For all you employers out there:

Once hired, young people too often come in on Day One wanting to be vice president

Odd, I've never wanted to advance, simply because I've never wanted to become like my boss...

but not wanting to pay the dues to get there.

Better phrased: In 5 years you'll advance so we'll work you like a slave and lay you off in 2. HeHeHe...

They want to know what the company is going to do for them

My only 3 interview questions:
1. What do you want me to do for you?
2. What are you going to pay me for it?
3. Who will I have to put up with?

and they rarely think about what they intend to do for the company.

See interview question number 1...

In fact, the whole notion of working often seems like an inconvenience

Yes, 60 hours a week at 10 bucks per hour is a major inconvenience to our personal lives...

something they'll tolerate until they get a minute, between YouTube and iPods

You've got a point there... Imagine how I feel being their coworkers...


So can I have a job?... ;)

---

It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

Jeffrey, your answers just help prove the point of the author of that news story that Misfit quoted.

For all you employers out there:

Once hired, young people too often come in on Day One wanting to be vice president

Odd, I've never wanted to advance, simply because I've never wanted to become like my boss...

What? You don't wish to be successful like your boss?

but not wanting to pay the dues to get there.

Better phrased: In 5 years you'll advance so we'll work you like a slave and lay you off in 2. HeHeHe...

If you equate 'doing your job (what you were hired to do), and doing it well' with 'slave labor', it is a wonder you lasted 2 years. Generally, businesses don't lay off their best employees if there is any way to avoid doing so. The best employees typically get offered other positions in the company.

This next one is a good one.

They want to know what the company is going to do for them

My only 3 interview questions:
1. What do you want me to do for you?

Short answer: Improve the business'es profit. This is, indeed, the only reason why private sector businesses ever hire additional employees.

Longer answer: you should at least have a good idea of what the job you are interviewing for entails. Asking this question indicates a lack of preparation and research, and would make me think twice about hiring you.

2. What are you going to pay me for it?

A brief discussion of this subject is ok. But try not to appear to be too curious or insistent on this topic.

3. Who will I have to put up with?

This question is a huge red flag in the interviewing process. It indicates that you have difficulty with your interpersonal skills in the workplace. It indicates that hiring you would be a disaster waiting to happen, either with the other employees or with the customers of the business. I would terminate the interview as early as politely possible, wait a few days, then send you a 'we are sorry, but...' letter.

and they rarely think about what they intend to do for the company.

See interview question number 1...

In fact, the whole notion of working often seems like an inconvenience

Yes, 60 hours a week at 10 bucks per hour is a major inconvenience to our personal lives...

Oh... Joy... You try being an owner of a small business sometime. Having to work 80 to 100 (or more) hours a week is brutal. 60 hours per week is no big thing. Its only 5 12-hour days per week. But, at least if you are paid by the hour, most businesses are not going to want to let you work that much. 60 hours per week = 20 hours of overtime (1.5x pay rate) per week. In your example, that is an extra $100/week to help make up for the loss of your precious 'personal time'.

something they'll tolerate until they get a minute, between YouTube and iPods

You've got a point there... Imagine how I feel being their coworkers...

Goofing off at work? When an employee is 'on the clock', they need to be concentrating on their job. An employee who lets their attention wander away from their job at best is not contributing effectively towards their employer's profit. At worst, in some jobs, a distracted employee can get themselves (and others) severely injured or killed. I once saw a forklift driver who was listening to a 'walkman' (yeah, this was years ago) while he was driving his forklift. He was really 'getting into' whatever music he was listening to, twitching around like he was at a disco. He picked up a pallet from an upper shelf, and made a sharp turn while rapidly backing out. His forklife tipped over, and he was fatally crushed beneath it. Talk about a 'Fatal Distraction'...

While, on the clock in an office job, things like accessing the internet for personal reasons or talking with one's S.O. on the phone are not usually dangerous to life and limb, they do stop (or greatly slow down) one from performing the tasks for which one is employed, thereby hurting the business that one is working for.

