Trump Has Allies Abroad-- Mostly From Enemies Of Democracy

 

Trump isn't generally admired around the world. In fact, he appears to be the most unliked American president in any of our lifetimes-- both by ordinary citizens and by most democratic governments. Just 6% of Danes, for example, want him to win reelection. With a still active fascist movement, Italians are the only people in Western Europe who back Trump with any strength at all-- and it's just 20%. Fascist governments in Hungary, Russia, Israel and Brazil, on the other hand, all think Trump is swell. In fact, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel covered an Eric Trump COVID-spreading event in a Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin bowling alley basement this week. Eric announced that the first person who "came out to wish" the president well was "Little Rocket Man," a reference to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Little Rocket Man, who inherited his job from his father who had inherited it from his father, is, in effect, the king of one of Asia's poorest countries. But that doesn't mean he is. Kim was born into great wealth and it is estimated that he's much richer than Trump, with a personal fortune of at least $5 billion. The best paid workers in North Korea earn around $62 a month.

On the other hand, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh is not a billionaire. He worked as a professor and then dean of Birzeit Universit, a non-profit school near Ramallah in the West Bank. It should come as a surprise to no one that the rabidly anti-Palestinian Trump doesn't many fans on the West Bank or Gaza. The Associated Press quoted him as saying "If we are going to live another four years with President Trump, God help us, God help you and God help the whole world."

The Palestinians have traditionally refrained from taking an explicit public position in American presidential elections. Shtayyeh’s comments reflected the sense of desperation on the Palestinian side after a series of U.S. moves that have left them weakened and isolated.

The Palestinians severed ties with Trump after he recognized contested Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in late 2017 and subsequently moved the American Embassy to the holy city. Trump has also cut off hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid to the Palestinians, shut the Palestinian diplomatic offices in Washington and issued a Mideast plan this year that largely favored Israel. The Palestinians have rejected the plan out of hand.

The Trump administration also has persuaded two Arab countries, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel and promised that other Arab nations will follow suit. These deals have undercut the traditional Arab consensus that recognition of Israel only come in return for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal-- a rare source of leverage for the Palestinians.

Shtayyeh expressed hope that a victory by the Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would raise prospects for a peace deal.

“If things are going to change in the United States I think this will reflect itself directly on the Palestinian-Israeli relationship,” he said. “And it will reflect itself also on the bilateral Palestinian-American relationship.”

The Taliban, on the other hand, is enthusiastically backing Trump's reelection. CBS News reported that in a phone interview Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid basically parroted dishonest and misleading Trump campaign talking points: "We believe that Trump is going to win the upcoming election because he has proved himself a politician who accomplished all the major promises he had made to American people, although he might have missed some small things, but did accomplish the bigger promises, so it is possible that the U.S. people who experienced deceptions in the past will once again trust Trump for his decisive actions. We think the majority of the American population is tired of instability, economic failures and politicians' lies and will trust again on Trump because Trump is decisive, could control the situation inside the country. Other politicians, including Biden, chant unrealistic slogans. Some other groups, which are smaller in size but are involved in the military business including weapons manufacturing companies' owners and others who somehow get the benefit of war extension, they might be against Trump and support Biden, but their numbers among voters is low."

Finally: Panic Washes Over GOP... But They Will Still Persist In Their Hateful And Unpopular Agenda

 

Republicans in Congress are preparing to triage Trump-- but not Amy Coney Island Baby. That's the hill they all seem happily willing to die on, a hill that symbolizes anti-Choice fanaticism, anti-healthcare mania, a pro-corporate and anti-regulatory extremism and, of course, the religious bigotry the GOP has wrapped itself in over the past two decades.

Republican Senators, Congress Members, state legislators, local officials, operatives and donors are all blaming Trump for their predicament. I hate Trump as much as anyone but if they want someone to blame for the tsunami headed their way, they should look in the mirror, not just to the White House. There was no time when they could not have said, "Wait, you are a fucking fascist and I am not and neither is my party." Too late for that now, though, because now their party is fascist and they have been enabling a fascist agenda-- eyes wide open.

The phrase on the lips of virtually all Beltway Republicans this month: "sinking ship," a way to describe the Trump reelection campaign, a battle being fought not in states Hillary won narrowly like New Hampshire, Virginia, Minnesota, Nevada and Maine but in states that were firmly in the Republican column way back then-- Arizona, Iowa, Georgia, Alaska, Ohio... even Texas.

And now, down-ballot Republicans are realizing-- too late-- they they are going down with that sinking ship. Some are even hoping to start showing their "independence" from Trump by breaking with his policies might help, after after their years of willing spineless subservience. Foolishly, they've chosen the wrong policy to break with. Trump, desperate to offer something to the voters, has ordered-- or re-ordered-- Mnuchin to work with Pelosi on a pandemic relief package that will include stimulus checks for struggling Americans (voters). For Mitch McConnell and his Senate colleagues that's a step too far. On Friday, Jonathan Swan and Alayna Treene reported for Axios that McConnell refuses to be tethered to Trump's growing desperation and that the president "has zero leverage to push them to support a bill crafted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and congressional Republicans aren’t inclined to wrap themselves any tighter to a sinking ship." McConnell's camp says "You’re never going to get a deal out of Pelosi that Republicans can support. So do you really want to divide your party within days of an election? This entire exercise from Pelosi is basically trying to jam up the Senate in the midst of a Supreme Court confirmation. They know that from a procedural standpoint McConnell can drive this train to conclusion, so what they’re trying do is throw as many roadblocks in the way as possible-- and the best way to do that is get the president focused on some extraneous issue." Swan and Treene concluded that even if Pelosi and Mnuchin were to strike a deal, "there is little chance the Senate GOP would get on board with it... Senate Republicans remain far apart on what they want as a conference. They also view Trump and Mnuchin as far more willing to give more to Pelosi than what they're comfortable with-- both numbers-wise and on policy." And to make matters worse, "McConnell doesn’t want to do anything to interrupt the only visible Republican win before the election in his chamber-- the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court."


