Bert’s job in Afghanistan was managing a team of Afghans to work on the ground with farmers, government officials, NATO forces, and aid agencies to try and bring drug production under control in a country that produces over 90% of the world’s heroin. He lived and worked in Kandahar, in the middle of a war zone, as an official with the Ministry of Counter Narcotics. Over the course of the 13.5 months that he was there, 44 of our country’s soldiers died in Kandahar, along with hundreds of Afghans including several with whom Bert worked directly. Bert himself narrowly avoided being killed several times by suicide bombers, including one whose remains rained down on his office after detonating short of his target. Despite these challenges, his team helped reduce the heroin yield by 18% in Kandahar during the first year, and similar results are anticipated this year. Bert credits this achievement to the Afghan members of his team, who risked death by both working in counter-narcotics and by working with Westerners.

Bert Tatham was sentenced to 4 years in prison in Dubai after a search traces hashish in the seams of his clothing during a stop-over on his flight home.
You can read more here.

Good news from Afghanistan, and this is just a fraction;

1. Millions of girls are back in school with 400,000 new female students starting school for the first time this year;
2. Over 100,000 women benefited from micro finance loans to set up their own business;
3. Over a quarter of parliamentarians are women;
4. Over 7 million girls and boys are in school or higher education;
5. 83% of the population now has access to medical facilities, compared to 9 percent in 2004;
6. 76% of children under the age of five have been immunized against childhood diseases;
7. More than 4000 medical facilities opened since 2004;
8. Over 600 midwives were trained and deployed in every province of Afghanistan;
9. GDP growth estimates of between12-14% for the current year;
10. Government revenues increased by around 25% from 2005/06 to 2006/07;
11. Income per capita of $355, compared to $180 three years ago;
12. Afghanistan is one of the fastest growing economies in South-East Asia;
13. Over 4000 km of roads have been completed;
14. Work has begun on 20,000 new homes for Afghans returning to Kabul;
15. Over 1 billion square metres (roughly 32 km X 32 km) of mine contaminated land cleared;
16. 10 universities are operating around the country, against one (barely functioning) under the Taliban; and
17. 17,000 communities benefited from development programmes such as wells, schools, hospitals and roads through the Government’s National Solidarity Program (NSP).

Or think of it another way – 17 examples of the breath-taking incompetence/dishonsty of Jack Layton and the federal NDP.

An interview with Michael Yon (podcast);

“I see progress being made here now. I see the surge working, and it’s working faster than I actually thought it could.”

UPDATE Lots more – a new entry by Michael Totten

“This is not what I expected in Baghdad,” I said.
“Most of what we’re doing doesn’t get reported in the media,” he said. “We’re not fighting a war here anymore, not in this area. We’ve moved way beyond that stage. We built a soccer field for the kids, bought all kinds of equipment, bought them school books and even chalk. Soon we’re installing 1,500 solar street lamps so they have light at night and can take some of the load off the power grid. The media only covers the gruesome stuff. We go to the sheiks and say hey man, what kind of projects do you want in this area? They give us a list and we submit the paperwork. When the projects get approved, we give them the money and help them buy stuff.”
Not everything they do is humanitarian work, unless you consider counter-terrorism humanitarian work. In my view, you should. Few Westerners think of personal security as a human right, but if you show up in Baghdad I’ll bet you will. Personal security may, in fact, be the most important human right. Without it the others mean little. People aren’t free if they have to hide in their homes from death squads and car bombs.

Lots of photos, there.
If you were thinking of donating to SDA this month, consider sending it to Michael Totten or Michael Yon instead. They do the work – I just spread the word.
And if you can’t, then do the next best thing, and pass this link along to your friends. And your Member of Parliament.
And more from Mudville Gazette: Monday, 23 July 2007 – While you were sleeping.

