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http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/07/gerecht.htm Here is an article in the July/Aug 2001 Atlantic Monthly about the CIA lack of operatives able to function against Bin Laden's organization. Even a Muslim CIA officer of Middle Eastern background with native-language abilities (of which the CIA has very few) cannot function in a police rich state like Pakistan without the local intelligence services being aware & the main issue is whether those services are for or against US involvement there. US Pakistan relations have been very poor for years, thanks to US Opposition to Pakistan nuclear program & their backing of Kashmir separists. America needs to rethink several policies & trade-offs. The CIA probably does not have a single truly qualified operative who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with diarrhea, no women, living in caves, and everything else that goes with the territory. http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/19/wwar19. xml also speaks to the topic of lack of CIA operatives in there, thanks to reasoning that said the only reason to spy there was due to the Cold War, but the Soviets are now out, the Cold War is now over, so why bother. Thus human intelligence has to come to the USA from Afghanistan neighbors & nations that have bothered, such as Britain. The Northern Alliance has pledged 15,000 fighters to the US led effort. Their motives are obvious. Hopefully USA leadership is getting guidance from long time allies who have human intelligence from the region what the value might be in helping The Northern Alliance defeat the Taliban. One of the major grievances that Muslim Fundamentalists seem to have with the west is how slow we were to move into cleaning up the mess in Yugoslavia, as if they had zero responsibility to clean up the mess, or use proper tools to galvanize Western action sooner. Perhaps helping the Northern Alliance to take over Afghanistan will just make the Muslim Fundamentalists that much stronger & not solve this core problem ... they will still be mad at the west for waiting so long to clean up another mess, so perhaps it would be better to clean it up in such a way that the new management there is not Muslim leadership, but a UN Protectorate. The UN needs to conduct a series of classes in how to build & sustain civilization. It is unfortunate that the Northern Alliance language is Farsi, which is also something the USA has officers who know, from perspective of communicating in Pushtu, the main language of the Taliban, but that does make it practical to communicate with these people, which is a start. MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac) Sep 11 Links: Great discussion archives http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TYR http://lists.midrange.com/cgi-bin/listinfo/midrange-nontech Newspapers World Wide http://www.wheretodoresearch.com/news/foreign_newspapers.htm http://www.wheretodoresearch.com/news/US_Newspapers.htm Intelligence Briefings by country http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/09/17/asia.support/ http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/af.html http://www.economist.com/countries http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/world/search/list/index.html http://www.debka.com/ http://www.stratfor.com
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