The New York Times exposes a farce enacted on the real stage of international politics: a perfectly performed con-trick by which an imposter extracted a mountain of moola from craven double-dealing presidents, diplomats, and generals involved in The Endless War of Waste and Futility.

The conman claimed to be Mullah Akhta Muhammad Mansour, “the second highest official in the Taliban movement” after the founder, Mullah Mohammed Omar.

He and “two other Taliban leaders” were flown to Kabul from Pakistan in a NATO plane, wearing serious beards, and were ceremoniously ushered into the presidential palace, where they proceeded to beard President Karzai in his den, so to speak. Then they were conducted to the city of Kandahar where “Mullah Mansour” and his two merry men hoodwinked government officials, NATO commanders, American diplomats and top-brass.

For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

American officials confirmed Monday that they had given up hope that the Afghan was Mr. Mansour, or even a member of the Taliban leadership.

Doubts about the man’s identity arose after the third session of negotiations. Only then –

A man who had known [the real] Mr. Mansour years ago told Afghan officials that the man at the table did not resemble him.

Even so, they wistfully hoped that whoever he was would come again. They’d paid him to keep the fake peace talks going, and any old talks, with anyone at all, are better than none.

While the Afghan official said he still harbored hopes that the man would return for another round of talks, American and other Western officials said they had concluded that the man in question was not Mr. Mansour. Just how the Americans reached such a definitive conclusion — whether, for instance, they were able to positively establish his identity through fingerprints or some other means — is unknown.

As recently as last month, American and Afghan officials held high hopes for the talks. Senior American officials, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, said the talks indicated that Taliban leaders, whose rank-and-file fighters are under extraordinary pressure from the American-led offensive, were at least willing to discuss an end to the war. …

President Karzai himself – who wears, literally, the mantle of power – denied that any talks with any Taliban, real or pretend, were going on at all:

“Do not accept foreign media reports about meetings with Taliban leaders. Most of these reports are propaganda and lies,” he said.

The Taliban also deny that any talks took place, or were planned.

In a recent message to his followers, Mullah Omar denied that there were any talks unfolding at any level.

Now, since “Mullah Mansour” turns out to have been a scam artist, it seems they might be telling the truth.

Since the last round of discussions, which took place within the past few weeks, Afghan and American officials have been puzzling over who the man was.

So who was he?

[Some] say the man may have been a [real] Taliban agent. “The Taliban are cleverer than the Americans and our own intelligence service,” said a senior Afghan official who is familiar with the case.  “They are playing games.”

Others suspect that the fake Taliban leader, whose identity is not known, may have been dispatched by the Pakistani intelligence service, known by its initials, the ISI. Elements within the ISI have long played a “double-game” in Afghanistan, reassuring United States officials that they are pursuing the Taliban while at the same time providing support for the insurgents.

The theory we like best is that he was “a humble shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta”, who simply enlisted the help of two cronies and carried out the sting operation for the most understandable of motives – to get a lot of money. Which they did.

General Petraeus has claimed counterinsurgency success in the Helmand province of Afghanistan. But if this Washington Post report provides a true picture of what success amounts to, it makes failure hard to define.

Helmand is the place with the highest concentration of American troops, and the site of the first major operation under the new military strategy, when U.S. Marines in February retook the Taliban-held town of Marja. Coalition commander Gen. David H. Petraeus now points to parts of Helmand, such as Nawa, as examples of counterinsurgency success.

But the Helmand refugees living in this squalid camp, known as Charahi Qambar, offer a bleaker assessment. They blame insecurity on the presence of U.S. and British troops, and despite official claims of emerging stability, these Afghans believe their villages are still too dangerous to risk returning.

“Where is security? The Americans are just making life worse and worse, and they’re destroying our country,” said Barigul, a 22-year-old opium farmer from the Musa Qala district of Helmand … “If they were building our country, why would I leave my home town and come here?” …

The camp has since grown to more than 1,000 families, making it the largest of some 30 informal settlements around Kabul. …

The residents say they are mostly farmers who brought their bundles by bus and taxi to live in these mud hovels or under scraps of tarp. It is a place of wailing children and dirt-caked faces, where husbands search for menial labor and wives burn heaps of trash to cook their daily gruel. …

Ahunzada, a 35-year-old mullah, gets by on meager donations from other refugees, given to him as payment for teaching Islamic classes and leading the daily prayers in a low-ceilinged makeshift mosque built from mud. Two years ago, he left his opium fields in Sangin, one of the most violent parts of Helmand, which British troops recently handed over to U.S. Marines after taking casualties for four years.

