ARS NOTORIA

Amrullah Saleh, former Afghan chief of Intelligence By Arif Salimi Yesterday we heard the news that the Afghan Chief of Intelligence has been forced to resign by Hamid Karzai. The reason is because he exposed a $500 million drugs deal that Karzai's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai carried out of Bagram airbase, with the approval and involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America. The rumour is that not only did Karzai want Amrullah Salah gone, but the US government also wanted him to go. And because he has been very effective in combating Al Qaeda and those elements of the Pashtun Taleban that support Al Qaeda, the Pakistani intelligence services, the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), who use these extremist groups to extend their influence in Afghanistan, also want him gone. The ISI tried to kill Karzai. When Salah found out that the ISI was behind the 4 assassination attempts on Hamid Karzai, the Pakistani government has denied it. Never

by JAMES TWEEDIE In military terminology, a 'bogey' is an unidentified aircraft. The word comes from 'bogeyman', meaning a mythical, evil spirit or creature. The combined armed forces of the US Army, the US Air Force, the US Navy and the US Marine corps lost some 9,000 aircraft in the Vietnam War, of which well over 5,000 were shot down in combat. About 60 per cent of the aircraft lost in combat fell to anti-aircraft artillery (flak) and small arms fire, 30 per cent to surface-to-air missiles and about two per cent to fighter planes of the Vietnamese People's Air Force (VPAF). The other eight per cent were victims of 'friendly fire'. In return, the US forces claimed to have destroyed 214 VPAF aircraft in aerial combat, all but four of those MiG fighters. These figures do not tell the whole story. The VPAF was always heavily outnumbered by the US air forces it fought against, and most of the fighters it operated were technologically less advanced than