Beware of Islamic jihadists shipping cargo. And especially on the weekend before midterm elections.

A friend writes:

What do you think? Isn’t this new terror attack just a bit too convenient for comfort? So, the Americans were alerted by Obama’s friends in Saudi Arabia. The packages were sent to Jews in Chicago – in the certain knowledge that Obama’s popularity among Jews has been in steep decline. Need I continue? It worked in Spain.

In other words, was this a foiled jihadist attack, or a successful Islamic influence operation?

Think of it: Right before Election Day, we witness the rise of Obama-the-Protector (of Jews, the "homeland," his own hometown, synagogues, the friendly skies, all good connotations), evidence that Obama's "anti-extremist" security systems work, and, it may and will be argued, whose "outreach" to the Islamic world works as well. "We are grateful to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for their assistance..."  announced dhimmi-unctuous Obama terrorism adviser...

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"SOLD!"

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This week's syndicated column:

Last Sunday, the New York Times described a crude scene that smacked of not exactly petty graft. There was Afghanistan's presidential plane on the Tehran airport tarmac, waiting for one last passenger before wheels up to Kabul. The missing passenger was Iran's ambassador to Afghanistan. The ambassador, Feda Hussein Maliki, climbed aboard and took his tardy seat next to Umar Daudzai, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai's chief of staff and closest adviser. Maliki then presented Daudzai with a plastic bag bulging with about $1 million in packets of euros.

From Iran with love.

This, the Times reported, was "part of a secret, steady stream of Iranian cash intended to buy the loyalty of Mr. Daudzai and promote Iran's interest in the presidential palace" in Kabul.

Bad enough, but it gets worse.

...

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Here is a link to a  remarkable video  that was posted by a Guardian reporter back in February 2009. It was shot at a Marine Combat Outpost in Kunar Province -- a remote and tiny installation that probably no longer exists since the US shut down many such COPs in the wake of disastrous attacks on Wanat and Keating in a shift in battle strategy last fall. The video is of an unusual quality and intensity.

Meanwhile, if the battle has shifted in any way, the strategy remains the same. The theory is, as the reporter explained in 2009, the Marines "will win over the locals while disrupting the Taliban's movements." Sound familiar?

Einstein is said to have defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Welcome to the insanity of American wars for hearts and minds in the umma.









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I thought that if anywhere there might be some tortuously fascinating rationale to explain away Hamid Karzai's "bags of cash" comments identifying Iran (and the US) as Big Daddy to the corruptocrats of the Karzai administration, it might appear at Contentions, possibly by Max Boot. I was not disappointed.

I was, however, stunned by the following quotation. Boot is arguing against the conclusions of a column by Fouad Ajami in which Ajami bemoans the lost "nobility" of our Afghan adventure. Boot writes:

As I suggested before, I respect Ajami’s views but in this case I do not agree with him. I believe there is just as much nobility to the war in Afghanistan as to the one in Iraq. We are, after all, fighting to make good on our post-9/11 promises to drive the Taliban out of power and establish a representative...

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Vlad Tepes has posted a string of pieces collectively entitled, "The Imam Always Gets His Man: Why Royal Candadian Mounted Police Outreach Isn't Working," that tells us that the same suicidal institutional mindset we saw on display recently among Homeland Security and FBI officials here and here addles the security institutions of our neighbors to the North -- namely, the RCMP.

Specifically, the post is about a conference in Ottowa tomorrow that RCMP members have been urged to attend. According to MacLeans, organizers include:

Green Party members who call themselves the “ Ottawa Group of Four.” They include Qais Ghanem, a doctor whose posting on the “Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth” reads: “I have, from the outset, believed that the 9/11 horrendous massacre of thousands of innocent civilians could not possibly...

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Can't seem to stop thinking about this poignant story.

From yesterday's Washington Post by David A. Fahrenthold:



ON HOLLAND ISLAND, MD. The story was strange enough to be a child's fable: In an isolated section of the Chesapeake Bay, there was a two-story Victorian house that seemed to emerge directly from the water.

And, scurrying around it, there was a retiree, trying to keep the house from falling in.

