• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

“It is a necessity of the first order given the political-military situation that now defines relations between Cuba and the empire,” Major General Leonardo Andollo warned, referring to the United States.

He told the official Granma newspaper that the “Bastion-2009″ exercises will “raise the deterrent capacity to prevent a military confrontation, under the principle that there is no better way to win a war than by avoiding it.”

The military exercise, Cuba’s largest in five years and the first since Barack Obama’s inauguration as US president in January, will be held Thursday through Saturday, followed by Sunday’s armed forces day to be marked nationwide.

Read entire article

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

An “additional income tax to the upper brackets, folks earning more than $200,000 or $250,000” a year, could fund more troops, Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said in an interview for Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt,” airing this weekend.

White House Budget Director Peter Orszag has estimated that each additional soldier in Afghanistan could cost $1 million, for a total that could reach $40 billion if 40,000 more troops are added.

Read entire article

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

For residents of Shinwar, a village in distant Nangahar province, the message from President Karzai’s address yesterday that the Americans would hand over security over the next five years was disappointing.

At the village bazaar, Mr Shinwari told The Times that he could not wait that long. In 2007, a unit of special forces was speeding along a busy road a few miles from his village when they opened fire, killing 19 people and wounding 50. The unit responsible was sent home and the local US commander described the incident as a “stain on our honour”. He paid out almost $40,000 (£25,000) in compensation.

Read entire article

Despite reports of the UK’s plan for peace talks with the Taliban, Premier Gordon Brown defends Britain’s military involvement in the Afghan war, saying his country must play a full role in ‘changing the world’.

“I believe that Britain can and must play its full part in changing the world,” the British prime minister said Monday.

“Britain can lead in the construction of a new world order,” he said in a speech, extracts of which have been released by Downing Street.

Supporting the UK’s military mission in the war-torn country, Brown said more has been planned in 2009 and “enacted with greater success” to cripple al-Qaeda than in any year since 2001.

“So I vigorously defend our action in Afghanistan and Pakistan because al-Qaeda is today the biggest source of threat to our national security,” he noted.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

The US, with cooperation of its European allies including Britain, invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to allegedly eradicate the Taliban and arrest militant leaders.

But more than eight years after the so-called war on terrorism began, a leaked memo has revealed that the British government has been seeking reconciliation with Taliban’s leadership council based in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

Britain’s state television BBC reported on Saturday that the memo proposed that “reconciled” Taliban should be removed from the UN sanctions list.

After the beginning of the war, Taliban leader Mullah Omar and al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden fled to Quetta, where they received the support of Pakistani security officials.

The eight-year-old war in Afghanistan has so far failed to kill or arrest the main militant commanders.

Brown, who is tipped to lose a general election to the opposition Conservatives due by June, is under tense pressure at home as public support for the war is waning.

According to the latest opinion poll, an increasing majority of Britons want the country’s 9,000 troops out of Afghanistan within a year.

Some 71 percent of Britons would back a phased withdrawal of British forces within 12 months, a poll conducted by the Independent showed on Sunday.

In the latest casualty on Sunday, a British soldier was killed while on foot patrol in southern Afghanistan, taking the death toll to 233.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

Hutchinson, of Oakland, California, is currently being confined at Hunter Army Airfield near Savannah, Georgia, after being arrested. Her son was placed into a county foster care system.

Hutchinson has been threatened with a court martial if she does not agree to deploy to Afghanistan on Sunday, Nov. 15. She has been attempting to find someone to take care of her child, Kamani, while she is deployed overseas, but to no avail.

According to the family care plan of the U.S. Army, Hutchinson was allowed to fly to California and leave her son with her mother, Angelique Hughes of Oakland.

Read entire article

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

NATO planes detected the militants after the vehicles stalled in a riverbed, and the commander of the German troops in Konduz Province ordered an air strike that killed scores of civilians and fighters who had gathered there, possibly to siphon off fuel.

The September 4 incident was surprising not only for the number of victims, but also because of where it took place. Not in the south or east, where Afghanistan’s “hot” war is being fought, but where the situation is supposed to be quiet.

Read entire article

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

The U.S. military failed to “maintain complete inventory records for an estimated 87,000 weapons — or about 36 percent — of the 242,000 weapons that the United States procured and shipped to Afghanistan from December 2004 through June 2008,” a U.S. Government Accountability Office report states.

“Accountability lapses occurred throughout the supply chain,” it says.

The Defense Department spent roughly $120 million during that period to acquire a range of small arms and light weapons for the Afghan National Security Forces, including rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

Read entire article

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

The navy crews exchanged fire near a disputed maritime border between the two countries; each side accused the other of violating the sea boundary.

The two navies have engaged in deadly exchanges twice along their western sea border in the past decade.

The row comes days before US President Barack Obama is to visit Asia.

Read entire article

President Barack Obama will discuss four options for a buildup of U.S. forces in Afghanistan when he meets tomorrow with his national security team, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

Gibbs, speaking to reporters traveling with the president to Fort Hood, Texas, declined to give details on those options.

Obama is under pressure to make a decision on whether to grant a request by his top commander in the field, General Stanley McChrystal, to send 40,000 more troops. That would expand the 68,000-strong U.S. force that will be in Afghanistanby the end of the year, including 21,000 that Obama authorized earlier this year.

Read entire article

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

Today, it is difficult to find noninterventionists in either party.

The Democrats demonstrate a disdain for capitalism, free trade and the validity of contracts. They cheer the restriction of certain types of speech on campus and in federal law, and think nation-building is our moral obligation, even when there is no discernible U.S. interest involved. Lately, the Democrats have been popularly associated with principled opposition to waging war in far-flung corners of the globe. But evidence on the ground today tells a somewhat different tale.

Read entire article