH forwards member contributions to the designated campaigns.

like the first thing i wanna know is how did she get past the litmus test...?

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Connecting USAID nominee Henrietta Holsman Fore to Tom Noe

doomsy finds this in the toledo blade...

In May, 2003, the White House and House Speaker Dennis Hastert recommended that Mr. Noe get a seat on the influential 11-member (Citizens Coinage Advisory) committee. Treasury Secretary John Snow appointed Mr. Noe, less than six months after the Toledo-area coin dealer expressed interest in joining a Mint committee to Henrietta Fore, then director of the Mint.

it all comes rushing back... tom noe, the rare coin dealer... what a fascinating and valuable piece of detective work, doomsy...

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Bush and Condi loved Tobias - and now he's gone

but, as abstinence promoters, i doubt any of them used condoms...

"I'm sad today," said one person close to Tobias, according to Saturday's Washington Post. "The president loves him and Condi absolutely loves him."

it's really hard to fill a gap in a threesome...

Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias [...] said "that he must step down" from his post "effective immediately," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement Friday that did not disclose his escort service link.

"He is returning to private life for personal reasons," the statement added.

Within minutes, Tobias's biography was deleted from the USAID Web site, the Washington Post reported on Saturday's front pages.

they're dropping like flies...

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