Failure Of Will

Afghanistan was supposed to be the "good" war. The one that even the left supported, at least intellectually. The one that Europe was backing, unlike Iraq. Only NATO members are turning a deaf ear on pleas from the NATO commanders for 2,000 more troops to help stifle the Taliban attacks in the South.

THE political head of Nato appealed yesterday for alliance members to provide hundreds more troops for the mission in southern Afghanistan.

With most of the fighting burden falling on the shoulders of the British, US, Canadian and Dutch troops in the South, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Secretary-General of Nato, said that some countries had failed to live up to their promises on troop numbers.

In an interview with the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, he said that he could not accept a scenario in which Nato members would fail to supply the necessary troops. Alliance foreign ministers will meet in New York next week to discuss the crisis.

Mr de Hoop Scheffer said: “I am calling for alliance solidarity because some nations are carrying more of the burden than others.” He was speaking out after The Times revealed that many Nato members had made it clear they had no intention of sending more troops. General James Jones, the American Supreme Allied Commander Europe, has asked for another 2,500 soldiers for southern Afghanistan.

This is a failure of will and a shortsighted policy. Failure now would plunge Afghanistan into another nightmare. Is the West so diseased now that they will abandon people to groups like the Taliban? Will they walk away from a commitment to these people. The old saying, "In for a penny, in for a pound" applies here. You cannot walk away from something like this once started.

More in this AP article.

A Drop In The Ocean

Australian authorities are investigating a man over his alleged involvement in an operation that sent over 2 billion spam emails in a single year, most promoting Viagra. Dutch authorities tipped off the Australians after discovering that the man had rented 35 servers from a company in the Netherlands for no other purpose than to pump out the spam, day in, day out. But the 2 billion spam emails barely scratches the surface of the problem.

Experts say that's a drop in the ocean compared to the number of spam e-mails sent globally each year, and the system he used probably wasn't very sophisticated.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority began investigating the man, whose identity was not immediately released, after receiving a tip-off from authorities in the Netherlands in May last year.

Danyel Molenaar, a project manager for the Dutch Independent Regulator of Post and Telecommunications, said the man had rented 35 servers for around 14,000 Australian dollars (US$10,493; euro8,256) each per month from a small Internet service provider in the Netherlands to carry out the alleged spam campaign.

"These 35 servers were used just for sending spam day-in, day-out for at least a year, probably longer," Molenaar said Wednesday. "This operation probably sent out billions and billions of e-mails."

Australia has some of the toughest laws in the world against spamming, the notoriously hard-to-stop practice of flooding as many inboxes as possible with unwanted sales messages in the hope some of the receivers will reply.

Under Australia's Spam Act of 2003, it is illegal for Australian residents to be involved in the sending of unsolicited commercial e-mails, even if they are generated from outside the country.

If the man is found guilty of violating the anti-spamming law, he could be fined quite a large sum of money. I'd suggest a more fitting punishment, however. Print out the 2 billion spam emails.

And make him eat them.

Holy Aristophanes, Batman!

In a new move to curb gang warfare, the wives and mistresses of gang member in Pereira, Colombia have turned to a very old idea. Stealing a page from the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes, the women are refusing to have sex with their partners until they give up the violence that has plagued the city.

Fretting over crime and violence, girlfriends and wives of gang members in the Colombian city of Pereira have called a ban on sex to persuade their menfolk to give up the gun.

After meeting with the mayor's office to discuss a disarmament program, a group of women decided to deny their partners their conjugal rights and recorded a song for local radio to urge others to follow their example.

"We met with the wives and girlfriends of gang members and they were worried some were not handing over their guns and that is where they came up with the idea of a vigil or a sex strike," mayor's office representative Julio Cesar Gomez said.

"The message they are giving them is disarm or if not then they will decide how, when, where and at what time," he told Reuters by telephone.

The women call it the "crossed legs" strike. There were 480 murders in Pereira last year attributed to gang warfare.

Work On Conserving Hunley Continues

Scientists have removed the rear hatch of the recovered Confederate submarine HL Hunley. The hatch was found to be locked from the inside, an indication that the crew did not panic or try to escape the submarine. The front hatch, where the submarine's commander, Lieutenant George E. Dixon, had his station, was found to be unlocked, however, creating another mystery.

The 40-foot, hand-cranked sub, the first in history to sink an enemy warship, sank off Charleston after sending the Union blockade ship Housatonic to the bottom on Feb. 17, 1864.

The eight Hunley crew members went down with the sub.

