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It seems as though everybody has their own opinion about what should be done in Afghanistan, and in a debate Friday on MSNBC’s Morning Meeting, the three participants appeared to be largely talking past one another on the issue.

Columnist Christopher Hitchens’ somewhat meandering argument appeared to be that the Taliban was invented by the Pakistanis as part of their struggle against India and that by effectively taking Pakistan’s side in the dispute, “we’re being played for suckers by the Pakistani elite.”

Republican strategist K.T. McFarlane, on the other hand, still believes that it’s all about terrorism and Pakistani nukes. “It’s extremely important to support Pakistan right now,” she stated. “If they can eliminate the Taliban as we eliminate them in Afghanistan … then you finally get a separation of nuclear weapons and terrorists.”

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald offered a third and very different perspective, focusing on the social rather than the military dimensions of the conflict. “The whole lesson that we supposedly learned from the September 11 attacks,” he stated, “was that one of the mistakes that we made was that we were propping up dictatorial and tyrannical leaders in the Muslim world and therefore turning Muslims against us and making them seethe with anti-American sentiment.”

“We’re doing all the things [in Afghanistan] that inflame anti-American sentiment,” Greenwald emphasized, “which our own government says is the fuel that gives rise to Islamic radicalism…. We’re aiding and abetting the extremists .”

Hitchens then rambled on at some length, proposing that the real problem is the war on drugs and that we had any sense we would be paying the Afghans to grow poppies — or maybe grapes — instead of letting the Taliban reap the profits of the drug trade. Greenwald, however, remained unconvinced.

“When you hear things like this, you feel like you’re living in a fantasy world,” Greenwald commented. “I mean, we’re a country that almost brought the entire globe to economic collapse. We have enormous debt that we’re drowning in ourselves. The idea that we can go to that part of the world and magically cure the problems that are over there is just inanity. We’ve been trying for ten years and we’ve been making the problem worse.”

“The inanity is pretending that Afghanistan will go away if we leave it,’ Hitchens grumbled.

This video is from MSNBC’s Morning Meeting, broadcast Dec. 4, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com

It seems as though everybody has their own opinion about what should be done in Afghanistan, and in a debate Friday on MSNBC’s Morning Meeting, the three participants appeared to be largely talking past one another on the issue.

Columnist Christopher Hitchens’ somewhat meandering argument appeared to be that the Taliban was invented by the Pakistanis as part of their struggle against India and that by effectively taking Pakistan’s side in the dispute, “we’re being played for suckers by the Pakistani elite.”

Republican strategist K.T. McFarlane, on the other hand, still believes that it’s all about terrorism and Pakistani nukes. “It’s extremely important to support Pakistan right now,” she stated. “If they can eliminate the Taliban as we eliminate them in Afghanistan … then you finally get a separation of nuclear weapons and terrorists.”

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald offered a third and very different perspective, focusing on the social rather than the military dimensions of the conflict. “The whole lesson that we supposedly learned from the September 11 attacks,” he stated, “was that one of the mistakes that we made was that we were propping up dictatorial and tyrannical leaders in the Muslim world and therefore turning Muslims against us and making them seethe with anti-American sentiment.”

“We’re doing all the things [in Afghanistan] that inflame anti-American sentiment,” Greenwald emphasized, “which our own government says is the fuel that gives rise to Islamic radicalism…. We’re aiding and abetting the extremists .”

Hitchens then rambled on at some length, proposing that the real problem is the war on drugs and that we had any sense we would be paying the Afghans to grow poppies — or maybe grapes — instead of letting the Taliban reap the profits of the drug trade. Greenwald, however, remained unconvinced.

“When you hear things like this, you feel like you’re living in a fantasy world,” Greenwald commented. “I mean, we’re a country that almost brought the entire globe to economic collapse. We have enormous debt that we’re drowning in ourselves. The idea that we can go to that part of the world and magically cure the problems that are over there is just inanity. We’ve been trying for ten years and we’ve been making the problem worse.”

“The inanity is pretending that Afghanistan will go away if we leave it,’ Hitchens grumbled.

This video is from MSNBC’s Morning Meeting, broadcast Dec. 4, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com

US’s unofficial war in Pakistan will ‘create enemies,’ author says

In the wake of President Obama’s plan to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan, questions are being raised about the use of private contractors in US operations there. The acknowledgement by Eric Prince, founder of military contractor Blackwater, that he has been serving for years as a CIA asset only intensifies these concerns.

For Jeremy Scahill, author of the bestselling book Blackwater, however, the real concern is not Afghanistan but Pakistan, where according to an article in the New York Times, “the White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program.”

“We need to view this sober reality,” Scahill told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Thursday. “The war is in Pakistan right now. There’s no question about it. The question, though, is how much it’s going to expand. … These are actions that are going to destabilize Pakistan and are going to create new enemies for the United States because of the high civilian casualties. … Here you have military operations inside a country that we don’t have a declaration of war against.”