Finally, the man gave up. And last week, the house did, too. Raked by a storm, it cracked at the spine and collapsed into a one-story wreck.

The tale of the house and the man illustrates the Chesapeake's problem with rising oceans and sinking land. It has already erased life on most of the bay's islands and now is threatening to erase the islands themselves.

The century-old house was the last structure left on Holland Island, an abandoned watermen's community. Waves had eroded so much land that, at high tide, the house seemed to sit directly on the...

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Every now and then, I check the headlines on my favorite political races to see how "my" candidates are doing -- LTC Allen West (USA retired), for instance, who is running for Congress in District 22 in South Florida.

It looks as if Allen's doing just great, holding on to a lead both in the polls and in fund-raising as the campaign heads into the final days.

His opponent(s), however, may have the distinction of mounting not just the sleaziest attacks in the country (releasing Allen's Social Security number in an ad, for starters), but also the lamest. I refer to the recent attempt by Klein supporters, led by US Rep Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, to depict Allen -- an officer and a gentlemen both literally and figuratively -- as, get this, being "anti-woman," as the Sun Sentinel blog headline reported. Or maybe not being anti-woman himself exactly,  but rather, as the report put it, "being associated with vicious, degrading attitudes toward...

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Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media (AIM) took his questions and his Flip Video recorder to the DC Green Festival, which provided a forum for ever-traitors Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Freedom of the press, right? Barely. Video of Cliff's interview with Dorhn is posted here, where, Cliff writes, he will be adding more about the Saturday event. Meanwhile, his video-taped encounter with Green Fest organizer Kevin Danaher offers a quite chilling and literally up-close look at the classic stonewall.

Update: Well, the video was on Youtube earlier. I'll repost if it reappears.

Update: Technical difficulties solved:





 





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Just yesterday (Friday), one of Geert Wilders' expert witnesses, Hans Jansen, posted a blog about how a judge had tried to influence his testimony for the defense at a dinner party (!) preceding his court appearance. This triggered a Dutch media and legal reaction that led to yesterday's sensational dismissal of the banc of presiding judges and a call for a new trial with new and, it is hoped, unbiased judges.

A close observer of the case in Amsterdam calls this move a "major victory" for Wilders, writing:"The case now has to start again with new judges. This will probably take months. It is true that these new judges might rule against Wilders but with the public prosecutor  demanding acquittal there is a bigger chance that an unbiased court will acquit  him."

...

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From Steynonline:

So I was reading about Oskar Freysinger of the Swiss People's Party and the curious difficulty he was having in getting a hotel in Brussels when I got the news about certain, ah, last-minute changes to the venue of my speech in London, Ontario on November 1st. The front page of today's National Post leads with "Perils Of Speaking One's Mind On Islam" over mugshots of me and Juan Williams. As Adam McDowell reports: Centre Refuses To Host Steyn Lecture On Free Speech 

From the London Free Press story, "Author Denied Hall Rental":

Controversial author Mark Steyn may be too hot a potato for one city-owned London hall...

Non-controversial reporter Kate Dubinski seems to have learned only one adjective at journalism school. Either that, or while I was sleeping some wag had my name legally changed to Controversial Author Mark Steyn. Whatever the reason, this is the way it is; this is "the...

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This week's syndicated column:

If, as polls show, war is "off the radar" for midterm voters, it's a non-issue for midterm candidates, too. Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, show up exactly one time apiece in the GOP Pledge to America (on one page out of 48), and merely to bolster the GOP case for sanctions against Iran. Iran "worked to harm our deployed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan," the pledge notes. That's all there is about wars that have strained the military and drained the treasury for almost a decade and counting.

Maybe for once, the political class and the people are in sync. According to a New York Times poll, only 3 percent of voters consider "Afghanistan or the war" the most important issue of the day. Given the beleaguered state of the economy, that isn't too surprising. "What is surprising," the paper points out, "is that hardly any Americans cite the war in Afghanistan at all."

Why don't they? How did we grow callous to these open wounds of war? NBC's Tom Brokaw...

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Next, freedom of speech goes on trial in Austria in Viennese Regional Court on November 23, 2010 when Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wollf is slated to appear on charges of speaking frankly and honestly about Islam. Austrian authorities, like Dutch authorities, NPR, the OIC, CAIR, the Bundesbank, the US Government, etc., etc., oppose this vigirous and vital practice. Given the totalitarian powers embedded in such legal monstrosities as "hate speech" laws, Austria, like the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Denmark, Great Britain, and other EU countries, is putting Elisabeth on trial. I have picked up the press release on her case (below), with information about donating to Elisabeth's defense fund, from Gates of Vienna, which will be covering the case closely.

BPE Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa Press Release on the Litigation Against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff Gemmingen, October 20, 2010

On September 15, 2010, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff learned through the media that she — like Netherlander Geert Wilders and...

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From the Washington Post:

Veteran journalist Juan Williams was fired from his job as senior news analyst for National Public Radio late Wednesday because of comments he made about Muslims and terrorism on "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News Channel.

NPR said in a statement that Williams's remarks - including that he gets "worried" and "nervous" when he sees people dressed in Muslim-style clothing on airplanes - "were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR."

Williams, 56, made the remarks Wednesday after the show's host, Bill O'Reilly, asked him whether he thought the United States was facing a "Muslim dilemma." "The cold truth is that in the world today, jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet," O'Reilly said.

Williams, who is African American and writes and...

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Trolling for ayatollahs and other Iranian support, Nouri al-Maliki popped up in Tehran this week to find Khameini and Ahamdinejad both  in fine form, railing against Western and American influence in the region. Not to be outdone ...

Maliki returned the favor by declaring that “Iraq pursues increasing relations with Iran in all fields.” According to Iran’s official English-language agency, PressTV, Maliki also praised Ahmadinejad’s recent trip to Lebanon: “During your visit to Lebanon, the Zionist regime [of Israel] was on high [military] alert, which proved they are really cowards,” he declared.

Scrapped -- both the Harrier jets and the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal

---

From the Guardian:

Britain's armed forces will no longer be able to mount the kind of operations conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan, the government's strategic defence review made clear today. For at least a decade it will also be impossible to deploy the kind of carrier taskforce which liberated the Falklands 28 years ago.

Though defence chiefs said today they will still have significant expeditionary forces, they will not be able to intervene on the scale of recent years. ...

Shocking on its face, to be sure. But honestly, what did such "intervention" -- blood and treasure to the tune of a £36bn "black hole" in the British defense budget (I shudder to think about ours) -- actually accomplish?  Was making Iraq free to bond with Iran and Afghanistan free to bond with the Taliban worth such a price? Most wasteful, however, is the fact that the expensive lessons the experience begs to teach...

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Polling indicates that only 3 percent of Americans consider Afghanistan an important issue -- correction: the most important issue -- as we pull into Election Day (I don't think Iraq even made it into the question), so 97 percent of us won't care about the following reports.

From the AP:

Afghan lawmaker: Karzai in talks with Haqqani

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A lawmaker says the Afghan government has been in reconciliation talks for months with members of a Taliban faction closely tied to al-Qaida and responsible for lethal attacks on coalition forces and bombings inside Kabul.

The parliamentarian, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks, says the government has been in direct contact with Jalaludin Haqqani, the leader of the Pakistan-based Haqqani network.

The New York Times reported Wednesday...

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Mohammed Enait, counselor for plaintiffs in the Wilders Trial

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The spectacle continues.

Following Friday's announcement that prosecutors in the Geert Wilders trial in Amsterdam have recommended that Wilders be acquitted, the trial of course (?) continues until November 5 when the judge hands down his or -- who knows? -- some other entity's verdict.

If the proceedings to date have resembled something out of Kafka or Koestler, we have now entered pure Waugh.

Below, Mohammed Enait, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, appears in a video via Vlad Tepes. I thought I recognized that mug, and sure enough I reported...

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Last week, I reported that Oskar Freysinger, the prominent member of the Swiss People's Party who led the successful and model campaign to ban minaret construction in Switzerland (and whom I interviewed here), had been invited to Brussels to speak about Islam in Europe only to have two hotels cancel venues out from under him in dhimmi-deference to sharia dictates against criticizing Islam.  Filip Dewinter, the prominent Vlaams Belang politician known for his campaigns to halt Islamization in Belgium and to liberate Flanders from Belgium (and whom I have interviewed and written...

