Bus passengers defy Taliban on road to renewal

I say help them now. It is not too difficult. The phone situation can be solved easily by moving to satellite away from terrestrial systems. I'm sure data bandwidth is not excessive for that area. Second: Get some other country's forces in there. Encourage or even pay the Chinese to send four or five of their divisions to seek out and destroy the talliban. Chinese love virtue. That alone is a selling point. Don't stop with the Chinese. Continue to recruit other countries to rotate in and out for a few months at a time. More than anything, promote the need to win against the taliban thugs. Capture their leaders and put them before the world now. Fight them to win. Period. Otherwise, withdraw now. Allow them back to dominate the region and reorganize the theater of war to "cope" with them. Commander in Chief Hussein will look good in that role and the world will envy him.

There is no earthly possibility that Afghanistan will ever get on its feet as long as it has Pakistan breathing down its neck all the time. Pakistan is at the bottom of all Afghanistan's troubles. Afghanistan's problems began with and because of Pakistan. As long as Pakistan is a part of the coalition against terrorism, the Isaf has no hope of succeeding in bringing peace and order to Afghanistan. The Taliban came to power in Afghanistan riding on Pakistan's back. After USA found a distraction in Iraq, the Taliban found time and opportunity to regroup and reorganize themselves. They cannot hope to do anything spectacular or long lasting but in the meantime they will succeed in causing suffering to the people of Afghanistan. The Taliban in Pakistan appear to be losing support among the tribals of the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands and the tribes are now organizing against the militants, including Taliban. But the support base of the Taliban in Afghanistan remains intact. Besides, the level of education among the people of Afghanistan is rather low as a rule: we cannot expect that the Afghan people themselves will adopt an attitude hostile to the Taliban, because the Taliban are able to propagate their ideology as meant for the glory of Islam. The Afghan government is hardly in a position to enforce its writ in the country or in the aeas at some distance from the capital. This is where the predicament of the supporters of Karzai's government comes in. Let us remember that the one lesson of Afghan history is that any Afghan government that was propped up by foreign military support had no chance of acceptance by the Afghan people. Western support to Karzai must stop at some point and he must be enabled to organize matters on his own so that the Afghan people will see that he was running the place by his own steam. Isaf may remain in Afghanistan until Afghan army and police have been organized enough to take control. V. C. Bhutani, Delhi, India, October 7, 2008, 0850 IST, vineycb1@vsnl.com