r3vliberty

In an article on the WTOP website, former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer has some recent comments on the war/occupation of Afghanistan and the all to familiar contradiction of how things are progressing there.

“What we managed to do was what invaders of Afghanistan always do. We took the cities and declared victory, but we didn’t kill the enemy,” Scheuer tells WTOP.
“The enemy escaped, the Taliban and al Qaida, now we have a growing insurgency in Afghanistan. And, we certainly don’t very many more troops to send there.”

think that was supposed to be: [don't have very many], but anyway…

Laura King wrote in the LATimes (via Urukunet) that things are indeed heading in that direction, as the ‘guys in black turbans” return from winter.

The first-time arrival in the south of a large force of Marines, the 24th Expeditionary Unit based in Camp Lejeune, N.C., has provided what commanders say is a much-needed infusion of firepower. The Marines have doubled the coalition’s air capacity; Harrier jump jets, lumbering cargo planes and combat helicopters line the freshly laid tarmac.

Just as crucially, commanders say, Marines’ deployment may at last give NATO-led troops the muscle and reach to choke off the flow of Taliban fighters and weaponry into neighboring Helmand province, consistently the most violence-racked in Afghanistan. It is the country’s epicenter of opium production and narco-trafficking, whose enormous profits help fuel the insurgency.

In this unforgiving environment, British troops, considered to be among the alliance’s most effective fighters, have been forced to confine their efforts largely to the province’s northern tier, making the south of Helmand, with its plethora of infiltration routes from Pakistan, a likely zone of deployment for the Marines.

Although allied commanders express satisfaction with the battlefield edge the Marines will bring, the Taliban professes unconcern.

“We have heard all about these Americans, and we are waiting — let them come,” said a Taliban field commander, reached by phone in the Panjwai district outside Kandahar. “They will learn what others before them have learned.”

someone should’ve been reading and listening to what Michael Scheuer has been doing on AntiWar.com.

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Brazil oil field could be huge find

By Alan Clendenning, AP Business Writer

SAO PAULO, Brazil – A deep-water exploration area could contain as much as 33 billion barrels of oil, an amount that would nearly triple Brazil’s reserves and make the offshore bloc the world’s third-largest known oil reserve, a top energy official said Monday.

National Petroleum Agency President Haroldo Lima cautioned that his information on the field off the coast of Rio de Janeiro is unofficial and needs to be confirmed — but his comments sent shares of state-run oil company Petrobras soaring in New York and Sao Paulo.

(full AP article)

pffttt!

looks like India isn’t wasting any time.
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