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No 1213 16th December 2003

If Saddam really was "responsible", in the broadest sense, from his hole in the ground for the Iraqis' resistance to the Western imperialist armed re-colonisation of their country, then the USA's Middle East warmongering plans can flourish further. But if imperialism's failures in Afghanistan two years on, for example, are any judge, then catching just one more especially unsavoury antagonist to Washington's manipulations will not rescue the West's monopoly-capitalist warmongering cause one whit more from the disaster it is facing. Treacherous tip-offs, lying "weapons of mass destruction" propaganda, and pro-Jewish imperialism muck-raking, are all losing issues if more debts and more bombs predictably fail to help the West curb Third World revolt against incurable economic crisis. Western warmongering racism is the problem, not anti-semitism

Internet reaction against the EPSR exposure of contemporary Jewishness as inseparable from its Zionist-imperialist misdeeds in the Middle East (see previous four issues, e.g.) predictably won't comment on the genocidal fascist tyranny wiping out the Palestinian homeland, or on the biggest brainwashing fraud of the modern era by which the vicious warmongering repression inflicted by the 'Axis' imperialist powers in WWII is presented as "different" from what US imperialism has brutally imposed in more than 400 wars and counter-revolutions since 1945, and its 'allies' (Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, etc, etc) have humiliated humanity with for more than 400 years.

There is no difference (see EPSR 1212), and ignorance of this reality undermines every single argument raised against the EPSR.

Take, for instance, the internet fan who claimed he could not read beyond the description (EPSR 1209) of the BBC as a "Nazi-CIA propaganda orifice".

The relentless massacre of Afghani village children, by the dozen, by F16 bombings because of "reports" of a "terrorist suspect" in a village building "somewhere" can be examined, for example.

This cynical state-terrorism is exactly the sort of thing German, Japanese, and Italian air-raids were accused of in WWII.

It is all copied from the civilian terror air blitzkrieg pioneered by British imperialism, first in the War of Intervention against the Bolshevik Revolution after 1917, and then against rebellion in Iraq in 1921-22 when Churchill & Co wanted to deliberately terrorise Iraqi villagers from joining the, of course, how the monopoly capitalist Jewish freemasonry's genocidal colonisation campaign to wipe out, then steal, the Palestinian homeland tries to terrorise-massacre all resistance into silent obedience.

Concentration camp torture was different?

Read the lengthy capitalist press admissions (EPSR 1212) about US imperialism's Guantanamo torture camp.

Mass genocide was different???

So what about the 4 million butchered in Indochina????

But 'Axis' methods were surely nastier?

So what is preferable about Agent Orange mass poisoning??

Who is being "eccentric" by arguing that deaths by dioxin or napalm are somehow "less terrible" than deaths by cyanide???

Or less "fascist"??

Or less "Nazi"??

So what then is the objection to likening US imperialism's secret-police counter-revolutionary crimes to those of the Gestapo, since their record of international murderous villainy is about 100 times as long as the Nazis achieved in 12 short years of their power compared to the hundred years and more which have taken American world-colonial domineering to the position of sole superpower??????

And since the BBC is forever the trusted voice of Western imperialist interests in general, and has willingly and knowingly kept such international lies going as, — that the fictional "Gulf of Tonking incident" justified the USA's launch of the Vietnam War; that the fictional "Recak massacre" in Kosovo justified the NATO blitzkrieg on Serbia; that Pinochet's overthrow of Allende was not a CIA coup; and that US imperialism had to invade Grenada because of totally fictional danger to some American medical students on the island; etc; etc; etc; etc; etc; etc; etc; etc; etc; etc; etc; etc; — then how is it that at the crucial immediate moment of any international crisis, when the BBC always automatically puts forward complete CIA propaganda nonsense with a totally straight face, only daring to risk a little bit of expose about 20 years later on average, it becomes "eccentric" or "unreadable" to remind anti-imperialists everywhere that this BBC is a TOTAL stooge of Western imperialist interests at key moments of history?????????????