So can I have a job?... ;)

The work ethic in this country has, for the most part, hit the skids. It had gotten bad a couple of decades ago, and is even worse now. You should see the bunch of bozos at my wife's job. If I was the manager there, at least half of them would be getting a pink slip. Standing around talking among themselves instead of waiting on customers (who are lined up waiting on them). Same thing with yacking on cellphones. Sneaking off and finding a seat somewhere and reading a magazine while they are not on break. Finding any excuse at all to not do their jobs. Argh.

You want a job? Fine, but no business out there 'owes' you a job or anything else. You must not only convince an interviewer that you can make the business more profit, but also you must keep on demonstrating it. What goes around, comes around. If you do an excellent job at your job, your employer will do right by you (after all, he/she wants to keep you). When you get a job, you are selling your labor to the business that hired you. Nobody wants to buy an inferior product. Work is, in addition to being a four-letter word, well... work. It is not supposed to be easy. At the end of the day, you can either take pride in doing an excellent job or you can plot new and improved ways to slack off. Guess which group is going to get raises, promotions, and avoid being laid off or fired, and which group isn't.

What? You don't wish to be successful like your boss?

What a chance to quote "The Man", Bob Dylan! :)


"You may be an ambassador to England or to France,
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance,
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world,
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody."

---

What? You don't wish to be successful like your boss?

Actually, I was thinking arrogant and greedy... Your entire rebuttal revealed both...

Welcome to the employers, 'me' generation number one...

Odd that they never have anything good to say about their own offspring... ;)

---

It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

human resources managers, who say they are at wits' end over dealing with young people.

Believe me, we employees are at our wits-end with you employers too...

Only difference being, you employers have the home court advantage...

You think you're frustrated? You don't even need us, remember? ;)

---

It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

What? You don't wish to be successful like your boss?

Actually, I was thinking arrogant and greedy... Your entire rebuttal revealed both...

Welcome to the employers, 'me' generation number one...

Odd that they never have anything good to say about their own offspring... ;)

Jeffrey,

The reason I quoted Bob Dylan here was to point something out to you that maybe you don't understand.

There are nearly No ultimate "Bosses" in the real world. The owners of a company have to answer to their suppliers, and to their clients. The clients have to answer to their customers, or lose them. And so it goes...

---

The owners of a company have to answer to their suppliers, and to their clients. The clients have to answer to their customers, or lose them.

Here is a little something that the employers don't seem to understand:

It's not our problem! ;)

---

It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

At the end of the day, you can either take pride in doing an excellent job or you can plot new and improved ways to slack off. Guess which group is going to get raises, promotions, and avoid being laid off or fired, and which group isn't.

Strange how in the public sector its those who slack off get the promotions. You cant promote the person doing the work, or you won't have anyone left to do it.

---

me@rescam.org

Making the CIA what it needs to be

DAVID IGNATIUS
THE WASHINGTON POST

July 9, 2007

Here's an example of the kind of accountability the CIA needs in order to get out of the doldrums and become a truly effective intelligence service:

It's 1985, and the CIA team assigned to stop the TWA 847 hijacking has returned home after an embarrassing failure. Despite a standing order from President Reagan to assault the aircraft and free the hostages, the order is never executed. A U.S. Navy diver, Robert Stethem, is murdered, and the terrorists get away.

The CIA operatives are summoned to a remote building. They think they are going to be fired. An unmarked car arrives carrying a top government official and his senior aide. The two officials send away everyone but the seven field operatives – the highest ranking among them is a GS-13 – and demand to know what went wrong. The CIA officers are told to describe what's broken in the system, and to name names.

The man asking the questions about TWA 847 is the vice president, George H.W. Bush. He spends three hours with these junior officers, probing for the mistakes that contributed to poor performance. When he is finished, he takes prompt steps to hold people accountable and fix problems: A two-star Air Force general is reprimanded; the CIA is given new authorities that allow it to conduct anti-terrorism operations more effectively.

