NATO/ISAF had a meeting in Tallinn on a NATO roadmap for transition to Afghan lead

An editorial in Friday’s New York Times advocates for Hamid Karzai to hand over responsibility for economic redevelopment of Afghanistan from the United Nations to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Such a move would do nothing more than complete the rape of Afghanistan by the west and institute policies that Naomi Klein documented in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

An honest 420 look at marijuana in Afghanistan. There is definitely a huge drug problem, and our strategy seems to be the cause of it. Our allies that we desperately rely on are all high on drugs, selling drugs, or both. And not only are we paying for it, people are dying because of it.

In case you hadn’t heard, the next stop in General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan is Kandahar, the ideological heart of the Taliban. Using the spadework done in advance of the Marjah operation as a template, McChrystal says the plan is to…

Stephen Walt has an interesting piece up at Foreign Policy talking about the recent Wikileaks release. He touches on the idea that massacres like the one in the Wikileaks video are to be expected as part of the price of our interventionist policies.

It’s been a busy few weeks for diplomatic engagement in Afghanistan. First Karzai’s meeting with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, then the US-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue, and now this week French President Sarkozy is in Washington for a meeting with Obama, and the main topic of discussion will be Afghanistan. The AP reports…

Afghan President Karzai is very excited about peace negotiations with the top al Qaeda supporting war lord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Karzai was a noted Northern Alliance official, and tries not to just be a puppet, constantly urging the US to be more careful to avoid civilian casualties, and constantly calling for peace negotiations with all of the Taliban trying to get others like the Saudis to mediate, with the Taliban’s usual response being he is a traitor not worth negotiating with. Now that he finally got his breakthrough, when Hekmatyar decided to negotiate with Karzai, Obama went to Afghanistan and lectured the Afghan government about corruption when Hekmatyar is about as corrupt as a warlord could be. I wish we had an intelligent peace movement coming to Karzai’s defense.

With all the vague mush going around the NY Times March 30 wrote an article shilling condemning Karzai for going out of his way to have good relations with Ahmadinejad and Iran. Perhaps this will wake the Kucinichs and Cindy Sheehans to the fact that Karzai is no US puppet.

We know President Obama discussed corruption with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in his surprise visit this weekend – that fact is all over the papers. And the New York Times, among others, hints that they talked about negotiations with the Taliban as well.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his HIG is seeking a truce with Karzai…

What do the negotiations between Karzai and Hizb-i-Islami mean to the anti-war movement? What can we learn from Hekmatyar’s 15-point peace plan? The current strategy is certain to fail, so how do we replace it with our own plan?