But the really "hair-raising" stuff for the internet faint-hearts results from the post-1945 total Western brainwashing which pretends that the "free world" leadership only ever had good intentions for mankind.

To doubt these good intentions is worse than cursing God in church; and pride of place among these good intentions was, naturally enough, the founding of a homeland for the Jews in "Israel" (i.e. Palestine).

To doubt the goodness of this intention is far, far worse than blasphemy.

It is simply never the done thing to doubt the right of "Israel" to exist, or to doubt the benign purposes of Western imperialism in stitching up this armed colonial land-grab through the comatose United Nations stooge-shop and past the eyes of the brain-dead Stalinist Revisionists, paralysed by delusions of eternal "peaceful-coexistence".

99% of the internet squawking is arising purely from the EPSR not accepting the fundamental premise that everyone else has been working around, — namely that "obviously, Israel is here to stay".

The one certainty, however, is the exact opposite, of course.

This "Israel" is nothing but a current colonial land-theft in a new post-1945 era when precisely, these physical colonial empires owned by Western monopoly-capitalist and state interests are the one thing that has had to go (as no longer tolerable to Third World anti-imperialist sensitivities).

Past genocidal monstrousness, like the stealing of North America from its hundreds of native Indian nations, or the theft of Australia from the Aborigines, may still be doubted as ever likely to allow restitution to be made or much of the legitimate inheritance to be put back together again.

But the Palestinian nation was only racistly and genocidally evicted at the point of a gun in 1948 within living memory.

And that homeland destruction continues today not only within the clear indignant comprehension of the ousted Palestinian nation, but physically within their sight on this small crowded territory.

The 7 million Palestinians can peer through the barbed wire of their encampments, refugee hovels, or concentration camps, and actually see their own land being ploughed by the armed colonising interlopers.

And these are not like a few remaining Lokota Red Indians still complaining about loss of land rights in South Dakota, surrounded by 50 industrial states containing a white imperialist power of nearly 300 million population.

These 7 million Palestinians are, in the first place, a formidable political and fighting force in themselves.

But beyond that they are part of the 300 million strong Arab nation which only 700 years ago was an advanced civilisation, more powerful, capable, and sophisticated than European civilisation.

Moreover, it is an Arab civilisation which is becoming increasingly angry against Western domination of their region and the world, and an economic and political power which potentially is in a position to do a great deal about it.

On top of all that, the Palestinians are part of the Muslim religion, — the fastest growing, vastest, and most militant anti-Western philosophy on Earth with an endless number of axes to grind, and enough driving spirit to face down the decadent and criminal West.

This insulting "Israel" implantation must be in the running to be the most outrageous and ludicrous and doomed provocation ever attempted in the whole of world history.

It is only the innate mildness and servitude of the Muslim religion, and the cowed-by-Western-imperialism past 600 years defeats for the Arabs, which have kept the heroic Palestinian fightback against colonial genocide within the limits that it has so far been contained.

But the direction which this epic epoch-making struggle must take next is glaringly obvious.

Having fought overwhelming Zionist military superiority almost to a standstill in a steady escalation over the 55 years of the colonisation's existence, (having started effectively squashed completely flat, and hampered behind barbed wire and non-stop Zionist armed-harassment and economic-starvation ever since), the Palestinian Intifada is now poised to wage a damaging guerrilla war against Western imperialism that could be the start of a world history turning-point leading to the end of 800 years of European capitalist supremacy.

It is in reaction to this stark projected reality that the emotionalism of the Jewish freemasonry starts hysterically to scream "Anti-semitism", but only by hurling every scrap of objective reason out of the window.

It starts from a groundless abstract assumption that "naturally, the Jews have a right to a homeland just like every other nation", etc, — which is endlessly repeated with such conviction that all analysis of this decidedly "unnatural" proposition simply ceases, and anyone having the "bad taste" or "ignorance" to dispute it, automatically qualifies as "eccentric", "racist", and "anti-Semitic" at the very least.