“The issues we faced in that event were identified and fixed, immediately, and as word spread throughout the system, we got an amazing amount of cooperation,” recalls a former CIA officer who was involved in counterterrorism operations at the time.

Now, contrast this tight accountability with how intelligence has been managed during the administration of George W. Bush. Vice President Dick Cheney's role has been to push for the answers he wants, rather than to ask questions. CIA officers who tried to warn in 2003 and 2004 about dangers ahead in Iraq were punished or ignored. George Tenet, the CIA director who unwisely embraced the administration's obsession with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, was awarded the Medal of Freedom. Tenet, to his credit, had angered the White House earlier when he refused to be the fall guy on false claims about the Iraqi nuclear program.

Wary of an independent CIA, the administration installed a Republican congressman as Tenet's successor. He arrived at Langley with a team of congressional aides who began a purge of CIA officers suspected of disloyalty. Competence was not their concern: They installed as the agency's No. 3 official a glad-hander who made his name taking care of congressional delegations traveling overseas. That official was indicted earlier this year for allegedly misusing his position to steer contracts to a friend.

The White House has done better on intelligence during the past year, thanks in part to chief of staff Josh Bolten, whose father was a career CIA officer. The administration appointed a strong CIA management team in Gen. Michael Hayden and his deputy, a highly regarded career spy named Stephen Kappes. The CIA team is matched by independent-minded officials at the Pentagon: Robert Gates, a former CIA director, as secretary of defense, and James R. Clapper, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, as undersecretary for intelligence.

Clear lines of accountability are still obstructed by the bureaucratic layering of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That bad idea originated with Congress, in its rush to seem responsive to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Bush should have listened to the many professional intelligence officers who advised against the reorganization. The new DNI, Mike McConnell, has issued a “100-day plan” and other management decrees, but it's still not clear whether this structure hurts performance more than it helps.

Hayden understands the importance of accountability. That's why he decided to release the 1973 accounting of CIA misdeeds known as the “family jewels.” How tame some of that material looks in light of current activities. Back then, the agency agonized over the mere discussion of assassination; today, the nation has an airborne assassination weapon on standing call, in the armed “Predator” drone. Back then, the possibility that the agency had experimented with drugs for use in interrogation was an unspeakable breach. Now, the vice president's office secretly campaigns to authorize CIA techniques that are widely regarded as torture.

The CIA today is not strong or supple enough to cope with the challenge of global terrorism. That's the conclusion of a new history of the CIA, “Legacy of Ashes,” by New York Times reporter Tim Weiner. The book stresses that over the CIA's 60-year history, its performance – for good or ill – has always been a function of what presidents wanted. A culture of accountability is needed in U.S. intelligence, and it must begin at the White House.

---

me@rescam.org

Jeffrey, your answers just help prove the point of the author of that news story that Misfit quoted.

For all you employers out there:

Once hired, young people too often come in on Day One wanting to be vice president

Odd, I've never wanted to advance, simply because I've never wanted to become like my boss...

What? You don't wish to be successful like your boss?

I, actually, consider success not in the bank account but whether or not I can look in my own eyes when seeing my face in the mirror. My boss can be wealthy like Gates, but to be seen as successful in my eyes they also have to be human. An "Ebenezer Scrooge" is not successful in my eyes, but just a poor lad.
I met a former top manager the other day, who signed up a contract in the 90's to save a company from closing down using a strategy enabling him to run business without getting rid of any employer; but he nullified this contract after the owner (a bank) changed their mind only one week later & wanted him to fire 90% of the employers which meant to close down the factory. He not only gave his reasons to resign from the contract to his CEOs, but also went to the press and told them why he resigned. Even now, after all these years, he still is respected by the people in that town just because he didn't want to be the evil one. That's success.

but not wanting to pay the dues to get there.

Better phrased: In 5 years you'll advance so we'll work you like a slave and lay you off in 2. HeHeHe...

If you equate 'doing your job (what you were hired to do), and doing it well' with 'slave labor', it is a wonder you lasted 2 years. Generally, businesses don't lay off their best employees if there is any way to avoid doing so. The best employees typically get offered other positions in the company.

