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Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal stepped off the whirring Black Hawk and headed straight into town. He had come to Garmsir, a dusty outpost along the Helmand River in southern Afghanistan, to size up the war that President Obama has asked him to save. McChrystal pulled off his flak jacket and helmet. His face, skeletal and austere, seemed a piece of the desert itself.
He was surrounded by a clutch of bodyguards, normal for a four-star general, and an array of the Marine officers charged with overseeing the town. Garmsir had been under Taliban control until May 2008, when a force of American Marines swept in and cleared it. Since then, the British, then the Americans, have been holding it and trying, ever so slowly, to build something in Garmsir — a government, an army, a police force — for the first time since the war began more than eight years ago.
The Marines around McChrystal, including the local battalion commander, Lt. Col. Christian Cabaniss, looked surprised, even alarmed, when McChrystal removed his protective gear. But as the group walked the rutted streets into Garmsir's bazaar, they began taking off their helmets, too.
"Who owns the land here?" McChrystal asked, peering up the street and into the shops. "Is it owned by the farmers or by landlords?"
It was the sort of question a sociologist, or an economist, would ask. No one offered an answer.
"If you owned 200 acres here, would you live on it, or would you live somewhere else?" McChrystal asked.
The entourage entered the bazaar. The Afghans sensed that an important American had arrived, and they began to gather in groups inside the stalls. Then the general stopped and turned.
"What do you need here?" McChrystal asked.
A translator turned the general's words into Pashto.
"We need schools!" one Afghan called back. "Schools!"
"We're working on that," McChrystal said. "Those things take time."
McChrystal walked some more, engaging another group of Afghans. He posed the same question.
"Security," a man said. "We need security. Security first, then the other things will be possible."
"That is what we are trying to do," McChrystal said. "But it's going to take time. Success takes time."
The questions kept coming, and the answer was the same. After a couple of hours, McChrystal put on his helmet and flak jacket, boarded the Black Hawk and flew to another town.
Success takes time, but how much time does Stanley McChrystal have? The war in Afghanistan is now in its ninth year. The Taliban, measured by the number of their attacks, are stronger than at any time since the Americans toppled their government at the end of 2001. American soldiers and Marines are dying at a faster rate than ever before. Polls in the United States show that opposition to the war is growing steadily.
Worse yet, for all of America's time in Afghanistan — for all the money and all the blood — the lack of accomplishment is manifest wherever you go. In Garmsir, there is nothing remotely resembling a modern state that could take over if America and its NATO allies left. Tour the country with a general, and you will see very quickly how vast and forbidding this country is and how paltry the effort has been.
And finally, there is the government in Kabul. President Hamid Karzai, once the darling of the West, rose to the top of nationwide elections in August on what appears to be a tide of fraud. The Americans and their NATO allies are confronting the possibility that the government they are supporting, building and defending is a rotten shell.
In his initial assessment of the country, sent to President Obama early last month, McChrystal described an Afghanistan on the brink of collapse and an America at the edge of defeat. To reverse the course of the war, McChrystal presented President Obama with what could be the most momentous foreign-policy decision of his presidency: escalate or fail. McChrystal has reportedly asked for 40,000 additional American troops — there are 65,000 already here — and an accelerated effort to train Afghan troops and police and build an Afghan state. If President Obama can't bring himself to step up the fight, McChrystal suggested, then he might as well give up.
"Inadequate resources," McChrystal wrote, "will likely result in failure."
The magnitude of the choice presented by McChrystal, and now facing President Obama, is difficult to overstate. For what McChrystal is proposing is not a temporary, Iraq-style surge — a rapid influx of American troops followed by a withdrawal. McChrystal's plan is a blueprint for an extensive American commitment to build a modern state in Afghanistan, where one has never existed, and to bring order to a place famous for the empires it has exhausted. Even under the best of circumstances, this effort would most likely last many more years, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and entail the deaths of many more American women and men.
And that's if it succeeds.