Closer examination, however, reveals grotesque and dangerous flaws in this completely abstract "self-determination" supposition.

What "nation"??? Adherents to the Jewish freemasonry are from scores of different national and racial backgrounds.

Their native languages are English, French, Italian, Dutch, Arabic, Persian, Polish, Hungarian, etc, etc, and the one "national language" which was claimed, Yiddish, is basically German.

Having been inserted by Western imperialist armed might into the heart of the Arab Middle East, this bogus "nation" then invented a new language, Modern Hebrew, based on a regional tongue in ancient times which had been preserved museum-like in the liturgy of Judaism.

Racially, the "Jewish nation" runs from black Ethiopians to the fairest of fair Scandinavians. There are no distinct racial characteristics whatsoever to mark out the "Jewish nation" comprehensively.

As a justifiably very famous religious freemasonry, one of the most talented in history, the changing role, meaning, and significance of "Jewishness" is as endlessly complex as that of any other self-identifying and self-protecting group, such as the Catholics, for example, and other famous Christian sects, — all variously persecuting or, mostly, persecuted all through history for a variety of local/political/dynastic/economic reasons, etc, etc.

All other religious freemasonries reveal the same fiendishly complex sectarian patterns of ups and mostly downs.

But it is precisely this ludicrously "religious" issue which "inspires" the most outrageous' idiocies of all in the whole "Jewish question".

It is insane enough to start an armed colonial war on Arab soil by armed and financed Western imperialist fanatics at all in the latter half of the 20th century.

But to try to get away with doing so on the basis of an obscure backward tribal voodoo from 1,000 years ago which prayed to a God who gave a "promised land" to his "chosen people" is gobsmacking stupidity which has 1% at most of "self-determination" abstract rigmarole in it, but 99% of taking the piss.

(It is in fact a useful incidental pointer to a constant flaw in much of the "self-determination-rights" abstract absolutism which the moralising fake-'left' love to embroil themselves in, to the exclusion of all practical political, economic, and class war considerations within particular historical perspectives.

There is invariably some notional "self-determination-right" to be found somewhere or other inside every complex historical conflict.

But the Marxist-Leninist view was always that such "rights" might well need to give way to other perfectly workable solutions for the greater good of many other problems, in many cases.)

It might be reasonable to ask any state formed by the Palestinian Arab nation, the majority in the Holy Land for the last 1,500 years, if they would allow Jewish religious fanatics to satisfy their emotional and cultural longings and delusions by settling permanently in the territory.

To that extent, the fanciful abstract notion of a Jewish "self-determination right" might have some vague meaning.

But in practice, after 1948, the only possible reality about the arrival of 4 million Jews into Palestine was that they would inevitably become the most hated permanent warmongering provocation in the whole history of Western imperialist tyranny.

In which case every abstract scrap of "self-determination-rights" diversion is nothing but a despicable fascist propaganda joke on the Arab nation and on the whole world.

The Jews who are riled by the EPSR won't deal with any of these questions but pour out their abuse about "anti-semitism" on the basis of yet another rigmarole of completely abstract moralising nonsense.

What these self-righteous Jewish sneers about "racism" are in fact defending so indignantly is the idea of being Jewish.

Many of them of course make a point of not defending the Zionist tyranny practice of effectively putting the Palestinian nation into a fascist-military concentration camp.

But this is all a ludicrous fraud and philosophical-logical nonsense. Of course it is possible for all Jews to get on their high horse and convincingly shout "anti-semitism" when it is the idea itself of what it is to be Jewish (prayers and dreams of a Jewish homeland Utopia one day). But just let them or anyone else try to conjure up in practice any alternative way in which the "promised-land" ideal might be realised (other than the path which the one real "Israel" has had to follow in order to survive at all), and they will find it impossible.

The mere idea of the "promised land" can never be anything else other than a totally unrealisable fantasy.

