In the current issue of Rolling Stone, journalist Nir Rosen explains how the war in Afghanistan unraveled and just how big a boondoggle the U.S. has on its hands. Click above for video of Rosen discussing the warzone — where he was held hostage while working there as a journalist. Click below for Rosen’s full piece plus a gallery of photos of the region with commentary care of Rosen.

• How We Lost the War We Won: A Journey Into Taliban Controlled Afghanistan

• Embedded With the Taliban: Photos and Commentary By Nir Rosen

This Los Angeles Times op-ed about dealing with the degeneration of Afghanistan into a terror/narco state presents one of the most interesting arguments I’ve read all year:

The solution is simple. Instead of destroying Afghanistan’s most valuable resource, Western governments should buy it outright and resell it to producers of legal opiate-based painkillers on the global market. Instead of confronting Afghan farmers about their crop, our representatives should be approaching them with hard cash.

This has been successfully tried before. In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration began to demand that the opium farmers of southern Turkey destroy their crops. Every attempt at destruction — carried out by reluctant Turkish prime ministers coerced with threats of cuts in U.S. military aid — failed. Eventually, Turkey was considered to be such a crucial Cold War ally that the U.S. granted it an exception. So Turkey joined India as a legal supplier of opiates for pain-control purposes, and it remains so today. Isn’t Afghanistan even more important today than Turkey was in the 1970s?

It is a strange truth that if President Bush really wants to live up to his rhetoric about saving Afghanistan, he must urgently launch the biggest drug deal in history.

Here’s one to put on your radar: India is now semi-officially blaming Pakistan for the bomb attacks in July in Mumbai, India, that killed more than 200 people. This isn’t just a quarrel between two unfriendly neighbors: both countries have nuclear weapons. And not the kind that Iraq supposedly had before we invaded Iraq (i.e., nothing) or the kind that Iran is supposedly trying to develop, but the real thing.

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An extended excerpt from Marc Cooper:

We’ve known about “extraordinary rendition” — the outsourcing of torture by the Bush administration to authoritarian regimes for some time now.But for the first time we have a vivid, detailed report on this barbaric practice from a Western governmental source. A Canadian judical report lays bare the case of Maher Arar, a a Muslim Canadian citizen.

The Royal Mounties mistakenly suspected the computer engineer of being connected to terrorists and asked U.S. officials to put him on a watchlist. In September 2002, while waiting to change planes in New York, Arar was snatched into U.S. custody. And then in the best of traditions of Argentine and Chilean dictatorships, he was “disappeared” into a clandestine gulag. Says the Washington Post:

He was held for questioning for 12 days, then flown by jet to Jordan and driven to Syria. He was beaten, forced to confess to having trained in Afghanistan — where he never has been — and then kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months before he was released, the Canadian inquiry commission found.

Let’s translate. Not on some remote mountainous battleground, not in the netherworld of a lawless Pakistani province, but right in the middle of a New York airport, a Canadian citizen was kidnapped by American agents. Instead of being subjected to a proper police investigation, instead of being tried in a court of law for supposed illicit association, he was instead packed off to our good friends in the Jordanian monarchy. And from there, delivered directly to the same torturers in Damascus that we denounce on a daily basis.

I think the Bush administration really must be scared. Their numbers on the midterms must be bleak. Else why would they be pushing so desperately to pass laws that whitewash their record of 4th-Amendment and human-rights abuses?

What’s most remarkable about both the Detainee Torture bill and the Wiretapping bill that are now the focus of the last days of the 109th Congress is that they both provide retroactive immunity from prosecution for wrongdoing.

These bills are nasty in their future implications to be sure: They give the current and all future presidents the right to eavesdrop on Americans at will, and solemnize the CIA’s use of medieval and Soviet styled torture of suspected enemies of the state. Fighting fire with fire aparently means fighting “Islamo fascism” with a slightly kinder, gentler variant of the old-fashioned kind.

But what is most nefarious is that these bills … (more…)

“Pakistan is committed to the war on terror, and of course we will go after any terrorist found to be operating here.” –Making nice by the same Pakistani general who said yesterday that bin Laden would be free to roam in his country as long as he lived as a “peaceful citizen.” (from The Blotter)

According to ABC’s The Blotter the Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf has, in essence, offered Osama bin Laden safe harbor within its borders as part of a peace deal that cedes control of tribal areas in mountainous Waziristan, along the Afghanistan border, to Taliban forces.

According to a Pakistani general, bin Laden “would not be taken into custody … as long as [he] is being like a peaceful citizen.”

How’s the War on Terror going? Five years after 9/11, the mastermind of the attacks is still at large, the Taliban army that gave him a surrogate nation state from which to launch his attacks is now the law of the land in Northwest Pakistan, and as far as our erstwhile ally is concerned, bin Laden is welcome to make himself at home there?
“The Taliban and al Qaeda leadership have effectively carved out a sanctuary inside Pakistan,” former counter-terror czar Richard Clarke told ABC.

Is the Bush Doctrine no longer in effect? What happened to making no distinction between terrorists and the states that shelter them? Where is the president who said: “Anybody who harbors terrorists needs to fear the United States and the rest of the free world. Anybody who houses a terrorist, encourages terrorism will be held accountable.”

Why aren’t we leading an international force to uproot the Taliban and Al Qaeda from their mountain perch, or making Pakistan pay “a heavy price” for standing with the terrorists?

• The GOP is quietly abandoning immigration reform as an election issue.
• They write letters: Senior Democrats outline a new plan for Iraq.
• The Iraqi Parliament has extended the nationwide state of emergency for an extra month.
• Narco-state Blues: Afghanistan’s already record opium production has skyrocketed 59%. “This year’s harvest will be around 6,100 tons of opium,” said Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nation’s Office of Drugs and Crime. “It exceeds global consumption by 30 percent.”