A few days after McChrystal filed his report, I sat down with him in his headquarters in Kabul. He seemed upbeat and relaxed. The report was still secret — it hadn't yet leaked to the public. The ensuing furor was still to come, as was talk that McChrystal was considering resigning, which he was forced to publicly dispel. The atmosphere was not tense — not yet. Only urgent.
"I took this job because I was asked to take it, and because it is very, very important," McChrystal told me. "Admiral Mullen" — head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — "specifically said to me: 'You go out, you decide what needs to be done, and you tell me whatever you need to do that. Don't constrain yourself because of politics. You tell me what you need.' "
I asked him about Obama.
"I didn't get any assurances from anyone that I would be given any amount of time," McChrystal said. "I didn't get any assurances from anyone that I would be given any amount of resources. I didn't ask for any assurances."
For a moment, McChrystal paused.
"I don't feel like the lonely man in the arena," he said, "with all the pressure on my shoulders."
THE MARINES WERE walking along the sandy road when the Afghans lined up to watch the bomb.
The Marines, members of Echo Company of the Second Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, had plodded through a mile of sodden cornfields in the heat of Helmand Province and climbed a rock promontory to an observation post once manned by soldiers of the Soviet Union. They arrived in early July as part of the big push ordered by President Obama; General McChrystal had visited their command post in Garmsir, 12 miles up the road, three days before.
The Marines had been in plain view for more than two hours. And when they moved down from the old Soviet lookout and walked up the dirt path that runs alongside the hamlet of Mian Poshteh, the Afghans started to come out.
At first, a lone man walked along the edge of one of Mian Poshteh's mud-brick houses. Then he stopped and turned and stood, watching. Then another man, this one in an irrigation ditch, stuck his head up over the ledge. A pair of children stopped playing. They turned to watch.
"Something's going down," Sgt. Jonathan Delgado said. He was 22 and from Kissimmee, Fla.
"Watch that guy," said Lance Cpl. Joshua Vance, pointing. He was also 22, from Raleigh, N.C.
Two more Afghans arrived. They stopped and stood and looked at a spot just ahead of the Marines. A man on a motorcycle drove past, driving slowly, turning his head. Then the bomb went off. It had been buried in the path itself, a few feet under the sand, a few feet in front of the Marines.
The blast from the bomb was sharp and deep, and a dirty cloud shot up a hundred feet. Waves from the blast shot out, toward the village and toward us. Ten Marines at the front of the line disappeared.
"We're hit! We're hit!" Delgado shouted, and everyone ran to the front.
Marines began staggering out of the cloud. They were holding their ears and eyes.
"God, I'm still here," Cpl. Matt Kaiser said, rubbing his ears. Kaiser had been at the front, sweeping the ground with a mine detector. He was from Oak Harbor, Ohio. "I'm still here."
"No one's hit," Delgado said. "Jesus, no one's hit."
The rest of the young men staggered out of the cloud while the Marines trained their guns on Mian Poshteh.
The Afghans were gone.
"My bell's rung pretty bad," Kaiser said. He was shaking his head and glancing up and down and half laughing.
The bomber had missed. The weapon had been what the Marines refer to as "command-detonated," which meant that someone, probably in Mian Poshteh, had punched a trigger — on a wire leading to the bomb — when the Marines came up the path. The triggerman needed to remember precisely where he had buried his bomb. Clearly, he had forgotten. If he had waited five more seconds, he would have killed several Marines.
Delgado, Kaiser and the others gathered themselves and walked toward Mian Poshteh. On their radio, the Marines could hear voices coming from inside the village.
"Is everything ready?" a voice said in Pashto.
"Everything is ready," another voice said. "Let's see what they do."
The Marines stayed back. Earlier in the war, they would have gone into Mian Poshteh; they would have surrounded the village and kicked in doors until they found the bomber. Most likely they would have found him — and maybe along the way they would have killed some civilians and smashed up some homes. And made a lot of enemies. The Marines are a very different force now, with very different goals. They walked to within 50 feet of Mian Poshteh, and Lt. Patrick Bragan shouted: "Send us five men. Five men."
