Help Pakistani Refugees With a Text Message

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is asking Americans to help over 1 million refugees, concentrated mostly in the Swat Valley in Pakistan by texting the word "swat" to 20222 to make a $5 donation that will provide medicine, tents, food, and clothing through the United Nations Refugee program. Secretary Clinton asked for donations at the same time as announcing that the US will give $110 million in aid to Pakistan, which has nearly 2 million internationally displaced refugees since last August.

According to Spiegel today:

There are few witnesses to the battle currently raging in the Swat Valley. The Taliban threatens to kill all journalists who do not report in their favor. Newspapers and television stations depend on the statements issued by an army spokesman. The Pakistani military has also disabled all cellular phone networks in the combat zones.

The valley at the base of the Hindu Kush mountains, a place of peach groves and clear brooks, is abandoned after a week of the offensive. Last Friday, tens of thousands of people took advantage of an eight-hour lifting of the curfew in Mingora to flee, filling the streets with an endless flow of pedestrians, donkey carts, overloaded small buses, trucks and mopeds. The city of 350,000 had been bombed for days, and water and electricity had been shut off for more than a week. [SOURCE]

Pick up your phones, y'all!

Let's Give the Taliban A Big Bear Hug

On March 20th, in my article, Opening the Door To Iran, I said that the US needed to, "...decide if the Taliban is our friend or foe and act accordingly..."

My friend and fellow blogger Maxomai, rather bluntly points out, "Karzai wants the Taliban off the UN black list. As revolting as this idea is to me -- given the Taliban's history of being a force of tyranny, superstition, and oppression -- I have a hard time seeing how they're a national security threat now that they've disowned and are at war against Al Qaeda."

Today, at an international conference in the Hague, Secretary of State Clinton said, "We must also support efforts by the government of Afghanistan to separate the extremists of al Qaeda and the Taliban from those who have joined their ranks not out of conviction, but out of desperation,"

While I would love to pat myself and Maxomai on the back, and praise how well great minds think alike, I doubt that is what is going on. (And, I greatly believe M would feel the need to go wash his brain if I compared his mind to Hillary Clinton's.) What I believe it means is the same thing it always means: our enemy is becoming our friend because they now hate our bigger, meaner, enemy, too.