Google has expanded their Usenet archive to include all of the posts from the past 20 years. Amazing.

Special Forces Captain Jason Amerine was inserted into southern Afghanistan all the way back on October 11 to assist Hamid Karzai in building up Pashtun resistance to the Taliban in the region. The WaPo has an interview with Captain Amerine, who was injured when an American bomb hit a group of US and Afghan soldiers, killing three Americans and an undetermined number of Afghans. The interview is basically an account of how Karzai established himself after returning to Afghanistan, built up an army, and eventually retook Kandahar. The whole story is really fascinating.

The most gripping part of the story is his recounting of the battle for Tarin Kot:

Soon there was word of a challenge. “We got a warning that the Taliban had launched a massive group of people north who had left Kandahar to retake Tarin Kot,” said Amerine, who recalled becoming immediately edgy, particularly because the Afghans wanted to take time to eat before preparing for battle.

After US aircraft destroyed the convoy …

About 10 or 12 Taliban fighters were captured while maneuvering on the eastern side of the town. They later revealed that their orders were not only to retake the town but to slaughter some residents, including women and children, to make an example of the rebels. “We saved that town,” said Amerine, calling it his proudest moment.
…
“When we turned back that convoy, the high religious heads came over to Hamid’s headquarters . . . and said if the Americans weren’t here, we’d all be dead now,” Amerine recalled. “Basically from that point on, our relationship was solid with the Pashtun tribes. Hamid told me word spread all the way down to around Kandahar.”

Damn straight.

Paul Krugman says that the spectacular failures of Enron and Argentina’s money policy demonstrate that extreme laissez faire systems are not the panacea that libertarians make them out to be.

Despite the fact that the Friendship Bridge between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan was reopened on Saturday, aid shipments still aren’t making it into the country, or aren’t being distributed effectively. The 9,000 tons of food and supplies that were delivered by the train that crossed the bridge in the ceremony on Saturday are still held up on the Afghanistan side of the border, and no aid shipments have made it across since then. Aid deliveries have been confounded by bureaucratic snafus at the border crossing, and a general lack of security around the country.

Tom Daschle Isn’t the Problem: the New York Times defends Tom Daschle in an editorial today. Now that Republicans don’t have Bill Clinton to smear any more (although they still take their swipes at him when they can), they have to settle for Tom Daschle. Running newspaper ads showing Daschle and Saddam Hussein side by side is utterly sleazy.

Salon Premium subscribers can read Scott Rosenberg’s response to conservatives blaming California liberalism for Johnny Jihadi running off to join the Taliban. You don’t have to be a statistician to know that a sample size of one is worthless, but that hasn’t stopped the professional axe grinders for screaming “I told you so” and blaming not only the kid’s parents, but pretty much everyone in California for the way he turned out. Kids go off the rails all the time (at least he didn’t blow away a bunch of students at his school) for all sorts of reasons, blaming a particular style of parenting is next to useless. That doesn’t excuse the flaky columnists who respond to Johnny’s Taliban adventure with a shrug and an “it’s all good,” of course, but that’s not I’m talking about.

I mentioned the MESA conference the other day, and pointed to a story about it in the American Prospect. The New Republic also has a dispatch from the conference that paints a different picture than the Prospect story.

Today, NPR had an obituary for Grady Martin, a Nashville guitarist who played on literally thousands of recordings. Any true fan of country music knows his work, but unfortunately, probably not by name. Here’s the obituary from the Nashville paper.

Joshua Michal Marshall has the goods on professional war monger Richard Perle.