Links From The Anglosphere

Today is links from our allies in the Anglosphere, all below the fold:
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Art: Conversation in a Park, Thomas Gainsborough, 1740

From North of the Border

Kateland at The Last Amazon blogs on the "second Inquisition." Palestinians are making use of Spanish courts to charge Israelis with war crimes. International law, just like the UN Human Rights commission, is subject to gross distortion.

The Covenant Zone sees China and Canada as going in opposite trajectories, the former towards greater freedom, the latter towards greater repression.

Halls of Macademia posts inarticulate commentary placed on his site from the left. Until recently, I was predisposed to ignore such folks, but I think we do so at our peril at this point.

The recent spate of Human Rights Commission cases in fact seems to be causing a lot of introspection on freedom of speech north of the border. Blazing Cat Fur has several good posts on this topic, including this one on articles addressing the topic by Nigel Hannaford and Ezra Levant in the Calgary Herald. But, as Five Feet of Fury notes, the Muslims who wish to silence speech in Canada and, for that matter, the HRC are determined to prevail. This really is grotesque.

Ezra Levant posts on his confrontation with his HRC accuser, radical Pakistani Imam Syed Soharwardy, on a radio show this week. He asked of Soharwardy when he was going to repay the half million taxpayers dollars wasted on the HRC inquisition of Mr. Levant.

From Down Under

Dr. John Ray posts at a Western Heart on how Kevin Rudd is using politicized science – evidence that is sounding ever more shrill as hard evidence of the falacy of anthropogenic global warming – to justify his massive assault on Australia’s economy.

Col. Robert Neville recounts the conversation of Derek & Clive as they contemplate Islam and anonymous commentor on the good Colonel’s blog. Interesting, the comment sounds very a lot like those from the loony left memorialized in the link to Halls of Macademia above.

KG is doing a bit of howling at Crusader Rabbit over a publicly funded meeting of NZ "bovines" and Islamics, apparently so the NZ ladies can brush up on their dhimmitude.

MK notes that, if you are travelling on the high seas, you had better go armed. Muslim piracy did not end with the Barbary pirates.

Aurora ponders the naked aggression of Russia and sees dangers for America’s allies if Obama is elected President and the world is left without any policeman.

From Across The Pond

Standards matter more than money. From an Englishman’s Castle: "The literacy and numeracy of new employees have tumbled over the past decade despite Labour’s £28 billion increase in education spending, according to research by a leading employers’ organisation."

Heh. At Biased BBC, the foxes are calling for a poultry protection act.

From Bishop Hill, the BBC – a snake pit of socialism, multiculturalism and post modernism – has now made its global warming bias official: "The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change]."

Brits At Their Best notes that Brits retain their affinity for measuring distance in miles, not metric.

Burning Our Money spells out, . . . well, how Labour is burning through Britain’s money.

From the Centre for Social Cohesion, this is an interesting artifice. Radical Muslims in the UK want Sharia law recognized for Muslims and, in fact, are running Sharia law courts, though not recognized by the UK. So what the radicals have done now, to give their Islamic marriage a patina of fairness between the sexes, is to launch a new Muslim marriage contract that is, on its face, more fair to women. If that is their goal, why not simply rely on the law of marriage in the UK? Clearly they intend to use this to try and blunt the criticism of those reactionary, non-BBC watching BNP types who do not want to see a parallel legal system recognized in the UK.

The Winds of Jihad has the story of the British welfare system at work. Counting Cats has his fur up and is hissing loudly.

David Thompson bravely goes where few will willingly tread – into the indecipherable prose of the academic bull-shit artist. He appears to have found a few literary Picassos.

The Heresy Corner weighs whether Obama is the anti-Christ.

Hibernia Girl casts a jaundiced eye at some more of the many benefits of EU law – such as preventing enactment of common sense laws to tackle welfare fraud. The EU really is the penultimate socialist nightmare.

Heh. The House of Dumb notes that the left has ferreted out an insidious plot by right wingers.

Mediocracy diagnoses the root causes of the difference in popularity between Gordon the Leper and Tony the Annointed.

