Triathlon, Education and Robert Fisk

A mother asked me about schooling for her children because she placed them in a traditional system in Mexico, and they used to go to an alternative school.  I did not have a doubt to answer: “What do you want for your kids?  You should take a decision for your kids based on what you want.”  Reading material and human behavior are and should be universal; it is called civilization. On the other hand, Education should take priority while learning whatever is taught.   Otherwise, we end up with too much schooling and little education.   

1)  Sit down to do your work for at least 10 minutes if you are six years old.  Sit an hour to do your homework if you are ten.  This should be learned in any system traditional or not.

2)  Learn to practice what you learned at school and make excellence a habit.

3)  Wait for your turns.

4)  Apologize for what you do against others and against the rules.

5)  Thank somebody when he/she is helping you.

6)  Do not harm people regardless if it is on purpose or not.  My patients say regardless of being conscious or unconscious; but defend yourself and others if somebody is behaving against the rules.  Rules are written and there are consequences if we do not follow them.  Unfortunately, there are places where consequences do not exist at all and people trespass the rules.

To accomplish what is mentioned above we need many centuries civilizing ourselves.  Nowadays, we even struggle to see what belongs to us versus what belongs to others.  Nature, lions, tigers are not voters in a democracy as well as many others in this globalized world, and we need education to understand them as OTHERS; we do not need democracy, we need education. We need years of education to be part of this “new world.”  TRIATHLON represents the sport that requires the best education to perform well.  I let you read three different articles that point out the difference in our schooling and our education.  Triathlon is not for everybody as you can see.

The Aimless War

By JOE KLEIN Joe Klein – Thu Dec 11, 6:10 am ET

AFP/File – US soldiers block a road at the site of a suicide attack in Kabul in May 2008. US Defense Secretary Robert …

"Things have gotten a bit hairy," admitted British Lieut. Colonel Graeme Armour as we sat in a dusty, bunkered NATO fortress just outside the city of Lashkar Gah in Helmand province, a deadly piece of turf along Afghanistan's southern border with Pakistan. A day earlier, two Danish soldiers had been killed and two Brits seriously wounded by roadside bombs. The casualties were coming almost daily now.

And then there were the daily frustrations of Armour's job: training Afghan police officers. Almost all the recruits were illiterate. "They've had no experience at learning," Armour said. "You sit them in a room and try to teach them about police procedures - they start gabbing and knocking about. You talk to them about the rights of women, and they just laugh." A week earlier, five Afghan police officers trained by Armour were murdered in their beds while defending a nearby checkpoint - possibly by other police officers. Their weapons and ammunition were stolen. "We're not sure of the motivation," Armour said. "They may have gone to join the Taliban or sold the guns in the market." See pictures of Training Afghanistan's Police Force.

The war in Afghanistan - the war that President-elect Barack Obama pledged to fight and win - has become an aimless absurdity. It began with a specific target. Afghanistan was where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda lived, harbored by the Islamic extremist Taliban government. But the enemy escaped into Pakistan, and for the past seven years, Afghanistan has been a slow bleed against an array of mostly indigenous narco-jihadi-tribal guerrilla forces that we continue to call the "Taliban." These ragtag bands are funded by opium profits and led by assorted religious extremists and druglords, many of whom have safe havens in Pakistan.

In some ways, Helmand province - which I visited with the German general Egon Ramms, commander of NATO's Allied Joint Force Command - is a perfect metaphor for the broader war. The soldiers from NATO's International Security Assistance Force are doing what they can against difficult odds. The language and tactics of counter-insurgency warfare are universal here: secure the population, help them build their communities. There are occasional victories: the Taliban leader of Musa Qala, in northern Helmand, switched sides and has become an effective local governor. But the incremental successes are reversible - schools are burned by the Taliban, police officers are murdered - because of a monstrous structural problem that defines the current struggle in Afghanistan.

