« previous | TPM CAFÉ READER POSTS HOME | next »
The REALLY Great Escape, 2008 (Steve McQueen as Mullah Omar, James Garner as Baitullah Mehsud
Are you kidding me? In this version of the movie (Oliver Stone, pick up the phone...) everyone gets clean away.
Freedom's on th' march fer sure...What kind of government is susceptible to this sort of evidence of open irrelevance?
Someone who knows Sarah Cheyes, please ask her what's up, because it is evident that the writ of Kabul runs about five hundred yards away from the Presidential palace, and no further.
"Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai who is president of Kandahar's provincial council, said... ''all'' the prisoners escaped, ''There is no one left,''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Afghan-Prison-Attack.html?hp
Advertisement
Comments (25)
That good news?
June 13, 2008 9:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS, FOR OSAMA!
(For us, eh, not so much...)
June 13, 2008 10:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
That said, it does appear that our puppet regime in Kabul is *mimicking our version of gitmo justice and perhaps we may be forgiven for thinking that some of the fleeing prisoners are no more guilty than the brave flyboys who busted out of that nazi p.o.w. camp...
*"Lawmaker Habibullah Jan said 47 of the prisoners had **stitched their mouths shut during the hunger strike in May. He said some of the hunger strikers had been held without trial for more than two years and others were given lengthy prison sentences after short trials."
**(These are some hard core motherfuckers...)
June 13, 2008 10:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dammnnnn... That's taking the "Iron-Jawed Angels" approach to entirely new heights.
June 13, 2008 11:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
That good news?
On second thought, maybe so:
"Some 300 women who came to protest outside the prison at the time said their relatives inside had been picked up by NATO and American military sweeps and were innocent but nevertheless held without trial for months and even years"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/world/asia/14kandahar.html?hp
June 14, 2008 12:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Iron-Jawed Angels
mmmm...Hilary Swank (disclaimer:gratuitous chauvinism alert)
June 13, 2008 11:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Whoa, from the NYTimes report:
What's that new P.R. effort all about?
I've been reading an awful lot of stuff suggesting that many peeps are growing increasingly unhappy with Karzai (and not just Bush peeps,) maybe that has something to do with it.
Oh and I found this one interesting:
June 14, 2008 1:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
American and allied combat deaths in Afghanistan had exceeded the toll in Iraq during May.
a real eyebrow raiser, n'est-ce pas?
June 14, 2008 2:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Apparently there's going to be enough material for more than one good action flick:
Mass jailbreak by Taliban stuns Kandahar
guardian.co.uk, UK - 4 hours ago
Up to 1000 prisoners, including 400 Taliban militants, were on the run in Kandahar last night after a dramatic Taliban assault on the southern Afghan city's ...
Could it have something to do with the Zawahiri v. Fadl debate?
June 14, 2008 1:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
the Zawahiri v. Fadl debate?
Ya gotta love the Salafi Chat Room--Uncle Ayman answers all your questions...
June 14, 2008 2:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, two action flicks, for sure:
RAF Harrier jets have been called in to destroy the largest drugs seizure in history after Afghan police discovered hashish worth at least £200 million.
Two Harriers launched a strike on a huge cache of 260 tons of the drug, stuffed in sacks of grain and buried in trenches and underground bunkers in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan.
The combat aircraft dropped 1,000lb bombs on the hiding place, which also included 2.5 tons of raw opium.
After the Harriers had delivered their payload, troops set the drugs ablaze. No previous haul comes close to matching this find, which weighed roughly the same as 30 double-decker buses....
June 14, 2008 4:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
I screwed up code on the 2nd article above, the link is here.
June 14, 2008 4:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
260 tons of marijuana
They don't mean grass like we would--they mean hash.
June 14, 2008 8:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
I saw a German guy walk out of Afghanistan in a pair of sandals that had a pound of hash in each sandal; When he got to the Persian side coming out of Isalam Kala, he watched the guard who was practically dissecting my workboots, and retired, like Michael Corleone in reverse, to stash his sandals on top of the ceiling level water tank.
Went through the inspection, returned to toilet, retrieved sandals.
June 14, 2008 8:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
More than 260 tons of marijuana was ... doused with petrol and set it alight....
That is just so wrong...
(It's hard not to visualize Cheech and Chong--BTW, Tommie Chong got a truly raw deal...)
June 14, 2008 8:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
Do you think the situation in Afghanistan is the result of turning security over to NATO, us diverting resources to Iraq, would have happened anyway, given the country?
June 14, 2008 11:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nothing has gone right in Afghanistan since the Brits split the Pashtuns into two sides of the Durant Line.
The Pashtuns (around 35 million!) are the world's largest single tribal grouping. I think it is fair to say that the presence in Pakistan of autonomous pashtun jurisdiction is fatal to any central government rule in an Afghanistan the geographical predicates of which include half but only half of the pashtuns.