I experienced that too often it's not the best ones who are promoted but those who are most convenient to the bosses.

This next one is a good one.

They want to know what the company is going to do for them

My only 3 interview questions:
1. What do you want me to do for you?

Short answer: Improve the business'es profit. This is, indeed, the only reason why private sector businesses ever hire additional employees.

Longer answer: you should at least have a good idea of what the job you are interviewing for entails. Asking this question indicates a lack of preparation and research, and would make me think twice about hiring you.

Not necessarily. Sometimes the informations available are quite generally, so my question also often is: What exactly do you want me to do? Example: I am hired as an "office worker" - my job though is to call people from out of a call-center.

2. What are you going to pay me for it?

A brief discussion of this subject is ok. But try not to appear to be too curious or insistent on this topic.

Sometimes companies ask me in the interview what I am expecting to be paid. I usually answer to expect wages similar to the salary tariffs for that job. Though this expectation is a just one, it's mostly reason enough to say Good-Bye for them

3. Who will I have to put up with?

This question is a huge red flag in the interviewing process. It indicates that you have difficulty with your interpersonal skills in the workplace. It indicates that hiring you would be a disaster waiting to happen, either with the other employees or with the customers of the business. I would terminate the interview as early as politely possible, wait a few days, then send you a 'we are sorry, but...' letter.

Why? If the job description remains unclear in this subject, the question is a just one, isn't it? See my example of the "office worker".

and they rarely think about what they intend to do for the company.

See interview question number 1...

In fact, the whole notion of working often seems like an inconvenience

Yes, 60 hours a week at 10 bucks per hour is a major inconvenience to our personal lives...

Oh... Joy... You try being an owner of a small business sometime. Having to work 80 to 100 (or more) hours a week is brutal. 60 hours per week is no big thing. Its only 5 12-hour days per week. But, at least if you are paid by the hour, most businesses are not going to want to let you work that much. 60 hours per week = 20 hours of overtime (1.5x pay rate) per week. In your example, that is an extra $100/week to help make up for the loss of your precious 'personal time'.

I'm glad that the laws here in Germany do give the workers some rights, making a 60hrs week at least difficult. Well some companies find ways to bend these rules though. And I still hardly understand why it should be impossible to let 100 people work 6 hours a day instead of 50 people working 12 hrs a day. The computer program doesn't care how many posts are on its list.

something they'll tolerate until they get a minute, between YouTube and iPods

You've got a point there... Imagine how I feel being their coworkers...

Goofing off at work? When an employee is 'on the clock', they need to be concentrating on their job. An employee who lets their attention wander away from their job at best is not contributing effectively towards their employer's profit. At worst, in some jobs, a distracted employee can get themselves (and others) severely injured or killed. I once saw a forklift driver who was listening to a 'walkman' (yeah, this was years ago) while he was driving his forklift. He was really 'getting into' whatever music he was listening to, twitching around like he was at a disco. He picked up a pallet from an upper shelf, and made a sharp turn while rapidly backing out. His forklife tipped over, and he was fatally crushed beneath it. Talk about a 'Fatal Distraction'...

While, on the clock in an office job, things like accessing the internet for personal reasons or talking with one's S.O. on the phone are not usually dangerous to life and limb, they do stop (or greatly slow down) one from performing the tasks for which one is employed, thereby hurting the business that one is working for.

Such distraction i think are fair reasons to fire somebody. But some companies are firing employees because they do such private things during lunch break! IMHO that's not okay.

So can I have a job?... ;)

The work ethic in this country has, for the most part, hit the skids. It had gotten bad a couple of decades ago, and is even worse now. You should see the bunch of bozos at my wife's job. If I was the manager there, at least half of them would be getting a pink slip. Standing around talking among themselves instead of waiting on customers (who are lined up waiting on them). Same thing with yacking on cellphones. Sneaking off and finding a seat somewhere and reading a magazine while they are not on break. Finding any excuse at all to not do their jobs. Argh.