The British troops in Helmand are fighting with both hands tied behind their backs. They cannot go after the leadership of the Taliban - still led by the reclusive Mullah Omar - which operates openly in the Pakistani city of Quetta, just across the border. They also can't go after the drug trade that funds the insurgency, in part because some of the proceeds are also skimmed by the friends, officials and perhaps family members of the stupendously corrupt government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Helmand province is mostly desert, but it produces half the world's opium supply along a narrow strip of irrigated land that straddles the Helmand River. The drug trade - Afghanistan provides more than 90% of the world's opium - permeates everything. A former governor, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, was caught with nine tons of opium, enough to force him out of office, but not enough to put him in jail, since he enjoys - according to U.S. military sources - a close relationship with the Karzai government. Indeed, Akhundzada and Karzai's brother Ahmed Wali - who operates in Kandahar, the next province over - are considered the shadow rulers of the region (along with Mullah Omar). "You should understand," a British commander said, "the fight here isn't really about religion. It's about money."

Another thing you should understand: thousands of U.S. troops are expected to be deployed to Helmand and Kandahar provinces next spring. They will be fighting under the same limitations as the British, Canadian, Danish and Dutch forces currently holding the fort, which means they will be spinning their wheels. And that raises a long-term question crucial to the success of the Obama Administration: What are we doing in Afghanistan? What is the mission? We know what the mission used to be - to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and destroy his al-Qaeda command. But once bin Laden slipped away, the mission morphed into a vast, messy nation - building effort to support the allegedly democratic Karzai government. There was a certain logic to that. The Taliban and al-Qaeda can't base themselves in Afghanistan if something resembling a stable, secure nation-state exists there. But the mission was also historically implausible: Afghanistan has never had a strong central government. It has been governed for thousands of years by local and regional tribal coalitions. The tribes have often been at one another's throats - a good part of the current "Taliban" uprising is nothing more than standard tribal rivalries juiced by Western arms and opium profits - except when foreigners have invaded the area, in which case the Afghans have united and slowly humiliated conquerors from Alexander the Great to the Soviets.

The current Western presence is the most benign intrusion in Afghan history, and the rationale of building stability remains a logical one - but this war has become something of a sideshow in South Asia. The far more serious problem is Pakistan, a flimsy state with illogical borders, nuclear weapons and a mortal religious enmity toward India, its neighbor to the south. Pakistan is where bin Laden now lives, if he lives. The Bush Administration chose to coddle Pakistan 's military leadership, which promised to help in the fight against al-Qaeda - but it hasn't helped much, although there are signs that the fragile new government of President Asif Ali Zardari may be more cooperative. Still, the Pakistani intelligence service helped create the Taliban and other Islamic extremist groups - including the terrorists who attacked Mumbai - as a way of keeping India at bay, and Pakistan continues to protect the Afghan Taliban in Quetta . In his initial statements, Obama has seemed more sophisticated about Afghanistan than Bush. In an interview with me in late October, Obama said Afghanistan should be seen as part of a regional problem, and he suggested that he might dispatch a special envoy, perhaps Bill Clinton, to work on the Indo-Afghan-Pakistani dilemma. Clinton seems a less likely prospect since his wife was named Secretary of State. The current speculation is that Richard Holbrooke may be selected for the job, which would be a very good idea. Holbrooke is a great negotiator, but he's also a great intimidator, and the first step toward resolving the war in Afghanistan is to lay down the law in both Islamabad and Kabul. The message should be the same in both cases: The unsupervised splurge of American aid is over. The Pakistanis will have to stop giving tacit support and protection to terrorists, especially the Afghan Taliban. The Karzai government will have to end its corruption and close down the drug trade. There are plenty of other reforms necessary - the international humanitarian effort is a shabby, self-righteous mess; some of our NATO allies aren't carrying their share of the military burden - but the war will remain a bloody stalemate at best as long as jihadis come across the border from Pakistan and the drug trade flourishes.