Americans have been voting-- and in much biggest numbers than ever before this early. No one needs a debate. This is a referendum on Trump and his enablers. Biden is horrible. People don't care. The majority of the Democrats recruited by the DCCC are horrible-- as are all the Democrats recruited by Schumer. No one cares. (They will in 2022, but not now. Now they only care about Trump and those who allowed him to run amok.) In early voting reporting yesterday's NY Times, a trio of writers noted that early returns give Democrats a 10 point advantage among the 275,000 first-time voters nationwide who had already cast ballots and an 18-point lead among 1.1 million "sporadic voters" who had already voted.

As of Saturday, more than 8.8 million ballots had already been received by elections officials in the 30 states that have made data available. In five states-- including the battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Minnesota-- the number of ballots returned already is more than 20 percent of the entire 2016 turnout.

The L.A. Times headline was hardly unique: As Trump’s fortunes sink, Republicans start to distance themselves in bid to save Senate. Evan Halper wrote that as "Trump skids deeper into political peril, anxious Republicans have started to try to distance themselves from his fate, appealing to voters to elect them as a check on a Joe Biden administration. As they make closing arguments in a desperate bid to keep control of the Senate, even Trump loyalists are chafing when asked how deep their support for the president runs. Senate campaigns, which long focused on electing candidates who would be loyal to Trump, now pitch a darker message to Republican voters-- one that assumes Trump won’t be there. 'If we lose the Senate, there will be no firewall to stop the Democrats from implementing their Armageddon plan to pack the courts with activist judges and to add four new Democrats to the Senate by giving statehood to DC and Puerto Rico,' said a fundraising appeal from the Senate Conservative Fund."

Halper noted that McConnell, who has been "one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, abruptly jumped off the Trump train this week to stake out a politically-- and medically-- safer position on the coronavirus crisis that is Trump’s biggest political liability. McConnell said at a news conference Thursday in Kentucky that he had not been at the White House for more than a month because he did not think its safety standards were stringent enough. 'My impression was that their approach to how to handle this is different from mine and what I suggested that we do in the Senate, which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing,' said McConnell, who is 78 and in an expensive fight for reelection this year. Veteran Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, in his pitch for an endorsement from the Houston Chronicle, scolded Trump for downplaying the dangers of the coronavirus. The paper, which had endorsed Cornyn in the past, ultimately opted to support Democrat MJ Hegar."

“I think Trump might cause us a tidal wave,” said one top Republican strategist and Trump supporter, who asked not to be named discussing internal party matters. “He is ankle weights in a pool on Senate candidates.”

The move away from Trump resembles the strategy Republicans followed in 2016, when many party leaders assumed he would lose, and in 1996, when the party’s nominee, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, badly trailed President Clinton.

In both cases, the approach was to avoid directly criticizing the nominee for fear of alienating his loyalists, while appealing to voters to keep a Republican Congress to deny Democrats a “blank check.”

...“A lot of Republicans are now having to walk this line where they don’t want be too critical of Trump and anger his base, but they need to reach out to moderates and independent,” said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor at the political forecasting journal Sabato’s Crystal Ball.

Yesterday, GOP lifer Ed Rollins, chair of Trump's Great America PAC, told CNN that the jig is up. "I'm afraid the race is over... What happened after the first presidential debate is every Senate race saw a 3- to 4-point drop for Republican candidates across the board. So campaigns are panicking and it’s the first time in a long while that they are being outraised. The potential is there to lose not only the presidency but the Senate as well… and to see the kind of wipeout we haven’t an experienced since the post-Watergate year of 1974." How could it can any worse for Trump. Well the Taliban could endorse him. Actually, they did.

NBC News reported that "some Republican operatives and donors" have given up on Trump's reelection and are "proposing that the party shift focus to protecting seats in Congress." Former NRCC staffer Ken Spain told NBC's Sahil Kapur that he sees "growing chances of a tsunami that drowns congressional Republican candidates," calling Trump's unpopularity "an anchor" for GOP candidates and worrying not about races in Colorado, Arizona and Maine-- that Republicans have given top on winning-- but in South Carolina, Georgia, Kansas and Alaska that they are in danger of losing.

Brendan Buck, a Republican consultant, who was a top adviser to former House Speaker Paul Ryan, said it would be a rational response to steer resources to saving endangered incumbents.

“We need to protect the Senate and limit the damage in the House,” he said. “They can’t say it out loud, but the president is likely toast, and a Republican Senate can serve as a check on a Biden administration and Democratic House. Republicans also need to keep the House in reach of flipping it back in 2022.”

If Republicans are struggling to protect an incumbent in the deep-red Palmetto State, it means the seat of Sen. John Cornyn in electoral vote-rich Texas may not necessarily be safe either, along with about a dozen others in a cycle in which Democrats need to pick up four seats to secure control, or three if they win the White House.

Biden’s campaign appears more bullish on Texas, purchasing $6.3 million in ads on TV and radio in the Lone Star State from Wednesday through Election Day, according to Advertising Analytics. His wife, Jill Biden, plans to travel to the state next week, the campaign announced Friday, with an itinerary a Biden campaign spokesperson said would include stops in Dallas, Houston and El Paso.

“Trump is definitely helping us,” Beto O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman and presidential candidate, told NBC News. “They have been neck and neck for weeks now, and Biden’s chances are only improving after his and Kamala (Harris)’s strong debate performances.”

O’Rourke, who came within 3 points of winning a Texas Senate race in 2018, insists the state and its 38 electoral votes are in play, and has been pleading with the Democrats to invest more there.

Democrats running for Republican-held congressional and state legislative seats are on the attack in Texas and closing in on Republican incumbents. Yesterday, Julie Oliver, progressive Democratic candidate running against crooked conservative Roger Williams in an R+ 11 district that the DCCC has completely ignored, told me that "We're in the middle of a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Many of our kids' schools are still closed. Women are having to leave their jobs. We've lost millions of jobs. And meanwhile, both Donald Trump and Roger Williams have consistently put themselves and their financial interests before the people in Texas. This presidency has been an unmitigated failure-- and Roger Williams has enabled him, every step of the way." Polling has turned so positive towards Oliver that last week the DCCC felt compelled to add her to their Red-to-Blue program. Same just happened in the district next door, TX-10, where Mike Siegel has battle the wealthiest man in the House, Trump lieutenant Michael McCaul to a dead heat. (You can contribute to both Siegel and Oliver here.)

