Today's Stories

October 15, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
Our Cheap Politicians

October 14, 2009

Michael Neumann
Fearsome Words? a Suppressed Talk on the Israel/Palestine Conflict

M. Reza Pirbhai
Fighting the Taliban: What, Exactly, is Being Fought in Afghanistan?

Gareth Porter
Hawks Play Up the Taliban's Ties to Al Qaeda

Paul Craig Roberts
War Criminals Are Becoming Arbiters of the Law

John Strausbaugh Fortress Moon

Ralph Nader
The CBO's Flawed Report on Medical Malpractice

Dean Baker
Won't You Please Come to Chicago to Greet the Bankers?

Charles Modiano
White Silence: Where Does Brett Favre Stand on Rush Limbaugh?

Nadia Hijab
Abandoning "Women and Children"

Walter Brasch
An Extension of Her Motherhood: Sherry Carpenter, Journalist and Animal Care Provider

Website of the Day
Nader: Obama Has a "Concessionary Personality"

October 13, 2009

Peter Linebaugh
Putting the Spine Back in the Commonwealth

Shamus Cooke
What Obama Isn't Telling American Workers

John Ross
War on Mexican Women

Brendan Cooney
Ask Awal Khan About Obama's Prize

Frida Berrigan
Operation Enduring Detentions: Losing the Moral High Ground

Yves Engler
Is Canada More Pro-Israel Than the US?

David Macaray
Why the Government Fears Unions

Dave Lindorff
Democrats: Selling Out, But Still Getting Screwed

Mark Weisbrot
Occupying Afghanistan is Making Things Worse

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
History Repeats Itself

Binoy Kampmark
That Dirty Colonial War

Website of the Day
The Health Insurance Industry's Latest Doublecross

October 12, 2009

Pam Martens
Secret Deal Between Wall Street and Washington Shines a Harsh Light on Federal Housing Agency

Mike Whitney
A Dollar Rout or More Bernanke Trickery?

Martha Rosenberg
Yale Lab Tech Causes Two Problems for Animal Researchers

Jessica Arents
The Price of Peace: Our Arrest at the White House

Eamonn McCann
Massacre in Ireland, Massacre in Iraq

Bill Hatch
Dairy Industry Goes Down the Tubes

Sen. Russell Feingold
Time for a Timetable in Afghanistan

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Siren Song of World Praise

Gideon Levy
Obama's Betrayed Mission in the Middle East

Iyad Burnat
Why Does Obama Get a Prize and Bush Got Shoes?

Alan Cabal
Why Obama Deserves the Nobel

Dan Bacher
The Astroturf Method

Website of the Day
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help

October 9-11, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
War and Peace

James Bovard
Eight Years of Big Lies on Afghanistan

Kathleen and Bill Christison
New Crisis Developing in Palestine

Andy Worthington
Congressional Depravity on Gitmo

Marc Levy
Talking Dirty to the Kids

Tariq Ali
Ahmed Rashid's War

Mike Whitney
The Securitization Boondoggle

Paul Craig Roberts
Warmonger Wins Peace Prize

Alan Nasser
Cockeyed Economics

Jack Z. Bratich
The Twitterest Pill: Policing Dissent in the Information Age

Steve Breyman
Time for a War Tax

David Michael Green
A Hapless Presidency

Dave Lindorff
The WTF Prize

Paul Buchheit
Fear of the Rich

Jim Goodman
Feedlots and E. Coli

Missy Beattie
Theater of the Absurd

Michael Leonardi
Ships of Poison

Nadia Hijab
The Plight of the Right of Return

Mel Packer
The Crackdown on Pittsburgh

David Macaray
The Raiding Game

James T. Phillips
Getting Burned

Charles R. Larson
One Man's Walk Through Hell

Michael Donnelly
Behind the Capitalist Curtain

David Yearsley
The Biggest Blot on Mel Gibson's Rap Sheet

Lorenzo Wolff
Rap That Threatens ... and Endures

Poets' Basement
Heyen, Ames and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Jobs Conference

October 8, 2009

Saul Landau
A Late September Morning With Fidel

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Dark Omens for the US in Afghanistan