All night I waited for a flight and was bumped again and again by soldiers on their way to places like War Eagle, Victory, and Fallujah. Finally I got on a manifest and gathered around a gruff barking sergeant with everyone else.
“I want you all back here in 20 minutes,” he bellowed. “First, I want you to go to the bathroom. Then I want to see you standing in front of me with a bottle of water.”
I went to the bathroom even though I didn’t have to. Then, as ordered, I pulled a cold bottle of water out of the fridge. We lined up with our gear and marched single file into the plane. I felt awkwardly out of place and also like I was in the army myself at the same time.
The plane was windowless and loud as 100 lawnmowers. I crammed pink foam plugs into my ears, strapped on my body armor, and seat belted myself into the side of the plane.
“Hang your bags on the hooks!” barked the sarge. “Hang them all the way up!”
“Don’t fall asleep,” said the soldier next to me. “When you see the rest of us grab our helmets, put yours on, too. We’ll be beginning the spiral dive into Baghdad.”

A great read by Michael Totten, from Baghdad.
He relies on reader donations to fund these trips, so consider hitting his paypal button while you’re there.

A fairly long piece by Pieter Dorsman on the political uncertainty that is Holland today;

[A]s rapturous and challenging the changes have been for the Dutch themselves, foreign media have equally stumbled to label the developments in that stable, liberal and prosperous haven of tranquility ever since three political icons disappeared from the scene in a highly unusual way. Pim Fortuyn, the gay professor turned conservative politician was fatally shot by an animal rights activist, outspoken moviemaker Theo van Gogh was killed by a gun and knife wielding jihadist and Somali immigrant and conservative-liberal parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali was more or less forced to pack up and set sail for a better and presumably safer life at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

Check it out. It should be especially informative for those who have been following the discussion on the Ayaan Hirsi Ali post below.

Adjusted for inflation. This takes a little time to load, but it’s pretty cool.

And the rejuvenation of a billion barrel oil field;

The Weyburn oil field located in south-east Saskatchewan has recovered to date almost 400 million barrels out of the 1.4 billion barrels originally in place. The field, over its 50 year history, has been at the fore front in Canada for applying new technologies to maximize oil recovery. Waterflooding, vertical well downspacing, water shut-offs and multi-lateral horizontal wells are some of the technologies successfully applied in Weyburn. In the year 2000 a CO2 miscible flood was implemented in the field. The CO2 flood is expected to recover an incremental 155 million bbls and extend the life of the reservoir for another 30 years. Implementation of the CO2 flood employs a unique pattern configuration comprising dual leg horizontal CO2 injectors and simultaneous water injection in nearby vertical wells. This unique configuration was tailored specifically to optimize recovery from the unique geology of the Weyburn Midale Beds. In addition to pattern configuration the operator, on behalf of the working interest owners in the field, is experimenting with significant infill development to reduce well spacing, increased injector to producer ratios as well as optimization of CO2 – water injection ratios. Through the use of these innovations, production from the field has increased to 30,000 BOPD, a rate not seen from this mature oil field since the early 1970’s.

More here.
Now, watch this…

Emails Glenn Reynolds;

“This is a very serious offensive kicking off in Iraq. The NYT realizes it’s serious, but nobody that I am seeing realizes just how big this is. Relatively massive.”

If you’re anywhere near a criminologist’s head at the moment, it’s advised that you take cover.

“Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it,” said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. “The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect.”
A 2003 study he co-authored, and a 2006 study that re-examined the data, found that each execution results in five fewer homicides, and commuting a death sentence means five more homicides. “The results are robust, they don’t really go away,” he said. “I oppose the death penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters) — what am I going to do, hide them?”
Statistical studies like his are among a dozen papers since 2001 that capital punishment has deterrent effects. They all explore the same basic theory — if the cost of something (be it the purchase of an apple or the act of killing someone) becomes too high, people will change their behavior (forego apples or shy away from murder).
To explore the question, they look at executions and homicides, by year and by state or county, trying to tease out the impact of the death penalty on homicides by accounting for other factors, such as unemployment data and per capita income, the probabilities of arrest and conviction, and more.
Among the conclusions:
# Each execution deters an average of 18 murders, according to a 2003 nationwide study by professors at Emory University. (Other studies have estimated the deterred murders per execution at three, five and 14).
# The Illinois moratorium on executions in 2000 led to 150 additional homicides over four years following, according to a 2006 study by professors at the University of Houston.
# Speeding up executions would strengthen the deterrent effect. For every 2.75 years cut from time spent on death row, one murder would be prevented, according to a 2004 study by an Emory University professor.