“Every day, fighting is going on there. The more infidels who come to our country, the more Afghans die, and the less safe we become,” he said.

Ahunzada has little affection for the Taliban. His father, Mohammad Gul Agha, and his brother, Abdul Zahir, both died when a fireball engulfed their car on the road to the provincial capital. The insurgents, he said, had planted the bomb to target a passing U.S. military convoy.

“We are not happy from either side, but I believe the British and American troops are more cruel than the Taliban,” he said. “I have seen it happen: The Taliban come on motorbikes, they open fire, then they leave. Then the Americans just come and kill us, they bomb us, they open fire on us, they kill the children and innocent people.” …

He makes this claim although “U.S. commanders say they have made reducing civilian casualties a top priority, and they say their soldiers accept more risk in order to minimize collateral damage” – a deplorable fact we know to be true.

Barigul [the 22-year-old opium farmer mentioned above] and his family left Helmand last month. He said the decision was the culmination of long-running harassment from American troops and their insurgent enemies. He has been detained, he said, accused of planting bombs, searched at checkpoints, and slapped in the face by foreign troops. Outside the Musa Qala district center, where American troops are dominant, the Taliban patrol the villages, block children from attending school and kill Afghans accused of collaborating with foreigners.

“If we grew our beards, the Americans arrested us and put us in jail saying we were Taliban. If we shaved, the Taliban gave us a hard time,” he said. “What are we supposed to do, shave half of our beard?” …

These camp residents – refugees though they are, who have sought protection in the camp from the Taliban – have decided that the Taliban is after all the lesser of two evils. They “clearly want foreign troops to depart”.

They blame the Americans for bombing them out of their homes:

“Who are the Taliban? They are our brothers, our cousins, our relatives. The problem is the Americans,” said Lala Jan, 25, also from Musa Qala. “If somebody attacks from one house, the Americans bomb the whole place. If the Taliban come inside, during the night the Americans come and raid the house. That’s the problem.”

As the number of foreign troops has risen – there are now about 140,000 U.S. and allied NATO soldiers on the ground – the population of those who have been displaced from their homes and have moved elsewhere in Afghanistan has also grown. …

Mohammad, a 36-year-old imam, said that during the Marine operation in Marja, his family hid in a hole, covered by boards, for 12 days as the Taliban fought Americans from house to house. This spring his mother-in-law’s home in Marja was obliterated by an American bomb, he said, killing six of his relatives.

“It was impossible to stay,” he said. “The house had collapsed. “If I go back to Marja, I will have to pick a side,” he said. “If I support the foreign forces, the Taliban will behead me. If I join the Taliban, I will also get killed.” …

For many, the lure to return remains strong. The rain seeps into Ahunzada’s hovel. … He lies on the floor at night and yearns to return to Helmand.

“I keep thinking I should go back to my village, either to cultivate opium or to stand alongside the Taliban. Then at least I will have money. I could send it to my wife and son,” he said. “I think about this every night.”

Yet he is not quite ready.

“When the infidels leave our province, on the next day I will go home.”

Where in this calamitous story does an Afghan army come in, well trained, effective, competently commanded, and seriously willing to take on the Taliban without foreign assistance?  Is it even remotely in prospect?

Without such a thing – and who at this stage can seriously believe in it? – whenever the infidel forces withdraw, whether in 2011 or in 2014 (dates that have been named) or in any unspecified year beyond that,  the Taliban will have won.

General Sir David Richards, Chief of the British Armed Forces, commander of  NATO forces in Afghanistan since 2006, “subscribes to the notion that such an ideologically-driven adversary [as al-Qaeda] cannot be defeated in the traditional sense, and to attempt to do so could be a mistake”, according to the Sunday Telegraph.

Sir David says “War” is the correct term for describing the conflict between the West and al-Qaeda and other Islamic militant groups.

It might not be the stereotypical view of war, he insists, in the sense of massed armies attempting to outmanoeuvre their opponents but it needs to be viewed in the same way. But this war – unlike those of the past – could last up to 30 years.

Why 30? We are not told. The war he describes has no conceivable end:

We are engaged in a global struggle against a pernicious form of ideologically distorted form of Islamic fundamentalism. …

A war against an ideology, he accepts, has to be fought differently from a war against an enemy nation; and whereas “in conventional war, defeat and victory is very clear cut and is symbolised by troops marching into another nation’s capital” , there can be no such moment of clear victory in this “global struggle” against a “form of Islamic fundamentalism”.