Linn Washington, Jr.
Pot and Perversion: Judicial Antics Expose Drug War Insanity

Marshall Auerback
Neo-Classical Economics Misses What Matters

Dave Lindorff
A Nation of Snoops

David Rosen
Bankrupt Morality: the Staying Power of Republican Sinners

Chris Darimont / Misty MacDuffee
The Bear Essentials: New Thinking Needed to Save BC's Salmon and Grizzlies

John V. Walsh
Remembering Hinton's Fanshen

Stewart Lawrence
The Edwards / Hunter Affair Reconsidered

Charles R. Larson
Conservatives in the Sandbox

Website of the Day
Et Tu, Code Pink?

October 7, 2009

Brendan Cooney
Are Republicans Breaking US Law in Honduras?

Paul Craig Roberts
Dead Labor: Marx and Lenin Reconsidered

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Recovery: Unemployment Up, Wages Down (But the Banks Have Been Saved ... Sort Of)

Jonathan Cook
A Third Intifada?

John Stanton
HTS: Congress Rewards Failure, Puts Personnel in Harms Way

Joanne Mariner
Tortured Language

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cherry Blossoms

Stephen Lendman
The Gaza War's Effect on Women

Sen. Russell Feingold
Time to Draw Down in Afghanistan

Mary Lynn Cramer
Doublespeak on Health Care

Website of the Day
How to Bag a Wolf by Aerial Assault

October 6, 2009

Mike Whitney
Dollar Hysteria: Is the Sky Really Falling?

Gareth Porter
The Iranian Rift in the IAEA: Leaked Paper Based on Disputed Intel

Jonathan Cook
How Israel Buried the UN's War Crime Probe

Boris Kagarlitsky
My Hour as Talking Head in Moscow

Iain Boal
The New Crisis at Pacifica

Ron Jacobs
Why Are We in Afghanistan?

John Ross
Wave of Anarchist Bombings Strikes Mexico

Michael Dickinson
Panic in Istanbul: Smoke, Mayhem and the World Bank

Stephen Fleischman
Beware the Predator

Ira Glunts
The Audacity of Nope

Missy Beattie
Outside Looking In

Website of the Day
Round Up the Usual Suspects

October 5, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Titans Use Aliases to Foreclose on Families While Partnering with a Federal Agency

Mike Whitney
Dead Man Walking: Welcome to the US Economy

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Feds Imprison the Innocent

Harry Browne
Ireland Says, "Yes, Please"

Sara Mann
My Little Town: Nothin' But the Dead and Dyin'

Omar Barghouti
Dissolve the Palestinian Authority

Shamus Cooke
A Jobless Recovery?

Brenda Norrell
A Dirty New Low for Peabody Coal

Fred Gardner
Situation NORML: Reconciling Medical Pot Use and Legalization

Binoy Kampmark Copenhagen Blues: McChrystal and the Afghan Trap

Website of the Day
In Goldman Sachs We Trust?

October 2-4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Geezer Renditions

Saul Landau
News From Raul Castro

Diana Johnstone
After the German Elections: Is Socialism Really Dead in Europe?

Greg Moses
Cramming for the Downside

William Blum
The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Another Cold War Myth

Brian Cloughley
Iran's Nuclear Program: Where's the Proof?

Russell Mokhiber
Welcome Back, Michael Moore

John Ross
Chomsky in Mexico

Ellen Brown
IMF Catapults From Shunned Agency to Global Central Bank

David Ker Thomson
Cop Shocks

David Macaray
The Audacity of Toyota

Gary Engler
Unions in a Rut

Robert Fantina
Meet the New Boss (Same as the Old Boss)

Lisa Stolarski / Naomi Archer
Pittsburgh: Still a (Coal) Company Town

Anthony Papa
Here is Your Chance to Help End the Failed War on Drugs

Joe Allen
The Good Wife: Bad View of a Corrupt System

Harry Browne
Tarantino Scalps His Audience

Ron Jacobs
Collective Fiction

Charles R. Larson
Cultural Warriors: Austrialian Aboriginal Art Triennial

David Yearsley
Hanns Eisler's Great National Anthem for East Germany is Available: Make It America's

Poets' Basement
Taylor, Gardner and Landau

Website of the Weekend
Wrongful Convictions of Youth

October 15, 2009

Why the Taliban Has Tripled in Size in the Last Three Years

Rethinking the Afghan Insurgency

By BRIAN M. DOWNING

A critical debate is underway to determine whether or not the US will send up to forty thousand more troops to Afghanistan. The debate is said to include a wide-range of opinion, but even at the top political and military levels, there isn’t profound understanding of insurgencies in general or the particular dynamics of the Afghan one.

