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With the surrender of the Afghan government in Kabul, the Taliban is poised to inherit a substantial fraction of the Afghan Air Force (AAF) the United States spent over $8 billion dollars rebuilding since 2008. Photographs posted on social media and compiled by the Oryx Blog confirm that the Taliban has already captured intact at least twenty-four helicopters, seven Boeing ScanEagle drones, and two airplanes as of Thursday according to a count U.S. intelligence claims the full number may be closer to thirty to forty. But given the 211 aircraft in the AAF inventory, at least 167 of which were...

The most efficient solution would be mandatory substantial recapitalization—seeking private resources first, but using public funds if necessary. One option would be to mobilize EFSF or other European-wide funding to recapitalize banks directly, which would avoid placing even greater burdens on vulnerable sovereigns.

The conflict between Russia and Georgia has been worsened by badly-translated French, France's foreign minister has admitted on the eve of crucial talks in Moscow between the European Union and the Kremlin. ... One reason for the continuation of the conflict now appears to be a passage in the Russian translation of the agreement that speaks of security "for" South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The English version speaks of security "in" the two areas. The difference is crucial, because Russia continues to keep its tanks and armed troops "in" Georgian territory. The international community, in turn, wants security "for" South Ossetia...

About 151,000 Iraqis died from violence in the three years after the United States invaded, concludes the best effort yet to count deaths... ...based on door-to-door surveys of nearly 10,000 households. Experts called it the largest and most scientific study of the Iraqi death toll since the war began. Its bottom line is far lower than the 600,000 deaths reported in an earlier study... ...It closely mirrors the tally Iraq's health minister gave in late 2006... ...The study authors say they are 95 percent certain that the true number is between 104,000 and 223,000...

BAGHDAD: In a number of Shiite neighborhoods across Baghdad, residents are beginning to turn away from the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia they once saw as their only protector against Sunni militants. Now they resent it as a band of street thugs without ideology. ...The street militia of today bears little resemblance to the Mahdi Army of 2004, when Shiites following a cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, battled American soldiers in a burst of Shiite self-assertion. Then, fighters doubled as neighborhood helpers, bringing cooking gas and other necessities to needy families. ..."Don't call it the Mahdi Army," Yasir said. "It was the...

Quotes from David Kilcullen - a reserve lieutenant colonel in the Australian army, doctorate in political anthropology and senior counter insurgency adviser to General David Petraeus. "... focusing the campaign on how to defeat one particular enemy is perhaps not the best way to approach ...the more we focus on the population and protecting them, the easier it is to deal with the enemy. The more we focus on the enemy, the harder it is to actually get anything done with the population. ... There has never been a successful counterinsurgency that took less than 10 years. ... It's evolution....

Koné Jaoussou stood in a doorway on the infamous Grande Borne council estate, shaking his head at the prospect of a victory for Nicolas Sarkozy in the French presidential election. “If Sarkozy wins this place is going to explode again,” said the 28-year-old immigrant from Mali as he recalled the violence that rocked La Grande Borne in 2005 and again last year. “There’ll be riots here and in the suburbs all over France.” Mr Jaoussou’s views are shared widely among the 11,000 people who live on the bleak 1970s estate in Grigny, outside Paris, the home to 52 different nationalities....

http://media.uselessjunk.com/videos/150508pork_bullets_for_terrorists.wmv

Thursday, a leader of the Sadr movement in one of its Baghdad strongholds publicly endorsed President Bush's new Iraq security plan, which at least some U.S. officials have touted as a way to combat Sadr's group... The Sadr movement controls several government ministries, including Health and Transportation... Since then, the country's healthcare and transportation infrastructures have visibly deteriorated under the control of Sadrist leaders. Hospitals, already strained to the breaking point by daily trauma casualties, have become dirtier, bloodier and more poorly equipped and staffed....Some Sadr supporters have begun turning against the movement... The Al Mahdi army, the fast-growing and...

Insurgents and terrorists are already abandoning some of their positions in Baghdad and moving to Diyala, al-Sabah said: In Diyala, politicians, religious and tribal figures demanded that their province be included in the security plan of Baghdad. This came after dozens of foreign Arab militants ran away from Baghdad to areas across Diyala in order to avoid raids by the Iraqi and American forces during the incoming security plan to secure Baghdad. Eyewitnesses told al-Sabah that areas such as New Baquba, Gatoon and al-Zour in Miqdadiya have become convenient bases for terrorists and foreign al-Qaeda members from Egypt, Syria, Yemen...

There's an interesting article in the NY Sun describing the conclusions reached by Iran's equivalent of the "Iraq Study Group". One key conclusion the Iranians reached was that in order to forestall Sunni attacks against Shi'a groups it was important to for Teheran to reach out to both sides of the sectarian divide. Equal opportunity terrorism. But maybe it went beyond that. One of the documents captured in the raids, according to two American officials and one Iraqi official, is an assessment of the Iraq civil war and new strategy from the Quds Force. According to the Iraqi source, that...

WASHINGTON — The Army, strained by unrelenting violence in Iraq and operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere, is considering ways it can speed up the creation of two combat brigades while shifting personnel and equipment from other military units. Under the plan being developed, the new brigades could be formed next year and be ready to be sent to Iraq in 2008, defense officials told The Associated Press. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans were not final. The Army's chief of staff, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, told a commission Thursday that he wants to increase the half-million-member...

This You Tube video is the absolute best pro-War On Terror (War For Freedom) song ever - "Poster Girl" by Beccy Cole of Australia: You won’t listen to my songs anymore You ripped my poster off the wall ‘Cause I’m the singer that went to the war You see no good in me at all Well pardon me if I believe I haven’t got it wrong And before you turn your back on me I’ll sing you one more song ‘Cause I shook hands with a digger on the wrong side of the world With a wife at home who...

During the 1980s, a friend of mine – a left-wing, secular-minded Syrian writer living in Paris at that time – surprised me by his open admiration for the newly organised Hizbullah. At first I thought his admiration was merely a passing fancy. But when Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1990, he and I finally collided. He could not disguise his delight at the "annexation" of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein's troops, which made me regard his secular, leftist views as a joke. Yet his career led him ever deeper into the arena of the struggle for human rights. With European financial support,...

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The Shiite-dominated parliament Wednesday passed a law allowing the formation of federal regions in Iraq, despite opposition from Sunni lawmakers and some Shiites who say it will dismember the country and fuel sectarian violence. The Sunni coalition in parliament and two Shiite parties tried to prevent a vote on a bill by boycotting Wednesday's session to keep the 275-seat body from reaching the necessary 50 percent quorum. But the quorum was reached with 140 lawmakers, who voted on each of the bill's some 200 articles individually, passing them all unanimously. The law includes a provision that regions...

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Israel did not go to war because its borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah.

U.S. Military Says Charges Three Soldiers With Murders Of Three Iraqi Prisoners

Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention." ... Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small...

George Bush and Tony Blair are to discuss in Washington this week a programme of troop withdrawals from Iraq that will be much faster and more ambitious than originally planned. In a phased pullout in which the two countries will act in tandem, Britain is to begin with a handover to Iraqi security forces in Muthanna province in July and the Americans will follow suit in Najaf, the Shia holy city. Other withdrawals will quickly follow over the remainder of the year. Officials in both administrations hope that Britain's 8,000 forces in Iraq can be down to 5,000 by the...