Scahill emphasized that the most destabilizing actions come not from the CIA but from Blackwater mercenaries, whom he recently described in The Nation as working for US special forces to “plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, ’snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan.”

The drone attacks outsourced to Blackwater are the source of the highest numbers of civilian casualties. Scahill told Maddow that one of his sources is a “very well-placed military intelligence source [who] is offended at the idea that you have these operations happening outside of the military chain of command and with no oversight from the Congress.”

“Blackwater has been operating under the cover of a training program,” Scahill explained. “Blackwater is training the Pakistani Frontier Corps, which is a federal paramilitary force that is hunting down high-value targets in the frontier province. A former Blackwater executive told me that the line is being crossed — that Blackwater guys are actually going out on these raids.”

Scahill also revealed a few interesting tidbits about Eric Prince’s decision to out himself as a CIA asset, saying, “I see this sort of as Eric Prince taking out an insurance policy for himself. … Eric Prince is in the cross-hairs now of the Congress, the federal investigators, and others … and it’s a way of trying to insulate himself from future attacks.”

This video is from MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Dec. 3, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com

Following President Obama’s announcement on Tuesday of a short-term troop surge in Afghanistan, an emotional Michael Moore told CNN’s Larry King, “I feel very bad for him.”

“I feel even worse for our troops,” Moore went on, blinking back tears. “And I feel a real sadness for the parents of those soldiers.of ours over the next eighteen months who will not come back home.”

“Our own CIA says there’s less than a hundred al Qaeda in Afghanistan,” Moore explained. “What are we doing in Afghanistan? This is absolutely insane. … We have been in this war for twice as long now as the US was in World War II. … We’re going to have 100,000 troops there to find these killers — who aren’t even there!”

Moore has been begging the president over the last week not to escalate the war in Afghanistan, writing at his own website, “If you go to West Point tomorrow night … and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. … With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true — that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so.”

“I hate to be even saying these things,” Moore told King in conclusion, “because I honestly think Barack Obama is a good and decent man. He has a good heart. I believe he’s a man of peace. … I don’t think there’s any evil or dark place in his heart that’s where this is coming from. I just think that he’s listened to the generals. He’s taken bad advice.”

CNN has a complete transcript here.

This video is from CNN’s Larry King Live, broadcast Dec. 1, 2009.

Filmmakers James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles have released new tapes of their anti-ACORN sting operation which appear to show an ACORN employee cheerfully counseling them on how to run a prostitution ring with underage girls and launder the proceeds into a campaign for Congress.

The two appeared with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Thursday, along with conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart, who distributed their earlier sting tapes at his BigGovernment.com website. All three are targets of an ACORN lawsuit in Maryland alleging “illegal videotaping.”

In an entry headed “Andrew Breitbart Trying To Blackmail The Obama Administration,” Newshounds notes, “Judging from the very edited video Breitbart presented last night, one suspects that the real reason it was withheld was because it did little to effectively incriminate ACORN. Breitbart, on the other hand, incriminated himself even worse. Near the end of the segment, he told Hannity that he had more videos and ‘not just ACORN’ that he threatened to release during the 2010 election cycle unless the Department of Justice opened a federal investigation into ACORN.”

Breitbart appeared to be particularly furious about an investigation by the office of California Attorney General Jerry Brown, which was opened in response to a request from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger but which Breitbart sees as tied to Brown’s own interest in running for governor. He complained that neither Congress nor Attorney General Eric Holder has shown any interest in launching a full investigation of ACORN, accused the Democrats of “hypocrisy,” and threatened to use still unreleased tapes as ammunition against Democratic candidates.

“Congress didn’t come in to investigate them,” Breitbart said somewhat incoherently, “obviously not the Attorney General’s office, and they’ve now realized, ‘Let’s get back into business,’ because they’ve realized that the dust settled and they were not being investigated. It was Hannah and James and me who were being investigated. That’s why we’ve been forced to offer this latest tape.”

Breitbart’s charges are likely to find a receptive audience among Republicans, a majority of whom — according to one poll — already believe that ACORN stole the 2008 presidential election for Barack Obama.

In a breathtaking attempt to use the O’Keefe-Giles tapes to put pressure on the Obama administration, Breitbart announced, “Not only are there more tapes, it’s not just ACORN. And this message is to Attorney General Holder. … We’re going to hold out until the next election cycle — or else, if you want to do a clean investigation, we will give you the rest of what we have, we will comply with you, we will give you the documentation we have from countless ACORN whistleblowers who want to come forward but are fearful of this organization and the retribution — that they fear that this is a dangerous organization.”

“So if you will get into an investigation,” Breitbart concluded, “we will give you the tapes, and if you don’t give us the tapes [sic], we will revisit these tapes come election time.”

According to Newshounds, “Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines ‘blackmail’ as ‘extortion or coercion by threats especially of public exposure or criminal prosecution.’” That would appear to cover Breitbart’s explicit threat directed to Attorney General Holder.

(via Newshounds)

This video is from Fox News’ Hannity, broadcast Nov. 19, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com