The Afghan insurgency, we are repeatedly told, is based on intimidation and violence. This is true in parts of the country, but dubious in others. Indeed, seeing any insurgency as resting mainly on force is wrong and it will lead to wrong responses. Insurgencies develop when a non-government group builds rapport with at least parts of the populace. This was the case in Malaya, the Philippines, Algeria, and South Vietnam. And it is the case in Afghanistan.

Consider a few patterns:

Pashtun elders meet with western officers and accept development programs, yet too often they make only desultory efforts to fight insurgents. This is clear from numerous small engagements and glaringly so from attacks conducted by sizable insurgent forces such as those who assaulted US positions in Nuristan recently and in Kunar last year. Tribes are, among other things, intelligence networks, keeping watch and ward over their lands for trespassers, bandits, and enemies. The coalescence and deployment of large insurgent forces could not have gone undetected by herdsmen, traders, or hunters who traverse the district and report to elders. Something is amiss here.

The Pashtun tribes are vaunted warriors who repelled the Russians, British, Persians, and numerous lesser-known powers unwise enough to venture into their lands. Yet these same tribesmen are said to bow before a band of lightly-armed guerrillas. Elders have the authority, weapons, fighters, and local knowledge to mount formidable resistance, but they elect not to. Why is this?

The spread of the insurgency in recent years, according to many observers with local knowledge, is often based more on negotiation than on force. Insurgents cannot match the resources of western powers, but they are able to win local support in other ways. Taliban figures settle disputes in accordance with Islamic law, stand as opponents of northern/Tajik dominance, offer the prospect of fairer government, listen to local needs without the western assumption of superior knowledge, fight without the use of massive firepower, and represent the promise of restored Pashtun greatness. Most critically, they present themselves as an enduring, indigenous power adamantly opposed to the presence of transient, foreign ones.

The insurgents are more adept at negotiations and assurances than are the Kabul government or the western powers. Kabul’s preference for aggrandizement and the US’s ignorance of counterinsurgency have allowed the insurgents to win over large numbers of Pashtun people in the South and East. They have even been able to gain support from a few non-Pashtun groups in the North and West, in part by presenting them as an alternative to the foreigners who have overstayed whatever welcome they once had. An insurgency is in ways a debate, and thus far the insurgents’ arguments are more convincing. Pashtun elders vote with their sons by attaching local men to serve in the insurgent bands, which has helped the Taliban triple in size over the last two years.

What then of the troop surge in a country with an insurgency more entrenched than thought? More western troops in contested regions will almost certainly strengthen local beliefs and insurgent claims that US and NATO forces are another occupying force – a belief paradoxically supported by western assurances that they will stay on until the insurgents are defeated. More troops will step up the fighting, which will further alienate the support of locals who see westerners, not insurgents, as the cause of widespread destruction.

Several other questions must be central to the debate in Washington. Will the insurgents’ numbers and experience require far more western forces? Have the insurgents already consolidated in large parts of the country such that counterinsurgency is not feasible or will take a decade or more to work? Is the US public likely to support the war for another decade? What of European publics? Perhaps most importantly, can more US troops make up for the ineptitude and corruption of the Afghan army and state without becoming an occupying power?

Brian M. Downing is the author of several works of political and military history, including The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam. He can be reached at: brianmdowning@gmail.com 

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Yellowstone Drift:
Floating the Past
in Real Time
by John Holt
Introduction by Doug Peacock

Click here to Buy!

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

"Powerful and shocking ..
see this film"
-- Joseph Stiglitz on American Casino

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

Spell Albuquerque:
Memoir of a
"Difficult Student"
By Tennessee Reed

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont