Leaders of NATO nations, together with some others, met in Lisbon at the weekend to discuss, as one topic on the agenda, whither Afghanistan. Leaving to one side that it was really no more than a photo-op for the leaders and that they could have saved a lot of time and money in not attending in the first place - given that the meeting was for one day only and almost certainly officials before the meeting had thrashed out what was going to happen anyway - bottom-line it was agreed that everyone is going to hang in there in Afghanistan until at least 2014.
The Afghans will be thrilled, especially when one has regard, by way of background, this report from Reuters:
"Afghans in two crucial southern provinces are almost completely unaware of the September 11 attacks on the United States and don't know they precipitated the foreign intervention now in its 10th year, a new report showed on Friday.
NATO leaders gathered in Lisbon for a summit on Friday where the transition from foreign forces -- now at about 150,000 -- to Afghan security responsibility will be at the top of the agenda, with leaders to discuss a 2014 target date set by Kabul.
Few Afghans in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, Taliban strongholds where fighting remains fiercest, know why foreign troops are in Afghanistan, says the "Afghanistan Transition: Missing Variables" report to be released later on Friday.
The report by The International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) policy think-tank showed 92 percent of 1,000 Afghan men surveyed in Helmand and Kandahar know nothing of the hijacked airliner attacks on U.S. targets in 2001.
"The lack of awareness of why we are there contributes to the high levels of negativity toward the NATO military operations and made the job of the Taliban easier," ICOS President Norine MacDonald told Reuters from Washington."
Then add this piece from CommonDreams to the equation and one can readily see that winning hearts and minds of Afghans is going to be stretch:
"With talk of a transition in Afghanistan and civilians still major victims of the violence there, women from Afghans for Peace have angrily protested the pretense that the war has done anything for women other than bring "more suffering, pain and grief." After nine years under NATO occupation, they say, violence against women has only risen.
"The truth is, Afghan women are doomed if NATO stays."
And then there is this from Answer:
"Borrowing a page from its infamous “pacification” effort in South Vietnam, where peasant villages were napalmed and burned to the ground to “save them from the communists,” the Obama-ordered surge in Afghanistan has been secretly blowing up thousands of homes and leveling portions of the Afghan countryside.
As tens of thousands of U.S. troops have surged into southern Afghanistan, villagers have fled. Then the Petraeus-led occupation forces have determined which homes will be destroyed.
“In Arghandab District, for instance, every one of the 40 homes in the village of Khosrow was flattened by a salvo of 25 missiles, according to the district governor, Shah Muhammed Ahmadi, who estimated that 120 to 130 houses had been demolished in his district,” reported the New York Times, Nov. 16, 2010.
The Pentagon asserts that they must destroy the homes because some of them may have explosive devices inside."
The Afghans will be thrilled, especially when one has regard, by way of background, this report from Reuters:
"Afghans in two crucial southern provinces are almost completely unaware of the September 11 attacks on the United States and don't know they precipitated the foreign intervention now in its 10th year, a new report showed on Friday.
NATO leaders gathered in Lisbon for a summit on Friday where the transition from foreign forces -- now at about 150,000 -- to Afghan security responsibility will be at the top of the agenda, with leaders to discuss a 2014 target date set by Kabul.
Few Afghans in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, Taliban strongholds where fighting remains fiercest, know why foreign troops are in Afghanistan, says the "Afghanistan Transition: Missing Variables" report to be released later on Friday.
The report by The International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) policy think-tank showed 92 percent of 1,000 Afghan men surveyed in Helmand and Kandahar know nothing of the hijacked airliner attacks on U.S. targets in 2001.
"The lack of awareness of why we are there contributes to the high levels of negativity toward the NATO military operations and made the job of the Taliban easier," ICOS President Norine MacDonald told Reuters from Washington."
Then add this piece from CommonDreams to the equation and one can readily see that winning hearts and minds of Afghans is going to be stretch:
"With talk of a transition in Afghanistan and civilians still major victims of the violence there, women from Afghans for Peace have angrily protested the pretense that the war has done anything for women other than bring "more suffering, pain and grief." After nine years under NATO occupation, they say, violence against women has only risen.
"The truth is, Afghan women are doomed if NATO stays."
And then there is this from Answer:
"Borrowing a page from its infamous “pacification” effort in South Vietnam, where peasant villages were napalmed and burned to the ground to “save them from the communists,” the Obama-ordered surge in Afghanistan has been secretly blowing up thousands of homes and leveling portions of the Afghan countryside.
As tens of thousands of U.S. troops have surged into southern Afghanistan, villagers have fled. Then the Petraeus-led occupation forces have determined which homes will be destroyed.
“In Arghandab District, for instance, every one of the 40 homes in the village of Khosrow was flattened by a salvo of 25 missiles, according to the district governor, Shah Muhammed Ahmadi, who estimated that 120 to 130 houses had been demolished in his district,” reported the New York Times, Nov. 16, 2010.
The Pentagon asserts that they must destroy the homes because some of them may have explosive devices inside."
Comments