Afeganistao: um diplomata (parcialmente) sincero

Uma avaliação sóbria do atual desastre afegão, que vai continuar, até que suas elites assumam suas responsabilidades.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

DIPLOMATIC MEMO
Departing French Envoy Has Frank Words on Afghanistan
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
The New York Times, April 28, 2013

KABUL, Afghanistan — It is always hard to gauge what diplomats really think unless one of their cables ends up on WikiLeaks, but every once in a while, the barriers fall and a bit of truth slips into public view.

That is especially true in Afghanistan, where diplomats painstakingly weigh every word against political goals back home.
The positive spin from the Americans has been running especially hard the last few weeks, as Congressional committees in Washington focus on spending bills and the Obama administration, trying to secure money for a few more years here, talks up the country’s progress. The same is going on at the European Union, where the tone has been sterner than in the past, but still glosses predictions of Afghanistan’s future with upbeat words like “promise” and “potential.”

Despite that, one of those rare truth-telling moments came at a farewell cocktail party last week hosted by the departing French ambassador to Kabul: Bernard Bajolet, who is leaving to head France’s Direction Génerale de la Sécurité Extérieure, its foreign intelligence service.

After the white-coated staff passed the third round of hors d’oeuvres, Mr. Bajolet took the lectern and laid out a picture of how France — a country plagued by a slow economy, waning public support for the Afghan endeavor and demands from other foreign conflicts, including Syria and North Africa — looked at Afghanistan.

While it is certainly easier for France to be a critic from the sidelines than countries whose troops are still fighting in Afghanistan, the country can claim to have done its part. It lost more troops than all but three other countries before withdrawing its last combat forces in the fall.

The room, filled with diplomats, some senior soldiers and a number of Afghan dignitaries, went deadly quiet. When Mr. Bajolet finished, there was restrained applause — and sober expressions. One diplomat raised his eyebrows and nodded slightly; another said, “No holding back there.”

So what did he say?

That the Afghan project is on thin ice and that, collectively, the West was responsible for a chunk of what went wrong, though much of the rest the Afghans were responsible for. That the West had done a good job of fighting terrorism, but that most of that was done on Pakistani soil, not on the Afghan side of the border. And that without fundamental changes in how Afghanistan did business, the Afghan government, and by extension the West’s investment in it, would come to little.

His tone was neither shrill nor reproachful. It was matter-of-fact.

“I still cannot understand how we, the international community, and the Afghan government have managed to arrive at a situation in which everything is coming together in 2014 — elections, new president, economic transition, military transition and all this — whereas the negotiations for the peace process have not really started,” Mr. Bajolet said in his opening comments.

He was echoing a point shared privately by other diplomats, that 2014 was likely to be “a perfect storm” of political and military upheaval coinciding with the formal close of the NATO combat mission in Afghanistan.

As for the success of the fight on the ground, which American leaders routinely describe now as being “Afghan-led,” Mr. Bajolet sounded dubious. “We do not have enough distance to make an objective assessment,” he said, “but in any case, I think it crucial that the Afghan highest leadership take more visible and obvious ownership for their army.”

His tone — the sober, troubled observations of a diplomat closing a chapter — could hardly have been more different from that taken by the new shift of American officials charged with making it work in Afghanistan: in particular, with that of Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the new American commanding general here. This week, General Dunford sent out a news release cheering on Afghanistan’s progress, noting some positive-leaning statistics and praising the Afghan Army’s abilities.

“Very soon, the A.N.S.F. will be responsible for security nationwide” General Dunford said, referring to the Afghan National Security Forces. “They are steadily gaining in confidence, competence, and commitment.”

At his farewell party, Mr. Bajolet wound up his realpolitik with a brisk analysis of what Afghanistan’s government needed to do: cut corruption, which discourages investment, deal with drugs and become fiscally self-reliant. It must increase its revenues instead of letting politicians divert them, he said.

Several diplomats in the room could be seen nodding as he said that drugs caused “more casualties than terrorism” in Russia, Europe and the Balkans and that Western governments would be hard-put to make the case for continued spending on Afghanistan if it remains the world’s largest heroin supplier.

The biggest contrast with the American and British line was Mr. Bajolet’s riff on sovereignty, which has become the political watchword of the moment. The Americans and the international community are giving sovereignty back to Afghanistan. Afghanistan argues frequently that it is a sovereign nation. President Hamid Karzai, in the debate over taking charge of the Bagram prison, repeatedly said that Afghanistan had a sovereign responsibility to its prisoners.

His implicit question was, what does that really mean?

“We should be lucid: a country that depends almost entirely on the international community for the salaries of its soldiers and policemen, for most of its investments and partly on it for its current civil expenditure, cannot be really independent.”

