Ann Jones, at Tomdispatch:
The vision of a reconstructed, peaceful, stable, democratically governed Afghanistan faded fast. Most Afghans now believe that it was nothing but a cover story for the Bush administration's real goal -- to set up permanent bases in Afghanistan and occupy the country forever... Instead, the Bush administration perpetrated a scam. It used the system it set up to dispense reconstruction aid to both the countries it 'liberated,' Afghanistan and Iraq, to transfer American taxpayer dollars from the national treasury directly into the pockets of private war profiteers....
The aid scam, which would be a scandal if it weren't so profitable for so many, explains far more than does troop strength about why we are on the verge of watching the whole Afghan enterprise go belly up. What's worse, there's no reason to expect that things will change significantly on Barack Obama's watch.
Paul Watson, in The Los Angeles Times: Maulavi Arsalan Rahmani, who was minister of higher education in the ousted Taliban government, now senator in the Afghan parliament, said members of the Taliban are ready for peace and have proposed a three-stage plan to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah and other leaders that would culminate in talks about what role the Taliban should play in the government... 'We have indirect relations with the Taliban. They will accept our proposals and the government will also. But what we are not certain about is whether the international community really wants the war to end. We doubt it, we doubt it.'
