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Deep down ever since I was a little boy, history was my favorite subject and war my favorite game, along with building cities and drawing pictures of war and cities. I grew up steeping myself in the details of ww2 hardware and campaigns, especially in the european theater. I can read and study maps for hours contentedly. I am sometimes transfixed, less so now that I am more mature, by the sight of actual real live military hardware in the steel.
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So after viewing this panel discussion by refugee Afghan intellectuals on the World Link satellite channel combined with DW footage from in country, I am re-convinced that the Taliban are fascist scum and must be ejected using force as the last resort. Yeah war {said not very enthusiastically}.
The pipeline project to end-run Iran and bring oil into the Indian Ocean through Pakistan was supposed to be made secure by the Taliban. It was already in the works in the mid-90's. That is why the US initially listened to Pakistan and Unocal and helped the Taliban secure their hold against the other competing groups in post-Soviet Akxhuystan. When Bin Laden fled there in 96 and Pakistan set off their nuke test in 98, the US realized it had blundered again. I probably don't know nearly enough details about this but I did come across a July 2001 grilling by a right-wing congressman from CA of two State Dept. people about our misleading the Northern Alliance into relaxing their posture while Pakistan was resupplying and rearming the Talib for a new offensive against them. He accused State of being either incompetent or duplicitous. To get anything close to stability after the devastation of the war is going to take a big expensive rebuilding project and drawing enough of the educated Afghans who fled the country for obvious reasons to come back and rebuild and run it. We pay to destroy it. We pay to rebuild it. We will have lots of help paying to rebuild from Saudi and Kuwait I hope if it is phrased properly. If we do what we did last time when the Sovs got ejected and fail to stay involved in peaceful rebuilding, it might bite us again. Meanwhile it looks like a deal to bring the Caspian Oil out through Rossiya has been struck. Why was that a hard deal to strike before I would like to know? Does the deal involve a bigger aid package to Russia?, NATO inclusion?, simple baksheesh to the right oligarchs affiliated with Gazneftprom?, simple acceptance of the brutal any means and all means necessary to subdue Chechnya (good luck eh?). Bunch of questions.
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