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Da extrema miseria humana: no Afeganistao do taliban

Quando as forças ocidentais se tiverem retirado do Afeganistão (elas terão de fazê-lo algum dia, cansadas de ver soldados morrerem inutilmente), e o país tiver sido novamente "normalizado" pelos soldados talibãs, os aliados dos ocidentais terão de partir junto ou enfrentar a morte.
O país, mesmo que não volte a ser o refúgio e quartel-general da Al Quaeda, se tornará, inevitavelmente um maior produtor de ópio do que já é, atualmente. Mas, ele será também, provavelmente, o lugar mais miserável do mundo para as mulheres, como se pode ver pela amostra abaixo.
Quem vai salvar as mulheres do Afeganistão? Provavelmente ninguém...
Existe maior miséria humana do que essa?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Más de 120 afganas envenenadas para evitar que reciban educación

Reuters – 23/05/2012

Niñas y niños en una clase en Afganistán. | Roberto Benito Leborans

Más de 120 alumnas y tres profesores han sido envenenados en el segundo ataque en dos meses atribuido a los radicales conservadores en el norte del país, según han declarado la policía afgana y funcionarios de educación.

El ataque se produjo en la provincia de Takhar, donde según la policía, los radicales se oponen a la educación de las mujeres y las niñas. Utilizaron un polvo tóxico no identificado para contaminar el aire en las aulas, lo que ocasionó que decenas de estudiantes quedaran inconscientes.

La agencia de inteligencia de Afganistán, la Dirección Nacional de Seguridad (NDS), ha dicho que los talibán parecen empeñados en cerrar las escuelas antes de la retirada en 2014 de las tropas de combate extranjeras.

“Una parte de la operación ofensiva de Al Faruq tiene por objetivo [...] cerrar las escuelas. El envenenamiento de niñas genera miedo. Ellos tratan de hacer que las familias no envíen a sus hijos a la escuela”, declaró el portavoz del NDS Lutfullah Mashal.

EL Ministerio de Educación de Afganistán ha asegurado que 550 escuelas en 11 provincias han cerrado por culpa de los insurgentes, sobre todo donde los talibán tienen un fuerte apoyo.

El mes pasado, 150 escolares fueron envenenadas en la provincia de Takhar después de haber bebido agua contaminada. Desde el año 2001, cuando los talibanes fueron expulsados del poder por Estados Unidos y las fuerzas afganas, las mujeres han vuelto a las escuelas, especialmente en la capital, Kabul.

Pero todavía hay ataques periódicos contra los estudiantes, maestros y centros escolares, por lo general en la parte más conservadora del país, al sur y al este, donde la insurgencia talibán tiene el mayor apoyo.

2092) Quando o inimigo é um... PowerPoint

Certas coisas são tão ridículas, em si, que nem mereceriam comentário, inicial, final, intermediário, at all, simplesmente nenhum...
Pode-se legitimamente perguntar quando os militares americanos vão sair de seus ambientes protegidos para tratar do real world...

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

A PowerPoint diagram meant to portray the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan certainly succeeded in that aim.
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
The Washington Post, April 26, 2010

WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.
Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.
Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.
“I have to make a storyboard complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens,” Lieutenant Nuxoll told the Web site. “Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”
Despite such tales, “death by PowerPoint,” the phrase used to described the numbing sensation that accompanies a 30-slide briefing, seems here to stay. The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.
“There’s a lot of PowerPoint backlash, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon,” said Capt. Crispin Burke, an Army operations officer at Fort Drum, N.Y., who under the name Starbuck wrote an essay about PowerPoint on the Web site Small Wars Journal that cited Lieutenant Nuxoll’s comment.
In a daytime telephone conversation, he estimated that he spent an hour each day making PowerPoint slides. In an initial e-mail message responding to the request for an interview, he wrote, “I would be free tonight, but unfortunately, I work kind of late (sadly enough, making PPT slides).”
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reviews printed-out PowerPoint slides at his morning staff meeting, although he insists on getting them the night before so he can read ahead and cut back the briefing time.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.
General McChrystal gets two PowerPoint briefings in Kabul per day, plus three more during the week. General Mattis, despite his dim view of the program, said a third of his briefings are by PowerPoint.
Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was given PowerPoint briefings during a trip to Afghanistan last summer at each of three stops — Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Bagram Air Base. At a fourth stop, Herat, the Italian forces there not only provided Mr. Holbrooke with a PowerPoint briefing, but accompanied it with swelling orchestral music.
President Obama was shown PowerPoint slides, mostly maps and charts, in the White House Situation Room during the Afghan strategy review last fall.
Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.
Captain Burke’s essay in the Small Wars Journal also cited a widely read attack on PowerPoint in Armed Forces Journal last summer by Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel, whose title, “Dumb-Dumb Bullets,” underscored criticism of fuzzy bullet points; “accelerate the introduction of new weapons,” for instance, does not actually say who should do so.
No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars, but the program did become notorious during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time.
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

Helene Cooper contributed reporting.