The general is all for fighting such a war, even though there can there never be  a “clear cut victory”.

What is more, he thinks no such victory is “necessary”.

You have to ask: “do we need to defeat it (Islamist militancy)?”  in the sense of a clear cut victory, and I would argue that it is unnecessary and would never be achieved.

It is true that the West is engaged in a war with Islam, which makes war because it is ideologically committed to making war, and the general almost says as much. Perhaps he hopes to be understood to mean as much. But he doesn’t exactly say so. He doesn’t say that what we are up against is Islam, or the ideology of Islam. He removes accusation as far from Islam as he can. We are, he says, under attack by  “a pernicious form“, [an] “ideologically distorted form“,  of “Islamic fundamentalism”. Not even Islamic fundamentalism itself, but a pernicious, distorted form of it.

Seen in those terms, the enemy can only be a bunch of deluded fanatics. In the general’s view there will always be such aberrant types who stupidly misunderstand the teaching of their own religion, and of course we must do what we can to protect ourselves from them. “The national security of the UK and our allies is, in my judgement, at stake,” he says.

And he hastens to add that, despite the indefeatable nature of the enemy, the war in Afghanistan is not futile. The deluded fanatics must be fought in any and every state where they establish themselves.

“Make no mistake,”  he states with added emphasis, “the global threat from al-Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates is an enduring one and one which, if we let it, will rear its head in states particularly those that are unstable. …

“Our men and women in Afghanistan are fighting to prevent this [pernicious, ideologically distorted form of Islamic fundamentalism] from spreading.”

But in the long run, what will best overcome it, even if never permanently and decisively, is something other than the weapons of war:

Education, prosperity, understanding and democracy, he argues passionately, are the weapons that would ultimately turn people away from terrorism.

Has he not been informed that most of the Islamic terrorists who have murdered thousands in the West are educated and prosperous, and grew up in the democracies they attacked? What is it that they failed to understand which could make all the difference?

The general is right that the enemies are Muslim, use terrorism, are ideologically driven, and are not defeatable by conventional warfare. He is wrong that they are an ignorant, impoverished, desperate, deluded atypical minority who have misunderstood the teaching of Islam.

The truth is that Islam commands jihad. Jihad is continual war against non-Muslims until Islam rules the whole world. The Taliban, the Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood, the mass murderers of 9/11, all those who have carried out the 16,384 (tally to this date) violent attacks in the name of Islam, understand perfectly what Muhammad taught and are obedient to the ideology of their faith.

Islam needs to be countered by persistent criticism and argument of all sorts, including derision. That is what Islam fears most – argument against it, critical examination, debunking – which is why the Islamic states are trying to make it illegal to say anything against Islam, hoping to achieve protection from reason by means of a United Nations resolution.

If by “education” General Sir David Richards meant continual teaching against Islam, he’d be right.

After the Second World War, the Germans were made to undergo a process of “denazification”. It was a program of education for all Germans to rid them of belief in the ideology of Nazism. Whether it actually cleaned out the minds of true believers or not, it did make it hard for anyone to speak publicly in defense of what the Nazis and the Third Reich had stood for, by making it shameful to do so. (The defeat itself more than anything else convinced Germany that the Nazis had been wrong.)

Ideally, the same should be done with Islam: a de-Islamization program wherever it could be put into effect.

Of course that will not happen. The West upholds freedom of religion, Islam calls itself a religion, so Islam will be left free to spread its malevolent practices: women mutilated, assaulted, enslaved; non-Muslims killed if they will not submit; legal execution carried out by stoning, burning, crucifixion, punishment by the amputation of hands and feet; and the world at large subjected to perpetual warfare until it accepts unquestioningly forever the law and morals of a cruel illiterate bandit of the Dark Ages.

At least we can and must argue against Islam. Learn about it, spread the truth about it, expose it, denounce it. Resist its advance in every way. No footbaths. No same-sex swimming sessions in public pools. No removal of pigs or their effigies from public places. No taxi drivers exempted from carrying dogs and alcohol. No time off work for prayer. No mosque at Ground Zero. No sharia-compliant financial deals. No legitimized sharia courts, enforcement of their rulings, or deference by judges to Muslim custom.

The West has the intellectual resources to defeat Islam. What it lacks is the will.