You want a job? Fine, but no business out there 'owes' you a job or anything else. You must not only convince an interviewer that you can make the business more profit, but also you must keep on demonstrating it. What goes around, comes around. If you do an excellent job at your job, your employer will do right by you (after all, he/she wants to keep you). When you get a job, you are selling your labor to the business that hired you. Nobody wants to buy an inferior product. Work is, in addition to being a four-letter word, well... work. It is not supposed to be easy. At the end of the day, you can either take pride in doing an excellent job or you can plot new and improved ways to slack off. Guess which group is going to get raises, promotions, and avoid being laid off or fired, and which group isn't.

I remember... once upon a time, back in East Germany, everyone had a right to have a job. The society owed you a job, and once you got a job you had the duty to go to work. That was one of the good things in these times though there were enough bad and worse things too...

---

Account frozen...

The Mighty George Galloway SLAMS the US Senate! LOLOL

Provided By:
EvilGoblin on YouTube
49 minutes


Anti-war hero George Galloway giving the US Senate a bollocking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wj0m0dSUPR8

---

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

For all you employers out there:

Once hired, young people too often come in on Day One wanting to be vice president

Odd, I've never wanted to advance, simply because I've never wanted to become like my boss...

but not wanting to pay the dues to get there.

Better phrased: In 5 years you'll advance so we'll work you like a slave and lay you off in 2. HeHeHe...

They want to know what the company is going to do for them

My only 3 interview questions:
1. What do you want me to do for you?
2. What are you going to pay me for it?
3. Who will I have to put up with?

and they rarely think about what they intend to do for the company.

See interview question number 1...

In fact, the whole notion of working often seems like an inconvenience

Yes, 60 hours a week at 10 bucks per hour is a major inconvenience to our personal lives...

something they'll tolerate until they get a minute, between YouTube and iPods

You've got a point there... Imagine how I feel being their coworkers...


So can I have a job?... ;)

Ummmm, why do I get the impression that most of the people that bother to read these musings of yours get the impression that every single meeting with your so-called superiors is a humiliating kick in the crotch?

"Many miles away something crawls to the surface of a dark Scottish loch...." ;)

---

Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

House balks at Bush order for new powers

By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer
Tue Jul 3, 8:16 PM ET

WASHINGTON - President Bush this month is giving an obscure White House office new powers over regulations affecting health, worker safety and the environment. Calling it a power grab, Democrats running Congress are intent on stopping him. ADVERTISEMENT



The House voted last week to prohibit the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from spending federal money on Executive Order 13422, signed by Bush last January and due to take effect July 24.

The order requires federal officials to show that private companies, people or institutions failed to address a problem before agencies can write regulations to tackle it. It also gives political appointees greater authority over how the regulations are written.

The House measure "stops this president or any president from seizing the power to rewrite almost every law that Congress passes, laws that protect public health, the environment, safety, civil rights, privacy and on and on," said Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., its sponsor.

"OIRA has quietly grown into the most powerful regulatory agency in Washington," the House Science investigations subcommittee, chaired by Miller, said in a report in April.

The administration contends Bush's order merely strengthens a similar directive issued by President Clinton in 1993 giving the White House budget office oversight of federal agency rulemaking.

Andrea Wuebker, a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget, which manages the White House regulatory affairs office, said the order, along with an OMB good guidance bulletin, "will help increase the quality, accountability and transparency of agency guidance documents."

Bush's executive order:

_Requires agencies to identify "market failures," where the private sector fell short in dealing with a problem, as a factor in proposing a rule. The White House regulatory affairs office is given authority to assess those conclusions.

_States that no rulemaking can go forward without the approval of an agency's Regulatory Policy Office, to be headed by a presidential appointee.

_Directs each agency to provide an estimate of costs and benefits of regulations.

_Requires agencies to inform the White House regulatory affairs office of proposed significant guidance documents on complying with rules. Critics say this will create a new bottleneck delaying the issuance of guidelines needed to comply with federal regulations.