One of the most hypocritical aspects of modern feminism is the utter failure to support Muslim women. Mick Hartley notes at least one feminist who justifies that by projecting onto veiled Muslim women the belief that they are making a conscious choice to go veiled so as "a way to register protest against the sexual objectification of women and express solidarity against Western colonialism." There is some post modern thought at its finest.

When I read this story at Pub Philosopher, all I could think was that I did not realize a Clockwork Orange was a documentary.

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Obama Watch

While we wait to see if Obama shall be baptized the annointed nominee of the left, here are some Obaminations to enjoy. Obama may be divine, but his honesty is a bit questionable. And under his first baptism of fire from the press, he decided that he didn't want to play any more.

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First up is, as the WSJ labels it, Obama's "Border Incident." A few days ago, Obama had plausible deniability on his campaigns back channel communicaitons to Canada. CTV was reporting that whilst Obama was promising to trash NAFTA to Ohio voters, his senior economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, was telling our largest trading partner, the Canadians, not to worry, Obama had no intentions of actually rescinding NAFTA. Obama denied everything, stating during a television interview on Feb. 29:



Yet lo and behold - not only did the meeting take place, but the Canadians had created a paper trail - a memo of the meeting which reads in pertinent part:

Noting anxiety among many U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign.

. . . He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.

So, with plausible deniability no longer an option, Obama has opted for just plain deniability - i.e., that the meeting with Canadian officials was just casual conversation and denying that Goolsbe was speaking on behalf of Obama. Goolsbee for his part claims that what the memo says on that one issue was not what he had said. When asked about his previous denial, that such a meeting had taken place, Obama said: "That was the information I had at the time." As John Podhoretz has summed up this episode, its the "politics of disingenuousness."

That is not the only issue Obama is playing fast and loose with. There is an excellent post at Just One Minute by Tom Maguire discussing Obama's claim in a recent speech:

Senator Clinton got it wrong. She didn't read the National Intelligence Estimate. Jay Rockefeller read it, but she didn't read it. I don't know what all that experience got her because I have enough experience to know that if you have a National Intelligence Estimate, and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee says, 'You should read this, this is why I'm voting against the war,' that you should probably read it," Mr. Obama said to thunderous applause.

Great political theater, just completely wrong on the facts, as Tom explains in his post. Given the substantive half-truths and untruths we've been seeing of late from Obama of late, I do wonder if he makes this stuff up on the fly.

It appears that Obama can't take the heat in the kitchen. He finally had a hostile news conference and left the stage in a huff when the reporters did not swoon. HotAir has the story, as does WaPo. At Protein Wisdom, Karl ponders who it was that dared to question the Obamamessiah.

And can Obama be judged by the questionable company he has kept in Chicago?

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NATO's Future in Deutschland's Hände

The U.S. has asked Germany to honor its NATO committments and provide a battalion of combat soldiers to Afghanistan. Whether Germany agrees to honor its NATO responsibilities will likely have far reaching implications for the future of NATO. An article today in Der Spiegel examines the debate in Germany - and its tenor is shocking.


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NATO is at a crossroads, with only a handful of nations meeting their committments in Afghanistan. For extensive background on this issue, see here here, here and here. One nation that has limited its involvement in Afghanistan is Germany. Although Germany has committed soldiers, they have done so on the proviso that the troops remain in the North of Afghanistan where there is little or no combat.

Germany's decision to limit its involvment in NATO's mission in Afghanistan was sharply criticized by German General and former NATO Commander Klauss Naumann. He recently "delivered a blistering attack on his own country's performance . . . 'The time has come for Germany to decide if it wants to be a reliable partner.' By insisting on 'special rules' for its forces in Afghanistan, the Merkel government in Berlin [is] contributing to 'the dissolution of Nato'".

Secretary of Defense Gates has formally called upon Germany to live up to its NATO committments and provide a combat battalion that could be deployed as needed into combat in the south of Afghanistan. At least one nation, Canada, has threated to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan if Germany refuses to meet its committment. The ball is now in Germany's hands and it is far from clear what they will do. Should they refuse to provide these soldiers, it will have significant ramifications for the future of the NATO alliance.