Although Democrats stand to pick up a half dozen Texas congressional seats-- and win back the state House to boot-- Texas isn't the only "red" state preparing the shed more seats to the Democrats. Kapur's report noted Beltway imbeciles-- he was more polite-- who long believed the GOP would gain seats are now confronting the prospect that their minority might shrink. "Cook Political Report’s forecast gives Democrats a better than even chance of expanding their House majority." That can be interpreted as "even the conservative fools at Cook fear Democrats are on the verge of winning dozens of seats we scoffed at the idea of flipping just a few weeks ago."

Beltway insiders like Cook and the DCCC have never taken Audrey Denney's race against Trump appendage Doug LaMalfa seriously. After all, CA-01, in the northeast corner of rural California where it borders on Republican parts of Oregon and Nevada, has a daunting PVI of R+11. It was one of only 2 districts in California where Hillary took less than 37% of the vote and in the midst of 2018's "Blue Wave," neither Gavin Newsom nor Dianne Feinstein won a single one of CA-01's eleven counties. But look a little closer at the 2018 results and you'll notice that in both the biggest and third biggest counties in the district-- Butte and Nevada-- Denney beat LaMalfa with substantial majorities. This cycle, she's been expanding her base into Shasta, Placer, Siskiyou and Placer counties and is poised to make up the 9 point vote deficit from 2018. Her latest tracking poll by Lake Research, one of the most consistently accurate polling firms in the country, shows her and LaMalfa in a dead heat. Please consider contributing to Denney's campaign here and take a look at this analysis from Lake, an analysis that shows exactly how a deep red district flips progressive blue:

Ancient Pashtun Proverb: A Woman's Place Is In The Home-- Or In The Grave

Monday morning, Nasiruddin Haqqani, the son of the founder of Afghanistan's Haqqani network-- and that group's chief financial officer-- was shot dead in Islamabad by gunmen on a motorcycle. He was definitely on a worldwide "most wanted" list and the only surprise about his violent end is that he wasn't killed in a drone strike. His younger brother, Sirajuddin, heads the Haqqani network which is connected to the Taliban and has been one of the most effective groups against the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

Syed Munawar Hassan has been the emir of Pakistan's biggest religious party, the very right-wing Jamaat-e-Islami since 2008. He's a kind of more successful, better educated version of Pat Robertson. Last week he went on TV to tell his followers that Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud-- killed by a U.S. drone-- is a martyr. Yesterday, the Pakistani military condemned his statement, demanding he apologize and claiming his statement was "irresponsible and misleading."

This weekend, though, as always, Pakistanis were getting mixed messages from their government. Condemning the pro-Taliban Islamists was one thing but moving to ban Malala's book from schools sent the exact opposite message. I Am Malala, Pakistani education officials claim, doesn't show enough respect for Islam. They called the girl who was shot in the head by right-wing Taliban thugs a tool of the West.

While Malala has become a hero to many across the world for opposing the Taliban and standing up for girls' education, conspiracy theories have flourished in Pakistan that her shooting was staged to create a hero for the West to embrace.

Adeeb Javedani, president of the All Pakistan Private Schools Management Association, said his group banned Malala's book from the libraries of its 40,000 affiliated schools and called on the government to bar it from school curriculums.

"Everything about Malala is now becoming clear," Javedani said. "To me, she is representing the West, not us."

Kashif Mirza, the chairman of the All Pakistan Private Schools Federation, said his group also has banned Malala's book in its affiliated schools.

Malala "was a role model for children, but this book has made her controversial," Mirza said. "Through this book, she became a tool in the hands of the Western powers."

He said the book did not show enough respect for Islam because it mentioned Prophet Muhammad's name without using the abbreviation PUH-- "peace be upon him"-- as is customary in many parts of the Muslim world. He also said it spoke favorably of author Salman Rushdie, who angered many Muslims with his book The Satanic Verses, and Ahmadis, members of a minority sect that have been declared non-Muslims under Pakistani law.

In her reference to Rushdie, Malala said in the book that her father saw The Satanic Verses as "offensive to Islam but believes strongly in the freedom of speech."

"First, let's read the book and then why not respond with our own book," the book quoted her father as saying.

Malala mentioned in the book that Pakistan's population of 180 million people includes more than 2 million Ahmadis, "who say they are Muslim though our government says they are not."

"Sadly those minority communities are often attacked," the book said, referring also to Pakistan's 2 million Christians.

The conspiracy theories around Malala reflect the level of influence that right-wing Islamists sympathetic to the Taliban have in Pakistan. They also reflect the poor state of education in Pakistan, where fewer than half the country's children ever complete a basic, primary education.

Millions of children attend private school throughout the country because of the poor state of the public system.

The Taliban blew up scores of schools and discouraged girls from getting an education when they took over the Swat Valley, where Malala lived, several years ago. The army staged a large ground offensive in Swat in 2009 that pushed many militants out of the valley, but periodic attacks still occur. The mastermind of the attack on Malala, Mullah Fazlullah, recently was appointed the new head of the Pakistani Taliban after the former chief was killed in a U.S. drone strike.

Speaking of Mali and Syria: NYT reporters and editors can hardly show us connections between stories which they don't see themselves

Okay, so we see Algeria and Mali over there on the left of the map (which you can click on to enlarge), and Syria is at the upper right, and Afghanistan is way the heck off the map to the right, and the Soviet Union isn't on the map at all anymore, and Osama bin Laden is, um, still dead. No way they're connected, is there?

"[I]ncredibly, one [piece] offers an example of what can go wrong when a government -- Algeria -- cozies up with a bloodthirsty killer and religious fanatic, while the other tells how the US government is in the process of doing exactly the same thing in Syria."

