The secrets of Obama's surge

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Is United States President Barack Obama telling it like it is as far as his new strategy for the Afghanistan and Pakistan war theater - AfPak, in Pentagonspeak - is concerned? There are reasons to believe otherwise.

Obama's relentless media blitzkrieg stressed the new strategy is refocusing on al-Qaeda. Washington, we got a problem. Why deploy 17,000 troops against "the Taliban" in the poppy-growing province of Helmand, not in the east near the Pakistani tribal areas, where "al-Qaeda" is holed up, plus 4,000 advisers to train the Afghan Army, when Washington actually wants to fight no more than 200 or 300 al-Qaeda jihadis roaming in Afghanistan, plus another 400 maximum in the Pakistani tribal areas? And by the way they are not Afghans - they are overwhelmingly Arabs, with a few Uzbeks, Chechens and Uyghurs thrown in.

President Hamid Karzai, the puppet in Kabul which has left Washington beyond exasperated, loved Obama's plan to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Especially because it involves the improbable "hunt for the good Taliban" (always bribable by loads of US dollars) mixed with Special Ops inside Pakistan, and not Afghanistan.

Former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto's widower, President Asif Ali Zardari, the puppet in Islamabad, loved it too. But as the Pakistani daily Dawn revealed, his Foreign Office diplomats definitely did not.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KD02Df03.html

[Tim01]

1. "America's War"

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2. I love Pepe Escobar...

what a great writer..and another great article. If only there were more of him.