Minutes passed, and five Afghans appeared. They were unarmed and ordinary looking.
"I have no idea who did that," an old man named Fazul Mohammed said.
"Maybe they came at night," a man named Assadullah said.
"I only heard the explosion," a man named Syed Wali said.
The face of Lieutenant Bragan was pink from the heat and from pleading.
"All you have to do is tell us," he said. "We're here to help you."
The Marines gave up. Near sunset, they started back the way they came, through the head-high corn. Delgado turned to one of his buddies, Cpl. John Shymanik, 22.
"They didn't get us today," Delgado said.
"They're still trying, though," Shymanik said.
STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL SAT at the head of a U-shaped bank of tables in a sealed room at Bagram Airfield, a main hub of the war. He was surrounded by five giant video screens. On each screen was another general — American, German, Dutch, French, Italian — each commanding a different part of Afghanistan. It was McChrystal's morning briefing, known as the commander's update.
One by one, the generals scrolled through the events from the day before: a roadside bomb in Khost, small-arms fire in Ghazni, a British soldier killed in Helmand Province. Then one of the European generals started talking about an airstrike. A group of Taliban insurgents had attacked a coalition convoy, and the soldiers called for air support. A Hellfire missile, the European general said, obliterated an Afghan compound. The general — he cannot be named because of the confidentiality of the meeting — was moving on to the next topic when McChrystal stopped him.
"Can you come back to that, please?" McChrystal said.
McChrystal's voice is higher than you would expect for a four-star general.
"Yes, sir," the European general said.
"We just struck a compound," McChrystal said. "I would like for you to explain to me the process you used to shoot a Hellfire missile into a compound that might have had civilians in it."
The European commander looked at an aide and muttered something. The killing of Afghan civilians, usually caused by inadvertent American and NATO airstrikes, has become the most sensitive issue between the Afghans and their Western guests. Each time civilians are killed, the Taliban launch a campaign of very public propaganda.
"Were there civilians in that compound?" McChrystal asked. He was leaning into the microphone on the table.
The commander started to talk, but McChrystal kept going.
"Who made that decision?" McChrystal said.
An aide handed the European general a sheaf of papers.
"I'm sorry, but the system is not responsive enough for us to get that kind of information that quickly," the general said.
McChrystal's face began to tighten. Generals tend to treat one another with the utmost deference.
"We bomb a compound, and I don't know about it until the next morning?" McChrystal said. "Don't just tell me, 'Yeah, it's O.K.' I want to know about it. I'm being a hard-ass about it."
The European general looked down at his papers.
"It seems it was not a Hellfire missile but a 500-pound bomb," he said.
McChrystal took off his reading glasses and looked around the room — at the video screens and the other American officers.
"Gentlemen, we need to understand the implications of what we are doing," he said. "Air power contains the seeds of our own destruction. A guy with a long-barrel rifle runs into a compound, and we drop a 500-pound bomb on it? Civilian casualties are not just some reality with the Washington press. They are a reality for the Afghan people. If we use airpower irresponsibly, we can lose this fight."
LATER THAT DAY, during a drive through Kabul, McChrystal told me that he had decided to drastically restrict the circumstances under which airstrikes would be permitted: for all practical purposes, he was banning bombs and missiles in populated areas unless his men were in danger of being overrun.
"Even if it means we are going to step away from a firefight and fight them another day, that's O.K.," McChrystal told me.
McChrystal's missive was the first in an array he has drafted aimed at radically transforming the way America and its allies wage war here. In his first weeks on the job, McChrystal issued directives instructing his men on how to comport themselves with Afghans ("Think of how you would expect a foreign army to operate in your neighborhood, among your families and your children, and act accordingly"); how to fight ("Think of counterinsurgency as an argument to win the support of the people"); even how to drive ("in ways that respect the safety and well-being of the Afghan people"). At the heart of McChrystal's strategy are three principles: protect the Afghan people, build an Afghan state and make friends with whomever you can, including insurgents. Killing the Taliban is now among the least important things that are expected of NATO soldiers.