h/t

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, former Reagan speechwriter, on today’s dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial;

It is an appropriate time to be dedicating this memorial. It was 20 years ago this week that President Reagan gave his now famous Berlin Wall speech. A columnist in the New York Times recently noted that the foreign policy gurus of that era, as compared to the American people in general, have not acknowledged the significance of that forceful challenge by President Reagan to the Communist Party boss Michael Gorbachov to “tear down this wall.”
The columnist noted that even George Shultz did not mention the speech in his lengthy memoirs of his years as President Reagan’s Secretary of State. Well, let’s set the record straight. George Shultz and the foreign policy elite, including Collin Powell, adamantly opposed that speech. They did everything they could to pressure President Reagan not to take such a tough public stand against the wall. They insisted that it would re-ignite “ill will” and would be taken as an insult to Gorbachov.
They were wrong and President Reagan’s moral clarity and commitment to confronting evil, rather then ignoring it for diplomatic or political purposes, carried the day. Instead of antagonizing the Kremlin leadership, the speech convinced them that the wall had to come down and yes, when it did communism crumbled along with it. The foreign policy elite, smug and arrogant, would have prolonged the Cold War had they had their way.

More ;

The memorial, a 4.2-meter-tall bronze replica of the “Goddess of Democracy” statue built by Chinese students during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, was the brainchild of historian Lee Edwards and former ambassador Lev Dobriansky, who spent more than a decade raising nearly $1 million to complete the project on a site near the U.S. Capitol.
The dedication ceremony was held on the 20th anniversary of former President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 speech in Berlin in which he called on then-Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall that separated the city and had divided a continent since the end of World War II. Bush noted that the wall would finally fall two years later, liberating the people of Central and Eastern Europe and changing the world.
In all, as many as 10 million innocents perished at the hands of communism, Bush said, helping to make the 20th century “the deadliest in human history.”
“We’ll never know the names of all who perished, but at this sacred place, communism’s unknown victims will be consecrated to history and remembered forever,” he said.

VictimsofCommunism.org

Figures released by Germany’s Federal Statistics Office

… showed that the number of Germans emigrating rose to 155,290 last year – the highest number since the country’s reunification in 1990 – which equalled levels last experienced in the 1940s during the chaotic aftermath of the Second World War.
[…]
Stephanie Wahl, of the Institute for Economics, based in Bonn, said that those who are leaving Germany are mostly highly motivated and well educated. “Those coming in are mostly poor, untrained and hardly educated,” she added.
Fed up with comparatively poor job prospects at home – where unemployment is as high as 17 per cent in some regions – as well as high taxes and bureaucracy, thousands of Germans have upped sticks for Austria and Switzerland, or emigrated to the United States.
Yesterday, the country’swoes were underscored by a report which disclosed that areas of unemployment-wracked eastern Germany were populated by a “male-dominated underclass susceptible to far right ideology” because of a dramatic 25 per cent exodus of young women aged 18 to 29.
More than 18,000 Germans moved to Switzerland last year. The US was the second most popular destination with 13,245, followed by Austria with 9,309.
Switzerland already has a resident German population of 170,000. Its presence has even provoked a xenophobic backlash in the country’s tabloid press. Earlier this year, the Swiss newspaper Blick ran an anti-German campaign which spoke of a “German invasion” and quoted readers who claimed they found the German immigrants to be “arrogant and rude”. Many immigrants, however, say the benefits of lower taxes and pay up to three times higher than at home far outweigh the occasional xenophobic outburst.

And the “danger of trusting anything that a journalist says about a legal proceeding”.
Add to that “anything that a journalist says about gun crime statistics, or the atmosphere, or the mission in Afghanistan, or critics of the mission in Afghanistan, or White House employees or….”

ARBIL, Iraq (AFP) – In a blaze of pomp showcasing Kurdish military muscle, US forces handed over responsibility for security in Iraq’s three northern provinces to the Kurdish regional government on Wednesday […] The handover was followed by a parade of Kurdish soldiers, including an all-female martial arts display.

