May 23, 2005

Bush Rebuffs Karzai's Request on Troops

President Bush said Monday that U.S. troops in Afghanistan will remain under U.S. control despite Afghan President Hamid Karzai's request for more authority over them.
[I think that, for form's sake, Karzai had to ask and President Bush had to turn him down.--Jen]

"Of course, our troops will respond to U.S. commanders," Bush said, with Karzai standing at his side at the White House. At the same time, Bush said the relationship between Washington and Kabul is "to cooperate and consult" on military operations.

There are about 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, costing about $1 billion a month. That is in addition to approximately 8,200 troops from NATO countries in Kabul and elsewhere.

Bush also said that Afghan prisoners under U.S. control in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere, would be slowly returned to their home countries.
[Must we do this?
Aren't we going to execute or imprison for life any of these killers who made war against us?]

"We will do this over time," he said. "We have to make sure the facilities are there."

Bush had high praise for Karzai as a valued anti-terror partner and credited the Afghan leader with "showing countries in the neighborhood what's possible."

Karzai thanked Bush for helping to put his country on the path to democracy. But he also came to their meeting with a long list of grievances.

Karzai wants more control over U.S. military operations in his country, custody of Afghan prisoners held by the United States and more assistance in fighting opium trade.

As for the opium-heroin trade, Bush said, "I made it very clear to the president that we have got to work together to eradicate the poppy crop."

Karzai commented on recent reports of abuse of Afghan prisoners by their American captors. "We are of course sad about that," he said, speaking in fluent English. But, he added, "It does not reflect on the American people."

Similarly, a report — later retracted — in Newsweek magazine earlier this month that alleged mistreatment of the Quran by American prison guards does not reflect American values, Karzai said.

While claiming the original report was not responsible journalism, Karzai said, "Newsweek's story is not America's story. That's what we understrand in Afghanistan."

Saying that he himself had been to a mosque in Washington, Karzai noted that many thousands of Muslims are going on a daily basis to mosques in America, without incident.

The two leaders addressed reporters in the East Room of the White House.

Bush welcomed his guest as the "first democratically elected leader in the 5,000- year history of Afghanistan."

"And your leadership has been strong," Bush added.

Bush and Karzai pledged to work more closely together amid continued instability and protests in Afghanistan.

"It's important for the Afghan people to understand that we have a strategic vision about our relationship with Afghanistan," Bush said.

He said the United States and Afghanistan had signed a "strategic partnership" that establishes "regular high-level exchanges on ... economic issues of mutual interest."

"We will consult with Afghanistan if it perceives its territorial integrity, independence or security is at risk," Bush said.

Karzai said that he hoped Afghanistan would be free of opium poppy crops within five to six years and that Afghan farmers could find alternative crops like honeydew melons and pomegranates.

Opium poppies are the raw material for heroin. Their cultivation has rocketed since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Last year, cultivation reached a record 323,700 acres, yielding nearly 80 percent of world supply.
[And the ones making the most money off of the "H" are the terrorists, who are the middlemen of the opium/heroin trade.
It's their cash cow to fund their war effort.]

"Indeed, Afghanistan is suffering from the cultivation of poppies, which is undermining our economy," Karzai said. "It's giving us a bad name, worst of all."

Ahead of their meeting, Karzai said that he wanted more control of U.S. forces in his country and to take over custody of the hundreds of Afghans detained in military jails in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during and after the 2001 U.S. invasion that ousted the repressive Taliban regime.

Karzai began his U.S. stay by sharply denying a reported State Department cable that said he has not worked strongly enough to curtail production of opium, the raw material for heroin. The cable, from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said the U.S. crackdown there has not been very effective, in part because Karzai "has been unwilling to assert strong leadership," The New York Times reported Sunday.
[Ah! One of the odd couples of the Left: the NYSlimes and the old. pre-Bush Administration hands in the State Dept.!]

Recent anti-American protests across Afghanistan killed at least 15 people and threatened a security crisis for Karzai's feeble central government.
[Don't forget the AP, as another pro-enemy MSM handmaiden!
Karzai's government is "feeble..."]

The White House blamed the May 9 Newsweek report for igniting the violence.

It's often true that politics is local and a good bit of the protests in Afghanistan over the Newsweek Koran story were also to decry the governance of Hamid Karzai.
Dr. Walid Phares cogently maintains that these "spontaneous" riots were planned long before the Newsweek story hit the world air waves:

With one sentence, Newsweek triggered a series of violent intifadas in countries as remote as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and beyond. That's at least how mainstream media, government officials, and most of the public see it. The truth is more complicated: Islamists had been planning these riots long before this story ever made it into print.

True, the short piece by Michael Isikoff and John Barry, which attempted to unveil a new scandal, became the trigger for mass violence led by Islamists across the world. But the jihadists had mobilized for a counteroffensive against the "infidels" long ago. Ironically, these two developments have something in common: both undermine the credibility of the U.S-supported democracy movements in the Arab world.

The violent marches in Pakistan and Afghanistan were not an abrupt and sudden reaction to the weekly magazine's sentence accusing U.S. personnel of desecrating a copy of the Muslim holy book. Since the fall of Tora Bora in December of 2001, al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants were waiting for this moment: they call it "al awda," meaning the "return." Patiently, the leaders of the jihadists, including Thawahiri, Mullah Umar, and the various Islamists of Jamiet Islami and Hizbu Tahrir, were working on mounting the major counteroffensive against the democratically elected government of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. Day after day, from Kabul to Kandahar, the Afghan society was moving away from the mental and political grip of the Taliban. And year after year, more and more al-Qaeda leaders were being eliminated and arrested, two over the past few weeks alone.
 
