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| Ср, Янв 28, 2015 05:58pm Martin E. Dempsey - 3375 d back | ↑↓ |
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The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has established a research and essay competition in honor of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz hosted by the National Defense University.
The king, who died Jan. 23 at age 90, oversaw the modernization of his country’s military during the time he spent as commander of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, a position he held from 1963 until he became king in 2005.
Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey said the essay competition is a fitting tribute to the life and leadership of the Saudi Arabian monarch.
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| Вт, Дек 1, 2015 11:46pm [Аноним] - 3068 d back | ↑↓ |
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Легко:Король Абдулла ваххабит, поддерживал террористов всех мастей, включая чеченских. В Афганистане за каждый доллар вложенный Абдуллой американцы тоже доллар клали. Все эти деньги шли через Пакистан к душманам. Сегодняшняя террористическая буча пошла по миру благодаря королю Абдулле.
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| Вт, Дек 1, 2015 11:51pm [Аноним] - 3068 d back | ↑↓ |
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Это отнюдь не пропаганда, раз уж это литературный форум то воспользуюсь шансом отрекомендовать отличную книгу: "Seeds of Terror" Gretchen Peters. Книга правда на английском, но прочитав открывает глаза на многие события не только прошлого но и настоящего
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| Ср, Дек 2, 2015 12:00am [Аноним] - 3068 d back | ↑↓ |
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Вот парочка экзерптов: OUR BATTLE GROUP WAS A RAGTAG CREW OF SCRUFFY AFghan cops and stony-faced American mercenaries. Our target was opium fields profiting the Taliban. As the first light of day cast a pink glow across the desert, the Afghans rewound their turbans to cover noses and mouths, clicked ammunition clips into Kalashnikovs, and piledonto tractors and Bedford trucks. Wearing flak jackets, baseball caps, and dark sunglasses, the men from DynCorp silently checked their M4 rifles, and peered out across the bleak horizon. I scribbled into my notebook as my colleague Nasir filmed the scene. John, my husband, was busy taking photos. Journalists rarely had access to ERAD, the poppy eradication force, especially in remote, lawless Helmand. Armed to the teeth and already covered in dust, our convoy looked like something out of Mad Max. We wanted to capture it all. That morning before dawn, an advance team patrolling the roads had come upon a group of insurgents planting an IED in our path. Once the Afghan police colonel and the DynCorp team leader identified where the would-be bombers came from, they decided to pay their village a visit. As punishment, the ERAD team would destroy theiropium crops. Around the cloud of dust that rose as we bumped along the Zamindavar Plains, poppy fields stretched as far as the eye could see: intense fuchsia blossoms floating in brilliant seas of green. Simple mud huts hugged the banks of irrigation canals. Veiled women hoisted buckets of water out of wells. Turbaned farmers tended their crops, staining their fingers black with the opium gum as they scraped it off the buds. The scenery actually looked lovely, not that I was able to sit back and enjoy it. We were deep in Taliban country and would be lucky to make it through the day without an attack. Inside our four-by-four, we rode in nervous silence. My mind replayed the array of nightmares that might befall us: ambush, IED, suicide bomb. Villagers along the road watched stonily as our convoy lumbered past. Each time a man approached on a motorcycle, or weslowed down to cross over a stream , my teeth clenched and my heart rose in my chest. It took about an hour to reach the target village. It felt like forever.
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| Ср, Дек 2, 2015 12:17am [Аноним] - 3068 d back | ↑↓ |
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"UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE LARGEST COVERT OPERATION in history, two American federal agents crept over the Afghan border in January 1988 on a top-secret mission. Across the devastated countryside , the final chapter of the cold war was drawing to a bloody close. For nine years Muslim guerrillas, secretly funded by the CIA, had waged jihad against their Soviet invaders. The conflict had united thousands of Islamic radicals (among them a young Osama bin Laden) who flocked to Afghanistan from around the globe to join what they considered a holy cause. Poppy fields and heroin labs had sprung up across the territory controlled by the rebels , who were known as mujahideen, Arabic for “strugglers.” By the time the two U.S. agents snuck across the border, the American spies who ran the clandestine program to train and equip the Afghan rebels knew the mujahideen were winning. A month later, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would stun the world by announcing plans to withdraw the hundred thousand Red Army troops from Afghanistan. It would be an astounding victory for the mujahideen, and a CIA triumph . But even before Soviet tanks began their long retreat over the Hindu Kush, there was growing unease insome U.S. government circles that a deadly mix of heroin smugglers and Islamic extremists would one day emerge as a by-product of the conflict. With that concern in mind, Charles Carter and Richard Fiano, two DEA agents posted to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, grew out their beards and wrapped themselves in the flowing robes of the mujahideen. 1 Riding in the back of a dusty truck, they rumbled up a smugglers’ trail into Helmand Province, with a handful of Afghans as their guards and guides. Alongside the CIA’s multibillion-dollar campaign to bring down the Soviet army, the DEA had concocted a relatively modest effort using mujahideen informants to identify and destroy labs where raw opium was processed into heroin. Most labs were nestled in the hilly Chaghi district of Helmand Province along the Pakistan border. “We trained the mujahideen with cameras, and ifthey found a place that looked like a lab, they would photograph it,” said Carter, then agent in charge of the Islamabad station . The camps weren’t much— just a couple of rudimentary mud huts, often strewn with grimy plastic barrels for mixing precursor chemicals like hydrochloric acid and acetic anhydride. “This wasn’t Bristol -Myers Squib,” Fiano said. Together, DEA and CIA agents in Islamabad analyzed photos their informants brought back. When the agents concluded a site was producing crystal heroin, “then we would go in with the mujahideen and take out the lab,” Carter said. They dubbed the program “Operation Jihad.” Both the DEA and CIA pitched in funds to destroy the labs, paying the mujahideen as much as $ 25,000 per site. It was a small outlay given the millions of dollars’ worth of heroin each lab produced in a thirty-day cycle. “Some of those labs were doingfive, even six hundred Ks a month ,” Fiano said. They destroyed drugs on site, keeping small samples for the DEA’s global tracking registry known as the System to Retrieve Information from Drug Evidence, or STRIDE. “As far as we were concerned, whatever else they seized was theirs,” Carter said. There was often buried treasure hidden in the ground around the labs— British pounds, German marks, Iranian dinars, and Pakistani rupees valued at tens of thousands of dollars. “The mujahideen would take the money and turn it back around into their war effort,” "