The practice of a real "Israel" can never be anything other than the brutal fascist tyranny, genocidally expelling the Palestinian nation, that all rational minds recognise and despise.

And the halfway house "nicer" colonising plan to stick 7 million humiliated and permanently cowed and terrorised Palestinians into reservations on a semi-desert 20% of their original homeland, is possibly even more odious than the full settler plan to grab the lot, because it is so knowingly and blatantly hypocritical.

This crap infamous "two-state solution" is precisely the duplicitous get-out for these mouthy self-righteous defenders of just the idea of the "promised land", — all so self-consciously quickly posturing their "we-don't-defend-everything-the-Israeli-government-does" self-deception.

This "conscience" is a stinking philosophical fraud.

There is only one real "Israel".

It is a terrorising consciously-fascist tyranny and could never be anything else.

Either the return of everything to all of the Palestinians, all of them coming back to reclaim their homeland, — which would obviously mean an overwhelmingly majority Arab state, with just a tiny minority of religious fanatic Jews living on as best they could.

Or the effective eviction of the entire Palestinian nation only two-thirds accomplished so far.

The "two-state" fraud is just a sanitised version of total cleansing, — a permanent police-state tyranny over a few surrounded and isolated Palestinian reservations, just as the original North American inhabitants ended up.

As the EPSR has explained, the only "Jewish" view worth giving serious respect for henceforth, — (in the light of the actual fascist-warmongering tyranny that "Israel" could only turn out to be, given the historical circumstances of being an implanted armed Western colonisation in the era of anti-colonialism, and in the light of how US imperialism's wider international warmongering agenda is now using the emotive fraud of "defend Israel" as a useful stunt to justify ever-increasing repression of Arab and Muslim nationalism of every kind), — is the Jew who campaigns for the destruction of the state of "Israel" as soon as possible for the sake of humanity.

From admittedly limited practical observation, there do not appear to be any ordinary Jewish adherents anywhere who are openly calling for the wiping out of this catastrophic historical abortion called "Israel".

Given the history and character of this particular religious freemasonry (not much different from most others, in fact), this absence of any really serious "anti-Israel" Jewish movement is hardly surprising.

In which case come EPSR observations that the old distinction between "Jew" and "Zionist" has no further use, and is just a deliberately confusing deceit, henceforth.

And where does the "racism" come into all this????

It is brought in by the Jews themselves, as explained.

First they cry "racist", purely on the basis of uncomfortably hating how their defence of maintaining just the abstract idea of some "promised land" sometime, somewhere, has been exposed as just a piece of posturing self-righteous philosophical conceit.

Secondly, in practice behind this moralising about "defending the abstract self-determination right for a Jewish homeland, while not defending everything 'Israel' does in reality", lies an actual justification of this one and only real "Israel"

.....which just happens to be an openly racist state and a colonial tyranny, — one of the nastiest in all imperialist history.

The state's racist essence, is intact now quite uniquely horrific and disgusting by any standards in all modern history.

So who are the "racists"?????

And the invitation for the colonising members of the multinational international Jewish freemasonry to go back to their own nations in America, Britain, Poland, and Russia, etc, is nothing more than the simple logic of what is actually going to happen sooner or later.

These settlers are Americans, etc.

They might be learning Hebrew, but everything about them is totally American.

They are in the Middle East, colonising Palestine at the point of a gun, because of a deluded twisted mixture of Western imperialist warmongering fascist bullying plus the particular slant that their Jewish religious freemasonry adherence gives to things.

When their demented armed-colonising racket gets defeated, they will crawl back to America.

The humane civilised thing to do is invite them to go back home to America now, before their deluded imperialist nastiness brings even more trouble and grief to themselves and the world.

Either way, and whatever happens, anti-"Israeli" terrorism is bound to grow.

However regrettable some might think it, a Marxist historical view can only be that this spontaneous terrorist fightback has to happen first before a more organised revolutionary political movement is likely to get going towards building a positive revolutionary Palestine to put a certain end finally, once and for all, to this Zionist-imperialist nonsense.