-- Dave Lindorff, in "Links? We Don't Do No Stinkin'
Links: Cognitive Dissonance at the New York Times"

by Ken

Dave Lindorff has a terrific piece today on his ThisCan'tBeHappening.net "news collective" blog: "Links? We Don’t Do No Stinkin’ Links: Cognitive Dissonance at the New York Times," which I saw via Nation of Change. It's about two articles from Saturday's NYT which he eventually characterizes as "two disjointed and poorly written pieces that add little to the readers' understanding of these latest hotspots in the Middle East":

"Algeria Sowed Seeds of Hostage Crisis as It Nurtured Warlord" by Adam Nossiter and Neil MacFarquhar

[which] reports on how the Algerian government essentially enabled and encouraged the crisis in neighboring Mali by backing -- even hosting in Algiers -- an Islamic militant leader and local warlord, Iyad Ag Ghali, who then tried to take over Mali by force, including taking Algerians and other foreigners hostage at an oil drilling site, leading to a deadly Algerian battle and now a war in Mali that has drawn in the old colonial powers. The article talked at length about the risks of working with such militants. The risks for Algeria, that is; not the risks in general of such a practice.

"A Rebel Commander in Syria Holds the Reins of War"

[which is] a glowing paen to Abdulkader al-Saleh, aka Hajji Marea, a rebel leader in the Syrian civil war. The article paints the man whose nom de guerre is comfortingly (and incorrectly) translated as meaning "the respectable man from Marea" (it actually means "the man from Marea who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca"), is clearly aligned with a radical Muslim group, the Al Nusra Front, which the article notes, is "blacklisted" by the US as a terrorist organization.

Already in these capsule descriptions of Dave's, I think we can see him nudging these pieces together in ways that seem clearly not have occurred to either the NYT writers or their editors. Dave is mightily ticked off because the paper "managed to run two closely related stories making opposite points in Saturday's paper without referencing each other," either in the print edition or online.

Typically, when two articles that are clearly related run in a newspaper, they are run side-by-side, with one appearing as a kind of side-bar to the other. In this case, though, the first article, on the warlord Iyad Ag Ghali, ran on page one, jumping to page eight, while the second, on Hajji Marea, ran on page 9, separated by several other articles in the intervening columns of both pages. Even in the Times' online edition, where it is easy -- and standard procedure -- to include links to relevant other articles, there is no link between these two stories.

Dave offers as an additional criticism what I imagine he would agree is at least in part an explanation for his original one: "Nor do the reporters on either piece include any historical background or context in their reports."

Thus Times readers are left blissfully unaware of the many examples of blowback that the US has experienced from its decades of such faustian bargains. The most damaging of these, of course, was the CIA's setting up of the Al Qaeda organization during the Jimmy Carter presidency, when he and his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski came up with the brilliant idea of encouraging, funding and arming local and foreign Islamic fanatics to foment a civil war in Afghanistan with the goal of undermining the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul and "bleeding" the Soviet Union. Of course, the US-funded and armed Mujahadeen became the Taliban, and among those foreign Islamic fanatics that the CIA- trained and armed to fight the Soviets was Osama Bin Laden and his merry band.

And we know how that turned out.

Surely at least a paragraph reference to that debacle would be in order when one is writing about the latest disastrous Algerian experience with blowback, or about America's latest support for religious fundamentalist fighters in its campaign to oust Syria's current government.

Of course, once you remove this background, the connections between the Algeria-Mali and Syrian-warlord stories are a good deal less clear, and it's not all that surprising that we wind up with this pair of "disjointed and poorly written pieces that add little to the readers' understanding of these latest hotspots in the Middle East."

And yet, incredibly, one offers an example of what can go wrong when a government -- Algeria -- cozies up with a bloodthirsty killer and religious fanatic, while the other tells how the US government is in the process of doing exactly the same thing in Syria.

Hmm, there just might be a story there, don't you think? Or maybe at least a link.

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Glad You Weren't Born In Pakistan?

Pick your poison

Forget for a moment that there's an on-going bloodbath in Pakistan's biggest city, Karachi, and that last week alone over 100 people were killed-- not in the tribal badlands but in the biggest city in the country. This weekend the news out of Pakistan began with two big stories: 1- a court ordered the seizure of former President Pervez Musharraf's assets for his involvement with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto; 2- the deaths of at least 2 dozen Pakistani troops in a cross-border raid by Afghan Taliban fighters. Each an immense story... and each nearly buried by a third... the killing of al-Qaida #2 operative, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan who has been running al-Qaeda's day to day operations, we're told. Supposedly essential for the functioning of the terrorist operation, Al-Rahman was killed August 22 in the tribal area of Waziristan. Just thought I'd mention-- obviously for no particular reason-- that after Musharraf had Bhutto murdered, he blamed Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the Pakistani Taliban. They usually revel in claiming credit for that kind of think but Mehsud and the Taliban denied any involvement. Almost immediately-- and exactly 2 years ago-- he was killed in a US drone attack, "one of the most high-profile casualties of the covert American campaign targeting al-Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan's lawless tribal belt on the Afghan border."

Back to 2011, an anonymous CIA agent told A.P. that "al-Rahman's death will make it harder for Zawahiri to oversee what is considered an increasingly weakened organization."

"Zawahiri needed Atiyah's experience and connections to help manage al-Qaida," the official said.

Al-Rahman was killed Aug. 22 in the lawless Pakistani tribal region of Waziristan, according to a senior administration who also insisted on anonymity to discuss intelligence issues.

The official would not say how al-Rahman was killed. But his death came on the same day that a CIA drone strike was reported in Waziristan. Such strikes by unmanned aircraft are Washington's weapon of choice for killing terrorists in the mountainous, hard-to-reach area along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Rahman has been thought to be dead before. Last year, there were reports that Rahman was killed in a drone strike but neither senior U.S. administration officials nor al-Qaida ever confirmed them.

Al-Rahman, believed to be in his mid-30s, was a close confidant of bin Laden and once served as bin Laden's emissary to Iran.

Al-Rahman was allowed to move freely in and out of Iran as part of that arrangement and has been operating out of Waziristan for some time, officials have said.

Born in Libya, al-Rahman joined bin Laden as a teenager in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union.

After Navy SEALs killed bin Laden, they found evidence of al-Rahman's role as operational chief, U.S. officials have said.

