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POPSMosul conflict ebbs after five-year battle The operation captured more than 1,000 insurgents, 12 tons of home explosives, 500 mortars and artillery rounds that could be used in Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), 84 rocket propelled grenades, and 221 IEDs. The formation of “Sons of Iraq,” an armed neighborhood-watch program that now includes 2,700 members in rural areas to the south of Mosul, denied insurgency safe havens to terrorists that had used them in past years.
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POPSObama would still oppose the surge
OK. This clinches it. Obama is utterly incapable of rational leadership. The terrorists were wreaking havoc in Iraq and killing hundreds daily. Now there is relative calm. Iraq is turning around. al Qaeda is out of Iraq. al Qaeda describes the situation as lost and say they can no longer recruit in the region. Iran is no longer having their way with propping up the insurgency. Intelligence tells us we are winning the hearts and minds of the Middle East. We have basically won in Iraq. However, Obama says he would still not support the surge after originally saying prior to the surge that he did not support the surge because it would have the "opposite effect" and increase violence. He is saying now that we should have let the situation in Iraq fester, withdrawn troops, hand the terrorists a victory in Iraq, allow the violence in Iraq to continue and instead concentrate on the few Taliban incapacitated in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. What a complete fool!
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POPSMilitants Kill Nine U.S. Troops in Afghanistan The difference in tactics is telling (4.00 / 1) In Iraq we are fighting a guerilla insurgency made up of numerous different groups, most of which are also fighting each other. It is a hit-and-run type of fighting made up of IED's and random attacks on moving groups. What you are talking about in Afghanistan is an organized assault directly on a military encampment. This type of structure and cohesion on the part of the enemy should have been annhialated several years ago. "The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy" - General Omar Bradley
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POPSMcCain's Surge in Iraq Crippling Efforts in Afghanistan The death rate for American troops in Afghanistan last month was four times that of Iraq. The last two months have been the deadliest of the war for U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan since 2001. And today, Afghanistan sustained the deadliest single terrorist attack since 9/11 when suspected Taliban militants blew up the Indian embassy in Kabul. This is directly attributable to negligent policies set forth by the Bush administration--an administration dangerously obsessed with Iraq at the expense of the Real Global War on Terror. When many were urging the U.S. to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan in early 2007, the Bush administration--with the support of Senator John McCain--launched the "surge" of troops into Baghdad. Unfortunately, Iraq is not, as John McCain says, the "central front" in the War on Terror--and it never has been. If there is such a thing, it is in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
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POPSGen. David Petraeus beats megastar Angeline Jolie.... People in the *real* world know who is truly important. No disrespect to Ms. Jolie, but her influence is minimal when it comes to life & death issues. This is also true of Crews, Baldwin, Franken, Hayden, etc..... Celebrities are useless when it comes to getting things accomplished. Nice article that gives credit where credit is due.
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POPSOn Petraeus' Counterinsurgency Guidance That's all well and good, but it's just unfortunate that no such organization exists. I'm still not sure why we keep asking the Army and Marine Corps to do such a thing. Back before the insurgency in Iraq started, it was commonly known that the purpose of the Army was to "break things and kill people." Therefore, if that wasn't your intent (the thought went), then you shouldn't be utilizing the Army. As far as I'm concerned, that still should be a general rule. If we can't "kill our way out of this endeavor," then we need far less reliance on the military to fix Iraq. Because that's what the military does.
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POPSTaliban Are Weaker As NATO Attacks Rebels (Update2) Afghan officials said the Taliban have now been cleared from the villages outside the city. Taliban rebels, seeking to overthrow President Hamid Karzai's government, stepped up their insurgency in southern and eastern provinces and increasingly targeted the capital, Kabul, with suicide bombings in recent months. While acknowledging the jail break and fighting posed difficulties, Wood said the international community wouldn't allow the district to fall to the insurgents. Our unified assessment in Kabul is that the Taliban is weaker in 2008 than it was at the beginning of the fighting season in 2007. The Islamist fighters last year lost districts and the U.S. has intelligence of ``some dissatisfaction among the rank and file of the Taliban with their focus on terrorism against innocent civilians. NATO leads a force of more than 53,000 soldiers battling the Taliban.
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POPSTaliban Fighters Take Over Several Afghan Villages Outside Kandahar "NATO has said the prison break was a tactical success for the Taliban but would not have a long-term or large impact on the Afghan conflict. However, Afghan officials have warned that dangerous members of the militia are now free, and that the prison attack essentially boosted the insurgents' ranks by 400."
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POPSHRW accuse Ethiopia of War Crimes "We don't like to rank abuses in different parts of the world, but what is happening in the Ogaden is up there with the worst," said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "We are talking about village elders being strangled, and women raped until the point of unconsciousness. And it is being done with complete impunity, and with a blind eye from the international community." A small-scale rebellion in the Ogaden region, populated mainly by ethnic Somalis, had been simmering for decades before the ONLF attacked an oil installation in April last year. More than 70 Chinese and Ethiopian workers were killed. ...Guardian
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POPSEat Crow, liberal Iraqi war skeptics If Democrats had won the White House in 2004, the jihadists might have succeeded. The idiotic liberals are still for retreat in the face of victory. The US decision to "stay the course" in the Iraq war, which was also widely mocked and criticized, served to thoroughly demoralize the jihadist movement. Another example of why liberals are unfit to run this country, unless you want to run it into the ground.