I flew by helicopter from Helmand to the enormous NATO base outside Kandahar to learn that three Canadian soldiers had been killed that morning in an ambush. I stood in a small, bare concrete plaza as the Canadian flag was raised, then lowered to half-staff. Next the Danish flag and finally the NATO flag were raised and left to rest at half-staff. A small group of soldiers from assorted countries stood at attention and saluted as the flags rose and fell. There were no American flags this day, but there soon will be. Before he sends another U.S. soldier off to die or be maimed in Afghanistan,

President-elect Obama needs to deliver the blunt message to the leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan that we will no longer tolerate their complicity in the deaths of Americans and our allies, a slaughter that began on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and continues to this day. Obama will soon own this aimless war if he does not somehow change that dynamic. 

Journalist Robert Fisk beaten by Afghan refugees

By Julie Hyland
12 December 2001

Veteran British journalist Robert Fisk, who writes for the Independent newspaper, was attacked and beaten by Afghan refugees in Pakistan last weekend.

In an account of the attack, Fisk, who suffered facial, hand and head injuries, said he understood the refugees’ anger, as many had relatives who had been killed by the US bombing of Afghan city Kandahar only the previous week. And in a graphic, and moving account of the assault, Fisk said that it “was symbolic of the hatred and fury and hypocrisy of this filthy war.”

Fisk reports that he was attacked when his car broke down as he drove through a village housing Afghan refugees near to the border city of Quetta. A crowd of 40 to 50 destitute people gathered. At first the exchanges were friendly, with Fisk and his colleague Justin Huggler shaking hands and exchanging greetings.

Very quickly, however, the mood turned ugly. A small child threw a stone, which was followed by many more. “And then I find myself being punched and beaten in the face. My glasses were smashed and my spare glasses were ripped away from me. I was covered in blood and couldn’t see anything. I was obviously frightened.”

“The more I bled, the more the crowd gathered and beat me with their fists,” writes Fisk. “Pebbles and small stones began to bounce off my head and shoulders... My head was suddenly struck by stones on both sides at the same time - not thrown stones but stones in the palms of men who were using them to try to crack my skull.”

At this point, Fisk recalled his long experience covering the wars in the Lebanon. “The Lebanese taught me, over and over again, how to stay alive: take a decision—any decision—but don’t do nothing”. And so he fought back, “bashing” his fist into several of his assailants.

“What had I done, I kept asking myself? I had been punching and attacking Afghan refugees, the very people I had been writing about for so long, the very dispossessed, mutilated people whom my own country—among others—was killing, with the Taliban, just across the border... The men whose families our bombers were killing were now my enemies too.”

Fisk was eventually rescued and taken for treatment. Besides his injuries, he had also lost several pairs of glasses, his mobile phone and his contact book containing 25 years of numbers. “It was a very frightening experience and I am in a lot of pain but I am glad to be alive. I’m going to bear the scars for the rest of my life—sadly I broke down in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The award-winning correspondent, who has covered the Middle East for over 25 years, is not the first journalist to become a casualty of Washington’s war against Afghanistan. With little chance of defending themselves against almost continuous US bombardment from the skies, Western journalists—who are regarded as little more than propaganda tools of their respective governments—have been easy targets for attack by Taliban fighters. Several journalists have been injured, and eight killed—higher than the number of Western soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan.

Unlike many others in his profession, Fisk has been an outspoken critic of US and British policy in Afghanistan. In his most forthright piece to date, Fisk accused US and British forces of war crimes in Afghanistan. In a November 30 comment entitled, “We Are Now War Criminals”, referring to the massacre of Taliban prisoners at the Qala-i-Janghi fortress, Fisk wrote that “US Special Forces—and, it has emerged, British troops—helped the Alliance to overcome the uprising and, sure enough, CNN tells us some prisoners were ‘executed’ trying to escape.

“It is an atrocity. British troops are now stained with war crimes.” Only days later, he continued, more executed Taliban members had been found in Kunduz.

The US bore particular responsibility for the massacre, Fisk insisted. “The US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, stated quite specifically during the siege of the city that US air raids on the Taliban defenders would stop ‘if the Northern Alliance requested it’.