Via Gateway Pundit;

7 of 18 Iraqi Provinces now control the security and governmental operations in their region.
How many Americans do you suppose know that?

h/t

It’s a conspiracy on the part of Big Environment;

Let’s consider the effect of EPA vapor pressure mandates on the price of gasoline. Energy Security Analysis Inc. senior consultant Mark Routt analogizes vapor pressure in gasoline to fizziness in soda pop. In the winter more fizziness (high vapor pressure) means that when you turn the ignition on a cold morning it sparks the gasoline and your car starts. However, in the summer you want “flatter” gasoline (less vapor pressure) because fizzier gasoline evaporates on hot days and contributes to smog. While EPA regulations help reduce smog, they also make it more costly to produce gasoline with lower vapor pressure. Lundberg estimates that summer blends can cost between 3 to 15 cents more to make than winter blends, depending on the exact formulation, time and place. […] Routt suggests that the EPA relax its vapor pressure regulations allowing retailers to more slowly switch to summer blends. However, he doubts that this policy could ever be adopted since it would characterized by activists as “an attack on the environment.”
Every one of the six analysts I talked with pointed out that the federal ethanol mandate adds substantially to gasoline prices. Ethanol costs more per gallon than gasoline; it contains less energy per volume so a blend of 90 percent gas and 10 percent ethanol delivers 3 percent fewer miles per gallon; and ethanol has a higher vapor pressure which makes it even more expensive for refiners to meet EPA summertime vapor pressure maximums.
[…]
No new refineries have been built in the U.S. since the 1970s. Why? NIMBY, nobody wants an oil refinery in their neighborhood. Also, environmental regulations are much tighter than they used to be. Ritterbusch estimates that it would cost $5 to $7 billion and take 7 years to build a new refinery in the U.S. Routt says oil company executives who vividly recall the oil crash of the 1980s when refineries hemorrhaged money are reluctant to make such huge investments in a volatile energy market.

(Emphasis mine)
That well-known organ of big oil, New York Times;

Lawrence Goldstein, an energy analyst at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, an industry-financed group, has been warning for nearly a year that the government’s twin goals of encouraging refiners to increase production and promoting increased supplies of biofuels work against each other.
“These two policies are not complementary,” Mr. Goldstein said. “These policies are in conflict.”
In addition, Mr. Goldstein said, an emphasis on ethanol might lead to increased volatility in fuel prices.
“If we get a bad corn crop, we will end up paying for it at the pump and on the food shelves,” he said. “We are not buying security. We are increasing volatility.”

h/t

*

h/t Edmonton Sun’s Neil Waugh, who has more of the gory details.

Via Halls of Macadamia;

If identity theft is the huge problem the media says it is… maybe the phone company shouldn’t be allowing corporations to spoof other people’s phone numbers.

Ya think?

At Instapundit, another email from Michael Yon;

I cannot believe my eyes and ears in Anbar. Very quiet where I am. Did a foot patrol today with Iraqi Army and a couple of Marines. Local population was friendly. Have not heard a shot fired in anger in days. (Whereas before the sounds of war were nearly always in the air.)

More confirmation of earlier reports coming out of Anbar that local tribal leaders have turned on Al Qaeda.
Strategy Page;

So far this year, many more parts of central Iraq have been cleared of terrorists, and the remaining ones know they have to maintain their visibility to survive. Setting off several bombs a day keeps the terrorists in the news, even if the explosions take place in a smaller and smaller area of Iraq. The terrorists play more to the international media, than they do to anyone inside Iraq. The terrorists are already hated and feared throughout the country, even in Sunni Arab areas. There, the terrorists must increasingly divert resources to terrorize Sunni Arabs, and keep them in line. They are aided by Islamic conservatives, who see all the unrest as an opportunity to impose Taliban like rules on the population. If the terrorists accomplish nothing else, they will have shown how to manipulate the mass media, and divert attention from the true origins of the terrorists, and their objectives. It’s been a masterful job which, of course, the mass media will have no interest in examining anytime soon.