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POPSNATO-Led Force 'Underresourced' For The Fight Against The Taliban
Marines are now on Day 30-plus of what was initially expected to be a three-to-five-day campaign, as they live without electricity or running water and face Taliban reinforcements who continue to flow into their territory from neighboring Pakistan. But they are making key strides, military officials say, with a recent operation to block escape routes and cut off Taliban supply lines. "Mowing the lawn." They are operating in an area that British forces, hobbled by insufficient troop levels, have tried to clear before. One British commander referred to it as "mowing the lawn," since the insurgency seems to just grow back. Other allies have suggested that Afghanistan's U.S.-backed government will need to hold reconciliation talks with insurgents from the former Taliban regime but not until some level of security is established. This year, the American ambassador sought advice from a former Taliban commander, asking what ISAF could do to reduce popular support for the Taliban.
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POPSColombia's Uribe refuses to rule out third term "Uribe is a Wall Street favorite but many investors and analysts say a third term by the bespectacled conservative would present a threat to the independence of Colombian institutions, such as the courts and the central bank."
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POPS Community Partnerships Project for the Guardian - pics Journalist spends two weeks every month reporting on Amref’s Katine Community Partnerships Project for the Guardian – a three-year development programme to improve the lives of the 25,000 inhabitants of Katine sub-county in rural Uganda. On his most recent trip, Richard recorded some of the many surprising moments he experiences while interacting with the people of Katine
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POPSJohn McCain is Not an Expert on Iraq Statement taken from clip that I fully believe in myself. I see no reason for Barack Obama to be bullied by a man who knows less about what's going on in Iraq than any 19-year-old private who's lived in Sadr City for a week.
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POPS Afghan Insurgents 'on brink of defeat' Task Force Helmand said Alternative crops, such as wheat or rape, could prove a greater attraction than Helmand's massive opium trade, especially as international prices continue to rise. The ability of what is known as the Quetta Shura leadership had been "hugely reduced" and its influence "increasingly marginalised", the brigadier said. Michael Ryder, the senior Foreign Office official in Helmand, agreed that intelligence assessments suggested that the Taliban had become "fractured and fragmented". "There's a lot of suspicion from southern Taliban commanders of the agenda of Quetta Shura," he said, with the leaders trying to draw in an estimated £20 million a year from the opium trade. The number of Afghans involved in the insurgency has also fallen, with increasing numbers of Pakistanis, Chechens, Uzbeks and Arabs found dead on the battlefield.
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POPSWhat is success? This doesn't mean it is over. It doesn't mean things can't change. What it does mean is we are on the right path and it would be pure ignorance to depart from that path now.
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POPSMilitary Matters: Iraq state fantasy The truth about Iraq and 4GW conflicts that the GOP and the Pentagon (and their supporters) don't get: "Because there is no state in Iraq, there is also no government. Orders given in Baghdad have no meaning, because there are no state institutions to carry them out. The governmental positions of Iraqi leaders have no substance. Their power is a function of their relationship to various militias, not of their offices. Maliki has no militia, which means he is a figurehead. "
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POPSAnti-Jihad 'University': Bringing Insurgents In From The Cold While I was not permitted to talk privately with detainees, I visited both Camp Cropper, near Baghdad International Airport, and remote Camp Bucca, near Basra in southern Iraq. A major tipping point in the program, say officers, was when detainees began volunteering for the classes being offered. Although al-Qaida detainees and the Takfiris (another group of religious extremists) pressured fellow Iraqis against participating in the very popular religious discussions, over 3,000 detainees have done so. “After Iraqis here learn how to read and write, they can read the Koran themselves for the first time,” says Sheikh Ali, a Sunni who counsels detainees and who, like most of the Iraqis working in the program, declined to have his surname used and must live in an American-guarded compound to avoid reprisals. “I’ve seen detainees break down and cry when they realize that the conduct they thought was sanctioned by God is actually a sin.”
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POPSSenlis Council: Did the Bush Gang get anything right? 
"The US is the common denominator in both countries – instead of containing the extremist elements in Somalia and Afghanistan, US policies have facilitated the expansion of territory that al-Shabab and the Taliban have psychological control over." Aid groups say Somalia, wracked by anarchy and violence for decades, is suffering its worst humanitarian crisis since 1993. According to Lazzarini, the UN head of humanitarian affairs for Somalia, 2.5 million people are in need of food or other aid. Against this grim backdrop, the Senlis Council, in its 79-page report, directly accused the US of undermining reconciliation efforts by backing the hardline president, Abdullahi Yusuf, instead of the more moderate prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein. According to the security thinktank, the US government in February disrupted negotiations with opposition parties - including hardline Islamists - by exerting pressure on the prime minister to exclude certain groups and individuals from a rec
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