2079) Realidades insustentaveis - os garotos dancarinos do Afeganistao

Certas realidades são difíceis de serem aceitas, e no entanto elas existem.
Assim como os atentados terroristas, não tenho notícias de que líderes religiosos islâmicos tenham alguma vez condenado a prática descrita nesta matéria abaixo transcrita.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Islamic Homosexual Pederasty and Afghanistan’s “Dancing Boys.”
Phyllis Chesler - Chesler Chronicles
Pajamas Media, April 21st, 2010 10:43 am

Last week, in Quetta, Pakistan, a homicide bomber attacked a prominent Shiite bank manager—and when his friends and relatives followed him to the hospital emergency room, another bomber attacked them, killing eight. The police assume that this was a “sectarian” (Muslim Sunni vs Muslim Shia) attack. This is nothing new; this is the template, the pattern. For example, also in 2009, in Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistan, a Shiite Muslim leader was shot down; the next day, at his funeral, a homicide bomber killed himself and 28 mourners. Again, the police described this as “sectarian” violence. In 2008, in the same town, after the shooting death of a Shiite Muslim cleric, both the hospital and the funeral were subsequently attacked either by a homicide bomber or by a “planted” device. These Muslims take no prisoners. Yesterday, the deputy mayor of Kandahar, in Afghanistan (123 miles away from Quetta), was shot to death while he was praying in a mosque.

What mercy might such people show to infidels, women, or children, including their own?

None. None at all. Westerners are so confused about this—not only because they are brainwashed and do not want to be called “racists,” but also because these people tend to have such charming and “sincere” faces.

Last night, I watched the saddest little movie, a brave Frontline documentary about the “Bacha Bazi,” the underage “dancing boys” of Afghanistan. These children are sex slaves to older, powerful Afghan men–in this instance, former Northern Alliance warlords, who have purchased them from their impoverished families or, as orphans, simply taken them off the street. When they try to escape, they are found and punished—or they are murdered.

An Afghan dancing boy

“Dagastir,” a former Northern Alliance warlord, who today has hundreds of police officers at his disposal, has an impassive, even a kind face. He does not look or sound ashamed or guilty about what he does. Yes, of course, he is married and has two young sons.

Human Rights Watch, cited by Amnesty International, first broke this story in 1997. They cited it as a Taliban-abuse. I write about this in my book The Death of Feminism. Now UNICEF says that this practice “has to be eradicated.” The documentary narrative admits that, although such sex slavery is illegal, the police will not make arrests, and that the rare jail sentence is quickly commuted. The police themselves often comprise the all-male audiences who enjoy the dancing boy performances.

And the people are so very poor and have so few options.

Bacha bazi (dancing boys) are taken and trained in singing and dancing when they are as young as six years old, more often when they are nine or ten. They wear women’s clothing, women’s jewelry, women’s makeup, and are taught to dance with alluring “feminine” gestures. Here, we might call them “transvestites,” but that would be an inaccurate comparison. These dancing boys are children, who are forced to dance and then have sex with men old enough to be their fathers and their grandfathers.


Afghan dancing boy with older man

Homosexual pederasty is epidemic in the Muslim world. Think ancient Greece (Alexander the Great marched on through Afghanistan clear to India); think Ottoman Empire Turkey; think Persia; think Saudi Arabia, where grown men still hold hands in public. The dancing boys are but one example or expression of it. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is hotly denied, and “homosexuality,” as westerners understand it, is strictly forbidden and often savagely punished in Muslim countries. On camera, one man suggests that the practice was learned in Pakistan when Afghan warriors fled the Russian invasion. But homosexual pederasty may also be indigenous to Afghanistan.

The bacha bazi kind of homosexuality is strictly prison-sex: it is taken by force, and is strictly about money and power. (In prison, this translates into “protection.”) The Afghan children have no choice but to make the best of it. Their lives are “ruined,” as one boy said on camera. But, when they “age out,” at eighteen, they hope to set up a stable of dancing boys of their own as the only or the best way to earn money.

Other than Radhika Coomaraswamy of UNICEF, we see no woman’s face on camera in the Frontline documentary. We see Afghan women in chadors prostrate, begging, on the street; we see women in chadors scurrying by. Only once do we hear an Afghan woman’s voice. It belongs to the mother of a murdered “dancing boy.” She sits, in full, eerie chador, at home, right next to another naked-faced son, and talks to the naked-faced interviewer, the very brave Afghan journalist who made this film: London-based Najibullah Quraishi. (His producer is Jamie Doran). To his credit, with the help of a former warlord, Quraishi actually manages to rescue one very young boy and relocates both him and his family.

The other young sex slaves are left to their own devices. Perhaps UNICEF or even President Karzai will rescue them. (This is a bitter, heartbroken comment. Please don’t think I’m holding my breath here).

Look: Wherever women are forced to wear chadors, burqas, niqab, be sure that in addition to woman-abuse and woman-hatred, children are also being abused. For men, especially warriors, who are brought up apart from women, taught to fear and despise women, their major erotic and social drives will be male-centric, not female-centric. Homosexual pederasty accompanies extreme gender apartheid in an extreme way.