I as many people believe that al-Rahman was killed as believe that Musharraf had Bhutto offed (It's been rep[orted widely in Pakistan that two senior police officers arrested for alleged dereliction of duty apparently told investigators that Musharraf himself had ordered the removal of a security detail on the day of her death.) And no one really knows whether al-Rahman was really killed by an American drone or not... but whether he was or he wasn't, a growing number of Pakistanis are sick and tired of American aid with CIA strings, aid that never seems to dribble down to society at large, but always winds up in the Swiss bank accounts of a small, corrupt elite-- and in the coffers of well-connected U.S. firms. The middle class here was very American-centric before 9/11. It isn't any more.

We don't believe in economic stimulus at home, but apparently it's OK to do it for the Taliban

With all that taxpayer moolah we're shoving directly and indirectly into Taliban piggybanks, can't we at least try to persuade them to "Buy American"? Or is this what's meant by "globalism"?

by Ken

And the, uh, good news, is that we managed to transfer this particular $360 million to the Taliban without having to give more than a modest amount of it directly. Most of it just sort of wound up in their hands.

Maybe it's because I had just read a review by Charles Rosen in the New York Review of Books of a new translation by John Ashbery of the prose poems of Rimbaud (the review, which also covers a new translation by Karl Kirchwey of Verlaine's Poems Under Saturn; only a digest is available free online, but if you're interested let me know and I'll see that you're taken care of), but I can't help feeling that what the folks at The American Prospect have achieved in today's "Balance Sheet" report, "A Stimulus for the Taliban," qualifies as some sort of prose poem. After telling us about AP's report ("$360M lost to insurgents, criminals in Afghanistan") "that the U.S. military, after going through hundreds of combat support and reconstruction contracts, estimates that $360 million in U.S. tax dollars has ended up in the hands of the Taliban," The Balance Sheet, um, explains:

In a confusing process described as "reverse money laundering," money moves from the United States to companies hired for transportation, construction, power projects and similar jobs who turn out to have ties to criminal networks. Only a small chunk of that $360 million was directly given to the Taliban; the bulk of the money was lost to profiteering, bribery and extortion by criminals and power brokers.

Say what?

I don't know about you, but I'm sure breathing easier knowing that "only a small chunk of that $360 million was directly given to the Taliban." After all, aren't those "criminals and power brokers" who extracted "the bulk of the money" via "profiteering, bribery and extortion" merely enacting an Afghan version of the Republican plan for turning the U.S. economy around? Isn't this pretty much what cesspools of corruption like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have in mind when they talk about "job creation"? Of course the only decent-paying jobs are for the profiteers, bribers, and extorters, but it's often true that a certain number of grunt-level jobs trickle down to the yawping masses.

As we've pointed out frequently, at least the huge sums that vanish down DoD ratholes normally provide a certain amount of economic stimulus, one of the few kinds apparently still permissible in the Teabagging Era -- it's what we call "military Keynesianism," and the Fiscal Prudes of the Right don't at all like to talk about it. However, at least that money tends to be shoveled into our own economy, whereas this particular $360M seems to have vanished into assorted Afghan ratholes. Criminal Afghan ratholes. And of course the Taliban.

The DoD is on the case, however. The Balance Sheet further reports:

The Department of Defense announced Monday that they would reduce subcontracting, and thus the number of connections to the criminal network. Additionally, U.S. authorities in Afghanistan are screening contractors more carefully, and are more aggressively barring companies that violate contract terms or are involved in illicit behavior. They hope this kind of scrutiny will prevent more money from getting to the pockets of the very people the U.S. is supposed to be fighting.

The Balance Sheet also includes -- in its "The Experts" side panel -- a quote from a piece by Karen DeYoung in yesterday's Washington Post (this is the correct link: "U.S. military awards contracts in Afghanistan to get money away from insurgents"):

U.S. commanders have argued that outsourcing the transport and security frees up the U.S. warfighters to handle more important missions. The only alternative, said a senior congressional staff member speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss information not yet released, is "to reduce the [U.S.] footprint in Afghanistan."

Policymakers and the public need to understand, he said, that "the cost of doing business is that we have to pay, effectively, our enemy for the right to be there."

Since that's clearly crazytalk, the business about reducing the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan, I guess we just have to go on paying our enemy for the right to be there. Which segues right into the other "expert" quote offered by The Balance Sheet, from the AP report linked above (here's another correct link):

Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., former chairman of the House oversight panel that investigated the wayward payments, said that the U.S. must stop the diversion of taxpayer dollars to the enemy. "When war becomes good business for the insurgents, it is all the more difficult to convince them to lay down their arms," Tierney said.

One might add, though, that a good part of the problem from a budgetary standpoint -- meaning in particular from a debt and deficit standpoint -- is that war is such excellent business for our own domestic profiteers, bribers, and extorters. And it actually produces a decent number of decent-paying jobs. But like I said, our friends the Fiscal Prudes never like to talk about military Keynesianism. So just forget I said anything.

Say, how 'bout that weather?


Of course weather talk is apt to lead to climate-change talk, and we're not supposed to talk about that either. So just never mind.

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Why Are We Occupying Afghanistan Again?

Dr. William Brydon, the only British survivor of the 1842 defeat of an entire British army between Kabul & Jalalabad

Although the phrase has been reworked and endlessly repeated-- primarily by high school history teachers-- I believe it was George Santayana who first said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (in the first volume of The Life of Reason). Today, though, I have nothing to say about Alexander the Great, the Czarist Russians, The British, the Great Game or the Soviets and their misadventures in Central Asia. Let's keep this little history lesson all post-9/11.

Eric Margolis is best known as "an expert" on the Middle East, primarily in Canada, where he's a contributing editor for the Toronto Sun and a go-to journalist for all things Asia and all things Islam. Here in the states we know him as someone who CNN and Fox use frequently. He made his bones embedded with the mujahadeen when they were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan before most Americans knew what embedded journalists were. Margolis is a conservative, though decidedly not a neo-conservative.