In which case, the only progressive historical comment it is possible to make about something that is going to happen anyway, in the direction of even better future developments, is "let it happen".

The Marxist programme for a communist revolution would rarely be wishing to encourage the development of spontaneous terrorist anarchy; but it would never condemn it either, even though it might often have cause to regret its consequences, along with other "innocents".

But fighting capitalist society's battles for it, against a mess of its own making, would be a ridiculously self-defeating thing for any serious anti-imperialists to do.

If nothing can stop a wave of spontaneous terrorist hatred from being brought about by the injustice, brutality, and degeneracy of the capitalist system, prior to the class war crisis becoming irreconcilably deep and matured enough to lead on to the development of a real revolutionary answer to collapsing bourgeois-system decadence; then the sooner this terrorist spasm is got through, then the more rapidly that the really serious revolutionary progress to put an end to the whole capitalist ruling-class system (and not just an end to individual capitalist state officials or random bourgeois elect ors) can get under way.

The silly exhibitionist Burchill has seized this opportunity to strike yet another "controversially dynamic" pose, railing against "anti-Semites who deny the Jewish people the fundamental right to a homeland of their own, and conceal their race hatred as 'anti-Zionism'".

As an abstract idea, a homeland for the Jews is not a problem, if empty territory can be found somewhere, and that is what this religious freemasonry really wants.

The problems begin over where it is decided to put this homeland.

The Palestinian nation has been in Palestine for 1,500 years.

Hence the name.

Why must they be genocidally cleansed from their homeland???

The usual biblical bollocks answer would produce such worldwide chaos if every single "national/racial" identity on Earth resolved in the late 20th century to re-colonise the land they allegedly possessed 2,000 to 3,000 years earlier, that no sane person would ever put this nonsense forth as a serious argument.

Every country on Earth would have to be handed over to someone else.

The Jews of the world have had many ideas or offers for a homeland put to them throughout their history as a particular religious freemasonry, — a common historical phenomenon with many human communities who have regarded themselves as "special" in some way; but the Jews have mostly turned them down, preferring to remain Frenchmen, or Scandinavians, or Americans, or Italians, or Scots, or English, or Dutch, etc, etc, etc, etc.

Going back to Palestine started to get the nod due to specifically Western imperialist causes.

In the climactic era of European imperialist land-grabbing, in the approaches to the great World War I inter-imperialist conflict for a land-grabbing sort-out, the Austro-Hungarian empire produced Herzl, and the Russian empire produced Weizmann, who between them invented Zionism whereby Jewish worthies within imperial Europe could justify an empire of their own, obviously most easily now in the Middle East where the major imperialist powers were doing their most frenzied warmongering, backstabbing, and stooge "nation building", inventing "new" countries left, right, and centre against the weak Arabs in this oil-rich region with which to further all their rival dreams of monopoly-capitalist triumph.

It was the priceless contribution to British imperialism's warmongering ambitions by Weizmann, by now an outstanding chemist in Manchester, using bacteria to turn carbohydrates into acetone to make the crucial cordite for shells, thus beating the German naval blockade of imported materials,which got for Weizmann not the offered knighthood but the Balfour Declaration by the then Foreign Secretary to turn over some Near East land to the Jews for a "national home" after the war had been won.

So the real answer as to "why Palestine?" which the Burchills of this world will never admit, is because the Palestinians are kicked-around Arabs who had never achieved much by the way of statehood.

In other words, it is the reasoning of the likes of Burchill which is the racism, pure NAZI racism, beating the Palestinians out of their homeland just because they are weak enough to be booted around, — by the Turks for hundreds of years, then by the British, and finally by the Jewish religious freemasonry representatives of Western imperialist interests in general.

This fascist "might is right" mentality is covered up by the crap of Judaic religious legend which decrees that "the chosen people" shall live in "God's promised land".