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| Ср, Дек 2, 2015 12:24am [Аноним] - 3068 d back | ↑↓ |
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"The United States’ clandestine adventure in Afghanistan bears remarkable parallels to today’s state of affairs. It began in 1979, when Pakistan was ruled by Zia ul-Haq, a mustachioed general who took power in a bloodless coup in 1977, ousting a democratically elected leader. The international community at first isolated the ruling junta, and then abruptly reversed its policy when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Overnight, Pakistan became a frontline state in the cold war, and the conduit for billions of dollars in military and other aid flowing to the Afghan resistance. Washington embraced the mujahideen as valiant freedom fighters, and their jihad in the forbidding Hindu Kush became a cause célèbre bursting with drama and intrigue. Strategically, the goal was to give the Soviets “a black eye,” as one former U.S. official put it, and get revenge for the United States’ humiliation in Vietnam. But no one wanted to start World War III or get sucked into Afghanistan’s complex political quagmire. A “light footprint” approach was better, the CIA reasoned. Using Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), as a proxy coordinator gave the United States deniability and freed the agency from muddying its hands in local politics . The downside to this approach was that it gave Pakistan free rein— and unprecedented funding— to pursue its own Islamist agenda in the region. Zia hoped that by waving the flag of Islam he could stamp out ethno-nationalist aspirations among Pashtun tribes living along the 1,500-mile Pakistan-Afghanistan Border"
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| Ср, Дек 2, 2015 12:31am [Аноним] - 3068 d back | ↑↓ |
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"The United States and Saudi Arabia were the central donors to the Afghan resistance, providing matching annual funds worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Britain, China, and various European nations also contributed. All the money was funneled through the ISI, giving the Pakistani spy agency tremendous control over which commanders and parties would benefit. When the resistance began, there were more than eighty Afghan political groups clamoring for foreign money, each claiming to represent the Afghan people. “We told the ISI to bring this down to a manageable number,” says a former U.S. official . “We said , ‘You know the language and the culture, not us. You deal with this.’” 12 Pakistan’s spy agency reorganized the eighty groups into seven parties, which became known as the Peshawar Seven, since their leaders had to travel to the Pakistani frontier city to collect their funds andmarching orders . Some of the parties were more loose amalgamations of regional warlords than functioning syndicates. “The loyalty of the commanders was often pretty fleeting,” says Milton Bearden, the CIA’s chief of station from 1986 to 1989. Hundreds of millions in private donations also flowed in from wealthy Arabs, and tended to benefit mainly fundamentalist Islamic factions. The ISI also favored the fundamentalists, claiming they were more disciplined. In fact, Pakistan feared the rise of ethnic Pashtun nationalism— espoused by some of the moderate parties— along its border. The fundamentalists received more money, weapons, food, and medical supplies, while others struggled for money. The ISI would routinely withhold food and medical aid when they needed errant commanders to fall in line. "
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| Ср, Дек 2, 2015 12:33am [Аноним] - 3068 d back | ↑↓ |
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Gretchen Peters is the Executive Director of the Satao Project, which supports governments, NGOs and private firms to find solutions to complex, transnational organized crime problems. She also co-chairs an OECD Task Force working to improve policy approaches to fight the trafficking of wildlife and other environmentally sensitive goods, and is the senior fellow on Transnational Crime at the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University.
Gretchen is the author of Seeds of Terror, a ground-breaking book that traced the role the opium trade has played in three decades of conflict in Afghanistan. She spent five years researching the book, which Barrons called “a well-written, well-documented and exemplary work of journalism.” Gretchen later authored a policy report on the Afghan opium trade for the U.S. Institute of Peace, and has written a paper about Haqqani network financing with West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.
She has supported U.S. Central Command, U.S. Special Operations Command and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counter Narcotics and Global Threats in understanding and analyzing the links between conflict and organized crime.
Gretchen has testified before the U.S. Congress about the Haqqani network and is a frequent commentator on television and radio including CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, NPR, Fox, Reuters, and New York Times among others. She has done presentations on her work for the Pentagon, the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, Special Operations Command, the Navy Seals, more than a dozen think tanks and universities, and for thousands of U.S. servicemen and women deploying to Afghanistan.
Gretchen holds a Masters’ Degree in International Relations from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, where she was awarded the Sié Chéou-Kang security and diplomacy fellowship and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers Life’s Choices Foundation Scholarship to examine illicit networks and transnational organized crime.
In a past life, Gretchen worked as a foreign correspondent, covering Pakistan and Afghanistan for more than a decade, first for The Associated Press and later for ABC News. She was nominated for an Emmy for her coverage of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and won the SAJA Journalism Award for a 2010 segment on the former Pakistani military ruler Pervez Musharraf. She has also reported from Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Mexico, Egypt and Kosovo. Gretchen has published editorials in the New York Times, the Washington Post and Foreign Policy, among other places. She speaks English and Spanish.
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