Originally published at Asia Times

Confirmed and reconfirmed by United States President Barack Obama, the US Senate and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and duly hailed as the new armored Messiah by US mainstream media, "tightly disciplined" political fox and former US Central Command chief General David Petraeus is about to land in Kabul. He will either hit the road to his 2012 Republican presidential nomination, or witness another disaster in a US$7 billion a month (and counting) quagmire.

The myth of Petraeus' "successful surge" in Iraq could not but linger on. The Pentagon never managed not to profit by selling a public relations operation to a gullible American public. Petraeus actually "won" the war in Iraq by disgorging Samsonites full of cash to selected strands of the Sunni resistance who were fiercely fighting the US occupation, while at the same time shielding the American military inside remote bases.

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Obama's widely expected surge in Afghanistan is the "gift" US taxpayers received right in the middle of the worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression.

The Pentagon for its part got (more or less) what it wanted - for now. As much as Obama stretched himself to stress this was not a new Vietnam, he trapped himself by conflating al-Qaeda with the Taliban and rehashing the same "war on terror" rationale - all clad in the glorious robes of a "noble struggle for freedom".

Pepe Escobar argues the most significant point about Obama's West Point address is what he omitted. He simply ignored the current, high-stakes New Great Game in Eurasia, on which the Pentagon is focused like a laser, and of which Afghanistan is just a peon.

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Originally published at Asia Times

It's September 11 all over again - eight years on. The George W Bush administration is out. The "global war on terror" is still on, renamed "overseas contingency operations" by the Barack Obama administration. Obama's "new strategy" - a war escalation - is in play in AfPak. Osama bin Laden may be dead or not. "Al-Qaeda" remains a catch-all ghost entity. September 11 - the neo-cons' "new Pearl Harbor" - remains the darkest jigsaw puzzle of the young 21st century.

It's useless to expect US corporate media and the ruling elites' political operatives to call for a true, in-depth investigation into the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Whitewash has been the norm. But even establishment highlight Dr Zbig "Grand Chessboard" Brzezinski, a former national security advisor, has admitted to the US Senate that the post-9/11 "war on terror" is a "mythical historical narrative".

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(Cross-posted from The Paragraph.) While President Reagan has many highways, buildings and the Washington National Airport named after him, President George W. Bush has so far had only a try at naming a sewage plant after him — to symbolize cleaning up the mess he left.⁴⁰ Yet many of the catastrophes of Bush flowed from the policies and tactics of Reagan:

• Just before 9-11, Bush ignored warnings of a coming Osama bin Laden terror attack, but it was Reagan who, as part of his campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan, boosted fanatical jihadists and gave bin Laden his start.⁴¹⁴²⁴³
• Bush, on his first week in office, planned for carving up the oil fields after an Iraq invasion, but it was Reagan who took the solar panels off the White House and returned the nation to its oil-guzzling ways.⁴⁴⁴⁵
• To muster support for invading Iraq, Bush published phony intelligence reports, like those claiming that Iraq was working with al-Qaeda.⁴⁶ In that he followed the lead of Reagan, who, to gain support for aid to brutal regimes in Latin America, set up “The Office of Public Diplomacy” to use CIA propaganda techniques against the American people, and who, to gain support for his military build up, edited radio transcripts to give the false picture that the Soviets willfully shot down civilian flight KAL-007.⁴⁷⁴⁸

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from Sheri Fink, ProPublica
May 28, 2009 8:27 am EDT (view source)

A version of this story was published on Salon.

Evidence is emerging that medical personnel monitored the medical effects of the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaida operative who was, according to government reports, subjected to the near-drowning at least 83 times in August 2002.

The new information comes from descriptions of cables, classified as top secret and relating to the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, that were transmitted from a Central Intelligence Agency field station to the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters nearly every day between Aug. 1 and Aug. 18 that year.

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Aijaz Ahmad, TRNN Senior Editorial Consultant and political commentator for the Indian newsmagazine Frontline, Political Science teacher, and frequent writer on South Asia and the Middle East, talks with Real News CEO Paul Jay with his analysis of the results of US policies and actions in Pakistan.

Today in "The secrets of Obama's surge" Pepe Escobar says that "the President is not exactly telling all that’s going on in AfPak", and argues there are many more strategic issues at play than meets the eye - and the President and his team's spin:

President Obama's highly anticipated new strategy for what the Pentagon now calls AfPak - Afghanistan and Pakistan - is full of grey areas.

Most extra troops will be deployed to poppy-growing areas, not to fight al-Qaeda, the President's stated number one objective.

The President talks about building trust - but as the US cannot trust the Pakistani ISI, the Pakistani people don't trust the US or even their own government.