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It is more complicated than just oil. It has to do with "imperial dominance" in Central Asia. Obama is just playing the same game as bushie.

The secrets of Obama's surge

Is United States President Barack Obama telling it like it is as far as his new strategy for the Afghanistan and Pakistan war theater - AfPak, in Pentagonspeak - is concerned? There are reasons to believe otherwise. ...

The Afghanistan-Pakistan war has got to be 2009's prime theater of the absurd. It took the New York Times and the usual "American officials" something like 13 years to "discover" that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) - a Central Intelligence Agency twin - helps the Taliban. And this while the CIA, alongside their ISI pals, is compiling a mega hit list in the Pashtun tribal areas inside Pakistan. Maybe this is what US Central Command supremo General David "I'm always positioning myself for 2012" Petraeus means by a "trilateral" love affair, as he told CNN's State of the Union. ...

Obama is selling the surge basically as nation building, based on trust. A hard sell if there ever was one - as Washington cannot trust the ISI or the Pakistani government, while the Pakistani masses don't trust Washington.....

...So this amounts to the State Department admitting that the Pentagon/Petraeus "humint" (human intelligence) component of counter-insurgency in AfPak, hailed as a gift from the Messiah all across US corporate media, is essentially useless. This also means there's no way of winning local hearts and minds....

So the question Americans must ask themselves is this: Would you buy a used car - sorry - war from people like Mullen, Petraeus, McKiernan? Well, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who's seen them all since John F Kennedy, wouldn't. For him, "they resemble all too closely the gutless general officers who never looked down at what was really happening in Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the time have been called, not without reason, 'a sewer of deceit'." ...

.... So is AfPak the Pentagon's AIG - we gotta bail them out, can't let them fail? Is it a Predator drone war disguised as nation building? Will it become Obama’s Vietnam? Whatever it is, it's not about "terrorists". Not really. Follow the money. Follow the energy. Follow the map.

http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/04/05/the-secr...

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