I don't know what he does to the Taleban,but he frightens me.

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2006/0 ... 28x302.jpg

Milliband will create some fake 'moderate' Taliban, negotiate with them, probably pay them off,

I thought about this a lot, without resolution.

Suppose we buy the opium from the farmers; we can control the trade and turn it into pharmaceuticals; the farmers get a good price and the Talibanski cannot afford a bidding war.

Does anyone know what is the scoped rifle in this photo? It doesn't look like our normal bolt action sniper rifle.

The NATO operation in Afghanistan is part of a wider UN-mandated effort by the international community. It was sparked by a single overriding concern: in the words of our British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown in a statement to the House of Commons in December 2007, “denying Al Qaida a base from which to launch attacks on the world.” It required, first, the removal of the Taliban Pashtun regime that had provided shelter for Al Qaida, and second help for the Afghan government non-Pashtun to build the strength to keep them out permanently.

Today, while people in our countries accept the need to fight the Taliban to avoid the return of Al Qaida, they want to know whether and how we can succeed the Taleban are linked to Al Qaida. That is not what I want to address clearly today.

It is vital that we start by understanding the nature of the enemy – the insurgency we face. It is easy to brand the insurgency under a single label: ‘The Taliban’. The reality is more complex (hint: they are all from an ethnic group beginning with "P"). And it requires our countries to work with Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.

There is no single authoritative leadership of the insurgency in either Afghanistan or Pakistan. Instead there are a range of diverse insurgent groups. They operate with varying degrees of autonomy in their own particular areas. Cooperation between them is opportunistic rather than strategic, and tactical above all. But what they have in common is they are all Pashtun. Let me repeat: we are fighting Pashtuns. They are the enemy.

In Afghanistan the southern insurgency is led by members of the former Taliban Pashtun government which had allied with Al Qaida. It has the largest number of fighters and the most hierarchical and well organised leadership under Mullah Omar. It is these people, in the Pashtun heartland, against whom British and American forces have been conducting major operations in the last few weeks.

In the east of the country, by contrast, a variety of other factions operate, including the Haqqani network, Hizb-e Islami and a range of smaller groups. Given half a chance, they'd get into a war with the warlords from the heartland. They're Pashtuns. Pashtuns love war. So the ideal solution to end this conflict is to give the Pashtuns their own state where they'll be pleasantly occupied fighting each other rather than waging Jihad on us.

In Pakistan’s tribal belt, leaders of the Afghan Pashtun Taliban are focused on gaining power west of the border. Within Waziristan, the three leaders of the main insurgency – Baitullah Mehsud, Gul Bahadur and Maulvi Nazir – belong to different Pashtun tribes and have different motivations historic enmities that we can, and should, easily exploit. Each, though, has links both to Al Qaida, and to the Haqqani network This is exactly what those Arabs are doing.

It is important to understand that people are drawn into the insurgency for different reasons, primarily pragmatic rather than ideological, and certainly nothing whatever to do with them being Pashtun despite what I've already said, honest.

There are the Pashtun foot soldiers whom the Taliban pay $10 a day – more than a local policeman. There are poppy farmers who support the Pashtun insurgents because they offer protection against eradication efforts. Yes, only nine years ago the Pashtun Taliban wiped out opium production, but now they're understood to have rebranded themselves as a compassionate Taliban. There are narco-traffickers who rely on them for safe passage of drugs. There are Pashtun warlords and aspirant power-brokers who believe that the Pashtun Taliban will win, and so position themselves for their own political advantage. And then – perhaps most crucially - there are the women ordinary Afghans Pashtun, ladies people who, despite dreading the Taliban's return, worry about the capacity of the state to protect them, so hedge their bets. They may not give active support. But they acquiesce or turn a blind eye.

The Pashtun nature of the insurgency gives it some advantages and it’s important to be clear about them. The different groups can feed off and support each other - providing suicide bombers, training or equipment. They do that because they are all Pashtuns. The autonomy Pashtun ethnicity of local commanders makes their groups resilient, even when their superiors are killed or captured. And strong bonds of local and tribal and Pashtun loyalty make it easier for them to rally people against outsiders.