It is routine in 100s of religious legends of the nations of aborigine North America, for example, that their eternal "promised land" for that particular "blessed nation" would forever be Long Island, say, or Manhattan (an area about the size of occupiable Palestine, now populated by 20 million highrise New Yorkers.)

But although this genocidal ethnic cleansing is less than 400 years old, and the wailing against this monstrous barbarity and cruelty can still be heard in the heartbroken Indian nations to this day, singing of their lost ancestral lands, — neither Burchill nor any of the flawed heroes she quotes as pro-Zionist, are ever heard scolding the planet for being racist fascist degenerates for not going into battle to return all of North America to those it belonged to.

But, of course, the celebrity shits of this world like Burchill do not know any "in-crowd" Red Indians to suck up to in British celebrity society, unlike all the talented, successful, and prominent Jews around.

So although the "promised land" idiocy is at least 1,500 years redundant, and not a mere 400 years, as in the great Algonquian nations case, all brain-dead instinctive adherents of the imperialist status-quo everywhere will think it a smart maverick "insider" strategy to come out strongly for the Jews and "Israel" just when more conventional petty bourgeois minds are beginning to get worried about the whole stinking Nazi-blitzkrieg project to blast the Palestinians out of Palestine as the benchmark for blasting all other "terrorist troublemakers" out of everywhere else all round the Middle East, the West's neo-colonial warmongering anti-crisis strategy which is facing DEFEAT, — as even pro-imperialist media admit below.

Build Leninism.

EPSR supporters.

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But, according to his soldiers and the local militiamen the US hires to fight alongside them, Cpt Croot was not quite telling the truth. Last month a special force operative, Special Sergeant Paul Sweeney, was killed and his interpreter was wounded in a Taliban ambush at Musa Qaleh, 30 miles north of Gereshk. More than 150 American special forces, including CIA paramilitaries, are now combing the area "to settle the score", as one soldier in Gereshk put it.

Three days earlier the corpses of two Afghan informers were brought to the US special force base, with bullet wounds to the head. The killing followed a battle between America's local allies and Gereshk's police force in which around 40 civilians were killed, according to officials in the town.

The battle began after Gereshk's police chief shot dead the militia's leader, Mohamed Edris. The militiamen said he had been killed because he had captured 22 suspected Taliban members for the Americans in the past six months.

Jalil Ahmed, a militiaman, said: "Ninety per cent of the people here used to work in the Taliban government. Of course they tell the Americans they're glad that they're here; but it's not true. They are not happy; they don't want the Americans here."

America's elite soldiers also know this. "As soon as we leave the base, we see lights flashing down the highway for miles," one senior officer said. "Whenever we enter the town the horns start hooting. The enemy intelligence network is on top of every move we make."

Across impoverished southern and eastern Afghanistan, the Taliban's tribal homeland, the same desperate pattern is emerging. Military analysts and aid agency bosses in Kabul say America's two year military campaign has failed to root out the Taliban or to bring peace.

"The Taliban are getting stronger; they're regrouping, reorganising, and we're getting a lot of fire right now," said Sergeant Ken Green, a National Guardsman seconded to US special forces. "We've racked up over 1,000 kills in just the last five weeks, mostly by air, putting B-52s over those bastards and bombing the hell out of them."

This week the US launched its biggest ground attack yet against the Taliban, into the mountains of south-eastern Afghanistan. Codenamed Operation Avalanche, the attack is expected to involve 2,000 of the 10,000 US troops stationed in the country.

According to Pentagon officials in Kabul the 10,000 US forces in Afghanistan, and their 170 international allies, have been attacked more times in the past three months than in the previous 12. Officially, 18 American soldiers have been killed this year and 20 wounded, mostly along the border with Pakistan, where the Taliban's shadowy leaders are believed to have found refuge.

"We're trying to get the country to a stable point, and part of that is you have to kill the bad guys," Cpt Croot said.

Yet the "bad guys" keep coming. And American troops are also killing civilians, including 15 children in air strikes in southern Afghanistan in the past week.