Yesterday he endeavored to teach his Canadian readers a little history about the current conflict in Afghanistan without once mentioning Alexander and Roxanna, the Simla Manifesto, or even Leonid Brezhnev or Mikhail Gorbachev. He starts with a version of another much-quoted aphorism, California Senator Hiram Johnson's 1918 statement that "The first casualty when war comes is truth," although some insist he got it from either Aeschylus or Sun Tzu. Margolis's point is that the current tragedy in Afghanistan is based on an utterly false premise, that "we've got to fight terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them at home." Few know better than him, through years of on-the-ground, gritty first hand experience how utterly untue this is. Americans, though they oppose escalating the war and though they tend to be unfocused and confused about Afghanistan, also tend to think the World Trade towers attacks were planned out either by the Taliban or by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan with the connivance of the Taliban. "False," says Margolis.

The 9/11 attacks were planned in Germany and Spain, and conducted mainly by U.S.-based Saudis to punish America for supporting Israel.

Taliban, a militant religious, anti-Communist movement of Pashtun tribesmen, was totally surprised by 9/11. Taliban received U.S. aid until May, 2001. The CIA was planning to use Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida to stir up Muslim Uighurs against Chinese rule, and Taliban against Russia's Central Asian allies.

Al-Qaida only numbered 300 members. Most have been killed. A handful escaped to Pakistan. Only a few remain in Afghanistan. Yet President Barack Obama insists 68,000 or more U.S. troops must stay in Afghanistan to fight al-Qaida and prevent extremists from re-acquiring "terrorist training camps."

This claim, like Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, is a handy slogan to market war to the public... Taliban are the sons of the U.S.-backed mujahidin who defeated the Soviets in the 1980s. As I have been saying since 9/11, Taliban never was America's enemy. Instead of invading Afghanistan in 2001, the U.S. should have paid Taliban to uproot al-Qaida.

The Pashtun tribes want to end foreign occupation and drive out the Afghan Communists, who now dominate the U.S.-installed Kabul regime. But the U.S. has blundered into a full-scale war not just with Taliban, but with most of Afghanistan's fierce Pashtun tribes, who comprise over half the population.

Obama is wrestling with widening the war. After eight years of military operations costing $236 billion US, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan just warned of the threat of "failure," a.k.a. defeat. Canada has so far wasted $16 billion Cdn. on the war. Western occupation forces will be doomed if the Afghan resistance ever gets modern anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles.

The U.S. is sinking ever deeper into the South Asian morass. Washington is trying to arm-twist Pakistan into being more obedient and widening the war against its own independent-minded Pashtun tribes-- wrongly called "Taliban."

Washington's incredibly ham-handed efforts to use $7.5 billion US to bribe Pakistan's feeble, corrupt government and army, take control of military promotions, and get a grip on Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, have Pakistan's soldiers on the verge of revolt.

Obama has been under intense pressure from flag-waving Republicans, much of the media, and the hawkish national security establishment to expand the war. Israel's supporters, including many Congressional Democrats, want to see the U.S. seize Pakistan's nuclear arms and expand the Afghan
war into Iran.

Obama should admit Taliban is not and never was a threat to the West; that the wildly exaggerated al-Qaida has been mostly eradicated; and that the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan is causing more damage to U.S. interests in the Muslim world-- now 25% of all humanity-- than Bin Laden and his few rag-tag allies. The bombing in Madrid and London, and conspiracy in Toronto, were all horribly wrongheaded protests by young Muslims against the Afghan war.

We are not going to change the way Afghans treat their women by waging war on them, or bring democracy through rigged elections.

The U.S. presence in Afghanistan, which, understandably is now widely looked at by the people there as a horribly foreign and often brutal and deadly occupation of their country, is making the resistance bigger, stronger and more widespread. In Friday's Boston Globe Bryan Bender pointed to American intelligence reports showing that the insurgents battling U.S. troops are fighting for lots of reasons but being religiously motivated Talban supporters is not high on the list of most of them; some are anti-Taliban. Only about 10% of the insurgency is Taliban-oriented now. No doubt, though, thousands will flock to collect the bribes Obama is leaning towards giveing Afghans who agree to forsake the Taliban.

Americans don't get Afghanistan, don't get Pashtunwali and need to pack up and leave the Afghans to themselves. As Alan Grayson (D-FL) said a few days ago, the best foreign policy is to just leave people alone. Grayson:

I’ve been to 175 countries all around the world including Afghanistan, including every country in that region, and what I’ve seen everywhere I go is that there are some commonalties everywhere you go. Everywhere you go people want to fall in love. It’s an interesting thing.  Everywhere you go, people love children. Everywhere, they love children. Everywhere you go, there’s a taboo against violence. Every single place you go. And everywhere you go, people want to be left alone. And that’s the best foreign policy of all. Just to leave people alone.

Make sense to you? Grayson was one of the 32 Democrats who voted against the supplemental budget to fund the war back on June 16. No Means No is an opportunity to thank him and his colleagues and to encourage other members of Congres sto get on board. Please click the link and lend a hand.

Is The Battle For The Swat Valley A War Of Extermination?

No good guys in this war

Today's Washington Post mentions a battle for Mingora, the capital of the remote Swat Valley, which is held by "the Taliban." The Taliban? Osama bin-Laden, the World Trade Center, Saddam Hussein? No, none of the above. Brutal, primitive religious fundamentalists with guns? Yeah, that-- battling against a corrupt government whose boots are on the neck of Pakistan's 150 million poor people. Wait, wait. Are they the good guys? No-- not any more than Pat Robertson and James Dobson are (not that Robertson or Dobson are champions of the poor on their least worst days)-- but this isn't as black and white as the western media paints it either. And part of that painting is preparing us for a war of extermination.

As of yesterday the war had turned into a street by street bloodbath, "an apparent escalation of the army's effort to retake the picturesque area, which has become a symbol of insurgent defiance and government deficiency." Something like two million Pakistanis are now internal refugees, fleeing for their lives with whatever they could carry as the army and the militants fought it out with little regard for anyone caught in the middle. (That's always what happens when you have "God" on your side; anything goes 'cause it's what "He" wants.)

Something like 15,000 American-equipped Pakistani troops, with artillery and air support, are battling 3-4,000 rebels in Swat. The military is vowing "to take it to a logical conclusion" and the Pakistani Prime Minister, Yousaf Gillani, says his government "is determined to stamp out terrorism."

