“Clear, hold and build ” doesn’t translate well into Pashto.

Sounds like it could become a fair movie.

Sounds like the government in a box escaped the box.

What did they do with the dirt they dug out?

Keystone Kops in Kandahar, O Kandahar! And eCAHN, loved the ‘escaped the govt. in a box’; LOL+!

“Government in a box” was one of the most arrogant phrases that I’ve heard invented by USG. Never knew why it wasn’t more widely mocked, so I look for opportunities to do so.

You’ve seen one mountain appear overnight in Kandahar, you’ve seen ‘em all.

I remember the TV series Hogan’s Heroes. Every time they were digging out an escape tunnel they had to go to great lengths to hide/get rid of the dirt so they wouldn’t be detected. With a tunnel as long as the one in Kandahar, you’d think someone would notice the dirt, but you would be wrong.

Freedom is a powerful idea.

This just highlights the nonsense our foreign policy is. I think they allow this so they can say “Hey there’s still Taliban here” and we have to stay. After all, we never left the UK, Germany, Korea, Japan, Italy, etc. We’ve expanded into Poland using NATO as a wedge.

At Stalag 17 in WWII, they sewed bags for inside their pants legs and walked around or played volleyball with the dirt leaking out

A 1,000 foot tunnel dug through rock that wasn’t discovered until the prisoners were gone. Let me guess, Xe was in charge of security, right? That ought to get them a couple of more no bid contracts with bonus money for “training”.

“This would only be more audacious if they dressed up someone as a giant nail file and had him walk into the prison untouched.”

LOL! Thanks for the hilarious image, dday.

The story, of course, is no laughing matter.

Yes, the hiding of the dirt allowed for many comedic opportunities.

In June 2001, my Polish relative in showing my son & me around the country, as we drove by a walled compound, said “The Russians moved out and the U.S. moved in.” In 2007 I found out that it was the secret rendition location.

Hey, why let all of that wonderful torture infrastructure got to waste?

We don’t know that the Russians tortured anyone there.

Since I’ve been thinking back on how random it was that I would personally intersect in the larger story, one of my ponders is how much the locals knew about what was going on behind the walls.

There was a severe language barrier with my Polish relative, so I could not easily ask Qs, plus I was embarrassed at the revelation.

There’s a small airport on the site, so locals would see planes coming & going.

The area is remote, farming & small towns. So gossip was probably rampant, but who knows what that involved.

News media should send Polish speaking investigative reporter over to interview locals. It would be interesting to find out what they thought was going on, both under the Russians, then under the U.S.

We don’t know that the Russians tortured anyone there

Considering what Stalin’s USSR did post WWII in Poland, it’s more than a reasonable assumption.

Fair enough point about Stalin.

I was thinking about what the Russians were doing in the few years before they left.

On the Stalin & Poland point, I heard an author on booktv a couple of weeks ago talk about both Hitler & Stalin. Most of both’s atrocities occurred in a narrow geography from roughly Poland to Ukraine. Hadn’t thought about it in those terms.

Most of both’s atrocities occurred in a narrow geography from roughly Poland to Ukraine.

Weird, huh? I guess the theory was that nothing promotes loyalty in disputed territory more than oppression and mass murder. Either that or the idea was to annihilate the native population in order to repopulate the areas with “patriots”. As for post USSR Russia, they aren’t warm, fuzzy bunnies either but you make a valid point.

Since Alexander the Great it has been abundantly clear that Afghanistan is no place for empires.

We need to get out of there now!

We need to get out of there now!

Tell that to your man Obama. This is his war now.

Would that be called “beyond the pale”?

I am thinking of the racial, ethnic, strategic location.

Racial/religious as in a traditional areas of Jewish activity,Catholicism vs. Orthodoxy,
Ethnic in terms of Slavic versus Saxons etc.,
and strategic in terms of a plain fought over most recently by the Nazis and Socialists.

I tuned in late, courtesy of channel surfing so I didn’t get the author’s full thesis.

Annihilation was certainly a large part of it. Lebensraum for Hitler, so both destruction of large segments of local population (gypsies, Jews to name 2) and where they moved many of the Jews from Germany to be killed. At first, I guess, so it wouldn’t be so obvious to the other Germans, later bc it was too far for Allied planes to fly during most of WWII.

I’m much less familiar with Russian history during Stalin, but had a lot to do with getting rid of those pesky farmers so he could do collectivization in the USSR breadbasket.

Author had a way of tying the two together that I can’t remember.

Yes, it is his war now.

And, I am very displeased with President Obama’s conduct of it.

I’m much less familiar with Russian history during Stalin, but had a lot to do with getting rid of those pesky farmers so he could do collectivization in the USSR breadbasket.

