Leon Panetta: 'slightly' late

Leon Panetta and the Flag of al-Qaeda

The new US secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, didn't waste time in Arlington, VA or across the Potomac river and was quickly on the ground in Afghanistan.

Furthermore he seems to have a strategy against Al-Qaeda!

Panetta says that the defeat of al-Qaeda is within reach. For this goal to be achieved he gathers killing or capturing "around 10 to 20 key leaders" of Al-Qaeda and its branches will suffice.

All very well, but did Panetta look at the calendar lately?

This strategy is almost 10 years late! Such actions should have been done long ago, before any invasion, when Al-Qaeda was still emerging.

The misguided decision to declare war on terror opened a huge Pandora box with many sub-compartments. Full scale warfare created more more enemies of the West than it eliminated, while sacrificing the moral high-ground  in places like Guantanamo bay. The declaration of war made a rag-tag bunch of Islamic militants once financed, armed and trained by the US feel that they could fight a war with the West on equal terms. This empowerment was fundamental for Al-Quaeda. Should an approach based on intelligence, the judiciary and the modern tools of special-ops have been used from the start, terrorists would never have been given the glamour and glorification they got, they would be simple criminals and we would be re-assured of our values.

The acts of the US government since 9/11 have resulted in the alienation of the Muslim world against the west. Every Muslim can become a Jihadist by his own decision at any moment, Al-Quaeda is now a personal affair and an organized framework in not a requirement. This is now almost irreversible. If 10 or 20 leaders are killed, the odds are even more will take their place.

Still it is good to see that someone with a background in intelligence, justifies the word. A clever Sicilian-American, probably signore Panetta has preached this gospel before (in his CIA hat), to deaf ears and empty brains in DC. Probably this idea entered presidential circle "brains" only after the Abbottabad raid.

We are not optimistic, but we sincerely wish Mr Panetta, the best of luck!
His luck is also the luck of the Western world.

Bin Laden - only idiots would kill him!

Given the chance of capturing Bin Laden, only idiots would kill him!

The man should be an endless source of information on the Islamist networks worldwide.

Finding him unarmed, given a chance of apprehending him alive, would any intelligent person kill him?

Of course Americans have a reputation of shooting first, and asking questions after, but there must be someone in the administration with an IQ above chicken level.

So, I would not be surprised if for the next few months Mr Laden would still be alive.
Probably locked in a cubicle somewhere, under daily torture, until he spills all the information.

Then one day, his mind properly drained, he will receive a merciful shot in the head and his body will be destroyed. Maybe even dumped at sea...

Of course the US would never bring the man to a court of law, where his career financed and propped by several American administrations would be publicly scrutinized. Americans cannot stomach that they created and nurtured Mr Laden.

Furthermore, any court process would end in the death penalty. An execution of Mr Laden would certainly bring back to the US some of the bad karma they have for long spread across the globe.

Bin Laden may well be alive, undergoing torture somewhere in the globe.

Kosovo & Metohija province under the Albanian criminals

As the dust of war settles what was obvious to many, is now official. The US administration in a barbarian war against Serbia, Delivered the province to a gang of organ-snatching mafia ogres, in short the klepto-terrorist band known as the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army. Compared to these US allies, group like Hezbollah are a gentleman's club. Kosovo is lost for Western civilization for the foreseeable future, that was America's achievement by interfering in European affairs.

The Council of Europe is finally publishing a report naming Hashim Thaci, the KLA's prime minister and former war lord 27 times! Allegations of organ-trafficking against the KLA were first published by the former prosecutor of the Hague International War Crimes Tribunal, Carla del Ponte, in 2008, but conveniently forgotten.

Of course in Washington D.C., president Hussein Obama II will pretend nothing happened.

The BBC reports:

"The Drenica group within the KLA, which was led by Mr Thaci, is accused of involvement in organised crime, including drug-trafficking and the trafficking of human organs.

Leaders of the group are also said to bear "the greatest responsibility" for running the "KLA's ad hoc network of detention facilities" inside Albania as well as determining the fate of prisoners.

Evidence is also presented of organised crime activities continuing up to the present day.

Mr Marty's report argues that the abuses were sufficiently widespread to constitute a pattern in neighbouring Albania as well as in Kosovo.

It suggests that at least six detention centres operated in Albania and it adds that prisoners continued to be detained after the end of the 1999 Kosovo conflict.

In addition, it says, a "state-of-the-art" reception centre was used for the removal of captives' kidneys as part of the organised crime of organ-trafficking. Mr Marty's sources allege the organs were shipped out to private overseas clinics.

The report also appears to corroborate allegations of crimes, mainly against ethnic Serbs, at a farmhouse in the Albanian village of Rripe known as the "Yellow House".

The Yellow House allegations were contained in a joint investigation by the BBC and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

The draft Council of Europe report says a small number of deaths occurred there and goes on to claim that the house was used as a transit point where victims were processed according to their physical condition.

The end point, the report alleges, was at Fushe-Kruje where victims were killed and their organs removed. The report notes its proximity to Albania's main airport near Tirana

Yet another source spoke of driving trucks packed with shackled prisoners - mainly Serbian civilians from Kosovo - to secret locations in Albania where they were eventually killed.

He recalled hearing two of the captives begging to be shot rather than tortured and "cut into pieces".

"I was sick. I was just waiting for it to end," the source told me. "It was hard. I thought we were fighting a war [of liberation] but this was something completely different.

Very few Kosovo Albanians have publicly revealed crimes committed by their own side. And for good reason. Witnesses who have agreed to provide testimony for prosecutions of KLA commanders have faced intimidation and death threats.It has taken these men 10 years to speak to an outsider about the dark side of the war. They were breaking a code of silence that has held strong in Kosovo.

Some have been killed, according to United Nations officials in Kosovo."

map of Serbia with its rebel province of Kosovo

10 French soldiers killed in Afghanistan

EU flag with mourning black stripe

10 French soldiers were killed and 21 injured after Taliban guerrillas ambushed a patrol east of Kabul, in the Sarobi district.

This happened barely one day after president Sarkozy completed a tour of Afghanistan. Before this tragic events, opinion polls showed that less than 25% of the French supported France's role in the conflict, and yet even the French Communist Party favours the war!

Europe should be able to accept its casualties with pride, but for  its own wars and causes. Europe is accepting US orders in a war euohemistically called "Operation Enduring Freedom" that makes no sense and that is lost from the very first day!

Have politicians on both sides of the Atlantic forgoten the image of a castrated president Mohammad Najibullah hanging from a post in Kabu's Aryana Squarel? He was the Karzai of the Soviets...

Time is on the side of the Taliban, and even America's closest ally in the region, Pakistan, covertly supports them  through their Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The west need to cut its losses and leave Afghanistan immediately. Negotiate with Mullah Omar. What is the difference if the Taliban control the country now or in 5 years?

Once the Taliban are in power they must be talked to and traded with, otherwise we create a new Iran or North Korea.

After all the terrorists that plant bombs in the West are usually Saudi or Pakistani, not Afghans. The predominant ethnic group in the country and in the Taliban are the Pashtun, a proud Indo-European people that mostly wants to be left alone. The world will be better off living with the Taliban than fighting them, after all they are a lot less radical than our Saudi "allies".

Kabul 1992: president Najibullah and his brother executed by the Taliban