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This week's column:

All eyes on the war on free speech, the one that Dutch powers-that-be are waging inside an Amsterdam courtroom. That's where Geert Wilders is standing trial for his increasingly popular political platform, based on his analysis of the anti-Western laws and principles of Islam, that rejects the Islamization of the Netherlands. But don't stop there. There's much more to see in the trial of Wilders, whose Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) is the silent partner in the Netherlands' brand new center-right coalition government. That camel in the courtroom is the tip off.

You haven't noticed it? I've been watching it since last year, when sometime after Dutch prosecutors announced in January 2009 that Wilders would go to trial for "insulting" Muslims and "inciting" hatred against them, Stephen Coughlin, famous in national security circles in Washington for his airtight and exhaustive briefs on jihad, clued me in to his analysis of the Wilders trial to date.

What we know...

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Andrew Bostom sent along this intriguing report from the Jerusalem Post:

"Israeli-Greco ties in bloom as Greek FM's arrival nears"

The newly kindled Israeli- Greek romance continues to blossom, as Greek Foreign Minister Dimitris Droutsas is expected in Jerusalem on Monday, a week after a high level official from the Greek Prime Minister’s Office came to Israel to “map out fields of cooperation” between the two countries. Droustas will arrive as part of a three-day regional tour that will also take him to the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. A Greek diplomatic official said the visit is further indication of the significant strengthening of ties between the two countries.

His visit will come just four days after Greece and Israel are scheduled to conclude a four-day joint military exercise. Eight Israeli helicopters are currently taking part in the combat search-and-rescue...

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Here's a video tag to last week's musings on "intelligence" and "society's shredding fabric."

No fan of women in combat moi but the sight of American women troops suited up for combat wearing hijabs in deference to Islam is enough to make any American roar. Or should be.

From Stars and Stripes.

Headline: "A woman's touch: Engagement teams make inroads with Afghanistan's female community"

Female servicemembers are going where their male counterparts often can’t: inside Afghan homes to engage with women barred by custom from talking to male strangers.

Never mind that those customs are Islamically derived, but what else is new? Nothing. In fact, this very long story kind of writes itself:

The teams reach out to Afghan women, who typically go inside or shroud themselves in burqas when U.S. male soldiers are present. ...

Aus and her team of three female soldiers go into villages with patrols to provide medical treatment for people who can’t reach the district center. Afghan women most commonly complain of headaches, muscle cramps and sore stomachs caused...

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Oskar Freysinger of the Swiss People's Party and Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang outside the Flemish Parliament on October 9, 2010.

From what I can gather from assorted reports, Oskar Freysinger, the Swiss force of nature (Alpine avalanche?) behind the country's successful, lawful and democratically determined and all-around-wonderful ban on minarets, was recently invited to Brussels to speak on the dangers of Islam. Due to alleged (and wholly plausible pressure) from Socialist Mayor Freddy Thielemans, two venues successively booked to host the event were cancelled out from under him. First, the Crowne Plaza Hotel and, next, the Diamond Centre Hotel both shut their doors to Freysinger -- something for Brussels-bound travellers to remember when booking lodging.

Why did they shut Freysinger out? Fear of the Muslim reaction to any and all criticism of and opposition to sharia. Such fear has a name -- dhimmitude -- and it proves that Brussels, at least according to the dhimmi-powers that be,...

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A. Millar rightly calls our attention to the increasingly urgent case of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a brave Austrian who faces the possibility of three years in prison in  Austria for delivering a lecture on the Islamic threat to liberty -- a factual, sourced lecture on the Islamic threat to liberty.

The headline asks the question: "Lawfare in Austria: Is Truth Illegal?" With Geert Wilders currently standing (kangaroo) trial in the Netherlands for similar "crimes" -- in essence, devising a political program to respond to a factual, sourced understanding of the Islamic threat to liberty --  the question answers itself. The dhimmi-powers that be in the West desperately want to outlaw such facts about Islam, in the process rendering truth too dangerous to touch, speak, think about, comprehend and master. Will they succeed? Not if Elisabeth and Geert  and their growing numbers of supporters can help it.







