Tag: NATO

The first original article, titled Renters caught in the housing bubble (by Adam Turl) via socialistworker.org:

EVEN THOUGH it was hard, Patricia and Michael Phillips kept up on the monthly $600 rent. Both are disabled–Patricia can’t use her right arm, and Michael is in a wheel chair–and both depend on Social Security payments for their limited income.

So they were shocked when the local sheriff’s department turned up at their front door in July and told them they were to be evicted by the end of the day. Their landlord was being foreclosed on–and even though he hadn’t been paying the mortgage for months, he had been cashing their rent checks.

So in the news today, The Guardian has this story: Nato admits mistakenly supplying arms and food to Taliban.

Nato forces mistakenly supplied food, water and arms to Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan, officials today admitted.

Containers destined for local police forces were dropped from a helicopter into a Taliban-controlled area of Zabul province…

A Nato spokesman said the pallets were carrying rocket propelled grenades, ammunition, water and food.

Nothing like delivering rocket propelled grenades into the hands of the Taliban to help “win” in Afghanistan.  

Today, Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke at the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy.  He reiterated Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent comments in London that NATO is at risk of collapse if member nations fail to meet their military obligations in Afghanistan.

In this diary we look back at the NATO takeover of leadership of (International Security Assistance Force) ISAF-Afghanistan in 2003, to see what US officials were saying at the time.  What we’re going to find is a continuing insistance from the US that the very viability of NATO depends on commitments to security in that non-NATO country.  Again and again, we see evidence that the real point of this near-hysterical rhetoric is to solidify a US-urged change in NATO’s mandate, from Eurpoean defense to world-wide interventionism.

Starting with Gates’ remarks today in Munich, we see a strange-seeming doomsdayism about the importance of NATO participation in Afghanistan.

Reuters has just posted a story that should make Americans stand up and take notice — assuming they can bestir their self-interested torpor — as the Senlis Council, a well-respected international think-tank, has released a report, “Stumbling into Chaos: Afghanistan on the Brink”, which argues the situation in Afghanistan has reached “crisis proportions”. This follows the revelations last month from a top British politician and former UN representative in the Balkans that the war in Afghanistan is “lost”.

Canadian Television summed up the conclusions in the Senlis report this way (all emphases in quotes throughout are mine):

*** The Taliban are winning hearts and minds in southern Afghanistan; the international community is not. NATO-ISAF troops are forced to fight in an increasingly hostile environment because of the international community’s blunt political errors.

*** The absence of comprehensive development aid plans has given a strategic advantage to the Taliban.

*** Time for a well-planned village by village hearts and minds campaign to re-engage the Afghan population and make NATO’s mission a successful one.