The following article from openDemocracy is giving me the creeps, people: This is what are the leftovers of Afghanistan and will be the leftovers of Irak. This is not what we wanted but what we wanted to prevent!! Those are our worst nightmares. Read on and think about it for a moment...





by Paul Rogers, 2008-05-30
(This article was first published on 29 May 2008)

A number of current trends in Afghanistan are of far more than local significance. The pattern of violence is the most visible: for example, a series of attacks on 26-27 May 2008 killed thirty-seven people (among them police officers, soldiers, and bus passengers) in the provinces of Kandahar, Farah, Khost and Nimroz. But armed action and the bloodshed it causes are also the surface manifestation of a strategic reordering that is inserting the Afghan conflict into regional and even global realities in new ways.

These incidents reflect the fact that many of the paramilitary groups in the country (and not just the Taliban) have become cautious about frontal assaults on western forces and are instead laying roadside- and suicide-bombs (see "Afghanistan's Vietnam portent", 17 April 2008). The tactic is routinely directed against Afghan police and army units, as well as government officials and NGO workers (mostly local, since a majority of international agencies have withdrawn).

An increased American military and political effort in Afghanistan is making the conflict there part of a new dynamic of global confrontation, says Paul Rogers.

This incremental rise in the level of violence may continue after the opium-poppy harvest, though so too in all probability will the current minimal level of western media coverage (diminishing to near-invisibility in the United States). But if the media and publics are less than engaged ...
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