Even Kabul is close to being threatened. Chalk up another botched mission by Team Bush and his boot-licking Tony Blair. If the US wants to be a leader, it's going to have to actually lead and not run away as we've seen in Afghanistan. Moving troops out of Afghanistan and into Iraq is coming back to haunt us. It's only a matter of time before the Bush crowd starts complaining again about NATO needing to send more troops when in fact, it was the US who abandoned this war. Mission Accomplished?
The Taliban has a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan and the country is in serious danger of falling into Taliban hands, according to a report by an independent thinktank with long experience in the area.
Despite tens of thousands of Nato-led troops and billions of dollars in aid poured into the country, the insurgents, driven out by the American invasion in 2001, now control "vast swaths of unchallenged territory, including rural areas, some district centres, and important road arteries", the Senlis Council says in a report released yesterday.
On the basis of what it calls exclusive research, it warns that the insurgency is also exercising a "significant amount of psychological control, gaining more and more political legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people who have a long history of shifting alliances and regime change".
War profiteers have benefitted handsomely from the war in Iraq. They've done it with little oversight. In my opinion, anyone who commits fraud or waste or abuse in a war zone is guilty of treason. They endanger the lives of our soldiers for profit:
[Special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction Stuart] Bowen's comments came in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, as lawmakers complained that assessing fines is not enough to stop the billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse plaguing Iraq reconstruction projects. Auditors last month told Congress that about $10 billion has been squandered by the U.S. government on Iraq reconstruction aid because of contractor overcharges and unsupported expenses.
The U.S. has appropriated more than $38 billion for Iraq relief and reconstruction, including some money for security forces and economic programs, according to the latest quarterly report from the special inspector general, released in January.
Assessing fines isn't enough. War profiteers should be in jail doing hard labor.
Of course, for the past four years of the war, there was no oversight. Leaders of the oversight committees, like Susan Collins who chaired the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, shunned their responsibility. Collins would not hold the Bush Administration accountable for the war that she helped them start. Kay in Maine exposes the real Susan Collins at Turn Maine Blue. Over the past few years, Susan Collins had a chance to be a bold, independent leader, like her predecessor Margaret Chase Smith. She didn't. She did the bidding for Bush.