“Leaving aside the revelation that the thugs and murderers of the Northern Alliance were now acting as air controllers to the USAF in its battle with the thugs and murderers of the Taliban, Mr Rumsfeld’s incriminating remark places Washington in the witness box of any war-crimes trial over Kunduz. The US were acting in full military cooperation with the Northern Alliance militia”.

The West is jettisoning every human rights’ precedent it has claimed to uphold during the past 50 years. After the end of World War Two, those accused of Nazi war crimes were put on trial at Nuremberg, and thousands of pages of evidence produced describing “The secret courts and death squads and torture and extra judicial executions carried out by rogue states and pathological dictators. Quite right too”, Fisk wrote. Now the West has adopted the same methods. President Bush’s decision to sign into law “secret military courts to try and then liquidate anyone believed to be a ‘terrorist murderer’,“ amounts to “legally sanctioned American government death squads,” writes Fisk.

In the same comment, Fisk reserved particular contempt for the majority of television journalists, who “to their shame, have shown little or no interest in these disgraceful crimes. Cosying up to the Northern Alliance, chatting to the American troops, most have done little more than mention the war crimes against prisoners in the midst of their reports”.

He wrote with disgust of Europe’s leaders, “the Blairs, Schroeders, Chiracs” who “have remained so gutlessly silent in the face of the Afghan executions and East European-style legislation sanctified since September 11.”

Yes, the “Taliban were a cruel bunch of bastards”, and yes, “September 11 was a crime against humanity”, he continued. But he was neither for Osama bin Laden nor George Bush. “I’m actively against the brutal, cynical, lying ‘war of civilisation’ that he has begun so mendaciously in our name and which has now cost as many lives as the World Trade Center mass murder.”

The same sentiments are evident in Fisk’s account of his beating in Pakistan. He decided to record his “few minutes of terror and self-disgust”, because “I don’t want this to be seen as a Muslim mob attacking a Westerner for no reason”. Responsibility for the “silly, bloody, tiny incident” lay with the West, he wrote. The refugees “had every reason to be angry”. In their position, “I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.”

Robert Fisk: 'Nobody supports the Taliban, but people hate the government'

As he leaves Afghanistan, our correspondent reflects on a failed state cursed by brutal fundamentalism and rampant corruption

Thursday, 27 November 2008

AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Taliban fighters in Maydan Shahr, west of Kabul

The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands – all but a square mile at the centre of the city – and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul. Hamid Karzai's deeply corrupted government is almost as powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad's "Green Zone"; lorry drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country.

The Red Cross has already warned that humanitarian operations are being drastically curtailed in ever larger areas of Afghanistan; more than 4,000 people, at least a third of them civilians, have been killed in the past 11 months, along with scores of Nato troops and about 30 aid workers. Both the Taliban and Mr Karzai's government are executing their prisoners in ever greater numbers. The Afghan authorities hanged five men this month for murder, kidnap or rape – one prisoner, a distant relative of Mr Karzai, predictably had his sentence commuted – and more than 100 others are now on Kabul's death row.

This is not the democratic, peaceful, resurgent, "gender-sensitive" Afghanistan that the world promised to create after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Outside the capital and the far north of the country, almost every woman wears the all-enshrouding burkha, while fighters are now joining the Taliban's ranks from Kashmir, Uzbekistan, Chechnya and even Turkey. More than 300 Turkish fighters are now believed to be in Afghanistan, many of them holding European passports.

"Nobody I know wants to see the Taliban back in power," a Kabul business executive says – anonymity is now as much demanded as it was before 2001 – "but people hate the government and the parliament which doesn't care about their security. The government is useless. With so many internally displaced refugees pouring into Kabul from the countryside, there's mass unemployment – but of course, there are no statistics.

"The 'open market' led many of us into financial disaster. Afghanistan is just a battlefield of ideology, opium and political corruption. Now you've got all these commercial outfits receiving contracts from people like USAID. First they skim off 30 to 50 per cent for their own profits – then they contract out and sub-contract to other companies and there's only 10 per cent of the original amount left for the Afghans themselves."