...

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What's up with FBI outreach to known Hamas op Kifah Mustapha? Everybody at a Washington intelligence conference this week told me to ask the FBI. So I did.

Answer below in this week's syndicated column.

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Reading Patrick Poole's splashy coverage of the FBI's VIP treatment of Kifah Mustapha -- a known Hamas operative and unindicted co-conspirator in the landmark Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial -- will make your head spin with this dizzying question:

How could the same officials charged with securing the nation against the very terrorism Mustapha's activities supported (as laid out in court documents filed by federal investigators) have possibly invited him into the top-secret National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and the FBI's training center at Quantico during a six-week "Citizen's Academy" hosted by the FBI as "outreach" to the Muslim community?

"The plugs had to be pulled on our [watch] system" just to get Mustapha in the NCTC door, Poole,...

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Day 3 of the Wilders "hate speech" trial and Jan Moors, the judge presiding, again betrays favoritism toward the plaintiffs in the case --  in this instance a lady-plaintiff who in the video below (via Klein Verzet) tells the  judge she does not wish to see the courtroom screening of Wilders' film Fitna and asks to be excused. (Do watch Fitna yourself, if you haven't seen it already,  here at Liveleaks.)

"I can imagine," Kangaroo Jan tells her.

During the ensuing exchange with Wilders' lawyer over this egregious comment, Kangaroo Jan further describes the lady as "an injured party."

Um, isn't that yet to be proven -- or not? Not in this Dutch Star Chamber. More on the proceedings from Klein Verzet here...

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Breitbart reports:

A US security official on Wednesday said the country was capable of withstanding another terrorist attack and bouncing back, saying Americans needed to put extremist threats in "perspective."

Michael Leiter, head of the Nationa Counterterrorism Center, said despite recent successes there was no guarantee that intelligence and law enforcement agencies could prevent every attempt by extremists to attack the United States.

"We're not going to have a perfect batting average and its important that Americans understand that," Leiter told a conference on intelligence reform.

I was at that same conference yesterday (more to come in this week's upcoming column) and I would add that not only was Leiter not the only US official charged with protecting national security to get this point across, but there was another more disturbing implication....

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This is a courtroom sketch of US District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum during attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad's sentencing in Manhattan this week.

Judge Cedarbaum may be a very fine judge -- she sentenced Shahzad to life without possibility of parole -- but she did not do her jihad homework.

"Allah Akbar," Shahzad said, following a rant of jihad labeled "defiant" in the headlines.

"You appear to be someone who was capable of education and I do hope you will spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Koran wants you to kill lots of people," the judge replied.

Is she kidding?

I wish. But this is the state of enlightened and, alas, empowered thinking on Islam today. It is clueless as to what the Koran says specifically about killing  "lots of people" in service to Islam, and it is also clueless as to the zealotry...

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Don't miss the comments from the head kangaroo, I mean, judge at the end of the video (via Vlad Tepes)

Over the past several years, I have posted many speeches by Geert Wilders -- all of them inspiring in their appeal to a reserve of strength that must be tapped if the Western world is to withstand the ongoing, multilayered, multileveled assault on liberty by cultural relativism from within, and Islamic law from both without and from within.

The following is the statement he made yesterday in the courtroom in Amsterdam where he fighting for his freedom to continue speaking out and, now, as leader of an essential parliamentary bloc in a new Dutch coalition government, to continue leading. He puts it this way: "Formally, I am being tried, but it is the freedom of expression of many Dutchmen that is being tried."

And don't think freedom of expression in the Western world isn't on trial, too.

Geert Wilders:

Mister Chairman, members of the Court, Thank you for...

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... the fix appears to be in.

I refer to the trial of bold, valiant Geert Wilders, leader of a rising and hopeful political movement in the Netherlands, and whose free speech rights to warn his countrymen and the wider West about the threat to liberty posed by the advance of  Islam poses are imperiled in a Dutch courtroom. So are his political powers as recently granted and expanded by the Dutch electorate. And so is his personal freedom. His purported "hate speech" crimes carry a sentence of one year in jail.