These days there cannot  be many states, if any, with governments free from corruption, but some are more corrupt than others. Afghanistan looks to be among the worst. Its make-believe democratic institutions, president and parliament, and the police and the military, are oiled with corruption. Bribery and extortion characterize the politics of the country. A thousand busy Americans driven by noble intentions will not easily succeed in purifying the soul of the nation or changing the Afghan way. Even John Kerry, whose noble intentions are on display though his own soul has been tainted by fibs about his military adventures, has failed to persuade President Karzai – the fellow who literally wears a mantle of power – to play nice. And though Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls Karzai to inform him loftily of her “displeasure”, he continues to do it his way. This so disheartens the well-intentioned folk pursuing the counter-corruption endeavor that they are thinking of abandoning it.

This is from the Washington Post:

A close adviser to President Hamid Karzai, arrested last month on charges of soliciting a bribe, was also under investigation for allegedly providing luxury vehicles and cash to presidential allies and over telephone contacts with Taliban insurgents, according to Afghan officials familiar with the case.

The Afghan officials also said that it had been Karzai himself who intervened to win the quick release of the aide, Mohammad Zia Salehi, even after the arrest had been personally approved by the country’s attorney general. The new account suggests that the corruption case against Salehi was wider than previously known and that Karzai acted directly to secure his aide’s release. …

The intervention by Karzai came after the Afghan investigators had begun to pursue corruption cases against the aide and possibly other Karzai allies inside the presidential palace. A commission formed by Karzai after his aide was released concluded that Afghan agents who had carried out the investigation with support from U.S.-backed law enforcement units had violated Salehi’s human rights and were operating outside the constitution.

The back-and-forth revolves around the work of two American-backed Afghan task forces, one known as the Major Crimes Task Force and the other called the Sensitive Investigative Unit. It has created perhaps the most serious crisis this year in relations between Afghanistan and the United States. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Karzai to express her displeasure with any decision that undermines anti-corruption enforcement, and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) flew to Kabul this week with a warning to Karzai that his actions put at risk U.S. funding and congressional support for the war. …

Salehi is a Pashtun from Wardak province who heads the administration of Afghanistan’s National Security Council. Salehi has played a key role in support of Karzai’s efforts to win reconciliation with Taliban insurgents and end the war in Afghanistan. The current and former Afghan officials said he had spoken regularly by cellphone with Taliban representatives and had arranged meetings between the Karzai administration and members of the Taliban …

The Afghan officials said that the investigation had determined that Salehi had also been involved with making cash payments from a palace fund to pay off Karzai’s political supporters, and distributed gifts such as armored Land Cruisers and luxury Lexuses.

“He was one of the most trusted staff members in the palace to do special things,” said one Afghan official with direct knowledge of the case. …

One of the special things he did was to accept a bribe not to investigate bribery:

Wiretapped conversations had also produced evidence that Salehi had accepted gifts, including a car provided to his son, in return for playing a role in opposing a corruption investigation aimed at New Ansari, the nation’s largest money-transfer business, which was raided by investigators in January. “The talk on the intercepts was pretty clear that this car was intended to get Salehi to interfere with the investigation,” said a senior U.S. official who worked with Afghan anti-corruption teams. The American official said the evidence had been presented to Afghanistan’s attorney general, Mohammad Ishaq Aloko, who signed an arrest warrant for Salehi and instructed the Major Crimes Task Force, an Afghan police unit mentored by the FBI, to execute the arrest. …

On July 25 … Salehi was taken to a counternarcotics detention center in Kabul.

By 6 p.m. the same day, however, police with the Major Crimes Task Force received a second letter from Aloko, the attorney general, ordering Salehi’s release.

An Afghan official with direct knowledge of the case said that Aloko had come under “enormous pressure” from Karzai to set Salehi free. A second Afghan official with direct knowledge of the events said that Aloko “received an order from the president” that Salehi be released. …

According to the Afghan officials, corruption investigators now say they fear for the safety of their families and do not believe it is possible to convict those close to the president. They do not expect Salehi to be indicted. Some believe the two elite task forces will be disbanded.

That would be a blow to General Petraeus. Apparently he’s pinned his hopes on them, believing that the country could be “restored” to stability if only the corruption could be got rid of.

Gen. David H. Petraeus the new American commander, has made clear that he sees the effort as central to restoring stability to the country.