"This can only further delay implementing health, safety and environmental protections," said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a private watchdog group that joined numerous labor and good-government groups, including the AFL-CIO, Public Citizen and the Union of Concerned Scientists, in opposing Bush's order.

Miller tried unsuccessfully at a hearing in April to persuade the White House regulatory affairs office's former acting administrator, Steven Aitken, to reveal what private groups might have been involved in rewriting the Clinton-era order.

Aitken stressed that the Clinton order also used market failure as a criteria in advancing new rules and directing agencies to appoint regulatory policy officers, many of whom were political appointees. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., backed Aitken up at the hearing.

"The pattern is that we are challenging the president's authority, hoping to find a mistake and then making a lot of political hay about it," Rohrabacher said.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service noted in an analysis last February that President Reagan made the White House regulatory affairs office the central clearinghouse for substantive rulemaking, reviewing 2,000 to 3,000 proposed regulations per year. With Clinton's 1993 order, White House reviews of proposed regulations dropped to between 500 and 700 a year, the researchers said.

Bill Kovacs, vice president for regulatory affairs with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the White House's regulatory affairs office now has about 35 people to keep track of the 4,000 rules federal agencies issue every year.

"It's only reasonable that you have some way of monitoring what your agencies are doing," Kovacs said, adding that the White House needs to assert control over the process.

___

The House bill is HR 2829.

On the Net:

Text of Jan. 18 Executive Order 13422: http:http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/orders

---

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

Raid at Islamabad Mosque Turns Long and Deadly

By Griff Witte
Washington Post Foreign Service

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 11 — A commando raid that was expected to be a quick operation to subdue Islamic radicals in the Red Mosque turned into a marathon battle Tuesday and Wednesday, with elite Pakistani forces sweeping through underground bunkers in more than 20 hours of intense combat.

Military officials said the fighting left at least eight commandos and 60 radicals dead — including the firebrand cleric at the center of the standoff — but they also suggested the toll might ultimately prove far higher. Among the hundreds of people estimated to be in the mosque when the raid began, only 83 made it out alive, most of them women and children.

Authorities had released no information about the fate of the others as of Wednesday morning, and reporters were barred from visiting local hospitals. Many of the missing were believed to be civilians who had been held hostage.
The Pakistani government and the mosque’s pro-Taliban leadership had been locked in a standoff for eight days after a street clash last Tuesday that left more than 20 people dead. Mosque leaders had been provoking the government for months by abducting alleged prostitutes and police officers, and by threatening music store owners. The mosque’s clerics, a pair of brothers, said they wanted to create a theocracy in Pakistan based on Islamic law.

For months, President Pervez Musharraf has faced pressure to shut down the mosque, but his government resisted because of concerns that a raid could trigger outrage among religious hard-liners. On Tuesday, there was evidence that a backlash had already begun.

In the North-West Frontier Province, bands of armed young men shut down a major highway, and religious leaders called for demonstrations elsewhere.
Pakistani officials acknowledged they had been surprised by the stiff resistance the commandos faced from the radicals, who used machine guns, rocket launchers, gasoline bombs and land mines to fend off the assault.
For much of Tuesday afternoon and into the evening, the elite commandos fought a subterranean war, feeling their way in the darkness through a nest of booby traps and ambushes as they chased militants through basements and tunnels. Fighting continued at the mosque after midnight.

“There’s been a lot of resistance,” said a military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad. “They’re very well-armed, well-trained terrorists.”
Among those confirmed dead was Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the firebrand cleric, who had said repeatedly during the standoff that he wanted to be a martyr. Ghazi was killed in the basement of the complex during a shootout between the commandos and several militants, after having given a series of final interviews to Pakistani TV stations in which he blamed the government for the failure of last-minute peace talks.

Government officials had said almost since the standoff began that raiding the mosque and ridding it of the radicals would be a relatively easy operation. They boasted they could do it in an hour or less, but wanted to get women and children out safely before launching an operation.