The problem, say the same analysts in Kabul, is twofold. First, driven by the US department of defence, America has concentrated on killing and capturing its enemies to the cost of delivering order and development. Washington's offer of $1.2bn (£69m) in aid looks less generous when set against the annual $l0bn cost of its military campaign.

And with few aid agencies now operating in southern Afghanistan, after 15 aid workers were killed in Taliban attacks, little aid money is likely to be spent there. The UN has withdrawn foreign staff to Kabul and forbidden them from walking in the city or even eating in its restaurants.

Second, analysts say Washington's military campaign is failing. To seek out its enemies the US relies heavily on local allies such as the unruly militiamen in Gereshk.

Many analysts suggest that America's local allies are not impartial professionals. "US forces in the field have a very sketchy understanding of the political environment they're operating in,"said Vikram Parekh of the International Crisis Group, a thinktank.

"They've relied on some extremely compromised intelligence from their local allies, and in the process exacerbated existing rivalries that have nothing to do with the Taliban."

"The truth is, are a bunch of Americans, or Brits or French, going to catch the bad guys? No, their intelligence network is amazing," Capt Croot said. "Almost every contact we have with them is a chance contact, and it's usually started by them."

Asked whether he expected to defeat the Taliban, he said: "Probably not, but that goes for most of these terrorist groups — you can't defeat them."

 

In a report released yesterday, the UN compared the current security situation in Afghanistan with that which gave rise to the Taleban in the first place, when the instability of the Mujahidin administration sent people into the arms of those who promised them peace.

Just as then, the Taleban is once again strengthening, spreading its influence further and further north towards Kabul. In remote, dusty villages across the south and east, no one questions who is stopping the aid getting through.

In the parched village of Sangesar, birthplace of Mullah Omar, the Taleban leader, villagers are hard-pressed to think of any great change that the fall of their former favourite son has brought.

"The Government promised us the world and yet we still have nothing," Abdul Gul, 35, a farmer said. "They do not support us and we do not support them." The nervousness among the assembled villagers is palpable when asked if them still support the Taleban.

Taleban fighters are active in the rocky mountains just miles from here and intelligence officials say that this is one of many villages they effectively control, if not during the day then at least at night.

"We will support anyone who helps us," Mr Gul said enigmatically.

Disenchantment with the coalition forces and their often heavy-handed techniques, witnessed this week in the killing of 15 children in airstrikes, have also garnered support on which the Taleban can rely. "The military activities of the coalition have delivered people to the Taleban," Vikram Parekh of the International Crisis Group said.

"They haven't done anything affirmative at all, worse when you look at these attacks on civilians. That lends the Taleban a powerful legitimacy as a force fighting to throw foreign forces out of the country."

That a supposedly defeated force should be able to rise so dramatically from the ashes comes as no surprise to those in the know: there were no ashes.

"They were never defeated," Nick Downie, the head of ANSO, a body which monitors the security situation for aid organisations said. "They tactically withdrew, regrouped, recruited, retrained and re-equipped."

That was partly made possible by the support of their allies in the Pakistani intelligence services who gave them a safe haven across the border, training camps in which to induct new recruits and funds for satellite phones and motorbikes to launch operations.

What has changed in recent months, intelligence officials say, is that while the training camps and safe havens remain, the Taleban are no longer merely running across the border and back again but operating inside Afghanistan for long periods, with the support of the local population, be it out of fear or fervour. The potential that gives them to launch attacks, security officials say, is devastating.

One recent report on the elections predicted that if the current security situation does not improve, voter registration would be impossible in a third of the country, all in the Pashtun southeast.

The pressure to hold the elections, however, is great from all sides, both from the United States, which needs to prove its intervention has been a success, and from President Karzai, who is anxious not to appear to be clinging to power without a popular mandate.

"This the most difficult transition I've ever seen in 20 years of election experience," Mr Austin said. "It's not a post-conflict situation. We're doing this in the middle of a war."

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