So the story of Salehi is not encouraging to those who still believe there is something to be won in Afghanistan. To others it bears a message of despair.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, having to make a statement about the 10 members of the medical team working for a Christian aid organization who were shot dead by the Taliban, said yesterday in that cold dead voice of hers:

With these killings, [the Taliban] have shown us yet another example of the lengths to which they will go to advance their twisted ideology.

Their twisted ideology? What is their ideology? It has a name – Islam. The ideology in the name of which the Taliban killed those men and women is Islam.

It is not their ideology that is objected to by the administration of which Hillary Clinton is a member. On the contrary, they protect it. Obama positively promotes it.

It is only the method the Taliban use that bothers Barack and Hillary: the method of terrorism. They have to denounce that, regardless of where their sympathies lie. But Muslims who help advance Islamic jihad by other means – infiltration, indoctrination – have the full blessing of Obama’s henchmen and henchwomen. Hillary Clinton herself lifted the ban on Tariq Ramadan getting a visa to enter the US, and he’s a Muslim who devotes his life to promoting the ideology of Islam.

When Attorney General Eric Holder had  to comment on the arrest of 14 American Muslims for supplying money and recuits to al-Shabab, the al-Qaeda  affiliated terrorist organization in Somalia, he did not say – not even once – that they were Muslims. He studiously avoided mentioning the fact. The word only came into his statement when he praised unnamed Muslims for helping to bring about the arrests. Then he went on to lecture us all, hastening to instruct us that Muslims are victims of terrorism. So are others, Mr Holder! In America many more non-Muslims than Muslims are victims of Muslim terrorism, but they don’t deserve a mention?

The administration is in denial that Islam is intrinsically militant, terroristic, cruel, and intent on the conquest of the rest of the world. But that is why the 10 Christians were killed in cold blood in Afghanistan. That is why American Muslims are helping al-Shabab and al-Qaeda.

What’s the point of pretending otherwise? Reality is not changed by pretense.

US counter-insurgency tactics in Afghanistan are being modeled on methods that worked – so they say – in Iraq.

The Washington Post reports:

Perhaps the most important reason population control worked to the extent it did in Baghdad was because each side believed the other posed an existential threat, and both turned to the United States for security. In many parts of southern and eastern Afghanistan, the population has yet to seek protection.

Their “hearts and minds must be won”, but –

Many Kandaharis regard the Taliban as wayward brothers and cousins — fellow Pashtuns with whom they can negotiate and one day reconcile. They also worry about siding with their government because they fear Taliban retribution, both now and when U.S. troop reductions begin next summer.

The U.S. counterinsurgency strategy depends on persuading Pashtuns to … cast their lot with their government.

Their incorrigibly corrupt government, it should be said. But push on.

The U.S. military and civilian agencies are trying to help the government win over the public by delivering services to the population that the Taliban does not offer, including education, health care, agricultural assistance and justice based on the rule of law.

That requires capable civil servants willing to work in an unstable environment — and that’s where the strategy is hitting its most significant roadblock.

“Unstable environment” being a nice way of saying “death trap”. Not many Afghans are attracted to it.

A recent effort by Karzai’s local-governance directorate to fill 300 civil service jobs in Kandahar and the surrounding district turned up four qualified applicants, even after the agency dropped its application standards to remove a high school diploma, according to several U.S. officials.

But the four could, maybe, read and write. Next problem, how to keep them alive?

U.S. officials are exploring ways to protect Afghans working for the government. One plan under consideration would involve transforming the Kandahar Hotel into a secure dormitory surrounded by concrete walls, for civil servants. Development contractors working for USAID are building compounds with secret entrances to minimize the chances that insurgents spot staff members.

Nervous men walled up together, sneaking through secret ways – as a recruiting ad, probably not great.

And even if a few more semi-educated civil servants were to sign up and be willing to huddle behind concrete barriers and slink about in fear, the outlook for law and order is not bright.

Getting government officials in place is no guarantee of success. Kandahar’s governor and mayor are regarded as ineffective administrators, but U.S. and Canadian advisers are trying to transform them into more competent leaders.

Trying and trying, however discouraging the signs:

In the Panjwai district to the west of Kandahar … the district governor and the police chief recently got into a fight. The chief hit the governor with a teakettle and the governor smashed a teacup on the chief’s head, the confrontation culminating in a shootout between their guards.

In Arghandab, U.S. military and civilian officials spent a year working closely with — and praising — the district governor, Abdul Jabar. When he was killed in a car bombing in Kandahar this summer, the officials blamed the Taliban.