The Hunley has two towers with hatches but the rear hatch apparently was locked. After it was removed from the sub, which is in a conservation tank at a lab in North Charleston, the hatch was taken to the lab for X-rays.

The way the sub was configured, most of the crew would have had to have opened that hatch and escaped through the back tower.

The fact it was locked indicates the crew didn't sense an emergency in the last minutes of the sub, said state Sen. Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston and chairman of the South Carolina Hunley Commission.

"It ends any speculation that there was panic on board," he said.

Earlier this summer, scientists found that the forward hatch, where Capt. George Dixon would have been piloting the craft, was unlocked.

It's unclear whether that might have been an attempt to escape or simply bring more air into the submarine. Scientists have also speculated it may have simply been damaged while the submarine sat on the ocean floor for 136 years.

"I don't think there was any attempt to escape the submarine that night," McConnell said. "Any attempt to get out of the submarine would have been to the back."

The work on conserving the recovered Hunley has been ongoing for six years. The recovered remains of the entire crew were buried in 2004. Fittingly, they were all buried together next to others who had died during testing of the Hunley.

The Friends of the Hunley organization has a website with lots of pictures, information and current news on the conservation efforts here.

“We Were Right And The Doctors Were Wrong.”

The words of Pat Flores, the mother of George Melendez, a severely brain damaged man who doctors once described as a vegetable. After being given the sleeping pill Ambien (zolpidem), he is able to talk with his parents and is greatly improved. It all came about through an accidental discovery.

For three years, Riaan Bolton has lain motionless, his eyes open but unseeing. After a devastating car crash doctors said he would never again see or speak or hear. Now his mother, Johanna, dissolves a pill in a little water on a teaspoon and forces it gently into his mouth. Within half an hour, as if a switch has been flicked in his brain, Riaan looks around his home in the South African town of Kimberley and says, "Hello." Shortly after his accident, Johanna had turned down the option of letting him die.

Three hundred miles away, Louis Viljoen, a young man who had once been cruelly described by a doctor as "a cabbage", greets me with a mischievous smile and a streetwise four-move handshake. Until he took the pill, he too was supposed to be in what doctors call a persistent vegetative state.

Across the Atlantic in the United States, George Melendez, who is also brain-damaged, has lain twitching and moaning as if in agony for years, causing his parents unbearable grief. He, too, is given this little tablet and again, it's as if a light comes on. His father asks him if he is, indeed, in pain. "No," George smiles, and his family burst into tears.

It all sounds miraculous, you might think. And in a way, it is. But this is not a miracle medication, the result of groundbreaking neurological research. Instead, these awakenings have come as the result of an accidental discovery by a dedicated - and bewildered - GP. They have all woken up, paradoxically, after being given a commonly used sleeping pill.

Across three continents, brain-damaged patients are reporting remarkable improvements after taking a pill that should make them fall asleep but that, instead, appears to be waking up cells in their brains that were thought to have been dead. In the next two months, trials on patients are expected to begin in South Africa aimed at finding out exactly what is going on inside their heads. Because, at the moment, the results are baffling doctors

It is quite a long article, but this is stunning news. The drug has been tested haphazardly at this point, but about 60% of those given the medication show improvement. The drug may be even more useful in those less severely damaged. A clinical study is about to get underway. Doctors have absolutely no idea why this is working the way it does.

The debate about when to remove people from life support just got a lot more complicated.

Why We Have To Finish The Job

The Washington Post has an article that explains exactly why we cannot abruptly pull out of Iraq. One of the top aides to Moqtada al Sadr tells the reporters that as soon as the US pulls out, a bloodbath will commence.

NAJAF, Iraq — In a shabby but spotless living room in the holy city of Najaf, a top deputy of Shiite Muslim leader Moqtada al-Sadr quietly sketched out his vision of the Iraq to come, after the Americans withdraw.

First, "there will be a civil war," said the aide, Mustafa Yaqoubi, as his three young children wandered in and out of the room. The rising violence and rivalries under the American occupation make a shaking-out all but inevitable once foreign forces go, Yaqoubi said. "I expect it."

"No matter the number of people who would lose their lives, it is better than now," he added. "It would be better than the Americans staying."

In other words, a precipitous withdrawal is a vote for genocide. I would like nothing better than to see our troops home. I can think of nothing worse than to negate their sacrifices by abandoning Iraq to genocidal Islamists. 

UPDATE: In comments, Blackhawk points to this Winds of Change post by Callimachus. The frustration of the people who are doing difficult and dangerous jobs over in Iraq, just to end up watching the media ignore progress and amplify defeatism is obvious. Opinion in the US is being manipulated by poor reporting from Iraq.