A Mingora resident reached by telephone said there had been intense fighting in the center of the city Saturday. Nasir Khan, a merchant, said that he had been stranded in the city and that from his home he could hear the two sides trading fire. The battle, he said, was apparently unfolding in several parts of Mingora, including the central bus terminal and along the main road near the city's primary gateway.

"Taliban militants are offering tough resistance," he said.

The army said Saturday evening that 17 Taliban fighters had been killed in the previous 24 hours. Overall, more than 1,000 militants have been killed, the army said, although the number is impossible to verify independently because nearly all journalists and civilian officials have fled the valley. About 100 security officers have been killed in the operation, the army said. Accounts from residents who have fled suggest that dozens of civilians have also been killed.

This afternoon we get reports from Mingora that the Pakistani Army has captured Green Chowk (or Square) after fierce fighting. The suddenly righteous Pakistani government, which was perfectly comfortable ceding the Swat Valley to the Taliban last year, are calling the re-taking of Green Chowk a great symbolic victory for the cause of... whatever they claim to be fighting for.

Under the Taliban, it had gained notoriety as “Slaughter Square.” Beheaded bodies-- often of people accused of spying or of un-Islamic behavior-- were thrown in the square to intimidate residents.

None of that bothered the Pakistani government in the slightest until the Taliban started expanding southward towards Islamabad and until Obama told them if they didn't clean up the mess, the billions of dollars in U.S. aid would cease flowing. Now they're bombarding their own citizens from the air.

With Pakistan Spinning Out Of Control, How Safe Are The Nukes?

One of those little symbols looks like it's WAY too close for comfort

Last week, I suggested at my travel site, The Around The World Blog that one of Pakistan's most beloved tourist destinations, the picturesque Swat Valley, might be a good place to cross off your future travel plans, although if you're just in your teens or twenties, it could be ok for your grandchildren-- maybe. And that's a big maybe, but one that means a lot to Barack Obama today. "We have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don't end up having a nuclear-armed militant state."

Late last night Reuters was reporting a full-scale assault by the American-equipped Pakistani Army on Taliban positions in the Swat Valley, which had been previously ceded to the Taliban as part of a ceasefire God told the Taliban to break immediately. They bombed the hell out of the place-- planes, helicopter gunships... the whole works. Half a million civilians had already fled but a curfew, later lifted, was keeping anyone else in the line of fire from getting out.

Apparently cleaning the Taliban out of Swat, which is 80 miles from the capital of the country, was a demand Obama made of Pakistani President Zardari when he was in DC last week. It was basically, get your ass in gear or forget any more aid, aid that keeps the country from falling into total chaos. Obama also promised to help-- or threatened not to help-- with Zardari's rival, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Pakistan's army went on a full-scale offensive after the government ordered troops to flush out militants from the Islamist stronghold, once an exotic tourist destination.

...In an incident that could hurt government efforts to rally support for the offensive, suspected pilotless U.S. drone aircraft fired missiles Saturday at targets in South Waziristan, an al Qaeda and Taliban sanctuary on the Afghanistan border, intelligence officials said.

One official as well as a Taliban source said the missiles killed five militants. Another intelligence official put the death toll at as high as 20.

Hours later, Pakistani security forces killed 18 militants in the same region, the military said. The shootout erupted after militants attacked a military convoy, killing one soldier and wounding two.

U.S. attacks have been criticized for killing civilians and violating sovereignty, and have caused opposition to Islamabad cooperating with Washington in fighting militants.

This morning the kill claims by the military are growing, thousands more flee their homes, creating a serious internal refugee problem, and Prime Minister Gilani said in a press conference after an emergency cabinet meeting that the battle with the Taliban is a "battle for survival of Pakistan."

Most Americans don't care about any of this at all. The only aspect that gets anyone's attention is the possibility of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of the Taliban. Could it happen? The Obama Administration says no. Richard Lugar (R-IN), who knows a lot about this stuff and, unlike most of his Senate Republican colleagues, puts America first and partisan differences on the backburner, isn't as optimistic. So how secure is Pakistan's nuclear arsenal? The Bush Regime put a lot of money into helping the Pakistanis put a good system of controls into place-- although I always suspected that those controls had more to do with preventing more proliferation (ala A.Q. Khan) than preventing a radical government from getting its hands on the weapons. Everything I've read indicates that the nukes are pretty secure. Is pretty secure enough? The U.S. doesn't know where all 60 to 100 weapons are and, supposedly, the Pakistanis refuse to tell their American counterparts, concerned "that the United States might be tempted to seize or destroy Pakistan’s arsenal if the insurgency appeared about to engulf areas near Pakistan’s nuclear sites."

As the insurgency of the Taliban and Al Qaeda spreads in Pakistan, senior American officials say they are increasingly concerned about new vulnerabilities for Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, including the potential for militants to snatch a weapon in transport or to insert sympathizers into laboratories or fuel-production facilities.

...“We are largely relying on assurances, the same assurances we have been hearing for years,” said one senior official who was involved in the dialogue with Pakistan during the Bush years, and remains involved today. “The worse things get, the more strongly they hew to the line, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got it under control.'"... [C]ooperation, according to officials who would not speak for attribution because of the sensitivity surrounding the exchanges between Washington and Islamabad, has been sharply limited when the subject has turned to the vulnerabilities in the Pakistani nuclear infrastructure. The Obama administration inherited from President Bush a multiyear, $100 million secret American program to help Pakistan build stronger physical protections around some of those facilities, and to train Pakistanis in nuclear security.

But much of that effort has now petered out, and American officials have never been permitted to see how much of the money was spent, the facilities where the weapons are kept or even a tally of how many Pakistan has produced. The facility Pakistan was supposed to build to conduct its own training exercises is running years behind schedule.