The matter is currently under debate in Germany. This today from Der Spiegel:

A day after NATO formerly requested that Germany send combat troops to Afghanistan and two days after Canada warned it would leave if more help didn't come south, Germans are debating whether sending more troops means more danger.

Germany announced on Tuesday that NATO had made a formal request . . . that it provide combat troops to replace the Norwegian Quick Reaction Force currently stationed in northern Afghanistan and due to end its mission there at the beginning of the summer.

The announcement came one day after Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper warned that his country would only extend its own mission in Afghanistan if other NATO countries deploy more troops to the more violent south.

Germany will make a final decision in the coming weeks as to whether it will deploy up to 250 combat troops to the country to supplement the 3,500 German soldiers already serving there, primarily in the more peaceful north.

. . . Bernhard Gertz, head of the German army federation -- a kind of union for the armed forces -- warned this weekend that the Bundeswehr had to be prepared to "see comrades coming back in wooden boxes after this type of fighting." On Wednesday, responding to the NATO request, Gertz voiced doubts about whether Germany has the correct weapons and communications devices to equip a rapid reaction force in Afghanistan. Speaking to the Passauer Neue Presse, he said that Jung had to address these issues: "That has to change quickly: the defense minister has to invest here."

Meanwhile, Germany's Green Party warned on Wednesday that the deployment of combat troops to northern Afghanistan could lead to the spread of the German mission to the volatile south of the country. Party defense spokesman Winfried Nachtwei told the Leipziger Volkszeitung that the Quick Reaction Force should not "open the door for the Bundeswehr in the south," and that the government should "guarantee that the limits of the mandate up to now are maintained." Nachtwei insisted that the combat troops should only be allowed to support troops in the north and not be sent to fight the insurgency.

The German media on Wednesday looked at the implications of the NATO request, which could see Germany further embroiled in Afghanistan.

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

"The defense minister is once again having a hard time explaining the decision, which had been made quite a while ago, to a predominantly critical public. Once again he has to hold out as a rationale the fiction of 'NATO's request,' which one can't turn down. This time even a letter from NATO headquarters was ordered. And that it just happened to arrive on the day that Minister Jung visited Kabul can be no coincidence. This unnecessarily defensive tactic for reinforcing your own troops serves neither the substance nor the debate about the deployment in Afghanistan. The Canadians, who have already lost 83 soldiers in the south, are threatening -- and not without due cause -- that they don't intend to stay there much longer, if soldiers from other members of the coalition don't get involved there."

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"There's no reason to panic, but there surely is reason to worry. ...The arguments of the critics who are warning of the dangers of the new Afghanistan deployment are justified. The politicians should stop playing them down and allaying them. It is right to not change the German army's basic strategy in Afghanistan and to not go on the offensive against the Taliban. But it is also right that the mission of a 'fire brigade' deployment is differentiated from those of the combat troops working with the regional reconstruction teams, the so called PRTs. 'QRF is not PRT,' said Inspector General Wolfgang Schneiderhan (referring to the Quick Reaction Force), which is exactly the issue."

"The German army is providing the Quick Reaction Force, because no other NATO partner is ready to assume the task. In doing so, Germany is not immune to additional demands by its allies."

The conservative Die Welt writes:

"Germany cannot turn down the request from Brussels, demanding loyalty and solidarity with the allied partner countries -- the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Great Britain -- who are under constant fire in Afghanistan. There is also no doubt of the rightness of the allied mission against a nihilistic opponent, who -- if it ever got the chance to again -- would impose its totalitarian and inhumane world view on Afghan society. But there must be more truthfulness in the discussions concerning Germany's deployment. Won't the NATO partners just increase their demands on Germany, just as they are indirectly doing with Canada now?"

The left-leaning Berliner Zeitung writes about the "trans-Atlantic relationship's test of endurance:"

"Of course, it's easy for the Americans to point the finger at the other allies. But it's also true that it was in no way the case that all Europeans were convinced of the usefulness of the mission to Afghanistan in the first place. (It) is far away. The overthrow of the Taliban is already six years behind us, and yet the allies are preparing themselves to stay there for many more years. The burdens have already been enormous. There's no chance that voters are going to allow further adventures."