The insurgency is a wide but shallow coalition of convenience: an amalgam of groups with different motivations and power centres. So they are divided. They are united only by their ethnic history as Pashtuns.

The Taliban are the largest element of the insurgency but, because they exploit predominantly Pashtun communities and sentiment, because the Taliban are Pashtuns, originally they arose from Pashtun community without any help from al Qaida, their support base is limited to the Pashtun districts of the south and east, and to the Pashtun pockets in the north and west. We are fighting Pashtuns. Ladies and gentlemen, there is your enemy.

The insurgency remains deeply unpopular with ordinary Afghans non-Pashtun, including the women in the south and east. Extremely accurate polling across Afghanistan shows that over 90% of the population do not want the Taliban back in power. The ten percent that do, over 3 million people, are concentrated in the Pashtun heartland of the south and east.

The Taliban can terrorise, but their military, technological and organisational inferiority to conventional forces means they cannot take and hold territory and power on a lasting basis. And when they do hold sway, and do put their values into practice, they appal the local population. Just think of the women and children! We've got to continue to fight for their rights. Critically, this is what has happened in Pakistan in recent months, with a large swing in support to the government in revulsion, and I use that word advisedly following my fifth visit to Pakistan two weeks ago, at what the Taliban stand for. And now I have to apologise to you all because I seem to have dropped page 5 of this speech, which covered our national interests, on the way to the auditorium. Please be assured that our national interests are at stake, and think of the children.

In the face of this enemy, the Pashtun, our ultimate objective in 2001 holds true for 2009: to protect our citizens from terrorist attacks by preventing Al Qaida having a safe haven in the tribal belt –in either Afghanistan or Pakistan.You can be very sure, these Pashtuns want Al Qaida to destroy the civilised world and have the ISAF parked on their doorstep.

The role of military operations is to deny insurgents the space to operate. That is: to clear and hold towns and villages under insurgent control, so allowing Afghans to build basic governance and justice, to deliver welfare Ferris wheels and latrines and dispense development assistance bags of IED grade fertiliser.

First, a political strategy for dealing with the insurgency through reintegration and reconciliation. Let's call it the Yugoslav model +. That means in the long term an inclusive political settlement in Afghanistan, which draws away conservative revolutionary Pashtun nationalists - separating those who want Islamic rule locally - the Pashtuns - from those committed to violent jihad globally - the Arabs - - and gives them a sufficient role in local politics that they leave the path of confrontation with their government. Yes, the 'D' word': devolution..

Second, a political strategy for the wider population, through reassurance about their future. NATO needs to show the Afghan people women that we will not abandon them to Taliban retribution; that our forces will stay until Afghan communities can protect themselves both sides are armed to the teeth and feel the best solution is ethnic cleansing and genocide, but no longer than we are needed - because we're getting out before the shit really hits the fan. And, as we transfer responsibility to non-Pashtun dominanted Tajik and Uzbek Afghans and withdraw our troops from combat, the international community will continue to help Afghanistan wash its hands off the consequences – one of the poorest countries of earth - with aid and training and of course arms necessary to support a de facto solution.

And third, a political strategy towards the neighbours in the region – including Pakistan and Iran – to ensure that they accept that Afghanistan’s future is not as a client of any, but as a secure country in its own right ours, because that region is so very important for our national interest, which are very clear and important, and of course the danger of Al Qaida, there being no such dangerous terrorists in Britain.. Once again it should be the commercial and cultural crossroads of South West Asia. A country in which each of the neighbours and near neighbours has an open but responsible stake.

The battle groups encountered relatively little resistance, an indication that Taliban fighters have fled the area as their hierarchy has fallen apart following the sustained attack over the past five weeks.

Further to my previous post:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -plot.html
Could have pasted, capped & underlined the whole article but.....

"These charges hammer home the point that terrorists and their supporters are not confined to the remote regions of some far away land but can grow and fester right here at home," lawyer George E B Holding said.

The charge said Mr Boyd, trained in Afghanistan and fought there between 1989 and 1992 before returning to the United States. Court documents charged that Mr Boyd, also known as Saifullah, encouraged others to engage in jihad.