By Tim Lynch

Printed with permission from:  http://blog.freerangeinternational.com/

Afghanistan

We had to make a run to Kabul last Friday to take some clients to the airport and to pick up new ones.  The Jalalabad to Kabul road is considered very dangerous by the military and US State Department, of medium risk by the UN, and very little risk by me and the hundreds of internationals who travel the route daily.  The Taliban or other Armed Opposition Group (AOG) have never ambushed internationals on this route with the sole exception of taking some pot shots at a UN convoy last week.  The reason this route remains open is that it is too important to all the players in Afghanistan to risk its closure – almost 80% of the Afghan GDP flows along it so the Taliban would have a real PR problem if they cut it causing a large scale humanitarian crisis.  The criminal gangs and drug lords who cooperate with the Taliban would also become very agitated if the road were closed and probably turn on any real Taliban groups foolish enough to be within their reach if that happened.   We don’t take this run lightly but we often choose to make it without body armor or long guns because we are afraid of being ambushed by the other villains – members of the Afghan security forces.  On Friday our long string of luck ran out and we became the latest victim of the Afghan security company game.  It cost us two sets of body armor which we cannot replace because you cannot import body armor into Afghanistan and we were lucky to get away with the weapons (which are also irreplaceable.)

“Russia can have at its borders only enemies or vassals.” – George F. Kennan, United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union

“You must draw a white-hot iron over this Georgian land!…You will have to break the wings of this Georgia! Let the blood of the petit bourgeois flow until they give up all their resistance! Impale them! Tear them apart!” – Vladimir Lenin

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The Taliban say they know that an election campaign is underway in Canada and that's why they have stepped up attacks against Canadians in Afghanistan.

Taliban spokesman Qari Muhammad Yussef said Tuesday the insurgent movement wants Canada's next prime minister to pull Canadian troops out of Afghanistan.

The modest shift in US forces to Afganistan announced Tuesday by President George W. Bush falls short of his commanders' requests despite signs the seven year-old US-NATO project there is at risk.

While conditions have improved in Iraq, Bush admitted that things have not gone so well in Afghanistan, shaken by an increasingly bloody insurgency fueled from safe havens in Pakistan. Click here to read the entire article by Jim Mannion in Yahoo News

Sadly, as I wait in an airport departure lounge, just days before returning to combat, a message came from Joe Galloway. And so, as I sit here reading Joe's latest column, I am less saddened than uplifted to know that such Americans as "Too Tall" Ed Freeman still exist. As I board my plane for Afghanistan, Too Tall gets to go to heaven. God Speed "Too Tall" Freeman!

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan: Afghan leaders celebrated Independence Day on Monday with a small ceremony inside a fortified military compound, in marked contrast to the parade and public festivities a year ago and another sign that Taliban militants are bearing down on the government.

August 17, 2008

Al Qaeda At 20 Dead Or Alive?
By Peter Bergen

Two decades after al-Qaeda was founded in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar by Osama bin Laden and a handful of veterans of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the group is more famous and feared than ever. But its grand project -- to transform the Muslim world into a militant Islamist caliphate -- has been, by any measure, a resounding failure.

By Samantha L. Quigley
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Aug. 15, 2008 – Listeners who log on to listen to Stardust Radio’s “Talking with Heroes” program on Aug. 17 will learn how they can honor veterans past and present and commemorate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The show’s host, Bob Calvert, will welcome Roxie Merritt, spokeswoman for the Defense Department’s America Supports You program and director of New Media and Community Relations for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. Merritt’s community relations staff is responsible for organizing this year’s fourth annual National America Supports You Freedom Walk here while hundreds of others are being planned nationwide and overseas.

“It means so much to our troops serving all over the world to see this kind of support coming from their communities,” Merritt said. “The military, in a lot of ways, is about community, and local actions like this have a huge impact on morale.”