Azizullah, the serious-minded son of a Pakistani farmer, yearned for martyrdom, his family said. This week the Taliban made his wish come true.The zealots inspired him to jihad, trained him to shoot and dispatched him to fight the infidel Americans across the border in Afghanistan. So it was fitting that after he died last Sunday night, trapped under a hail of American firepower, that a procession of black-turbaned men brought him home.

“He always wanted to die like this, a heroic death. We are very proud of him,” said his brother, Gul Nasib, a solemn looking man with a drawn face, at their home in Bagarzai Saidan, a village on a yawning plain in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. The Afghan border lay 30 miles north.

Azizullah died in Panjwayi, a violent district of Kandahar province where US A-10 “warthog” planes pounded a religious school filled with Taliban. The Americans claimed to have killed up to 80 fighters; yesterday a human rights group said 34 civilians perished too.

The battle was the climax of Afghanistan’s bloodiest week since 2001. A succession of firefights raged across Kandahar and Helmand, where 3,300 British troops are being deployed as part of an ambitious Nato mission. By yesterday an estimated 339 people were dead, most of them Taliban fighters like Azizullah.

But the Taliban nerve centre is allegedly 30 miles south in the provincial capital Quetta, which a British officer, Colonel Chris Vernon, recently described as “the major headquarters”.

Once a British colonial garrison town, Quetta has long been a home to spies, smugglers and fighters. During the 1980s it was a base for Afghan mujahideen battling Soviet troops inside Afghanistan.

Diverted western aid, such as American vegetable oil and United Nations sheeting, are on sale in the main bazaar. For those interested, so are guns, heroin and hashish smuggled across the border from Afghanistan.

The Taliban move through the town like a dark whisper. Yesterday morning in Pashtunibad district, small groups of young men with kohl under their eyes and silky white or black turbans on their heads strolled between the vegetable stalls and clothes traders. By midday many had pushed into the city’s mosques, where preachers dished up the usual fiery fare.

The Taliban’s true strength, however, is felt across the border. Over the past six months the insurgents have ratcheted up their campaign to overthrow President Karzai’s western-backed government – an idea that once appeared quixotic but has now acquired some potency. At least 32 suicide bombs and almost daily roadside bombs so far this year reveal an enemy that is better organised, funded and motivated than ever before

“It hasn’t been this bad since 2001,” said one westerner with several years’ experience in Kandahar. “And I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

Take the time to read the whole article. This is just an excerpt. You won’t see anything like it on Fox News. You may not see anything like it in your local paper, either.

I have to wonder — when our fellow Americans have obviously concluded the process that brought our nation into further disrepute and contempt is flawed and corrupt — wouldn’t you think they’d look around a bit and seek alternative sources of information? Sources with a better reputation than lying politicians and lapdog media?

The whole world was behind us when we responded to 9/11. Now, that everyone has seen how incompetent, greedy and grasping that “solution” has been, that world reacts with revulsion to politics as usual in the US. I’m afraid that shortsighted American voters will simply accept this week’s excuses from the same crowd who led them down the path to failure in the first place.