was their "harboring" any worse (for lack of a better word) than other states/regimes that we've worked w/ (and w/o) to attack al aqaeda?

also, i was hoping you'd bring up Iraq, b/c i've noticed lately (as this massacre has brought Afghanistan into the news again), that whenever people talk about the afghan theater of this war they always end up talking about Iraq and how it impacted the objectives of Afghanistan. i just think it furthers the utter mistake this "war on terror" has been from 9/12 on.

yes--the org was operating in their country, with their knowledge. we didn't think stealth ops alone (ie pakistan now) would work back then, i presume, and that seems like a plausible thing to have thought then. tech was worse, and al qaeda was stronger (not that we probably were even sure of its full strength)

A 1998 document by the U.S. State Department confirms that "20–40 percent of [regular] Taliban soldiers are Pakistani."

...

In total, of roughly 45,000 Pakistani, Taliban and al-Qaeda soldiers fighting against the forces of Massoud in mid-2001, only 14,000 were Afghans.

after perusing wikipedia's write-up of Afghanistan's history, I'm even more annoyed w/ our governments alliance w/ pakistan and saudi arabia.



it seems to me that a shift in policy, rather than full-scale intervention, would have accomplished our goals much more effectively and efficiently.

When I did my alternate history I learned a lot about how screwed up the US/Pakistani alliance has been. It certainly puts a black mark on Jimmy Carter's foreign policy record.

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him "we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie", he simply replies: "Yes."

Egyptian military takes over. Totally not what everyone expected:

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/14/egyptian-court-calls-for-parliament-to-be-dissolved/?hpt=hp_t1

Spring has sprung.

http://news.yahoo.com/2-months-later-massacre-haunts-syrian-town-064533766.html

An article about a massacre in Syria. What struck me was in describing minimal rebel activity in the town, it is related that rebels destroyed 9 tanks, mostly with homemade bombs as the army left the town. I'm curious if some of these 'opposition activists' (an interesting term for a militia of sorts, isn't it?) learned these skills in Iraq blowing up coalition forces. Syria was a major transit point for jihadis during the Iraq war, wasn't it? Or maybe its nothing and they just teach IED 101 in every local Syrian junior college.

"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" according to a famous book from that area of the world.

that's an interesting quote b.i., seeing as they're borrowing from the U.S.'s playbook too:

Well... Obama is a Muslim dictator... so... yeah.

much like Bush II was a disciple of the inquisition.

"Burn the Quran! Burn the fucking Quran!" a woman screams hoarsely, over and over again. Tinny guitars course beneath her howls, sawing away at any semblance of melody. Sampled snippets of fundamentalist Islamic rhetoric filter through, and muffled voices exhort their unseen audience to praise Allah and to destroy the infidel.

To fans of heavy music, the hallmarks are immediately recognizable. This is raw, mid-tempo black metal, a lo-fi example of heavy metal's most evil subgenre. Black metal feeds upon hatred, nihilism, and anti-human behavior. Extremity is everything. It drinks the blood of Christ, turns upon its own, and takes almost carnal pleasure in the theory and imagery of war. The music from the early days of this scene conjured images of the ashes of burned churches and the dried blood of murder, and yet the genre, in its middle age, often doesn't shock the way it once did. The hellish noise of this particular song, though, does. There's something different about it. This is real.