"You can kill Taliban forever," McChrystal said, "because they are not a finite number."
That strategy is underscored by an extraordinary sense of urgency — that eight years into this war the margin for error for the Americans has shrunk to zero. "If every soldier is authorized to make one mistake," McChrystal said, "then we lose the war."
While Afghanistan is not Iraq, McChrystal's plan does resemble in some ways that of General David H. Petraeus, who took command of American forces in Iraq in early 2007, when the country was disintegrating in a civil war. For four years, the American military had tried to crush the Iraqi insurgency and got the opposite: the insurgency bloomed, and the country imploded.
By refocusing their efforts on protecting Iraqi civilians, American troops were able to cut off the insurgents from their base of support. Then the Americans struck peace deals with tens of thousands of former fighters — the phenomenon known as the Sunni Awakening — while at the same time fashioning a formidable Iraqi army. After a bloody first push, violence in Iraq dropped to its lowest levels since the war began.
"It was all in," Petraeus told me about that time.
And so if it was Petraeus who saved Iraq from cataclysm, it now falls to McChrystal to save Afghanistan.
Petraeus and McChrystal are in fact close — their bond solidified in the crucible of Iraq. Petraeus, now head of the U.S. military's Central Command, with overall responsibility for both Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed McChrystal for the job. "He was a key part of the team in Iraq," Petraeus told me.
Now 55, Stanley McChrystal is the son of Herbert J. McChrystal Jr., an Army general who served in Germany during the American occupation and fought in Korea and Vietnam. Stanley McChrystal was the fourth child in a family of five boys and one girl; all of them grew up to serve in the military or marry someone who did. "My dad was always the soldier I wanted to be," McChrystal said.
He graduated from West Point in 1976, at the Army's post-Vietnam nadir. Over the next 30 years, McChrystal ascended the ranks, mostly by way of the elite, secretive wing of Special Operations, in units like the Rangers. He served as a staff officer and an operations officer in the first gulf war and did stints at Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations (where he is remembered for running a dozen miles each morning to the council's offices on the Upper East Side).
With his long and gaunt face and his long and lean body, McChrystal looks almost preternaturally alert — coiled, hungry. He pushes himself mercilessly, sleeping four or five hours a night, eating one meal a day. He runs eight miles at a clip, usually with an audiobook at his ears. "I was the fastest runner at Fort Stewart, Ga., until he arrived," Petraeus told me recently. "He's a tremendous athlete." On a recent daylong helicopter trip touring bases around the country, McChrystal yawned throughout the day — the only evidence of his exhaustion. He drank regularly from a large mug of coffee, black.
As McChrystal drives himself, he sometimes affords little tolerance to those who do not.
MCCHRYSTAL WAS ONLY a month into his new job when he strode into the area inside NATO's International Security Assistance Force headquarters in Kabul known as Destille Gardens. A collection of one-story buildings with a courtyard and patio, it is the only thing at headquarters that resembles a lounge or a recreation area. Soldiers and Marines — most of them staff officers — would gather there for coffee and even, if they were European, a glass of beer or wine. It's a world away from Helmand Province.
McChrystal was coming for a haircut, and as he walked through the courtyard, he passed a table of coalition officers chatting and drinking. According to several officers present, his face showed immediate disapproval, but no one noticed and he kept on going. Twenty minutes later, when McChrystal walked back across the courtyard, his hair freshly trimmed, the officers were still at their table. Some of them had dozed off. The general's mouth tightened. He walked over to their table.
He woke one officer and said: "Good afternoon, I'm Stan McChrystal. Is there a problem with your office space?"
He turned and walked off. Six weeks later, McChrystal issued an order banning alcohol from I.S.A.F. headquarters.