Read the entire article.

I would hate to add up the costs we have paid over the last half century to rebuild Germany after WWII and then defend that country as part of our pledge to NATO. In light of that, the tenor of this debate, at least among the socialist left, is shocking. It is disloyal to an astonishing degree, it is cowardly, and it is incredibly short sighted both as to the ramifications for NATO and as to the refusal to recognize the threat to Germany from the Salafi Islamists should they retake Afghanistan. Indeed, as to European targets for Salafi terrorism, Germany tops the list. In any event, Germany has a choice to make, the ramifications of which will echo far beyond Afghanistan.

As to my own commentary on all of this - a picture is worth a thousand words:

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A Short Primer on NATO's War In Afghanistan

Afghanistan is more and more in the news with the regrowth of the Taliban and al Qaeda from their safe havens in Pakistan, the shadow the conflict has thrown over NATO, and the increasing tempo of military operations in the country.

From the CIA Factbook, Afghanistan is a country of 31 million people settled across a land locked country that is just slightly smaller than the state of Texas. The life expectancy of a person born today in Afghanistan is about 43 years, and the literacy rate among males is about 43%. The birthrate is an incredibly high 6.64 children per woman. The per capita GDP is approximately $800 per person with a growth rate of 8%. The largest cash crop in Afghanistan is opium. The country is mostly Sunni Muslim with Shi'a Muslim and other accounting for 20% of the population.

Politically, the country is dividied into twelve provinces:



Ethnically, Afghanistan is a mix of Pashtun 42%, Tajik 27%, Hazara 9%, Uzbek 9%, Aimak 4%, Turkmen 3%, Baloch 2%, other 4%. The geographic distribution of these ethnicities is show on the map below.



Currently, US and NATO forces in Afghanistan number approximately 54,000 soldiers. You can find the order of battle for 2007 here. According to Bill Rogio at the Long War Journal:

During 2007, Afghanistan experienced its most violent year since the overthrow of the Taliban regime in early 2002. Suicide attacks, improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, and small-arms attacks reached new heights in 2007. The Taliban, with its sanctuaries in the Northwestern Frontier Province and Baluchistan in Pakistan, have stepped up attacks against the Afghan military and the International Security Assistance Force in an attempt to destabilize the Afghan government and force the Western governments to withdraw.

The southern, southeastern, and eastern regions, all which border Pakistan, experience 73 percent of the Taliban-inspired violence in Afghanistan. Kunar, Kandahar, Khost, Nangarhar, and Paktia provinces, all of which border Pakistan, experience the most Taliban-driven attacks in Afghanistan. Kunar, which borders Pakistan's Bajaur province, an al Qaeda command-and-control hub, is Afghanistan's most dangerous province.

Read the entire post here. The increasing violence in Afghanistan coupled with less than enthusiastic support from several of our NATO allies has caused increasing friction. This from the Council of Foreign Relations a month ago:

. . . U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, frustrated by an inability to secure additional helicopters and soldiers, lashed out at member nations ahead of meetings in Scotland on December 15. Britain’s top defense official, Des Browne, also has called on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) “to share the burden” (BBC) in rebuilding. Those allies on the receiving end of such messages—including Germany, which supplies the third-largest contingent of forces to the effort but refuses to conduct major combat missions—responded coolly (Spiegel Online). The criticism will be “taken seriously,” a spokesman for the German interior ministry said, “but is not entirely new.”

Bickering between capitals underscores the challenges facing the Afghanistan mission six years after U.S.-led forces invaded. Suicide attacks are on the rise (PDF), aid workers are increasingly targeted (Times of London), and the Taliban has surfaced in once-peaceful regions. U.S. and British pleas for multilateral assistance also say much about the health of NATO itself—and the price of failure for the strategic alliance forged in the early days of the Cold War. Until this year’s Taliban resurgence tied up NATO forces, particularly from Canada, Britain, and the Netherlands, the alliance had focused largely on development and reconstruction. There are 41,700 troops from thirty-nine countries in the International Security Assistance Force (PDF), including fifteen thousand Americans. But the United States also has an additional twelve thousand non-NATO soldiers who conduct counterinsurgency missions. The two forces don’t always coordinate.

