Militants Destroy NATO Trucks

More than 100 trucks loaded with supplies for American and allied forces in Afghanistan were destroyed Sunday by militants in Peshawar, a Pakistani city that serves as an important transit point for the Afghan war effort.
It was the latest in string of major attacks by Taliban militants on NATO supplies in Pakistan in less than a month, and served to expose the vulnerability of the route from the port of Karachi through Peshawar and over the border into Afghanistan. The United States relies on the route for an overwhelming proportion of its supplies for the war in Afghanistan.
The damaged trucks were loaded with American war matériel destined for the Afghan National Army, including Humvees, said Col. Greg Julian, a spokesman for United States forces in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital.
Early Monday, militants in Peshawar also attacked a terminal for the supply trucks, torching up to 50 military vehicles awaiting shipment.
"We were unable to challenge such a large number of armed men," said Muhammad Rafiq, a security guard of the Sunday attack. He estimated that 200 militants had been involved in the attack.
Pakistani security forces apparently fired at the attackers. "There was artillery and rapid exchange of fire," said a retired police official, Hidyatullah Arbab, who heard the firing from his home. "Peshawar is becoming a battleground."
Colonel Julian said the loss of equipment would have a minimal impact on the overall war effort. "It's a very insignificant loss in terms of everything transported into Afghanistan," he said.
But critics of the war effort in Afghanistan have argued that the United States needs to act more urgently to shape the Afghan Army into an effective fighting force. The loss of supplies to the Afghan Army is a setback to that effort.
About 80 percent of supplies for the war in Afghanistan move from Karachi east through Pakistan and on to Afghanistan. Peshawar is the last staging point before the border about an hour’s journey, or 40 miles, away.
From Peshawar, the Pakistani trucks loaded with the military supplies go through the Khyber section of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The Khyber area is almost totally controlled by factions of the Taliban, and many civilian government officials no longer dare to travel the road that the trucks use.
The Pakistani government said two weeks ago that it had beefed up protection for the supply trucks along the route.
But the ease with which the militants destroyed the vehicles on Sunday exposed the susceptibility of stationary equipment, even in the center of a city that houses the 11th Corps of the Pakistani Army.
Last week, militants attacked another parking area in Peshawar. About 12 trucks with NATO supplies were ruined.
Perhaps the most brazen attack came on Nov. 10, when about 60 Taliban militants hijacked a convoy of trucks on the Khyber road in broad daylight.
The Pakistani government is eager to hold on to the trucking business that supplies the war in Afghanistan. But the truck owners complain that the government is impotent in the face of the Taliban. The hijacking of the convoy last month was carried out by Taliban loyal to Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the umbrella group called Tehrik-e-Taliban.
After that episode, one trucker said the government had stood by, a “silent spectator.” The Taliban had attacked and looted his trucks, and killed his drivers even, he said.
American military officials have said that they are looking to supply the Afghan war theater through Central Asia, which would diminish the dependence on Pakistan.

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The Overburden Of America's Defense Meltdown

From the Center of Defense Information / Strauss Military Reform Project
The most important problems can briefly be summarized as follows:

• Our military has broken its constitutional controls. Our Founding Fathers wanted no more than a very limited size and role for a federal military. They feared standing armies not only because they might be used against the American public, i.e. to establish military rule, but also for their potential to involve us in costly foreign wars that would drain our treasury, erode our freedoms and involve us in the “entangling alliances” that George Washington warned of in his farewell address. At that time our armies were composed mainly of state militias that the president needed the cooperation of Congress and the state governors in order to use. Today, we have one large all-volunteer federal Army, which for all practical purposes responds only to the president and the executive branch. It has engaged in numerous foreign wars, involved us in many entangling alliances, drained our treasury and eroded our liberties just as our Founding Fathers foresaw. It has enabled the president to take the nation to war on little more than his own authority. The recent repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 allows him to unilaterally use the military not only against foreigners, but against the American people as well.

