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KABUL (Reuters) - A senior Taliban commander in southern Afghanistan surrendered to Pakistani authorities and British forces killed another leader, dealing a "shattering blow" to the militant group's leadership, the British army said on Tuesday.
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Mullah Rahim, the top commander for southern Helmand province, gave himself up after British forces had killed two other Taliban leaders in little over three weeks.

Hours after his surrender, another senior Taliban commander, Abdul Rasaq, also known as "Mullah Sheikh," was killed in a British missile strike 15 km (9 miles) north of the town of Musa Qala in Helmand on Monday morning, the British army said in a statement. Three other insurgents also died.

Rasaq headed Taliban actions around Musa Qala and was active in the insurgency for a number of years, it said.

"The Taliban's senior leadership structure has suffered a shattering blow," British army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Robin Matthews said in the statement.

Musa Qala town holds a symbolic importance after Taliban fighters forced British troops out of the dusty opium-trading centre in late 2006. The Taliban then seized it in February last year making it the only town of any size held by the rebels.

Afghan, British and U.S. forces took back Musa Qala in an offensive in December but Taliban insurgents are still active around the town.

Elsewhere, U.S.-led coalition and Afghan forces backed by airpower killed or wounded more than 30 Taliban insurgents in fighting in the west of Afghanistan, a senior police official said on Tuesday.

Fighting broke out in the Bala Boluk district of Farah province on Tuesday, regional police chief Ikramuddin Yawar said.

"The toll might be more than 30 because the operation is ongoing," Yawar told Reuters.

SUICIDE ATTACK

A U.S.-led convoy was hit by small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades on Tuesday morning in Bala Boluk, a U.S. military spokesman said.

Air strikes were called in but no munitions were dropped. The U.S. military could not confirm if any Taliban were killed dead. International forces do not usually give casualty figures for insurgents.

In the capital, Kabul, a Taliban suicide bomber wounded five civilians when he blew himself up as he was challenged by police on Tuesday, the Interior Ministry said.

Taliban militants have launched some 100 suicide attacks so far this year, mostly targeting Afghan and international security forces but as many as 80 percent of their victims are civilians, security experts say.

The bomber struck in the morning in the Gozargah area of the capital, next to the walls of the historic tomb of Babur, the 16th century founder of India's Mughal dynasty. Only a leg of the bomber remained, lying on the ground, Reuters witnesses said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.

(Additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi, Yousuf Azimy and Sharafuddin Sharafyar; Writing by Jon Hemming and Jonathon Burch; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Live Vote
Is Democrat Barack Obama unfairly receiving more coverage than Republican John McCain? * 131284 responses
Yes, the media has a liberal bias. No one should be surprised by this.
79%
No, media coverage is based on newsworthiness. McCain is just not as newsy as Obama.
14%
Sometimes, but it's a long campaign. There weren't a lot of McCain complaints during Obama's problems with Rev. Wright.
6.3%
Not a scientific survey. Click to learn more. Results may not total 100% due to rounding.

I will reveal where the poll came from after I hear the leftwingnuts responses.

ony Blair calls mainstream media, "feral beast"
And they know they've been nailed.
By Mark Kilmer Posted in Culture — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Tony Blair critiqued the mainstream media today, and they are on solid defense. They are reacting badly, but they know they've been nailed.

The British Prime Minister was speaking of the Brit media – singling out The Independent -- but he could just have easily been addressing our own mainstream media [transcript]:

The reality is that as a result of the changing context in which 21st Century communications operates, the media are facing a hugely more intense form of competition than anything they have ever experienced before. They are not actually the masters of this change, they're in many ways the victims.

The media, Blair argues, can't help it. "The fault, dear Dan, lies in the stars not in ourselves that we are obnoxious twits." (The meter wasn't hurt too badly in the revision.)

Read On…

Tony continues:

The result, however, is a media that increasingly and to a dangerous degree is driven by "impact". Impact is what matters. It is all that can distinguish, can rise above the clamour, can get noticed. Impact gives competitive edge. Of course the accuracy of a story counts. But it is often secondary to impact.