. . . Julianne Smith of the Center for Strategic and International Studies blames the United States and its partners for neglecting broader regional issues (PDF) such as the deepening unrest in neighboring Pakistan. She says an inability to stem the influx from Pakistan’s tribal areas, home to training camps for al-Qaeda and the Taliban, has prompted some NATO partners to “lose confidence” in the mission.

Revamping the alliance’s role has therefore become a key concern for Washington and Brussels. The Bush administration, under pressure (WashPost) to shift resources from Iraq where violence levels are declining, is said to be considering an increase in troops to Afghanistan. The top NATO commander in Afghanistan supports the increase. A series of strategy reevaluations (NYT) are also planned to bolster counterinsurgency and development efforts. On December 20 President Bush said his “biggest concern” would be for NATO countries to withdraw troops prematurely. Meanwhile, the United States and Britain are seeking to install a “super envoy” (Reuters) to coordinate international efforts and some alliance members are considering an extension of their mission.

Washington can use the help; the Bush administration’s ability to foster NATO success in Afghanistan is seen as vital to the alliance’s future (PDF), and to that of the region. Chaos in Afghanistan could embolden regional actors, including Iran (thought to be supporting the Taliban), and militants in Pakistan. Yet a renewed and vibrant NATO alliance is far from guaranteed. CFR President Richard N. Haass, writing in the Financial Times, argues Europe’s “capacity for global intervention is diminishing, especially in the military field.” . . .

Read the entire article. And there is this today from the Washington Post:

The U.S. plan to send an additional 3,200 Marines to troubled southern Afghanistan this spring reflects the Pentagon's belief that if it can't bully its recalcitrant NATO allies into sending more troops to the Afghan front, perhaps it can shame them into doing so, U.S. officials said.

But the immediate reaction to the proposed deployment from NATO partners fighting alongside U.S. forces was that it was about time the United States stepped up its own effort.

After more than six years of coalition warfare in Afghanistan, NATO is a bundle of frayed nerves and tension over nearly every aspect of the conflict, including troop levels and missions, reconstruction, anti-narcotics efforts, and even counterinsurgency strategy. Stress has grown along with casualties, domestic pressures and a sense that the war is not improving, according to a wide range of senior U.S. and NATO-member officials who agreed to discuss sensitive alliance issues on the condition of anonymity.

While Washington has long called for allies to send more forces, NATO countries involved in some of the fiercest fighting have complained that they are suffering the heaviest losses. The United States supplies about half of the 54,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, they say, but the British, Canadians and Dutch are engaged in regular combat in the volatile south.

"We have one-tenth of the troops and we do more fighting than you do," a Canadian official said of his country's 2,500 troops in Kandahar province. "So do the Dutch." The Canadian death rate, proportional to the overall size of its force, is higher than that of U.S. troops in Afghanistan or Iraq, a Canadian government analysis concluded last year.

British officials note that the eastern region, where most U.S. forces are based, is far quieter than the Taliban-saturated center of British operations in Helmand, the country's top opium-producing province. The American rejoinder, spoken only in private with references to British operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, is that superior U.S. skills have made it so.

NATO has long been divided between those with fighting forces in Afghanistan and those who have restricted their involvement to noncombat activities. Now, as the United States begins a slow drawdown from Iraq, the attention of even combat partners has turned toward whether more U.S. troops will be free to fight in the "forgotten" war in Afghanistan.

When Canadian Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier visited Washington late last month, he reminded Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Canada's Afghan mandate expires in January 2009. With most of the Canadian public opposed to a continued combat role, he said, it is not certain that Ottawa can sustain it.

Bernier's message was that his minority government could make a better case at home if the United States would boost its own efforts in Afghanistan, according to Canadian and U.S. officials familiar with the conversation.