• Our military is inwardly focused. This is to say that it focuses on itself and its internal concerns, rather than looking outward at the world and reacting to what occurs there. This is partly a consequence of domestic politics, which determine the military budget, and partly due to a climate of intellectual laziness and complacency that prefers the glories of the past over the unpleasant realities of the present and future. This has made it very difficult for us either to produce or implement a realistic grand strategy or to adjust to changing realities, particularly the emergence of Fourth Generation War (4GW).

• Our military is very expensive. The “official” budget will soon hit $600 billion per year. This approximates the military budgets of all other nations of the world combined. Some have argued that this amounts to only a few percent of our gross national product (GNP) and that it should be increased. One might reply, however, that the military budget might instead be determined by the military needs of the nation (the determination of which requires looking outward at potential threats) more than an arbitrarily determined portion of its economy. Also, the real budget is much higher than the official one. The official budget does not include the Department of Homeland Security or Veterans Affairs, both of which are really military expenses. The current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are paid for by offline “supplemental” budgets so they are not included either. If one adds these costs the budget climbs to about a trillion dollars. It absorbs much of the government’s discretionary spending and has contributed significantly to the depreciation of the dollar.

• As our military gets more expensive it gets smaller and less capable. Although the current military budget, even adjusting for inflation, is the highest since World War II it buys us only modest forces. At the height of the Reagan military buildup in the 1980s the U.S. Army had 18 active divisions. Yet today, with a higher budget, it has only 10. At the height of the Vietnam War the U.S. military maintained over 500,000 men in Vietnam besides a substantial force in Germany under NATO. It fought an enemy with more than half a million men under arms that had armor, heavy artillery, and even small naval and air forces. The North Vietnamese were also receiving assistance from both the Soviet Union and Communist China. Today, it is all the U.S. military can do to maintain 140,000 to 150,000 troops in Iraq and 30,000 in Afghanistan, where they fight enemies whose combined strength (after Saddam’s fall) seldom if ever exceeded 30,000. Unlike in Vietnam these enemies have no air or naval forces, no modern heavy weapons, little or no formal military training, and no outside support. This dramatic decrease in U.S. capabilities should be no less astonishing than the simultaneous increases in the budget. Worse, the strength of the forces we have is eroded by the skyrocketing costs of new weapons. It has resulted in a shrinking inventory of aging weapon systems only a fraction of which can be replaced because their replacements are too costly.

• Our military is not professional. That is to say its officers, especially the senior ones, are poorly educated in the military profession. U.S. Army training in mechanical skills such as flying an airplane or repairing a truck compares very well to similar training in foreign militaries. However, true comprehension of why things are done as opposed to how to do them, is usually deficient. This makes it much harder to deal with the unfamiliar and unexpected. This in turn relates to the military’s inward focus already referred to. It is easier to focus inwardly on the familiar than outwardly on the unfamiliar. This follows a long American tradition of commissioning officers at the last-minute (usually when a war is just beginning) based largely on civil education and social status, and then giving them training not unlike that of enlisted recruits. Subsequent promotion depends more on politics, social skills and personal ambition than on military and leadership skills. This has left us with a military that has a leadership that has never really learned to “think” in its own profession. Such leaders find it difficult to devise sound strategy or offer advice to their political superiors that they can clearly explain and justify.

A more detailed elaboration of these main points appears below. Readers should understand that the four points given above are in fact so closely interrelated that to discuss them separately would only lead to confusion. Therefore, I have taken a more chronological approach to describe how these problems evolved and what effect they have on military policy today.
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Peace to you all.

Do It Your Way: Muxes of Mexico

Mexico can be intolerant of homosexuality; it can also be quite liberal. Gay-bashing incidents are not uncommon in the countryside, where many Mexicans consider homosexuality a sin. In Mexico City, meanwhile, same-sex domestic partnerships are legally recognized — and often celebrated lavishly in government offices as if they were marriages.
But nowhere are attitudes toward sex and gender quite as elastic as in the far reaches of the southern state of Oaxaca. There, in the indigenous communities around the town of Juchitán, the world is not divided simply into gay and straight. The local Zapotec people have made room for a third category, which they call “muxes” (pronounced MOO-shays) — men who consider themselves women and live in a socially sanctioned netherworld between the two genders.