It is this necessary devotion to impact that is unravelling standards, driving them down, making the diversity of the media not the strength it should be but an impulsion towards sensation above all else.

Why quibble over the cause? The Prime Minister has the symptom of the effect well stated. Because the angry scandal, not matter how contrived, plays well with the advertisers, it's what we get. And the public wants what the public gets.

And they want the tabloids. In Britain, there are broadsheets, newspapers that a printed similarly to the major national papers here in the United States and, indeed, to your local paper. (The Times of London, the Daily Telegraph, and the Guardian Unlimited [to Manchester?] are the largest.) In Britain, there are the glossy tabloids -- The Sun, The Daily Express, and the Daily Mail, etc. – with their celeb scandal what-are-the-royals-up-to-Fergie-Camilla outlook.

Blair seems them all under pressure to compete to produce the nastiest thus tastiest morsels to toss into the public maw to quench the appetites of the people and those who want to sell them stuff.

Broadsheets today face the same pressures as tabloids; broadcasters increasingly the same pressure as broadsheets. The audience needs to be arrested, held and their emotions engaged. Something that is interesting is less powerful than something that makes you angry or shocked.

The consequences of this are acute. First, scandal or controversy beats ordinary reporting hands down. News is rarely news unless it generates heat as much as or more than light.

And journalism becomes a farce. The New York Times has led the charge to victimhood on this one.

Second, attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgement. It is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial. Watergate was a great piece of journalism but there is a PhD thesis all on its own to examine the consequences for journalism of standing one conspiracy up. What creates cynicism is not mistakes; it is allegations of misconduct. But misconduct is what has impact.

Let us consider the War in Iraq. It could have served, perhaps, a wonderful purpose had our mainstream media questioned the President's various judgments regarding Iraq. A healthy national dialogue about what we were doing and how would have been good for the nation, but our mainstream media did not want to allow for one. They attacked the motives of the Administration at every turn, which is something the Democrats had to do by simple fact of being a clueless opposition. The media do not have that excuse, unless they are, too, a clueless opposition.

Tony Blair's list of consequences continues:

Third, the fear of missing out means that today's media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no-one dares miss out.

The media is the beast. This is not a case of individual reporters or organizations going on the attack; rather, they all think and act as one. And they hate. And they feed. I'm thinking now of Scooter Libby and Alberto Gonzales as two current wildebeests on this National Geographic Channel episode played out on the DC safari.

It's time for Number Four. Tony…

Fourth, rather than just report news, even if sensational or controversial, the new technique is commentary on the news being as, if not more important than the news itself. So - for example - there will often be as much interpretation of what a politician is saying as there is coverage of them actually saying it. In the interpretation, what matters is not what they mean; but what they could be taken to mean. This leads to the incredibly frustrating pastime of expending a large amount of energy rebutting claims about the significance of things said, that bears little or no relation to what was intended.

This is a large part of why the ratings are dropping for the network newscasts, of why newspaper subscription figures are dwindling. Over at Rathergate.com, we have a solution to the current ills of the mainstream media: Cut out the nonsense and just tell the truth, report the news. Period.

When you read this blog, you know you are getting opinion and analysis, and you know from where we come. You can pick from several scads of blogs to find what you want.

With the major media, we're told we are getting the news – period – but this news is laced with personal and/or organizational opinion, often mindless bilge water leaking from a ship of vacuity, navigating the oceans of banality.

No, there is good journalism and there are valuable journalists, and I am sure the Prime Minister agrees. They are the real pros, the ones who report what they've discovered with context but not with often ill-informed analysis and opinion influenced by mental diseases resembling rabies. (A real professional, in my estimation, is someone like Greg Palkot.)

Blair's speech goes deeper than all this, and I do recommend it [transcript] ( learned of the speech from a post by Curt at Flopping Aces.)

The surge appears to be working because:

1- the Iraqis know that Bush's term in office is coming to an end.

2- Obama's visit has confirmed this and given them hope for a better future and withdrawal of U.S. troops

As a democrat I have EVERY RIGHT to be ANGRY at the screw-ups of this administration.