"I don't think he expected an express commitment that day that they would draw down in Iraq and buttress in Afghanistan," the Canadian official said. "But he certainly registered Canadian interest and that of the allies involved."

According to opinion polls, Canadians feel they have done their bit in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Stephen Harper last fall named an independent commission to study options -- continuing the combat mission, redeploying to more peaceful regions, or withdrawing in January 2009. The commission report, due this month, will form the basis of an upcoming parliamentary debate.

With a Taliban offensive expected in the spring, along with another record opium poppy crop, the new Marines will deploy to the British area in Helmand and will be available to augment Canadian forces in neighboring Kandahar.

Both President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have toned down their public pressure on allies. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Bush at his Texas ranch in November, U.S. and German officials said, she told him that while Bonn would step up its contribution in quiet northern Afghanistan, any change in Germany's noncombat role would spell political disaster for her conservative government.

"It's not an excuse; it's simply reality -- coalition reality and domestic reality," a German official said. Merkel came away with Bush's pledge to praise Germany's efforts and stop criticizing.

Although Gates began a meeting of NATO defense ministers late last year by saying he would not let them "off the hook" for their responsibilities in Afghanistan, he said in a news conference at the end of the session that further public criticism was not productive.

Still, the Defense Department hopes that increasing its own contribution -- nearly half of an additional 7,500 troops Gates has said are needed in Afghanistan -- will encourage the allies. "As we're considering digging even deeper to make up for the shortfall in Afghanistan," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said, "we would expect our allies in the fight to do the same."

Many Europeans believe that the United States committed attention and resources to Iraq at Afghanistan's expense. But U.S. officials say the problems of NATO countries in Afghanistan have roots in not investing sufficiently in their militaries after the Cold War. Canada, U.S. officials say, needs American military airlift for its troops in Afghanistan because it got rid of a fleet of heavy lift helicopters.

At the same time that they want more from their partners, however, U.S. defense officials often disdain their abilities. No one, they insist, is as good at counterinsurgency as the U.S. military.

U.S. and British forces have long derided each other's counterinsurgency tactics. In Iraq, British commanders touted their successful "hearts and minds" efforts in Northern Ireland, tried to replicate them in southern Iraq, and criticized more heavy-handed U.S. operations in the north. Their U.S. counterparts say they are tired of hearing about Northern Ireland and point out that British troops largely did not quell sectarian violence in the south.

The same tensions have emerged in Afghanistan, where U.S. officials criticized what one called a "colonial" attitude that kept the British from retaining control over areas wrested from the Taliban. Disagreement leaked out publicly early last year when British troops withdrew from the Musa Qala district of Helmand after striking a deal with local tribal leaders. The tribal chiefs quickly relinquished control to the Taliban.

Britain, with a higher percentage of its forces deployed worldwide than the United States, is stretched thin in Afghanistan. Not only did the British have insufficient force strength to hold conquered territory, but the reconstruction and development assistance that was supposed to consolidate military gains did not arrive.

"It's worth reminding the Americans that the entire British army is smaller than the U.S. Marine Corps," said one sympathetic former U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

After 10 months of Taliban control, Musa Qala was retaken in December in combat involving British, Afghan and U.S. forces. The new Marine deployments will supplement British troops, and both sides insist they have calmed their differences. "Whatever may or may not have been said between the two in the past," said one British official, ". . . we are now in the same place."

Now, he said, "the much more interesting question is where do we go from here, and can we sustain a cautiously positive picture in Musa Qala" and elsewhere.

British officials hope that new deployments and stepped-up Afghan security training by the Marines will address one of Helmand's biggest problems -- the expansion of the opium crop. Opium provides income for the Taliban and is a major source of corruption within the Afghan police and government, yet the allies are divided on how to stop its production.

U.S. officials in Afghanistan, led by Ambassador William B. Wood, have insisted that the current strategy of manually destroying opium fields is ineffective and have pressed to begin aerial spraying of herbicide. . . .