Yet for all his asceticism, McChrystal displays a subtlety that suggests a wider view of the world. "If you were to go into his house, he has this unreal library," Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, McChrystal's intelligence chief and longtime friend, told me this summer. "You can go over and touch a binding and ask him, 'What's that one about?' And he'll just start. His bad habit is wandering around old bookstores. He's not one of these guys that just reads military books. He reads about weird things too. He's reading a book about Shakespeare right now."
Also on his recent reading list this past summer: "Vietnam: A History," Stanley Karnow's unsparing account of America's defeat.
When McChrystal decided to come to Afghanistan, a lot of people signed up to come with him. "I first worked for him in the gulf war, and General McChrystal was the sharpest, fastest staff officer I have ever come across — and I had been serving for 20 years at that point," said Graeme Lamb, a retired British general and former commander of the Special Air Service, Britain's equivalent of Delta Force. "He could take ideas, concepts, directions, and he could turn them into language, into understanding, and pass it out at an electric rate."
Lamb was getting ready to retire earlier this year when McChrystal asked him to join his team. Lamb flew to Washington to talk it over, and the two men sealed the deal at a Mexican restaurant in Arlington, Va. "I don't think there is a Brit that could have made the same call," Lamb told me.
One big question hovering over McChrystal is whether his experience in Iraq truly prepares him for the multiheaded challenge that faces him now. For nearly five years, McChrystal served as chief of the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the military's commando units, including the Army Delta Force and the Navy Seals. (Until recently, the Pentagon refused to acknowledge that the command even existed.)
As JSOC's commander, McChrystal spent no time trying to win over the Iraqis or training Iraqi forces or building the governing capacity of the Iraqi state. In Iraq (and, for about a third of his time, in Afghanistan), McChrystal's job, and that of the men under his command, was, almost exclusively, to kill and capture insurgents and terrorists.
The rescue of Iraq from the cataclysm that it had become by 2006 is an epic tale of grit and blood and luck. By February of that year, Iraq had descended into a full-blown civil war, with a thousand civilians dying every month. Its central actors were the gunmen of Al Qaeda, who, with their suicide bombers, carried out large-scale massacres of Shiite civilians; and the Shiite militias, some of them in Iraqi uniforms, who retaliated by massacring thousands of young Sunni men.
Breaking the cycle of attack and revenge was crucial to stopping the civil war, and it was here, McChrystal and his colleagues say, that JSOC played a critical role. In a series of operations that climaxed in 2006 and 2007, McChrystal's commandos set out to destroy Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia.
"The aim was to go after the middle of their network — in a regular army, their senior noncommissioned officers. We tried to cause the network to collapse," McChrystal told me. "We took it to an art form. It really became a machine."
McChrystal said that as early as the fall of 2006 — when Al Qaeda was at its murderous peak — it looked like the group was coming apart. "We sensed that Al Qaeda was going to implode," he said. "We could just feel it. We were watching it and feeling it and seeing it." In addition to driving the civil war, Al Qaeda gunmen were seen as a main obstacle to Iraq's Sunnis' reconciling with the Americans and the Iraqi government. By degrading Al Qaeda, McChrystal and others say, they helped significantly reduce the civil war, and by so doing created a space that allowed a broader movement of reconciliation — the Sunni Awakening — to succeed.
"What General McChrystal was doing with the forces he had under command in Iraq was absolutely essential to setting the conditions that allowed the Awakening to move forward," Lamb, the former S.A.S. head, told me.
The most significant moment in McChrystal's tenure was on June 6, 2006, when a crucial piece of information came across one of JSOC's video screens. For months, according to sources involved in the operation (though not McChrystal), McChrystal and his commandos had been hunting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian head of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Zarqawi, of course, was the man responsible for the murder of many hundreds of innocents in car bombings and suicide attacks. McChrystal was so desperate that he created a separate task force to get him. The task force narrowly missed Zarqawi several times; a few months before the June sighting, the operator of a Predator drone, a pilotless airplane, had spotted Zarqawi in a taxicab in Anbar Province. He lost him — and Zarqawi jumped out — when the operator changed the focus on the Predator's camera lens.