“Muxe” is a Zapotec word derived from the Spanish “mujer,” or woman; it is reserved for males who, from boyhood, have felt themselves drawn to living as a woman, anticipating roles set out for them by the community.

Anthropologists trace the acceptance of people of mixed gender to pre-Colombian Mexico, pointing to accounts of cross-dressing Aztec priests and Mayan gods who were male and female at the same time. Spanish colonizers wiped out most of those attitudes in the 1500s by forcing conversion to Catholicism. But mixed-gender identities managed to survive in the area around Juchitán, a place so traditional that many people speak ancient Zapotec instead of Spanish.
Not all muxes express their identities the same way. Some dress as women and take hormones to change their bodies. Others favor male clothes. What they share is that the community accepts them; many in it believe that muxes have special intellectual and artistic gifts.

Every November, muxes inundate the town for a grand ball that attracts local men, women and children as well as outsiders. A queen is selected; the mayor crowns her. “I don’t care what people say,” said Sebastian Sarmienta, the boyfriend of a muxe, Ninel Castillejo García. “There are some people who get uncomfortable. I don’t see a problem. What is so bad about it?”
Muxes are found in all walks of life in Juchitán, but most take on traditional female roles — selling in the market, embroidering traditional garments, cooking at home. Some also become sex workers, selling their services to men. .
Acceptance of a child who feels he is a muxe is not unanimous; some parents force such children to fend for themselves. But the far more common sentiment appears to be that of a woman who takes care of her grandson, Carmelo, 13.

“It is how God sent him,” she said.

More:

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At last: One Thing of Beauty at The White House

Yes of course. It's the horse.

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History of the Taíno

Part 1.

part 2.

part 3.

Celebrating the Taíno

The seven girls posed, preened and smiled with all the energy of Miss Universe contestants, but this was no ordinary pageant.
The competitors, from about 6-years-old to 16, had just paraded through a downpour to a small stage surrounded by mountains, where they displayed elaborate outfits handmade from wood, plants or, in one case, jingling shells. And the judges also sought a special kind of beauty: those who most resembled Puerto Rico’s native Indian tribe, the Taíno, received higher marks.
“It’s different,” said Félix González, president of the National Indigenous Festival of Jayuya, of which the pageant is a part. “It’s not white culture and blue eyes; it says that the part of our blood that comes from indigenous culture is just as important.”

Puerto Ricans have long considered themselves a mix of African, European and Native American influences. But since the 1960s, the Taíno — a tribe wiped from the Antilles by European conquest, disease and assimilation — has come to occupy a special place in the island’s cultural hierarchy.
The streets of Old San Juan are lined with museums and research centers dedicated to unearthing Taíno artifacts and rituals. Children are taught from a young age that “hurricane” is Taíno in origin, from the word “huracán,” while no Latin pop music concert is complete without a shout out to Boricuas — those from Borinquen, the Taíno name for Puerto Rico, which means “land of the brave noble lord.”
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The Real Bill Ayers

IN the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”
Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.
I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.
With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.
Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.
Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.
I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.

I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.
The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.
We — the broad “we” — wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war.

The dishonesty of the narrative about Mr. Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other’s behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we’ve been unable to rise above it.

President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others, I wish I knew him better.
Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let’s hope they never will again. And let’s hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.

Afghanistan: Some Real History

Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, corrupt, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators.

The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office. “It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it,” writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time.

The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed.

The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided public education for girls and for the children of various tribes.
A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been “a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city’s university. Afghan women held government jobs—-in the 1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university students were women.”

The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world’s heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a “genuinely popular government and people looked forward to the future with great hope.”

But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government’s dedication to gender equality and the education of women and children.

Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers.

A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.

It should be noted that all this happened before the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted--months before Soviet troops entered the country--that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas.

In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily.