DOUBLE STANDARD? When John Cusack bombards his girlfriend's home with music, it's cute. When the CIA uses a boombox, it's torture.

So, a pretentious group of musicians is upset that their music is being used to torment America’s most dangerous enemies?

And now they want the U.S. government to release an official song list?

I can’t imagine that such a document actually exists. Are we supposed to believe that CIA and Pentagon interrogators around the world were issued official playlists by some audio-torture DJ?

It’s a safe bet that the music choices used to keep terrorists awake 24/7 were straight from a gazillion different iPods.

However, there WAS an official songlist when the U.S. Army flushed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega out of hiding in 1989. The psychological warfare guys surrounding the Vatican Embassy during “Operation Just Cause” called in their requests to Army Radio.

How retro.

Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" made this dictator's skin crawl!

THE OFFICIAL 1989 MUSIC TORTURE SONG LIST FOR NORIEGA

Straight from U.S. Army records, here is a portion of the radio playlist used to annoy Manuel Noriega.

1. (You’ve Got) Another Thing Coming — Judas Priest
2. All I Want is You — U2
3. Big Shot — Billy Joel
4. Born to Run — Bruce Springsteen
5. Bring Down the Hammer — Georgia Satellites
6. Don’t Look Back — Boston
7. Don’t Fear the Reaper — Blue Oyster Cult
8. Eat My Shorts — Rick Dees
9. Feel a Whole Lot Better (When You’re Gone) — Tom Petty
10. Give It Up — KC and the Sunshine Band
11. Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down — Paul Young
12. Guilty — Bonham
13. Hang ‘Em High — Van Halen
14. Hanging Tough — New Kids on the Block
15. I Fought The Law and the Law Won — Bobby Fuller
16. Judgment Day — Whitesnake
17. Never Gonna Give You Up — Rick Astley
18. No More Mister Nice Guy — Alice Cooper
19. Panama — Van Halen
20. Paranoid — Black Sabbath
21. Stay Hungry — Twisted Sister
22. The Party’s Over — Journey
23. The Star Spangled Banner — Jimi Hendrix
24. They’re Coming to Take Me Away — Henry VIII
25. Time is on My Side — Rolling Stones
26. Wanted Dead or Alive — Bon Jovi
27. We Didn’t Start the Fire — Billy Joel
28. We Gotta Get Out of This Place — The Animals
29. Who Will You Run To? — Heart

Who knew that Billy Joel and New Kids on the Block would ever serve their country so effectively?

Wanna see the full list of Noriega torture tunes?  CLICK HERE.

Responding to Cheney’s assertion that the administration is “dithering” in regards to sending more troops, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs responded today that similar requests to the Bush Administration sat on their desks “for more than 8 months“.

The ABC News “Fact Check Desk” finds the truth a a bit more nuanced, with portions of the troop requests filled and others delayed for fulfillment by NATO troops, etc. The full story, according to ABC News, is really summed up this way:

So Gibbs’s claim that for “eight months” McKiernan’s request for troops “sat on desks” isn’t accurate.

But those request weren’t exactly being met with the urgency Cheney has suddenly decided President Obama must meet, lest he be seen as “dithering.”

It’s a little known fact that one of the big reasons Iraq turned around is we simply offered a better price than al Qaeda. Within a month the word got out that we were paying top dollar and the insurgents were turning against the terrorists and the US body count started to drop.

Will the same strategy work elsewhere?

From the Times Online:

Afghans are known for changing sides back and forth during their long years of war — there is an old saying that “you can rent an Afghan but never buy one” — and battles have often been decided by defections rather than combat.

Paying Taliban foot-soldiers to switch sides could spare US lives and save money, say its advocates. A recent report by the Senate foreign relations committee estimated the Taliban fighting strength at 15,000, of whom only 5% are committed idealogues while 70% fight for money — the so-called $10-a-day Taliban. Doubling this to win them over would cost just $300,000 a day, compared with the $165m a day the United States is spending fighting the war.

And here’s a bit about a what we did in Iraq…

The tactic was used to good effect in Iraq where the US government put 100,000 Sunni gunmen on its payroll for about $300 a month each.

Some disagree that this strategy will work without more troops, but a refocusing of priorities along with paying people to not kill us will do the trick. Afghans are like anybody else…they want to be able to provide for their families and if somebody is offering a better deal, they’ll go with the best price in town. This isn’t a holy war even though the Taliban would like to convince everybody it is.

More as it develops…

George Will writes today that we should pull out of Afghanistan and instead focus on Pakistan.

Even though I still think we should stay (and I’ll get into why), at this point he has my ear…

U.S. forces are being increased by 21,000, to 68,000, bringing the coalition total to 110,000. About 9,000 are from Britain, where support for the war is waning. Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.

So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

Couple this with the reality that a soldier dies every 14 hours in Afghanistan and dropping public opinion about why we should be there, and you have a recipe for quick withdrawal.

But here’s why I think we still need to keep pushing for at least another year…opium.

I’ve talked about this before, but to sum it up…if we allow Afghans to grow opium legally (as they do in India and Turkey) and sell it to pharmaceutical companies, we can regulate it and they can pull themselves out of the crushing poverty that is the backdrop for sympathetic views of the Taliban.

If not, we should just pack up and go.

Seriously. Because they’re not going to be able to build a stable economy with anything else and without money there is no hope for the country. And I mean NO hope. Virtually nothing can grow there, they have scant natural resources and their infrastructure is literally 200 years behind ours. It’s a crazy place and we can’t simply pour billions after billions to rebuild. Well, we can, but it’s not sustainable.

The choice is ours, but one thing is for sure…more troops won’t make Afghanistan whole again. No way, no how.

I welcome your thoughts…

From AP:

Gen. David Petraeus said the number of attacks in Afghanistan over the last week hit the highest level since the December 2001 fall of the Taliban.

“Some of this will go up because we are going to go after their sanctuaries and safe havens as we must,” Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, said during a speech at the Washington think-tank Center for a New American Security.

“But there is no question the situation has deteriorated over the course of the past two years in particular and there are difficult times ahead,” he said.

So how much violence?

There were more than 400 insurgent attacks last week, including ambushes, small arms volleys, assaults on Afghan infrastructure and government offices, and roadside bomb and mine explosions. In comparison, attacks in January 2004 were less than 50 per week.

Extremist attacks in the rural nation tend to increase in the summer months, and in part are spurred by military efforts to crack down on insurgents, Petraeus said.

It looks like we’re going to be there for a while. And I think most Americans are fine with that since Afghanistan always has been the central front in the fight against Islamic extremism.

Why we didn’t finish the job when we had the chance will be one of those things historians look back on and shake their heads about. But we’re there now and we can’t allow it, or Pakistan, to descend into chaos. Especially since Pakistan has nukes. That would be bad, bad news.

While some have worried that the Democratic controlled Congress might strip our war efforts of funding, that wasn’t the case in the House where members passed $97 billion in war funding by a vote of 368-60 — $12 billion more than President Obama requested.

The senate is in the process of passing a similar bill, making it almost a sure thing that Obama will get all the money he needs to fight our wars the way he wants. I wonder if a President McCain would have gotten the money as easily?

Question: can the problems in Pakistan and Afghanistan be solved or will this be Obama’s Iraq?

Discuss…

Since I covered the Tea Parties today, I figured I should also cover a protest that’s much more in the spirit of what the Boston Tea Party stood for.

From NY Times:

KABUL, Afghanistan — The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of men.

“Get out of here, you whores!” the men shouted. “Get out!”

The women scattered as the men moved in.

“We want our rights!” one of the women shouted, turning to face them. “We want equality!”

The women ran to the bus and dove inside as it rumbled away, with the men smashing the taillights and banging on the sides.

“Whores!”

But the march continued anyway. About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital on Wednesday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of Taliban-like restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.

Folks, there’s true bravery for you. And that’s when compared with any protests that happened in this country in recent memory, not just today’s events.

Also, I think this type of behavior by the Afghan government is atrocious and I hope Obama leans on Karzai enough to help get things changed, especially since we’re doubling down on our bet to win this country’s freedom.

Obama warned that al-Qaida is actively planning attacks on the United States from secret havens in Pakistan. He said he was setting new benchmarks and sending in 4,000 more troops, hundreds of civilians and increased aid for a war that has lasted more than seven years and still has no end in sight.

“I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future,” Obama said. “That’s the goal that must be achieved. That is a cause that could not be more just.”

The president, who declared last weekend an “exit strategy” was needed for Afghanistan, never used those words in announcing his plans on Friday. His strategy is built on an ambitious goal of boosting the Afghan army from 80,000 to 134,000 troops by 2011 — and greatly increasing training by U.S. troops accompanying them — so the Afghan military can defeat Taliban insurgents and take control of the war.

I’ve always believed there has to be a military aspect to combating terrorism and am willing to trust the president that greater military force is needed in Afghanistan to secure our safety. Given that Obama’s plan has us substantially invested in Afghanistan until at least 2011, this is now his war.

Politically, it’ll be interesting to watch how having a liberal conduct a militaristic war against terrorism compares to having George Bush conduct that war. Some of the familiar narratives of both the left and the right will likely change. After all, like it or not, support for a president and support for current wars tend to strongly interrelate.

Of course, what really matters is that our strategy is sound and our success is substantial. I think most of us can agree on that.

Looks like President Obama isn’t the reactionary pacifist some of his critics (and supporters) thought he was. Tomorrow, the administration is expected to announce a major increase in forces in Afghanistan.

Confronting an inherited and faltering war, President Barack Obama plans to dispatch thousands more military and civilian trainers to Afghanistan by the fall on top of the 17,000 combat troops he has already ordered, senior administration officials said Thursday.

Obama’s war strategy, which will he announce on Friday, includes no timeline for withdrawal of troops. The war began more than seven years ago.

As he plans to put more U.S. lives and money into the war zone, Obama will set benchmarks for progress in Afghanistan and neighboring, troubled Pakistan. The goal is to show Congress and the American people that the strategy is working — and to set a clear framework for making corrections as needed.

While Obama did campaign on refocusing on the conflict in Afghanistan, this news is likely to surprise more than a few. Apparently, the president believes military force can help our ongoing war on terror conflict against various terrorist organizations. Obviously, Obama wants to be very sure to put in place the kinds of benchmarks his predecessor resisted. That’s probably for the best considering the war has gone on for over seven years. I doubt the public will have much patience for more war and will expect measurable results.

More when the official announcement comes.

Following up on his campaign promise to have a surge-like push in Afghanistan to see if it could help the country.

From Fox News:

“This reinforcement will contribute to the security of the Afghan people and to stability in Afghanistan,” Obama said in a statement. “I recognize the extraordinary strain that this deployment places on our troops and military families. I honor their service, and will give them the support they need.”

Obama said the deteriorating security in Afghanistan made the troop increase necessary, adding that the country has not received the strategic attention or resources it needs.

Although 17,000 troops have been authorized to go, the Pentagon identified and mobilized only about 12,000. Of those troops, 8,000 will be Marines and the 4,000 others will comprise an Army Stryker Brigade. The additional 5,000 troops will be identified and announced at a later date.

But sources provided FOX News with the identity of all 17,000 troops: 10,000 will be Marines stationed in the South; 3,800 with an Army Stryker Brigade; 1,000 Special Operations Force trainers and 3,200 force enablers.

Also, according to the following report, Sec of Def Robert Gates wanted 30,000 troops…

My guess is if more troops are needed in Afghanistan, that’ll be an easy case for Obama to make to pull troops from Iraq. And I have little doubt that more forces are required because right now it’s a mess.

More as it develops…

A U.S. combat outpost in the endless mountains of Afghanistan

President Obama said in his campaign that he would shift U.S. attention to the war in Afghanistan and rethink American strategy there.  It’s clear he intends to do just that.  But according to a New York Times story sourced to “senior administration officials,” in a somewhat surprising move, Obama plans to take a “tougher line” toward Afghan President Hamid Karzai and “put more emphasis on waging war than on development.”

Mr. Karzai is now seen as a potential impediment to American goals in Afghanistan, the officials said, because corruption has become rampant in his government, contributing to a flourishing drug trade and the resurgence of the Taliban.

All that development and “nation building” stuff will be left to NATO, most of which shows little interest in contributing more troops or engaging in combat:

They said that the Obama administration would work with provincial leaders as an alternative to the central government, and that it would leave economic development and nation-building increasingly to European allies, so that American forces could focus on the fight against insurgents.

“If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who served under Mr. Bush and is staying on under Mr. Obama, told Congress on Tuesday. He said there was not enough “time, patience or money” to pursue overly ambitious goals in Afghanistan, and he called the war there as “our greatest military challenge.”

The U.S. is shifting its strategic focus away from lofty goals for Afghanistan’s future and protection for — who has been called the “Mayor of Kabul” because he doesn’t wield authority beyond the capital — so the planned doubling of U.S troop levels by this summer can be used to battle the Taliban in the countryside and ratchet up the military pressure on Qaeda in hiding across the Pakistani border.

As the “senior official” (I get the feeling it’s Gates) put it:

“What we’re trying to do is to focus on the Al Qaeda problem. That has to be our first priority.”

A report by Stratfor, the private intelligence service, sees U.S. policy evolving quickly along lines similar to those suggested by the Times’ source.

Stratfor for believes that the counter-insurgency war to defeat the Taliban and defend the Afghan central government is essentially not winnable, even with a half million U.S. troops, and that the U.S. interest in Afghanistan is the suppression of al Qaeda, not the governance of that sprawling, divided and inhospitable “nation.”

Accordingly, Stratfor believes that U.S. strategy will wind up looking something like this:

“[T]he search for al Qaeda and other Islamist groups is an intelligence matter best left to the covert capabilities of U.S. intelligence and Special Operations Command. Defeating al Qaeda does not require tens of thousands of troops — it requires excellent intelligence and a special operations capability. That is true whether al Qaeda is in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Intelligence, covert forces and air strikes are what is needed in this fight, and of the three, intelligence is the key.

Sounds like a plan.  Tell us what you think in the comments.

(Visit me at The Purple Center)

Indian Army troops of the famed Gurkha Rifles on parade

A flurry of reports in the Indian, Pakistani and Western media indicate that both India and Pakistan are taking serious steps to prepare for a new conflict between the two nations, which have fought three wars since 1947, in the wake of the November 26 terror attacks in Mumbai.

According to reports from both sides of the border, Pakistan has cancelled all military leaves, put its forces on high alert, and is moving troops from the west to the frontier with India.  At least two corps of Indian Army troops are also on the move in what officials called “annual exercises.”  And Indian Prime Minister met for the second time in a week with India’s top military officers in a widely publicized gathering to review “defense preparedness.”

Meanwhile, the Indian government is warning its citizens not to travel to Pakistan, and both sides are ratcheting up their war of words.  Over the past week, India has increased its pressure on Pakistan to take concrete action against the Pakistan-based groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, that India and U.S. intelligence officials believe were responsible for the Mumbai attacks.  India pointedly delivered a letter from the sole surviving Mumbai attacker to Pakistani authorities, contending that it constitutes the evidence demanded by Pakistan of the terrorists’ Pakistani ties.  But Pakistan has refused to consider the letter as sufficient proof.

The United States continues to call on both sides to avoid a conflict that could seriously harm the American-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan by diverting Pakistan’s armed forces from west to east. A parade of high-ranking U.S. officials has descended on Pakistan and India in recent weeks, making no bones about their strong interest in a Pakistani crackdown on Kashmiri terrorists and Indian forbearance.  However, Indian officials have harshly scolded the “international community” — which in this case can be taken to mean chiefly the United States — for not doing enough to “deal effectively” with a terror threat in Pakistan that India regards as the “greatest danger” to the world.  While pushing for heightened international pressure on Pakistan, India is also laying the groundwork to be able to say it exhausted international channels to solve the problem before deciding to strike.

In what might well be a propaganda move designed to counter India’s claims about the Mumbai attackers and rally Pakistanis behind their flag, Pakistan said Thursday that it had arrested three Indian nationals for a bombing in Lahore and linked them to an “Indian spy.”  India immediately dismissed the charge as a “ploy.”

Referring to the kind of precisely targeted Indian attack along the lines I speculated about a few days ago, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani and Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi warned that Pakistan would retaliate for any such attack.  Their statements were presumably designed to convince India and others that any Indian military action — even a “surgical” strike against one or more of the Kashmiri separatist training camps located within the Pakistan-administered portion of Kashmir — would lead to a wider war.

I, for one, don’t doubt that.  The Mumbai attacks have put both sides between a rock and a hard place.  Anger over the attacks is so widespread among large segments of India’s population that India’s governing Congress Party must extract significant concessions from Pakistan of a kind that no Pakistani government, civilian or military, has ever been able to give and still survive.  There is no chance that Pakistan’s weak civilian government will arrest and extradite to India anyone associated with the attacks.  It’s even unlikely that Pakistan will directly punish lower-level militants or take serious steps to break up Lashkar-e-Taibi or Jaish-e-Muhammed.  The simple fact is that the minimum needed to placate India is more than the maximum that any Pakistani government can afford to do.

Of course, the U.S., NATO, and the Afghan government have a major stake in seeing that Pakistan’s army is not drawn away from the North West frontier, but as the stand-off between India and Pakistan goes into its second month, it’s not clear what more any of them can do to avert a clash.

I’m just guessing, but my guess is that India will launch a targeted strike sometime soon.  If so, President Barack Obama will face another serious crisis just as he assumes office.

(Visit me at The Purple Center)

Thoughts?

With the current financial crisis, Iraq and Afghanistan haven’t been leading many news stories. But those conflicts are still going on and, just as importantly, the effects of those wars are still being felt by the soldiers who fought them.

Whatever you think of the policies behind our current wars, I think it’s always important to support the men and women who fight in our nation’s uniform. That’s why I’m taking just a moment to alert you to Survivor Corps’ returning troops efforts.

Survivor Corps works around the world with survivors of conflicts and is working here in the U.S. to help servicemen and women get on with their lives after returning from war. Veterans are at a higher risk for suicide and homelessness, and Survivor Corps wants to make sure every veteran, no matter where they live, has access to services that can help them stay on their feet.

Here’s a CNN interview with Capt. Scott Quilty (Ret.), the Survivor Corps U.S. Program Manager.

It’s a worthy cause.

Things are getting extremely dire…

WASHINGTON — A draft report by American intelligence agencies concludes that Afghanistan is in a “downward spiral” and casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban’s influence there, according to American officials familiar with the document.

The classified report finds that the breakdown in central authority in Afghanistan has been accelerated by rampant corruption within the government of President Hamid Karzai and by an increase in violence by militants who have launched increasingly sophisticated attacks from havens in Pakistan.

The report, a nearly completed version of a National Intelligence Estimate, is set to be finished after the November elections and will be the most comprehensive American assessment in years on the situation in Afghanistan. Its conclusions represent a harsh verdict on decision-making in the Bush administration, which in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks made Afghanistan the central focus of a global campaign against terrorism.

Note the part about Pakistan in there. This is why Obama is winning that argument. The “Talk Softly” strategy that McCain wants to employ simply isn’t an option because of how incredibly bad things are at this point.

In other news, it sounds like Saudi Arabia is brokering a peace deal between the Taliban and Afghanistan…

Taliban leaders are holding Saudi-brokered talks with the Afghan government to end the country’s bloody conflict — and are severing their ties with al Qaeda, sources close to the historic discussions have told CNN.

The militia, which has been intensifying its attacks on the U.S.-led coalition that toppled it from power in 2001 for harboring Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network, has been involved four days of talks hosted by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, says the source.

The talks — the first of their kind aimed at resolving the lengthy conflict in Afghanistan — mark a significant move by the Saudi leadership to take a direct role in Afghanistan, hosting delegates who have until recently been their enemies.

They also mark a sidestepping of key “war on terror” ally Pakistan, frequently accused of not doing enough to tackle militants sheltering on its territory, which has previously been a conduit for talks between the Saudis and Afghanistan.

More as it develops…

That can’t be good for people who think she’s inexperienced.

Also, it turns out she was just plain wrong when she claimed he didn’t say an Iraq style surge didn’t work.

And I quote…

“Afghanistan is not Iraq,” said Gen. David McKiernan, who led ground forces during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and took over four months ago as head of the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan.
During a news conference yesterday, McKiernan described Afghanistan as “a far more complex environment than I ever found in Iraq.” The country’s mountainous terrain and rural population, its poverty and illiteracy, its 400 major tribal networks and history of civil war all make for unique challenges, he said.

“The word I don’t use for Afghanistan is ’surge,’ ” McKiernan emphasized, saying that what is required instead is a “sustained commitment” to a counterinsurgency effort that could last many more years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.

And so it goes…