They pretty much got rid of any Poles who had ambitions for self governance too. What Stalin did in Poland in some cases rivaled what Hitler had done. The Polish resistance who greeted the USSR as liberators soon found themselves in camps the Nazis had abandoned. There were many who pushed Truman to roll into the Soviet Union and dispose of Stalin too, Churchill and Patton among them. I imagine it might have happened too if we hadn’t still been fighting Nihon at the time.

“Beyond the Pale” a phrase from much earlier history than Hitler, Stalin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Pale

Yes, Poland was definitely caught in the middle.

My father is of Polish descent (he was born in U.S. but his parents were born in Poland). I don’t have a great interest in the country, but have read a history or two from time to time. Of perhaps the first one I read, decades ago, I remember only that Poland was conquered from east & west so many times bc it has no geographic barriers on those sides.

Well, like Afghanistan, history suggests that is easier contemplated than done.

I like Obama on women’s equality in pay but not his “compromising” away reproductive rights. I’m glad he’s showing signs of kinda-sorta coming around on LGBT rights, though his insistence that marriage is “between a man and a woman”, and the fact that he had to be dragged to repeal DADT rankles. Other than those two, I can’t think of much he’s done that I can get behind. His ass and his rhetoric probably have the largest gap between them than in any other US presidency. I’d be less disappointed if he didn’t insist on talking like a progressive while behaving like a Republican.

History? It’s about somebody’s caricature of being a “man”. We could leave and leave them to their own devices. It would suck ass that the people who’ll be tortured and oppressed when we leave but that’s happening now anyway. It’s not up to us to make things “right” throughout the world nor do we do so. We impose our ideology on them in order to make them safe for our corporations to exploit their people and resources. More slaughter is almost never the answer to slaughter. Leaving in humiliation is better by far than costing one more innocent life. But we can’t have that. It wouldn’t be “manly”.

Yes, history!

You suggested that but for fighting Nihon that American forces might have rolled into Russian and deposed Stalin.

So now the word will go out through the ranks: Take no prisoners.

Yes, that Russian invasion thing worked out so well for Napoleon & Hitler.

That is exactly my point.

Guess the U.S. trainers “forgot” to train prison officials and guards to do nighttime prisoner checks.

Oops.

Or maybe they did, and…

Naw, the U.S. wouldn’t prop up a hopelessly corrupt and or antagonistic government riddled with those trying to sabotage their pretty little occupation, would it?

Americans! Your vaunted “blood and treasure” are going down the sewer to enrich a coterie of rich people running energy and military-related industries, and embellishing the military careers of morally-obtuse officer corps. Know what your children are dying for (as well as the children of your “enemies”), and weep. Then protest.

We have no right at all to be in Afganistan. I’m delighted the prisoners got away, and hope they are never recaptured.

And they did this with no bribe to, or collusion from, the guards?

For the believers, I have a “savvy, articulate, courageous, preznint” to sell you….cheap.

“It’s called winning.”

That’s exactly what it is called. Gates, Petraeus, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, etc., etc. must be ecstatic. Perpetual war needs the justification of perpetual enemies. What, they’re all just going to go home? That’s not winning.

Similarly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhwbxEfy7fg

“savvy”

the meaning of this word, has been changed completely , since it’s ridiculous misuse by President Obama.

re
soviet torture locales;

I’m Pretty sure the soviets had torture facilities all over their empire, see Norilsk, where slaves built nuclear reactors. see Novosibirsk, or their western Pacific islands, they had slaves everywhere they wanted something built.

So, what the US called terrorists, then enemy combatants, are now fungible and completely recyclable. American innovation to make war perpetual!

Had to be dug from the outside in, no?

They must have tapped into an existing conduit, sewer… etc. because at 1000 feet of tunnel, even skinny guys would need min. crossection of 3 square feet, and that would be over 200 cubic yards of dirt/ 20 dump trucks.

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Ok so the accepted story is that Stalin was… almost as bad as Hitler, all the photo ops with FDR and Churchill, to the side, Stalin has been revised as super villain. One part of that is called by [Stalinists] Kruschev Revisionist history.

So jump past that whole question, and what do you do with a nations bad spawn?

But since Stalin demonization is universally accepted, How many might there be, in a country, that would be eligible for the kind of treatment that Stalin is alleged to have meted out, in the Siberian countryside… (for the lucky ones, ) as in the mining, forrestry, heavy industry, forced labor, and forced… military conscription, shock troops, forced against enemies at gunpoint. (suicide duty.)
Dostoevsky and Soldenitzen are colorful sources on that type of imagery and particulars.

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Seem that Poland was a buffer zone between Russia and Germany for the most part, Stalin Hitler pact was a deal that was to split up Poland and take each a half. but the role of the buffer, was to allow Russia and Germany to exist, which a common boundary would not work. dadada

Well, the change and the misuse of “savvy” began with it’s incessant use by Hillary’s supporters, who persisted in chanting it while Clinton brilliantly crashed her campaign for the nomination by kissing right wing ass like it was Prince Charming’s cheek.