. . . More important, programs to provide rural Afghans with alternative income sources remain underfunded and poorly coordinated. Each of NATO's regional Afghan commands operates its own provincial reconstruction teams, and scores of nongovernmental organizations work in the country. But with few exceptions -- such as Khost province under U.S. command in the east, where military and reconstruction resources are meshed -- they share no overriding strategy or operational rules.

The United States has pressed U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to appoint a high-level representative to coordinate non-military activities in Afghanistan. Karzai has resisted, and Ban is said to be worried about taking responsibility for what he sees as a worsening situation.

Read the entire article. As Iraq draws down, the problem of Afghanistan looms ever larger.

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Interesting News - 14 January 2008

This is hilarious. All the reasons to vote for Fred, Part II


(H/T Blogs of War)

Normalcy returns to Baghdad, block by block.

Do read this eloquent posting from the Covenant Zone on the Danish Cartoons, the prosecution of Ezra Levant, and the left’s defining cult of victimhood ascendant in Canada today.

Read this superb roundup on the situation in Pakistan from Dinah Lord. And do see this on the plot to blow up the Eiffel Tower.

From the Int’l Herald Tribune: "Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi received an Islamist death threat Friday in a letter containing two bullets that was sent to a newspaper owned by his family's media empire. . . In September 2001, when Berlusconi was prime minister, he inflamed the Muslim world and angered Western diplomats by stating that Western civilization was "superior" to that of Islam." Just as a curious aside, why would Berlusconi’s statement anger Western diplomats? If they think Islamic culture superior, they should adopt it. (H/T MK’s Views Down Under)

The Velvet Hammer takes note of Hillary playing the . . . Osama card?

At Gates of Vienna, a response to the taqiyah of main stream British Islamist and grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Tariq Ramadan.

See Dr. Sanity for her incisive thoughts on capitalism.

And on a related note, see the Glittering Eye for a review of the blunders of those who are supposed to be watching and assessing capitalism for us.

Soccer Dad has a great analysis Shibley Telhami’s editorial in today’s paper about the driving motivation of Arab regimes today.

American Digest has a great roundup of "Science Made Stupid"

Britney Spears to go burkha? Apparently so. According to the Jawa Report, Britney Spears, currently involved in a relationship with a British Sunni Muslim, "will be converting to Islam, thus ending all doubt that she belongs in a mental institution."

And lastly, from the Shield of Achilles: The photo [below] is Mayor Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, from Arlington, Oregon, a short time before she took office. The photo . . . upset some people in the town enough to demand her resignation. Holy cow, people need to get a life: 1) The photos were taken before her job as Mayor, and have nothing to do with her job; 2) These aren't nude photos anyway (you can see the same amount of skin at the beach), and 3) she looks great! You don't see too many town mayors with that kind of muscle tone and flat stomach. Wow! She should be proud. It's actually the kind of example in physical fitness that America needs more of, not less.

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Freedom of Speech North of the Border

Ezra Levant is a Canadian publisher who published the Danish cartoons. For that act, a Saudi cleric living in Canada made a complaint to Canada's HRC which Mr. Levant was hauled into the commission to answer. He was kind enough to videotape these proceedings and post them to the net.


















You can find Ezra Lavant's website here.

And do see these post's from the Volokh conspiracy on freedom of speech in Canada:

Canada Restricts Freedom of Speech.

Canadian Islamic Congress Website Reveals Its Views.

Free Speech Challenged in Canada.

The Strange Canadian Human Rights Statute Might Have a Loophole.

Another Attempt to Restrict Speech in Canada

Calling Speech Restrictors "Enemies of Free Speech" Can Now Lead to Legal Liability in Canada

And lastly, there is this rather amazing exchange chronicled by Mark Steyn at NRO:

. . . .this exchange from the Warman vs Lemire hearing before the Canadian Human Rights Commission (page 4793 of the transcript). Dean Steacy is the principal "anti-hate" investigator of the HRC:"

MS KULASZKA: Mr. Steacy, you were talking before about context and how important it is when you do your investigation. What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate one of these complaints?

MR. STEACY: Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value.

MS KULASZKA: Okay. That was a clear answer.

MR. STEACY: It's not my job to give value to an American concept.

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