JD Johannes spent three weeks with the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team in Baghdad;

“Some people forget that the sectarian violence kicked off in 2005 as part a deliberate strategy by AQIZ. Too many people assume that Sunni and Shia in Iraq have been killing each other for centuries.
The war in Iraq is plagued by a Congress who lacks the information to cast a vote and a public who lacks the basic knowledge to take part in an opinion poll.
[…]
Is there hope for Baghdad? Yes. The additional U.S. forces from the surge are already showing limited signs of success. They are not the signs quantified by London or D.C. think tanks.
Every Battalion Commander I talked with gave me the same metrics to measure success–Commerce, people returning to their homes, essential services, kids playing soccer in fields they haven’t played on in 2 years, professionalization of the police and security services.
Those are things that do not fit well in an index and things a person can only see on the ground by going back to the same areas of operation every few months.

Lots more at both those links – plus this letter from Steve Miska, LTC, Infantry, Task Force Justice Commander.

Delta-Optimist;

Out of 1,000 English respondents, 76 per cent said commercial fishermen, whether they are First Nations or not, “should be subject to the same rules and should be treated equally by the law.”
The Privy Council, the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans commissioned Pollara to conduct the poll last July. The timing was important.
It was commissioned just 11 days after Prime Minister Stephen Harper wrote to a Calgary newspaper stating he opposed a racially divided fishery in B.C. Within a week, the bureaucrats managed to raise $22,600 to pay for the poll, and came up with several questions about the controversial native commercial fishery on the West Coast.
Delta-Richmond East MP John Cummins said bureaucrats were striving to get a particular answer to prove to the prime minister he was out of touch with the Canadian public. The results show those efforts backfired, the longtime MP said.
“They intended to use that to basically bring the prime minister to heel,” Cummins said.
Two of the poll questions asked respondents directly if they recalled reading or hearing about Harper’s comments on July 7.
Cummins was made aware of the poll by West Coast fishermen who received it by accident in an Access to Information request.
Phil Eidsvik, executive director of the B.C. Fisheries Survival Coalition, obtained the poll as well as a flurry of insider e-mails. Those e-mails show while the bureaucrats came up with the questions, they asked the polling company to review them. Pollara told the civil servants their questions were “leading,” showed “bias” and were “double-barreled.”
The questions were adjusted, but Cummins said they were still biased in favour of the native commercial fishing agenda.
“In spite of asking these leading questions, the public saw through it and said, ‘We don’t agree,’ so the bureaucrats buried the poll. I’m sure that poll was never shown to the PM,” Cummins said.

This little exercise in undermining the new boss is also illustrative of the “better public policy through opinion polling” mindset. I smell the ghost of Paul Martin.
Via Joel Johannesen. who has further thoughts on the problems posed for the Harper government by a public service stacked with anti-conservative bureaucrats.

This looks cool.
(In response to concerns expressed in the comments, the source is an ABC News tech writer.)

Michael Barone on the changing demographic of urban America;

Start with the Coastal Megalopolises: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago (on the coast of Lake Michigan), Miami, Washington and Boston. Here is a pattern you don’t find in other big cities: Americans moving out and immigrants moving in, in very large numbers, with low overall population growth. Los Angeles, defined by the Census Bureau as Los Angeles and Orange Counties, had a domestic outflow of 6% of 2000 population in six years–balanced by an immigrant inflow of 6%. The numbers are the same for these eight metro areas as a whole.
There are some variations. New York had a domestic outflow of 8% and an immigrant inflow of 6%; San Francisco a whopping domestic outflow of 10% (the bursting of the tech bubble hurt) and an immigrant inflow of 7%. Miami and Washington had domestic outflows of only 2%, overshadowed by immigrant inflows of 8% and 5%, respectively.
This is something few would have predicted 20 years ago. Americans are now moving out of, not into, coastal California and South Florida, and in very large numbers they’re moving out of our largest metro areas. They’re fleeing hip Boston and San Francisco, and after eight decades of moving to Washington they’re moving out. The domestic outflow from these metro areas is 3.9 million people, 650,000 a year. High housing costs, high taxes, a distaste in some cases for the burgeoning immigrant populations–these are driving many Americans elsewhere.
The result is that these Coastal Megalopolises are increasingly a two-tiered society, with large affluent populations happily contemplating (at least until recently) their rapidly rising housing values, and a large, mostly immigrant working class working at low wages and struggling to move up the economic ladder. The economic divide in New York and Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo.

The rest at Opinion Journal.