The raid — code-named Operation Silence — came just after dawn prayers Tuesday, with commandos assaulting the compound from three directions around 4 a.m. Only minutes earlier, a contingent of government-appointed negotiators had been hopeful that the conflict was about to end peacefully.
The negotiating team, which included religious leaders and government officials, had been sent in as part of a last-ditch effort to avoid a raid. Talking with Ghazi first by loudspeaker and then by cellphone, the two sides reached a draft agreement around midnight, and a top government official, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, was dispatched to Musharraf’s house in the garrison city of Rawalpindi to discuss it.

He returned three hours later with a new offer that Musharraf said was final. The sticking points were whether Ghazi would be allowed to evade prosecution, and what would happen to foreign fighters believed to have been inside the mosque.

When Ghazi did not respond to the revised offer, the negotiating team left and the commandos swooped in.

“At the end, there was hope that we could save women and children,” said Mufti Abdul Hameed Rabani, a member of the negotiating team. “But the government wanted to do the operation in a hurry.”

Another religious leader who had been part of previous negotiations said the government was to blame for the failure of the talks and had made a hasty decision to conduct the raid, a decision it would later regret. “First it was one Red Mosque in Islamabad,” said Maulana Abdul Majeed Hazarvi. “Now you will find Red Mosques everywhere.”

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, denied that the government had cut off negotiations preemptively. “The government tried its level best to use every available means to resolve this through dialogue,” he said. “There were positive signs and we were very hopeful. But then there was a total breakdown of the dialogue.”

The first few hours of the operation produced intense exchanges of gunfire and window-rattling explosions. A thick plume of smoke rose over the mosque, and it appeared as though the radicals had been quickly vanquished when guns fell largely silent for several hours in the late morning.

But inside, militants retreated deeper into the compound, virtually ceding the mosque to the government and massing instead in a warren of basement rooms at the girls’ madrassa, where many women and children were being held hostage. Militants and commandos fought from room to room, occasionally hearing women’s and children’s cries as they “carefully” tried to flush out the militants, Arshad said.

Even beneath the basement, there was a network of tunnels that led between the various buildings in the compound, which takes up two city blocks and includes nearly a dozen structures.

The militants used the tunnels to move from the madrassa to the mosque and up into one of the minarets. Several commandos were shot after a militant fired from the minaret long after the commandos thought it had been cleared.
The Red Mosque standoff attracted round-the-clock coverage from Pakistan’s various 24-hour news networks all week, and once the raid began, the government appeared determined not to let them broadcast images that might inflame the public. Reporters were kept far enough from the mosque that they couldn’t capture images of the carnage.

By early Wednesday morning, the government could not produce a comprehensive figure of civilian casualties. However, officials struck a somber note as they spoke, and indicated that the death toll may be high.

Abdul Satar Edhi, leader of a human welfare charity, said the government had asked him to be prepared to provide supplies for 300 burials.

One major question left unanswered Wednesday morning was how the radicals had been able to build up such a massive arsenal. The mosque, only a few hundred yards from the president’s house, is also close to the headquarters of Pakistan’s main intelligence service. Despite its location, the mosque had become a well-defended fortress by the time commandos went in.

“Somebody has to answer for this,” said retired Maj. Ikram Sehgal, a security analyst. “This cannot happen in the center of the capital of the country.” Special correspondents Shahzad Khurram in Islamabad and Imtiaz Ali in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.

---

I will be moving this thread to the new Politics forum soon.

Thank you, Qui-Gon.

There I already have a question about election

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Account frozen...

NATO didn't lose Afghanistan

By Sarah Chayes; author of “The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban.”

July 11, 2007

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – When things go wrong – touchdown passes are missed, products come out defective, wars are lost – it is typical to blame the equipment, or the help. In the case of the unraveling situation in Afghanistan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has become the favorite whipping boy of American officials and military personnel.

NATO countries aren't sending enough troops, we hear. Those who do arrive are constrained by absurd caveats that prevent them from engaging in combat. NATO lost Helmand province to the Taliban.

