Democracy for Vancouver

Al Qaida’s back in pre-9/11 fighting form, operating without fear or restraint along the Pakistan- Afghanistan border with the tacit support of Pakistan’s ISI, but somehow Iran is the world’s “most active” state sponsor of terrorism according to BushCo:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Al-Qaida has rebuilt some of its pre-Sept. 11 capabilities from remote hiding places in Pakistan, leading to a major spike in attacks last year in that country and neighboring Afghanistan, the Bush administration said Wednesday.

Attacks in Pakistan more than doubled from 375 to 887 between 2006 and 2007, and the number of fatalities jumped by almost 300 percent from 335 to 1,335, the State Department said in its annual terrorism report.

In Afghanistan, the number of attacks rose 16 percent, to 1,127 incidents last year, killing 1,966 people, 55 percent more than the 1,257 who died in 2006, it said.
…
More than 22,000 people were killed by terrorists around the world in 2007, 8 percent more than in 2006, although the overall number of attacks fell, the report says.

The report once again identifies Iran as the world’s “most active” state sponsor of terrorism for supporting Palestinian extremists and insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, where it says elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps continued to give militants weapons, training and funding.
…
In Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, al-Qaida and its affiliates remain “the greatest terrorist threat to the United States and its partners”…

A primary reason for its resurgence was a cease-fire the Pakistani government reached with tribal leaders last year, the report says….

“Numerous senior al-Qaida operatives have been captured or killed, but al-Qaida leaders continued to plot attacks and to cultivate stronger operational connections that radiated outward from Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe,” it says.

Nice work, guys. Fuck-ups this consistent, across the geopolitical board, can only be the perfect melding of Bush’s Oedipal codpiece complex, Doug Feith’s stupidity, Steven Hadley’s geographical ignorance, Cheney’s perverse bloody-mindedness, and Bill Kristol’s religio-cultural douchebaggery.

That, or all this violent chaos is deliberate, and brown lives come cheap when oil’s in the balance.

Either way, January 20 can’t come soon enough - for us and the rest of the planet.