That said, the Taliban could have been dispossessed from the drug trade by over bidding them and making medical morphine out of the local opium.
(There is always the impossibly sensible alternative of full on drug legalization, which is to say refusing to enforce the franchise for which the drug lords have spilled their own and others blood)
Certainly there would have been more chance for success if our special forces and cia assets had not been so early snatched out for redeployment to Iraq.
Yet and still, no one has made a success of occupyong Afghanistan and it's been tried by the best.
The terrain is unforgiving.
June 14, 2008 12:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
We are simpatico, I would have answered something similar.
I sometimes fantasize that creation of the nation of Pashtunistan is the key to solving a lot of problems. Let them alone to do it their way, proudly show what kinda wunnerful place they can create as a beacon to the rest of the Sunni world. See who wins that contest, Dubai or Pashtunistan. :-) It would be a little bit of helpful kick in the ass if, when the world agrees to such a state, they make it a condition that the women of such a state can freely cross the border for an alternative choice of citizenship in Pakistan or Iran, with a nice welfare check to get them started. (An Islamic version of Lysistrata might end up being written out of it.)
One thing I never got into researching is how the heck those federally adminstered tribal areas got created within Pakistan. The powers that be had no qualms about causing all kinds of horror dividing Muslim and Hindu, but no one would dare force the Pashtuns to submit fully to a state?
June 16, 2008 3:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
created... Pakistan
For another headscratcher:
P(unjabi)
A(fghani)
K(ashmiri)
istan...
You got it, the damn name of the country is a fuckin' acronym. A total construct from the word go.
Sarah Cheyes knows the wily Pashtun better than any westerner alive--check out the Bill Moyers interview on the PBS site from about three months
ago for a bit of local border color...
Consider further, that the state the suzerainty of which the British East India Company superceded was, in fact, Afghanistan, in the sense that the seat of the Mogul Empire was Balkh, and the Durant Line which (when drawn) separated the British Raj from the remaining territory of the Moghuls, is today the Afghan-Pakistan Border.
June 16, 2008 10:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
no one would dare force the Pashtuns to submit
The Siege of Malakand was the 26 July – 2 August 1897 siege of the British garrison in the Malakand region of modern day Pakistan's North West Frontier Province.[8] The British faced a force of Pashtun tribesmen whose tribal lands had been bisected by the Durand Line,[9] the 1,519 mile (2,445 km) border between Afghanistan and British India drawn up at the end of the Anglo-Afghan wars...The unrest caused by this division of the Pashtun lands led to the rise of Saidullah in Malakand. the small garrison at the camp of Malakand South and the small fort at Chakdara were both able to hold out for six days against the much larger Pashtun army... a relief column was sent... Accompanying this relief force was second lieutenant Winston Churchill, who later published his account as The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Malakand
June 16, 2008 10:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wikipedia also has a bit on the creation of the FATA themselves, along the changes thereafter and how they work now:
But the words "Frontier Crimes Regulation" are not linked, so they don't have a page with more on that...saving googling it for another day.
June 17, 2008 2:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
"The deaths of Mullah Naqibullah, the longtime leader of the Alokozai tribe that populates Arghandab, and another senior commander, Abdul Hakim Jan, who was killed in a huge suicide bombing in February, have critically depleted the tribe, which has always fiercely opposed the Taliban."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/world/asia/17afghan.html
Naqibulllah and Hakim Jan were Sarah Cheyes protectors in Kandahar. She has been running a botanical oil/soap stuff business and loving the Pashtuns for maybe four years.
June 16, 2008 11:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yup, Kandahar province, the joint is jumpin'.
Taliban Fighters Infiltrate Area Near Afghan City
By CARLOTTA GALL and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA 9:37 AM ET
Hundreds of Taliban fighters have swarmed into a strategically important district just outside Kandahar.
And to continue the cinematic imagery...
Old-Line Taliban Commander Is Face of Rising Afghan Threat
By CARLOTTA GALL
Published: June 17, 2008
I find continual irony in that a cultural movement that wants to go back to the days of the Caliphate is so invested in the ways of Hollywood action flicks (Bruce Willis in this particular case? :-)) in order to inspire and recruit. No one has beaten Osama and Khalid on that front yet, but they certainly are continuing their tradition.
I myself cannot get the cinematic image out of my mind of Karzai getting alone with Mullah Omar as a prisoner and not being able to hold himself back from strangling the old dude with his own hands.
June 17, 2008 1:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
P.S. My own cinematic imagery is of course the effects of Godfather Sopranos et. al. on my brain, as, yes I do know that Karzai is Pashtun. He is Pacino, with "them" dragging him back in...
June 17, 2008 2:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Afghans See Pakistan Role in Karzai Plot
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/world/asia/26afghan.html
June 27, 2008 1:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Post a Comment