Watching the players arrayed against Wilders assemble -- from the Justice Minister with...

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From the Washington Post obituary:

Sgt. 1st Class Lance Herman Vogeler, who grew up in Maryland, was described Monday as a leader of men, a religious man and a member of an elite Army unit.

He was also a husband and father of two.

He had been deployed four times to Iraq and eight to Afghanistan.

FOUR TIMES TO IRAQ AND EIGHT TIMES TO AFGHANISTAN?

Can anyone anywhere explain ... why?

The United States reaps so many, many benefits from such sacrifice: Our airports are safe again; our great buildings and institutions are wide open to the public once more; our treasury is replenished; our borders are secure; our Constitutional liberties are safeguarded against de facto dhimmitude...

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In January 2009. Adm. Mike Mullen -- he who failed to present and then sabotaged a non-COIN Afghan war plan for the POTUS, says Woodward -- wrote that our problem in Afghanistan (after seven years of American sacifice to ward off Taliban depredations against "the people") is that the US hadn't yet won Afghan trust.

That was idiotic then (here's why) and it's idiotic now as Mullen applies his trust plan to Pakistan, where the "moderate" government is blocking the NATO supply trucks the "extremists" are burning.

Admiral Mullen, who has visited Pakistan 20 times since taking the top military post in 2007, said the United States had been working to rebuild Pakistani trust. How that’s resolved, he said, would go a long way towards shaping the future US-Pakistani relationship. “We left them in a dark hole from about 1990 to 2002, and they don’t trust us,” he said. “We are trying to rebuild that trust. And it’s basically coming, but you don’t rebuild it overnight.”

Maybe you...

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Dear Friends,

I am very happy to be here in Berlin today. As you know, the invitation which my friend René Stadtkewitz extended to me, has cost him his membership of the CDU group in the Berlin Parliament. René, however, did not give in to the pressure. He did not betray his convictions. His dismissal prompted René to start a new political party. I wish him all the best. As you may have heard, the past weeks were extremely busy for me. Earlier this week we succeeded in forging a minority government of the Liberals and the Christian-Democrats which will be supported by my party. This is an historic event for the Netherlands. I am very proud of having helped to achieve this. At this very moment the Christian-Democrat Party conference is deciding whether or not to approves this coalition. If they do, we will be able to rebuild our country, preserve our national identity and offer our children...

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The Guardian reports on another futile, see-no-Islam idea, courtesy Uncle Sam: buying Pakistani hearts and minds with humanitarian flood relief:

The Chinook helicopters, travelling in pairs, swooped and curled between the lush valley walls of the Hindu Kush. The aftermath of Pakistan's epic flood scrolled underneath: torn bridges, crushed houses, entire fields swept away by the racing waters.

Inside the helicopters about 70 highland peasants, mostly fathers and their sons, gripping one another in terror and wonderment. Some poked fingers in their ears against the deafening engine roar; others peered out of the open hatch, awestruck – they had never seen their homeland like this before.

Rule of Islam: Women and girl children, LAST.

At a small military base the villagers stumbled out of the Chinooks, clothes pressed to their skin by the powerful rotorwash. Then their rescuers – silent American soldiers in black, bug-like helmets, eyes hidden behind mysterious looking black...

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This week's syndicated column:

Bob Woodward's latest publishing event, "Obama's Wars," includes maybe the most significant scoop of his career: Directing not only Obama's wars, but also America's, is a veritable military junta.

I exaggerate -- some. Frankly, I don't know how else to assess the information in Washington Post excerpts of Woodward's coverage of the deliberations leading up to President Obama's decision last year to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. The stories -- anonymously sourced as usual and, as such, questionable even as they undoubtedly influence subsequent coverage -- describe a president frustrated, ill-served and finally overwhelmed by military muscle concentrated in the hands of Defense Secretary Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mullen and then-CENTCOM chief Petraeus (all longtime regulars, if not favorites, of this column). Headline No. 1 says it all: "Military thwarted president seeking choice in Afghanistan." If the military "thwarts" a president, the president isn't in charge, which is not a good thing unless military dictatorships are your bag.

...

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