Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar’s February, 2010 capture was heralded here at the Lake, as “one serious motherfucking success.” Yesterday, the NYT reported (h/t Raw Story) that — and when will ever learn? — we’ve been jacked again by Pakistan’s decades-old Double Game.

Pepe Escobar, unlike his denser American colleagues, makes great use of myths and metaphors in his reportage. As he says in his new piece for Asia Times Online, ‘Surge’ smoke follows Petraeus to AfPak, “Anyone who buys Pentagon spin believing the same successful “surge” will happen in the Pashtun south and southeast of Afghanistan must have smoked Hindu Kush’s finest.”

Pepe Escobar’s latest article for Asia Times Online, The American Taliban are coming, deconstructs the “official” myth-making regarding the failed Times Square bombing, looks into the worldview of neo-jihadis like Faisal Shahzad, Dhiren Barot, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and sees blowback on America’s horizon.

Pep Escobar recently pointed out real-time political myth-making intended to obscure the real driving force behind the threat of nuclear war in the Middle East: nuclear terrorism by the US and Israel in the name of full-spectrum dominance. Such efforts make a mockery of every word spoken on nuclear weapons by the US.

Pepe Escobar, in a May 8, 2010 AntiWar Radio interview with (the other) Scott Horton, answers, again, the trillion dollar question: why are we fighting bogus holy wars in Eurasia? It’s the dominance, dammit!

CTuttle, commenting on the previous DCM diary, Deconstructing Myths of America: Pepe Escobar Special Edition pt1, makes two points most difficult to challenge: A) “Pepe [Escobar] is the man;” and B) Gareth Porter ain’t too shabby, either. As evidence, watch Porter’s July 12 and 14, 2009 videos for The Real News Network.

Pepe Escobar, the “extreme traveler” who writes The Roving Eye for Asia Times Online, makes better use of mythology in an analysis of geopolitics than any other journalist I’ve read. His May 1, 2010 article, “The Myth of Talibanistan,” is yet another superlative example.

How did the US military reduce Clausewitz to “get ‘er done”? Lt. Col. William Astore (USAF, Ret.) yesterday posted at TomDispatch.com a detailed analysis of our military’s obsession with the mythical superiority of Third Reich methods, such as blitzkrieg. One problem our military overlords overlooked: those methods got their Nazi master’s asses kicked all around the world. Pepe Escobar’s July 20, 2008 interview with Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt, The Pentagonization of US Life, amplifies Astore’s points.