Afghans working for charitable organisations and for the UN are telling their employers that they are coming under increasing pressure to give information to the Taliban and provide them with safe houses. In the countryside, farmers live in fear of both sides in the war. A very senior NGO official in Kabul – again, anonymity was requested – says both the Taliban and the police regularly threaten villagers. "A Taliban group will arrive at a village headman's door at night – maybe 15 or 16 of them – and say they need food and shelter. And the headman tells the villagers to give them food and let them stay at the mosque. Then the police or army arrive in the day and accuse the villagers of colluding with the Taliban, detain innocent men and threaten to withhold humanitarian aid. Then there's the danger the village will be air-raided by the Americans."

In the city of Ghazni, the Taliban ordered all mobile phones to be switched off from 5pm until 6am for fear that spies would use them to give away guerrilla locations. The mobile phone war may be one conflict the government is winning. With American help the Interior Ministry police can now track and triangulate calls. Once more, the Americans are talking about forming "tribal militias" to combat the Taliban, much as they did in Iraq and as the Pakistani authorities have tried to do on the North West Frontier. But the tribal lashkars of the Eighties were corrupted by the Russians and when the system was first tried out two years ago – it was called the Auxiliary Police Force – it was a fiasco. The newly-formed constabulary stopped showing up for work, stole weapons and turned themselves into private militias.

"Now every time a new Western ambassador arrives in Kabul, they dredge it all up again," another NGO official says in near despair. "'Oh,' they proclaim, 'let's have local militias – what a bright idea.' But that will not solve the problem. The country is subject to brigandage as well as the cruelty of the Taliban and the air raids which Afghans find so outrageous. The international community has got to stop spinning and do some fundamental thinking which should have been done four or five years ago."

What this means to those Westerners who have spent years in Kabul is simple. Is it really the overriding ambition of Afghans to have "democracy"? Is a strong federal state possible in Afghanistan? Is the international community ready to take on the warlords and drug barons who are within Mr Karzai's own government? And – most important of all – is development really about "securing the country"? The tired old American adage that "where the Tarmac ends, the Taliban begins" is untrue. The Taliban are mounting checkpoints on those very same newly-built roads.

The Afghan Minister of Defence has 65,000 troops under his dubious command but says he needs 500,000 to control Afghanistan. The Soviets failed to contain the country even when they had 100,000 troops here with 150,000 Afghan soldiers in support. And as Barack Obama prepares to send another 7,000 US soldiers into the pit of Afghanistan, the Spanish and Italians are talking of leaving while the Norwegians may pull their 500 troops out of the area north of Heart. Repeatedly, Western leaders talk of the "key" – of training more and more Afghans to fight in the army. But that was the same "key" which the Russians tried – and it did not fit the lock.

"We" are not winning in Afghanistan. Talk of crushing the Taliban seems as bleakly unrealistic as it has ever been. Indeed, when the President of Afghanistan tries to talk to Mullah Omar – one of America's principal targets in this wretched war – you know the writing is on the wall. And even Mullah Omar didn't want to talk to Mr Karzai.

Partition is the one option that no one will discuss – giving the southern part of Afghanistan to the Taliban and keeping the rest – but that will only open another crisis with Pakistan because the Pashtuns, who form most of the Taliban, would want all of what they regard as "Pashtunistan"; and that would have to include much of Pakistan's own tribal territories. It will also be a return to the "Great Game" and the redrawing of borders in south-west Asia, something which – history shows – has always been accompanied by great bloodshed.

At the end, we have a problem of education; a problem of basic education that takes centuries to address.  We just started it a few years ago.  Oprah still thinks that we are too far from achieving civilization (I agree with her):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFODS4RQ2kc

Triathlon best performers are very civilized men and women.  They do not lie to themselves.  Their discrimination is to perform well and better than other competitors; they rest, eat and recover accordingly, discriminating whatever is on their way of performing well.