But some of those same officials concluded that the governor was skimming U.S. funds for reconstruction projects in his district. His killing, they think, was the result of anger by fellow residents over his not distributing the spoils, not a Taliban assassination.

“It was a mob hit,” said one U.S. official familiar with the situation. “We saw him as a white knight, but we were getting played the whole time.”

Maybe if Afghans who can read and write are transported out of their “unstable environment” to the United States and trained in, say, Texas, they might do better?

It ‘s been tried, at least by the military. Afghans were willing, even positively eager to be flown to America. Once there, they weren’t slow to take advantage of the opportunities suddenly laid before them: wine, women, song, and freedom.

Fox News reports:

A loose network of Mexican-American women, some of whom may be illegal immigrants, have been responsible for helping numerous Afghan military deserters go AWOL from an Air Force Base in Texas …

Many of the Afghans, with the women’s assistance, have made their way to Canada; the whereabouts of others remain unknown. Some of the men have been schooled by the women in how to move around the U.S. without any documentation.

The Afghan deserters refer to the women as “BMWs” —  Big Mexican Women — and they often are the first step in the Afghans’ journey from Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, to Canada …

The Afghan military men usually meet the women at three nightclubs in San Antonio … The nightclubs include two military hangouts — Tiffany’s Cocktails and Mirage, located outside Lackland’s main gate — and Graham Central Station, a massive warehouse-like building in downtown San Antonio that houses “six nightclubs under one roof” that host a variety of theme nights. Photos on Graham Central’s website show scantily clad women rolling around in what appears to be Jell-O.

In the past eight years, no fewer than 46 members of the Afghan military have gone absent without leave … As most Afghans on the base do not have cars [what – they’re not given cars?! – JB], many of them depended on the women to pick them up at Lackland’s back gate in the middle of the night and help them vanish.

Many of the men decided to go AWOL just hours before they were scheduled to fly home to Afghanistan …

In one instance, a student … who is now living in Toronto, spent hundreds of dollars on books and materials to take home to Afghanistan, where he was supposed to teach English. But he vanished less than a week after purchasing the textbooks — and just hours before his flight was due to depart.

Another student … described by friends as the most unlikely of the 46 to go AWOL, decided at the very last minute not to go home. A pilot with two wives and more than a dozen children, he failed his final exam and felt too humiliated to face his family, the sources said. He vanished in March, and the sources said he could not have gotten away from Lackland without help. …

The women are believed to have been responsible for picking up numerous other Afghans …

The women who help the deserters are like groupies…  Many are single and older than the Afghans, who tend to be in their early 20s. If an Afghan needs a ride, they’ll pick him up. If they’re needed to run errands — or to take them away from the base in the middle of the night — they will be there at a moment’s notice …

But the women do more than drive the “getaway cars”; … they also provide the deserters with crucial advice and encouragement, apparently drawn from their own personal experiences. The women … have told some of the men that it’s possible to live in the U.S. illegally.

“These guys, they want a better life, but they’re scared to run away without their passports or identification, they’re scared they’ll get caught,” a source who has assisted in [a] multiagency investigation said.

“These BMWs say, ‘It’s OK.’ Then poof, they’re gone.”

So some 92,000 US military documents were leaked by an unknown agent to Wikileaks and handed on to three big news outlets for co-ordinated news releases today.

The question is, what do they reveal according to the New York Times, the Guardian (Britain), and Der Spiegel (Germany)?

Not much is the answer.

The NYT finds proof that Pakistan’s intelligence service has been actively helping the Taliban. But news reports of that have been appearing for some time now.

The Guardian, perhaps a jot more interestingly, finds no convincing evidence of it in the documents. What it does find is evidence that a secret  unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders – which is already known or at least assumed  – and that the US has covered up the fact that the Taliban got hold of, and is deploying, heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles. The Taliban’s possession of them must be a cause for concern, but is not a startling revelation. If the high command, or the Pentagon, or the administration, or all of them have been trying to conceal the fact, the wonder is why, and how they hoped to succeed.

Der Spiegel finds evidence that German troops are coming under increasing threat. But the German government has plainly said as much.

Any scandalous revelations? There are mentions, yet to be filled out, of civilian deaths that may have been suppressed. Bad, but not unusual in a war.

It’s possible that something surprising, illuminating, significant in some way will yet be caught in that blizzard of paper. Possible, but not very likely.

Wikileaks is an international organization “based” (whatever that means) in Sweden, that “publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive documents from governments and other organizations, while preserving the anonymity of their sources” (according to Wikipedia).  One of its founders is Julian Assange, an Australian who seems also to be its only or chief spokesman.