In fact, after watching rotation after military rotation cycle through here since late 2001, I see NATO as an improvement over its American predecessors.

One key difference is NATO's training program, born of the challenge of gathering troops from different countries, speaking different languages, into a cohesive fighting force. In March, I joined about a dozen civilians who had lived and worked in Kandahar for years at the final training exercise for the NATO officers who recently took over Afghanistan's Regional Command South. We spent 10 days briefing them, fielding their questions on everything from tribal relations to the electricity supply, eating meals with them and playing roles in a simulation of three days in southern Afghanistan.

“Uh . . . we've got a bit of a situation here,” I heard one of my fellow teachers, an Australian who was a top United Nations security official, say calmly into the phone. He threw me a wink. He was starting the simulation by reporting the sounds of a large detonation and small arms fire. Later, on another line to an officer training to run public information, a sociological researcher played the role of a journalist, her voice incredulous: “Are you sure you want to say that?”

With the help of these seasoned civilians, experienced NATO officers and some Afghans, the new team was rigorously tested on the many aspects of its mission that go beyond combat tactics. Three months later, after these trainees had taken up their new jobs, the training staff traveled to Kandahar to debrief them to learn which aspects of the training had been useful and which needed improvement.

Given the constant disruption caused by short troop rotations, competent training is key to improving officers' effectiveness as soon as they hit the ground.

The American troops' training, in contrast, seemed ad hoc, usually carried out by each unit on its own, rather than by a dedicated training staff. And it involved very few civilians, despite the crucial humanitarian and political aspects of the mission here. (I have occasionally been invited to address American officers, but only when a friend in the unit has convinced a commander that I might have something to offer.)

NATO's second advantage is continuity, despite its multinational makeup. I observed that rivalry between American units led to confusing policy reversals each time new troops came in. The best American commanders were those who understood that Afghanistan is no toy soldier battlefield, that they would have to bone up on anthropology, diplomacy and civil engineering. But such commanders were rare, and their replacements – seeking to make their own mark – usually undid their work within weeks.

NATO has tried to reduce the disruption of replacing troops and officers en masse. Rotations are staggered. This may cause some logistical headaches, but it reduces abrupt changes in direction.

But if NATO is doing better than the United States, why is Afghanistan doing worse? The answer is twofold. NATO was brought in too late, and under false pretenses.

Within days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, NATO voted to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty – its core principle, which states that an armed attack on one member will be viewed by the others as an attack on themselves. Never before in the history of the organization had the principle been activated. The American reaction was thanks but no thanks. Our government was sure we could go it alone in Afghanistan, that allies would be an inconvenience.

In 2003, NATO moved peacekeeping forces into Kabul and parts of northern Afghanistan. But not until 2005, when it was clear that the United States was bogged down in Iraq and lacked sufficient resources to fight on two fronts, did Washington belatedly turn to NATO to take Afghan south off its hands. And then it misrepresented the situation our allies would find there. NATO was basically sold a beefed-up peacekeeping mission. It was told, in effect, that it would simply need to maintain the order the United States had established and to help with reconstruction and security.

In fact, as was clear from the ground, the situation had been deteriorating since late 2002. By 2004, resurgent Taliban were making a concerted push to enter the country from Pakistan, and intensive combat between American forces and Taliban fighters was taking place north of Kandahar.

By 2005, top Afghan officials could be blown up in downtown Kandahar without drawing much of a reaction from either the Afghan government or ours. Notorious drug lords governed the three main southern provinces to which we were dispatching our allies. It was the bloodiest and most belligerent situation since the fall of the Taliban.

NATO should have been brought in from the start and given the kind of muscular peacekeeping mission it learned to conduct in the Balkans. Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, begged for peacekeepers, spread throughout the country, in those early years when they could still have made a difference.

Having snubbed our allies when we should have accepted their help, and having stuck them with the most difficult, yet most strategically critical, part of Afghanistan, the least we could do now is offer gratitude and support, rather than blame our friends for our own follies.

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me@rescam.org

Iraqi Gov't