For Rent Only

Friends,
And lest we forget; al Qaeda, the Taliban, and number one for the sixth year in a row-Osama bin Laden. You will not find any of those three in Basra. No matter how many people are killed in Iraq, you will find none of the above, either in Basra or in all of Iraq.

"Last year, a man in Peshawar explained to me why the United States' efforts to subdue Afghanistan were faltering. "You thought Pashtuns were for sale, but you misjudged," he said, smiling. "We are only for rent." Nicholas Schmidle, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is writing a book about Pakistan, where he lived from 2006 to January 2008.

Peace and Love,
Rev O

"But, handicapped by the lack of a good plan, reliable allies or decent intelligence, the United States has watched as this strip of mountainous territory wedged between Afghanistan and Pakistan has become the most ungoverned, combustible region in the world. The U.S. intelligence community has described it as a refuge for Osama bin Laden and the rest of al-Qaeda's reconstituted leadership. And recently, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, predicted that the next terrorist attack on the United States would originate from the tribal areas, probably from a town much like Darra."

"The tribal belt is dominated by Pashtuns, an ethnic group of about 20 million who live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. Pashtuns are renowned for their hospitality and their martial ways, a people reputed to treat guests like kings but eye strangers with suspicion. U.S., Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agencies banked on this when they armed Pashtuns to drive the Soviet army out of Afghanistan in the 1980s."

"Today, Pashtuns compare the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan to the Soviet one, and residents of North and South Waziristan regard the Pakistani troops there, most of them Punjabis, as foreign invaders."

Like the Wild, Wild West. Plus Al-Qaeda. Washington Post