The Wikileaks list of past revelations is not very impressive.

They were one of several channels through which the Climategate documents were released. Good.

They saw fit to release Sarah Palin’s private emails when she was a vice-presidential candidate, given to them in September 2008 by the hacker himself. Not so good.

Far more useful would be documents revealing  the suppressed facts of Obama’s life, schooling, and career. And even better would be a list of the politicians who made the decision to admit millions of Muslim immigrants into Europe and the United States, and documents that would tell us why they made it. If Wikileaks could supply those, it would truly deserve the gratitude of this generation and future historians.

In an interesting article at Canada Free Press, Philip V. Brennan not only defends (Chairman of the RNC ) Michael Steele’s view of the impossibility of US victory in the Afghanistan war, but gives a fascinating account of how the British found it impossible to win a war there in the 19th century.

Speaking of the war in Afghanistan and President Obama’s involvement in that struggle Steele let loose with this warning about U.S. Involvement in that strange and hostile region. (I won’t call Afghanistan a country because this collection of fiercely independent tribal areas is anything but what qualifies as a nation state.) …

[Steele observed] that if Obama is “such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? … Everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed. And there are reasons for that.”

Wildly inaccurate, screeched both G.O.P. and Democrat Party critics … [one of whom] went on to cite the British experience in 1842 when, [the Democrat critic] insisted, the UK had scored a success. Either the Democratic strategist is woefully ignorant of what happened to the Brits in that year or he was flat out lying. He should try to tell that whopper to the descendants of the 16,000 British and Indian [retreating] troops who were cut to pieces by Afghani tribesmen at the beginning of 1842. …

“A fearful slaughter ensued…  Without food, mangled and cut to pieces, each one caring only for himself, all subordination had fled; and the soldiers of the forty-fourth English regiment are reported to have knocked down their officers with the butts of their muskets. … More than 16,000 people had set out on the retreat from Kabul, and in the end only one man, Dr. William Brydon, a British Army surgeon … made it alive to Jalalabad. …  It was believed the Afghans let him live so he could tell the grisly story.”

If that’s a success story I’d hate to read one dealing with failure.

He goes on to quote this verse by Rudyard Kipling:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains

And the women come out to cut up what remains

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier

Go, go, go like a soldier …”

We sure hope no wounded US or NATO soldier will be driven to suicide by the wild Afghan tribes.

But we agree emphatically that victory over them is impossible, and the war should be stopped now.

America, Britain, NATO  – anyway, our side –  is trying to sue for peace with the Taliban.

They’re not calling it that – they’d say they’re “asking for talks” – but it amounts to the same thing. It’s the first step in the attempt they must make to get out of the war without too great humiliation. So far, they’re not succeeding even with that low aim.

The British army chief of staff, General David Richards, egged on by US commanders, shouted out loud that “it might be useful to talk to the Taliban”.

The Taliban couldn’t help hearing, and their  answer through intermediaries is that they will not enter into any kind of negotiations with Nato forces.

That’s according to the BBC – not a source we usually trust, but the story rings true.

The Taliban statement is uncompromising, almost contemptuous.

They believe they are winning the war, and cannot see why they should help Nato by talking to them. …

June, they point out, has seen the highest number of Nato deaths in Afghanistan: 102, an average of more than three a day.

“Why should we talk if we have the upper hand, and the foreign troops are considering withdrawal, and there are differences in the ranks of our enemies?” said Zabiullah Mujahedd, [when] a trusted intermediary conveyed a series of questions to [him], the acknowledged spokesman for the Afghan Taliban leadership, and [he] gave us his answers.

“We do not want to talk to anyone – not to [President Hamid] Karzai, nor to any foreigners – till the foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan.” …

Doubts about the value of the operation are already growing in every Nato country.

The BBC  (or “Auntie Beeb” as the old harridan is often unaffectionately called in Britain) thinks that General Petraeus’s task is now to change that perception. We don’t think so. His task, as we have said, is to find a way of getting out of the war with as little humiliation as possible.

But even that’s a bad idea. Best thing would be to get out now, because the most humiliating way will be to go on trying not to be humiliated without succeeding.

Actually there must be humiliation whatever is done.

Karzai in power corruptly and/or dealing with the Taliban ? Humiliation.

NATO/US talking to the Taliban to include them in power? Humiliation.

