How We Help To Arm The Taliban

(© picture-alliance/dpa)

From The Telegraph:

British and other Western taxpayers are helping to fund the Taliban, writes Christopher Booker.

These months of 2009 will be remembered as the time when, brought to a head by the corrupt shambles of President Karzai's bid for re-election, faith in the West's eight-year-long intervention in Afghanistan finally fell apart. The increasingly obvious futility of our military presence, having so far cost 213 British lives and those of more than a thousand soldiers in all, is one thing. But another shocking element, coming to light from various sources, is the extent to which the confederation of insurgent groups we call the Taliban are actually deriving an ever larger part of their income from Western taxpayers, through a maze of criminal rackets. Not only are we in large part paying for the Taliban to kill our troops, our aid programme even supplies most of the explosives used to kill them.

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My Comment: This article by Christopher Booker makes a very convincing argument that our efforts and sacrifice are helping to speed up a disaster in Afghanistan

He has a point. We are now spending billions of dollars each month in Afghanistan .... but it appears that Afghan society has structured itself for only one purpose .... to steal our money and to kill our troops.

I wrote earlier in the day that our options on what to do in Afghanistan are rapidly deteriorating. We are damn if we stay, and we are damned if we do not.

What has surprised me this summer is how the American public has been surprisingly quiet on this subject. I expected far more vocal opposition to the war, as well as a full scale revolt from Congress.

But for now .... very little to report.

However .... if more journalists like Christopher Booker start to come out with stories like the one above, and if the casualty rate is as high as it was today for Afghan and Western troops .... things are going to change back home .... and change very quickly.