The more lethal danger facing the jihadi ideology is the success of democracy in the region. Afghani women voted by the millions; Iraq's 8.5 million voters braved Zarqawi's killers; a million marchers challenged Syria's military in Beirut, and just this week, Kuwaiti women forced parliament to give them the right to vote. By jihadi standards, the war of ideas is being lost. The Newsweek story gave them the ability to counterattack and try to gain ground in their terror war.

Preparing their "come back," the Salafists understood that demonstrations are their best weapons for the time being. Suicide bombings and beheadings made them look as evil as they are, even in the eyes of most Arabs and Muslims. They saw how popular expressions from Kabul to Beirut, from Tehran to Baghdad, captured the imagination of younger and younger Muslims, but also the attention of public opinion in the West. Back in the early winter, Ayman al Thawahiri, al-Qaeda's number two, called on his followers to "take back the country and reduce Karzai to his palace." That was the mission order: to find a way to re-conquer the street and, from there, the entire Arab world. On Al Ansar websites, on al Jazeera and on Hezbollah's al Manar TV, a global propaganda campaign has been waged since 2002, increasing sharply since the fall of Saddam. In the chat rooms I visit, the dominant motif is: America  has made war on Islam as a whole, as a religion.
[Recall, if you will, that yesterday in Jerusalem, a Muslim asked First Lady Laura Bush "why her husband kills Muslims" where the world press could hear it.]

The clever clerics played with the doctrinal genes of their followers. Day in and day out, from Saudi Arabia to Virginia, the jihadis patiently prepared for the moment of the explosion. In a sum, Newsweek's article didn't create the "Big Bang"; it triggered it. The explosion was coming, but the apparent motive had to be supplied. It could have been a rape, a killing, or another Western desecration. Newsweek's "investigative journalists" provided this fuse.
 
Messrs. Isikoff and Barry, probably on a domestic political crusade, wrote hastily: "sources tell NEWSWEEK: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur'an down a toilet." As simple as that and in a style more appropriate to Arab popular media than to the Western press, the "story" hit the presses. Basing their accusations on a source they weren't able to identify, they provided a graphic description of the act. Since at least one of the authors, Michael Isikoff, describes himself as an "expert on terrorism," he should have known that describing flushing a Koran down a toilet was the equivalent of shooting napalm into a warehouse packed with dynamite.

More disturbing is the pattern behind the short article. Isikoff has shown a deliberate trend of activist-writing rather than objective journalism. Back in October, Isikoff targeted a coalition of American Middle Eastern groups supporting Washington's campaign for democracy. After a series of interviews with the members of that coalition, he accuses them in an article (October 29) of "Lobbying for Libya." He didn't inform his readers though, that among the coalition members, were dissident Libyans who were calling for a regime change in Tripoli. As for this week's scandal, Isikoff initially wanted to undermine the policies of the Bush administration. He ended up lying, denying any error to his readers, and provoking chaos. The ludicrous "Libyan" accusation may have caused some minor tensions among Middle Eastern Americans, but his "Koran" accusation cost lives and human suffering, 16 dead and 100+ injured.

One element lost in all the coverage of the jihadist-inspired riots is the rioters' utter hypocrisy. Their concerns for the Muslim holy book did not manifest when they burned mosques to the ground in Pakistan over the past few months. Nor did they launch demonstrations after they destroyed mosques in Iraq throughout the year. There were certainly hundreds of Korans burned into ashes. (It didn't hurt that the owners of these mosques were Shi'ites.) A couple of decades earlier, Hafez Assad's brutal brigades leveled off the mosques of the city of Hama. Thousands of Korans were destroyed (along with 20,000 Sunnis). Yet, the Arab and Islamic world didn't raise a ruckus. The selective outrage over the destroyed Korans is not theological but political. It is only when the Islamists want to wage a jihad for their holy book that infractions begin to make any difference to them. When Arab militias raids black Muslim villages in Darfur, and destroy them, along with their holy books, that is acceptable, but one sentence in an article published in a U.S. magazine deserves a whole holy war? Who are we kidding here?

What the jihadists want is to mobilize their followers on "religious" grounds. They see the march of democratic principles, secularism, and modernity, and they want to stop it.They are using their last weapons: dogmatic extremism. They want to fight back against the force that is diminishing the grip they've had over their followers since the Dark Ages. Around the region, Salafist scholars are stating, (joined recently by Hassan Fadlallah of Hezbollah), "This is not about a particular incident, it is about America waging a war against Islam as a religion." This is the grand scheme. Civil societies in the Arab world are not duped; they understood the threat Islamist demonstrations posed. Unfortunately, while the true democrats of the region stave off the onslaught of their own troglodytes, Newsweek extended a special invitation for global jihad and gave the Islamists the spark they needed for their malicious counteroffensive. 

I quite agree with Dr. Phares and it's crystal clear that Newsweek has a lot to answer for because of their specious Koran flushing story: with one fell swoop, they gave the IslamoNazis the moral high ground and demonized our soldiers.
The WOT will be longer, harder and more people will suffer and die because "loose lips sink ships." Really.