On 6/12/2009 6:27 PM spake thus:

On Jun 12, 1:55 pm, David Nebenzahl wrote:

We "took the Taliban out of power"? Really? *Really*?

Yeah, that's right. Last time I checked, Afghanistan has a
functioning government that doesn't include the Taliban. And girls
are going to school again. Funny, aren't you libs supposed to be in
favor of women's rights? And people aren't having their heads cut
off by the govt for alleged religious infractions or being beaten in
public for not dressing the way the Taliban says you must. The Al-
Qaeda training camps, through which 50K terrorists openly passed while
Clinton was in charge, are now gone. Yeah, the Taliban still
controls some parts of Afhanistan and is causing trouble, but they
have paid a heavy price.

If you want to know what's really going on in Afghanistan, read this:
http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick03302009.html. Patrick Cockburn is
one of the few journalists in the world who has made reporting on events
there his job since before 9/11.

From another article of his:

Even hiring one's own security men is not necessarily a guarantee of
safety. On the same morning that Mr Karzai was leaving Kabul for
Washington, the Taliban attacked a squad of armed security men in
Qalat, a poor dusty city that is the capital of Zabul province in the
far south. Hired to protect road construction workers, they were
slaughtered in a gun battle in which seven of them were killed and
three captured. Asked why he did not look for help from the Afghan
army or police to protect his truck convoys, Mr Bayan looked bemused.
"Get help from the soldiers and policemen?" he replied scornfully.
"Why, they can't even protect themselves, so what can they do for
me?"

The question goes to the heart of the crisis in Afghanistan. It is
not so much that the Taliban is strong and popular, but that the
government is weak, corrupt and dysfunctional. "Security has not
deteriorated because of what the Taliban has done," says Daoud
Sultanzoy, a US-trained commercial pilot who is a highly respected MP
from Ghazni province, south-west of Kabul, "but because people feel
the government is unjust. It is seen as the enemy of the people, and
because there is no constitutional alternative to it, the Taliban
gain." He is angered by a misconception common in the West that
Afghans do not like any form of central government or authority. "It
is not true that we do not like good government," he says, "but for
267 years we have been misruled."


--
Found--the gene that causes belief in genetic determinism