UPDATE: This Is Going To Be REALLY Bad

I'm sure you've noticed what a mess Iraq and Afghanistan have been. Iraq has 31,234,000 people, approximately the same as Afghanistan, although I doubt Afghanistan has half that many. Pakistan has 165,900,000, over a hundred million more than both combined. And then there are those 60-100 supposedly secure nuclear weapons. I've been to Pakistan twice and the place creeped me out both times, although I was absolutely in love with both India and Afghanistan. Pakistan, a weird and dysfunctional construct more than a real country to begin with, is falling apart right in front of our eyes now-- and it's going to be very, very ugly, much worse than anything we've experienced in Iraq or Afghanistan. The problems there are strictly about religious fundamentalism alone. There is also a class aspect and an uprising against a rotten out and corrupt feudal society. Today's NY Times reports that "It remains unlikely that Islamic militants could seize power in Pakistan, given the strength of Pakistan’s military, according to American intelligence analysts." Now where have I heard that before? Certainly Iran and Cuba. I'm not sure if they said that about Libya in 1969; I was in Afghanistan when 27 year old Muammar Gaddafi overthrew U.S. puppet King Idris. The strength of the Pakistani army is illusory, unless you mean they have tons and tons and tons of expensive American equipment that is unlikely to do them any good in a guerilla war against determined jihadis. There is no there there and there's nothing propping it up. I suspect there are an awful lot of people transferring their savings to Britain around now.

Is There A Message For Obama In Swat?

When I ventured into Mingora in Pakistan's Swat Valley in 1969 it had just gone from being a princely state to just a normal administrative district of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, east of Afghanistan. More recently it has been more or less ceded to the Taliban. Until recently it was still a tourist and honeymooners' destination. That's over. It was Pakistan's most fabled skiing resort. The Taliban burned that down-- along with every school that teaches girls. Once it was a relatively prosperous and well-educated part of Pakistan. Now it's a Taliban hellhole, abandoned by a faltering federal government and under the sway of Shari'a law. Although it's only 100 miles from Islamabad, the Pakistani military has been unable to dislodge the Taliban-- who have killed hundreds of their opponents-- and Pakistan announced a cease fire last week leaving a psychotic local religious leader, Maulana Fazlullah in charge. It would be as if the U.S. government allowed Fred Phelps to run Topeka or James Dobson to take over Colorado Springs. In the Swat Valley, all girls' schools were ordered to close down and when a few refused, they were blown up.

The Taliban and their Chechyan and Arab allies have terrorized the region and, in effect, beaten the Pakistani military, a military the U.S. has poured billions and billions of dollars into. The last free elections saw overwhelming support in Swat for the secular Awami National Party, which sent the Taliban on a murderous rampage, leading to several hundred thousand residents packing up and leaving.

Many Pakistanis greeted the terms of the truce with skepticism. One newspaper, Dawn, said the deal sent a "disastrous signal: fight the state militarily and it will give you what you want and get nothing in return."

Legal experts in Pakistan said the deal would set a precedent for militants to campaign for and win the imposition of Islamic courts elsewhere in Pakistan. The United States, which supports the civilian government of Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari, was cautious in its early reaction.

It's Saturday. I hope you have 12 spare minutes to watch this important new documentary from BraveNewFilms that delves into the catastrophe unfolding in than Pathan homeland (eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan).



Joseph Galloway suggests we dig out some old Rudyard Kipling verses to help focus our attention on the well-worn road to doom Obama is dragging us down in Afghanistan:

When wounded and left on Afghanistan's plain,
And the women come out to cut up your remains,
Roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

In case you missed it in the legendary Friday news dump, the Pentagon says that the Taliban have "coalesced into a resilient insurgency"

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that this wasn't breaking news on Friday, something that some precocious young Pentagon trend-spotter just happened to notice, and said, "By golly, I wonder if Secretary Gates knows about this." Actually, since the news came in the form of a report that was sneaked out on Friday, this startling conclusion was presumably known, well, at least days earlier.

In fact, according to the AP's Lolita C. Baldor:

The report was released Friday along with a separate plan for the development of Afghan security forces. They are the first two comprehensive Pentagon reports to evaluate progress in Afghanistan.

Vast problems -- corruption, the illegal poppy trade, human rights abuses and slow progress in reconstruction -- were detailed, as well as the struggle to train and equip the Afghan Army and police.

The report described a dual terror threat in Afghanistan that includes the Taliban in the south, and "a more complex, adaptive insurgency" in the east. That fragmented insurgency is made up of groups ranging from al-Qaida and Afghan warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's radical Hezb-i-Islami group to Pakistani militants such as Jaish-e-Mohammed.

Insurgents will continue to challenge the government in southern and eastern Afghanistan, and the may also move to increase their power in the north and west, the report predicted.

The assessment was bluntly pessimistic as it described efforts to train the Army and police.

Now possibly the report could have been released earlier in the week, when it would have been likely to receive more normal media attention. Perhaps that was the plan, and the Pentagon supply office simply ran tragically short of those shiny report folders -- or maybe even, gasp, staples! Wouldn't you think they go through a lot of staples in an average week at the Pentagon? Let's say you forget to reorder one week. Boy, are you going to have a lot of loose papers!

In a panic you call over to Foggy Bottom to see if the State Department guy's got any staples he can spare, and it turns out she is a Colin Powell gal, still nursing grievances over the boss's serial humiliations at the hands of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. No help there! So you mobilize a massive national-security crisis effort, and finally, in the wee hours of Friday morning, you lay hands on enough staples to release the report -- just in time to catch all those press guys 'n' gals heading out for the weekend.

The Friday news dump is a cherished D.C. institution -- in fact, it's probably known and beloved of governments all over the world. But in the Bush regime it's become something of an art form -- no, an entire genre.

One of the many things I cherished about Rachel Maddow's old morning show on Air America Radio was the regular Monday feature in which they sifted through the weekend dump to see what the regime was legally compelled to release and least wanted brought to public attention. There was always something.

Now, I'm hoping Rachel still does this on her evening show (which airs at an impossible time for me). Frankly, though, this is a feature you'd think would be emulated by, well, every news outlet in the country. Gradually readers and viewers could be trained to look forward to weekly treasures from the dump. It could become a highlight of the weekly news calendar. Why, it's possible to imagine Friday becoming the worst day of the week for these awkward disclosures.

That is, of course, if our news media were actually interested in reporting the news.

Meanwhile, perhaps the Pentagon will have some thoughts on how to deal with the mess in Afghanistan. Check back on Friday.

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