The Taliban refusing to talk to NATO and waiting for it to leave? Humiliation.

Continuing to pretend there is an Afghan army loyal to “the nation”?  Humiliation.

Leaving next July with the same sort of mess there is now or worse? Humiliation.

Giving up on victory and preferring the word “success”? Humiliation.

Pretending Pakistan is an ally and doesn’t have its own designs on Afghanistan? Humiliation.

Trying not to be humiliated and pretending not to be? Humiliation.

Defeat on the battlefield in Marja, Kandahar, and soon all over? Utter humiliation.

Our side is thoroughly, deeply, irredeemably humiliated now. And not another American or NATO life should be lost in this hopeless and even absurd cause .

Afghanistan has never been a nation-state as the West understands such a thing.

This report shows plainly enough that any plan to meld the Afghan tribes into one democratically governed nation is doomed to failure; but it also shows how hard it is for those who imagined it could succeed to see its naivity.

Even an Afghan member of the so-called parliament, trying to fit into the Western illusion, speaks of Afghanistan being “split” as if it were a nation that might be divided into two sides, whereas in fact the region is inhabited by a plurality of feuding fiefdoms, and “splintered” would be a better word to describe the humanscape (to coin a term). An even better word might be “crazed”, in the sense of a network of cracks.

It describes how President Karzai’s attempt to bring the Taliban into a central government is the very thing that will shatter such West-compliant unity as has been tentatively achieved. And it calls this a “paradox” rather than what it is – the proof of the impossibility of a hopeless, foolish, Western fantasy, the pursuit of a mirage.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, it tells us, still think they can prevent Afghanistan being “torn apart” – as if it had even been whole, or as if they really can make their fantasy come true.

The drive by President Hamid Karzai to strike a deal with Taliban leaders and their Pakistani backers is causing deep unease in Afghanistan’s minority communities, who fought the Taliban the longest and suffered the most during their rule.

The leaders of the country’s Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities, which make up close to half of Afghanistan’s population, are vowing to resist — and if necessary, fight — any deal that involves bringing members of the Taliban insurgency into a power-sharing arrangement with the government.

Alienated by discussions between President Karzai and the Pakistani military and intelligence officials, minority leaders are taking their first steps toward organizing against what they fear is Mr. Karzai’s long-held desire to restore the dominance of ethnic Pashtuns, who ruled the country for generations. …

“Karzai is giving Afghanistan back to the Taliban, and he is opening up the old schisms,” said Rehman Oghly, an Uzbek member of Parliament and once a member of an anti-Taliban militia. “If he wants to bring in the Taliban, and they begin to use force, then we will go back to civil war and Afghanistan will be split.”

The deepening estrangement of Afghanistan’s non-Pashtun communities presents a paradox for the Americans and their NATO partners. American commanders have concluded that only a political settlement can end the war. But in helping Mr. Karzai to make a deal, they risk reigniting Afghanistan’s ethnic strife.

Talks between Mr. Karzai and the Pakistani leaders have been unfolding here and in Islamabad for several weeks, with some discussions involving bestowing legitimacy on Taliban insurgents.

The leaders of these minority communities say that President Karzai appears determined to hand Taliban leaders a share of power — and Pakistan a large degree of influence inside the country. The Americans, desperate to end their involvement here, are helping Mr. Karzai along and shunning the Afghan opposition, they say. …

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was worried about “the Tajik-Pashtun divide that has been so strong.” American and NATO leaders, he said, are trying to stifle any return to ethnic violence.

“It has the potential to really tear this country apart,” Admiral Mullen said in an interview. “That’s not what we are going to permit.” …

There are growing indications of ethnic fissures inside the army. …

Prominent Afghans have begun to organize along mostly ethnic lines. ….

Recently [President Karzai] he has told senior Afghan officials that he no longer believes that the Americans and NATO can prevail in Afghanistan and that they will probably leave soon. That fact may make Mr. Karzai more inclined to make a deal with both Pakistan and the Taliban.

As for the Pakistanis, their motives are even more opaque. For years, Pakistani leaders have denied supporting the Taliban, but evidence suggests that they continue to do so. In recent talks, the Pakistanis have offered Mr. Karzai a sort of strategic partnership — and one that involves giving at least one [of the] the most brutal Taliban groups, the Haqqani network, a measure of legitimacy in Afghanistan. …

“Karzai has begun the ethnic war,” said Mohammed Mohaqeq, a Hazara leader and a former ally of the president. “The future is very dark.”