••• Except: “Firms are exempt whose guards work inside compounds used by foreign embassies and international businesses and aid and charitable organizations… [C]ompanies operating from some fixed sites, including power plants, [may] continue their work… Employees from the firms can join the Afghan security forces if they wish… ”
“While NATO and the United States have alternative supply routes into Afghanistan, the Pakistani ones are the cheapest and most convenient.”
••• Not anymore.
“Razziq is the poster child for all that is wrong with Afghanistan’s government…”
In 2009, Iraq signed a dozen deals with multinational oil companies in the hopes of boosting output to 12 million barrels per day in seven years – from the current 2.5 million bpd…
••• In 1990, Iraq was pumping 3.5 million bpd.
“We left them in a dark hole…and they don’t trust us.”
••• Maybe Pakistanis will start trusting Americans when Washington officials stop planning coups—er, “contemplat[ing] the effects of a[nother] change.”
“I have never sold weapons to anybody,” Bout said…
••• What the reports from Viktor Bout’s trial don’t say is—did anyone in the courtroom laugh?
“Osama bin Laden may be history’s greatest military strategist. He made Washington abandon its lofty moral ideals, forced the United States into a sea of debt and played a key role in pushing the United States off its pedestal of being the world’s supreme economic power. But ultimately, it is the collapse of the Soviet Union that is to blame.”
••• The view from Moscow.