A Lot of Afghanistan, A Lot of Pakistan

Show Summary 5/10/2009

How the Taliban gained control of the Swat Valley.

From al Jazeera:
Swat: Pakistan’s lost paradise

Their actions have made a mockery of the government’s commitment a day earlier that the schools would reopen with its patronage and protection.
Only last week did the national parliament pass a resolution, rejecting the ban on female education and condemning the blowing up of schools.

Washington Post
Taliban-Style Justice Stirs Growing Anger

The refugees are the “victims of ignorant cavemen masquerading as fighters of Islam,” columnist Shafqat Mahmood charged in the News International newspaper Friday. He said that the “barbarian horde” that invaded Swat never intended to implement a sharia-based judicial system and that they just used it as cover. “This is a fight for power, not Islam,” he wrote.

Debka.com
Pakistan hangs back from major Swat offensive, talks secretly to Taliban

While by no means a phony war, DEBKAfile’s military sources report that accounts of a major Pakistan military offensive launched to flush Taliban out of their strongholds in the northern Swat Valley are generally inflated. This is not to say that hundreds of thousands of civilians are not fleeing the valley. Some half a million are on the move and will join the same number displaced since August, generating a large-scale humanitarian catastrophe.
According to our sources, the Pakistani army has so far not fought a single pitched battle with the Taliban. Neither have the insurgents been rooted out of any of the cities and villages under their control.

Russia and Afghanistan

US Army Foreign Military Studies Office Joint Reserve Intelligence Center

Searching within a website with Google: ie: site:http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil: grau

Hungary and the fall of the Iron Curtain 20 years ago.

Sleep Deprivation and Water Boarding

Ranger and other military training schools.
LATimes.com
Memos shed light on CIA use of sleep deprivation

Detainees were clad only in diapers and not allowed to feed themselves. A prisoner who started to drift off to sleep would tilt over and be caught by his chains.

Global Warming and Sunspots

Tamil Tigers and Sri Lanka

Tamil Net

Russia, Georgia and NATO exercises

Border Violence