It doesn't mean killed recently, however. All the livestock left the area for the winter in October.
You might want to call Jim Lukens (208) 756-2271) and ask him why he approved the killing of this pack of 7-10 wolves in the middle of the wolf hunt 7 months before the cows show up again.
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President Obama said he decided to send more troops (and spend $30 billion per year) because he is "convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan," which he called "the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by Al Qaeda."
What he DIDN'T tell us is that U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/president-obamas-secret-100-al-qaeda-now-afghanistan/story?id=9227861
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If you want to read something really scary, Nate Silver has ten reasons why Caribou Barbie could be the GOP candidate in 2012. And Nate Silver is rarely wrong.
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Obama with Blood on His Hands
President Barack Obama carefully avoided describing his decision to dispatch 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan as an "escalation," but that is what he announced.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/02-12
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Along with the increase of 30,000 troops to the Kabul Quagmire, there will be an increase in the number of private contractors and mercenaries hired to support their effort. As the Army Times reports, we would be much better off without some of that "support".
Ill-disciplined private security guards escorting supply convoys to coalition bases are wreaking havoc as they pass through western Kandahar province, undermining the coalition's counterinsurgency strategy here and leading to at least one confrontation with U.S. forces, say U.S. Army officers and Afghan government officials.
The security guards are responsible for killing and wounding more than 30 innocent civilians during the past four years in Maywand district alone, said Mohammad Zareef, the senior representative in the district for Afghanistan's intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security.
Highway 1, the country's main east-west artery, runs through Maywand and is the route taken by logistics convoys moving west from Kabul and Kandahar to coalition bases in Helmand province. The Afghan government's district chief for Maywand says the men hired to protect the convoys are heroin addicts armed with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles.
So if they are junkies at least are money is going back to our friends the Karzais, who may be the only friends we have if the mercs keep shooting up the countryside.
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I've always really admired the Salvation Army, so am a bit disappointed to learn that they are withholding presents from immigrant children and that they hate teh gay.It'd be a real shame if wicked people tried to pressure the Salvation Army into treating everyone with dignity by doing something like this:
1. Download the graphic below.
2. Print it.
3. Cut it into check-sized pieces.
4. Deposit "checks" in Salvation Army kettles.
Please don't do it, and for God's sake, don't go to other blogs and mention it in their comments.
Speaking of teh gay, did you know that homosexuals and transsexuals 'will never enter the kingdom of heaven' because they are an 'insult to God'? So says Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, Mexican Cardinal and President Emeritus of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Health Care Workers in the Roman Catholic Church.
How about pedophiles, Mr. Barragan? Do they get in?
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"Every day for the people of Afghanistan is September 11."
The Left Coaster: Afghan Hero Malalai Joya: "A Continuation Of A War Crime"
To those who believe we are escalating the war in Afghanistan to benefit the Afghan people, I suggest you read the words of Malalai Joya. To those who believe we are escalating the war in Afghanistan to benefit Afghan women, I suggest you read the words of Malalai Joya. To those who believe we are escalating the war in Afghanistan because we owe the Afghan people, I suggest you read the words of Malalai Joya.
Who is Malalai Joya? As I wrote in 2007:
Malalai Joya is just five feet tall, unassuming and soft-spoken. On May 21 (2007), she was suspended from the Lower House of the Afghan Parliament for having in an interview compared the Afghan legislature to a stable or zoo.As Human Rights Watch explained:
Joya, 28, is the youngest member of the Afghan legislature. As a 19-year-old refugee in Pakistan, she taught literacy courses to other Afghan women. During the Taliban years, she ran an orphanage and health clinic in Afghanistan. In 2003, she gained international attention for speaking out publicly against warlords involved in drafting the Afghan Constitution. Two years later, she was the top vote-getter from Farah province in Afghanistan's parliamentary elections, and was easily elected to the lower house of the legislature. Since her election, Joya has continued to be an outspoken defender and promoter of the rights of Afghan women and children. She has also continued to publicly call for accountability for war crimes, even those perpetrated by fellow parliamentarians. Joya has survived four assassination attempts, travels with armed guards and reportedly never spends two nights in the same place.
So, she might know of what she speaks. In July of this year, she wrote in The Guardian: http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/014605.php
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Morford: Obama, the great disappointment?
The Miracle President hasn't actually accomplished much? Wrong
President Obama has ordered roughly two more divisions into Afghanistan. I'm having a rough time trying to figure out what the rate of supply is for an Army division in combat.
A US Army division in Europe during WW2 consumed about 600+ tons of goods a day, which was ten times or so of the rate of consumption from WW1. I've seen reports that 1,000 tons a day is a rough working figure.
A standard 40' shipping container can hold 30 tons (short tons, about 26.7 metric tons) of cargo. A thousand tons of stuff would take 34 containers a day. That may include fuel, so we can cut the number of containers and add in tanker trucks, probably a lot more tanker trucks to support the mechanized vehicles and helicopters. Two divisions, at least 70 more trucks of stuff have to arrive in Afghanistan each day and my wholly unsupported guess would be maybe 100 truckloads. That's just to support the additional guys, you can quadruple that for the amount of cargo needed to support all of the foreign forces and we are also supplying the Afghan Army, so maybe quintuple that.
That is a shitload of stuff.
Go look at a map of South and Central Asia. See if you can find how the stuff gets to Afghanistan. There are few options to move that amount of stuff other than by ship to Karachi and then by truck into Afghanistan, a supply line that runs more or less right through territory disputed by Islamic militants. Afghanistan has no railroad network of note, but, as experience from back in the days of T.E. Lawrence has shown, railroads are very vulnerable to demolition devices. The trucking supply line has been attacked by militants before and most assuredly will be again.
Stuff cannot be shipped in through Iran. It may be possible to send supplies through Russia and the neighboring `stans, but the price extracted by those nations may be too high and the transshipment of war supplies through Russia may be politically untouchable, even for the Russian government.
Even if all that stuff can be sent without sporadic interdiction by the militants, there is still the issue that we are propping up arguably the most corrupt national government in the world, a government that will assuredly fall as quickly as did the government of President Najibullah after the Red Army left.
Pakistan, regardless of how much our government prods them, is still playing a lesser version of the Great Game with India. The object of their version of the Great Game, as it was between the British and Russian Empires, is control of Afghanistan. Pakistan fought three formal wars with India (all of which they lost) and has been sponsoring a sputtering guerrilla war over Kashmir for decades.
Elements of Pakistan's intelligence service have always seen the Taliban as a counterweight to India. They may be closer to recognizing that the militants recognize no borders whatsoever and that the militants now see Pakistan itself as a prize to be won. Pakistan's offensive in South Waziristan has apparently done little other than force the militants to relocate. As any study of any insurgency-type war will show, measuring how much territory a uniformed army claims to control is a false metric. In any event, the Pakistanis are concerned about their own militants, not the Afghan Taliban.
You have little chance of winning a counter-insurgency war if your enemy has a place where they can regroup, rearm, retrain and where you cannot go. That is the situation now. If Pakistan will not commit to helping to defeat the Afghan Taliban, then it matters little if the President sends in 30,000 more troops or 100,000.