This time, McChrystal believed, Zarqawi was in his sights. The tip was long in coming, a result of thousands of hours of intelligence work, but according to several sources, it boiled down to this: Under interrogation, an Iraqi insurgent who was a member of Zarqawi's inner circle pointed to an Iraqi named Abd al-Rahman, who, the insurgent said, served as Zarqawi's spiritual adviser. Whenever Rahman was preparing to meet Zarqawi, the source told the Americans, he would send his wife and family out of Baghdad the day before.
McChrystal and his JSOC team watched Rahman for 17 consecutive days. Then, on June 6, 2006, it happened — Rahman's family was seen piling into a vehicle and leaving the city. The next day, a Predator drone followed Rahman himself as he made his way northeast out of Baghdad, to a small house in a palm grove near the village of Hibhib. Rahman went inside. McChrystal had a commando team on the ground, 18 minutes away.
As McChrystal and his staff watched through the Predator camera, a man, dressed in black, walked from the house to the edge of the road. The man looked to his right, then to his left. It was Zarqawi. He walked back inside. They were sure it was him.
At an operations center, a senior Special Forces commander, realizing that time was short, ordered an airstrike. Two F-16's were dispatched; one of them was hooked up to a refueling plane; the second jet was told to go alone. A pair of 500-pound bombs killed Zarqawi. McChrystal and his staff were waiting at JSOC's headquarters in Balad when the corpse came in.
McChrystal's tenure as JSOC's commander was not flawless. JSOC never got its most wanted quarry, neither Osama bin Laden nor Ayman al-Zawahiri. One of JSOC's units, Task Force 6-26, was cited for abusing detainees, many of them at a site known as Camp Nama, in Baghdad. McChrystal himself was not implicated, but at least 34 task-force members were disciplined. "There were cases where people made mistakes, and they were punished," McChrystal told me. "What we did was establish a policy and atmosphere that said that is not what you do. That is not acceptable."
He also signed off on the Silver Star recommendation for Cpl. Pat Tillman, the N.F.L. star and Army Ranger killed in Afghanistan in April 2004. The medal recommendation erroneously suggested that Tillman was killed by enemy fire; in fact he was killed accidentally by his own men, which McChrystal suspected at the time. The medal was awarded at a memorial service for Tillman, in which he was lionized as a man killed by the enemy.
McChrystal said he did indeed sign off on the recommendation for Tillman, because he believed it was warranted. The award was for valor, and Tillman had been extraordinarily brave, regardless of who killed him. McChrystal said he never intended for Tillman's death to be exploited politically or to convey an incorrect impression about his death. "I certainly regret the way this came out," McChrystal told me.
As for his current job, McChrystal said there are two lessons from Iraq that apply to Afghanistan. The first is that his role — killing insurgents — worked there only because it was part of a much larger effort to not only defeat the insurgency but also to build an Iraqi state that could stand on its own. "Ours was just a supporting effort," he said. The second lesson is perhaps more startling. It is that no situation, no matter how dire, is ever irredeemable — if you have the time, resources and the correct strategy. In the spring of 2006, Iraq seemed lost. The dead were piling up. The society was disintegrating. One possible conclusion was that it was time for the United States to cut its losses in a country that it never truly understood. But the American military believed it had found a strategy that worked, and it hung in there, and it finally turned the tide.
"One of the big take-aways from Iraq was that you have to not lose confidence in what you are doing," McChrystal said. "We were able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope."
SHORTLY AFTER HIS ARRIVAL in Afghanistan in June 2009, McChrystal sat down with the commanders of the 82nd Airborne Division, which oversees a broad swath of eastern Afghanistan. The briefing, given by the 82nd's officers, was sophisticated but sobering: corruption in the Afghan government is pervasive, the officers said; the insurgency, supported from Pakistan, is resilient. Every valley and every village is different, each its own patchwork of ethnic groups and tribes, each with its own history. The Americans are having to learn them all.
"The environment is so complex that there is no overarching solution," Brig. Gen. William Fuller told McChrystal.
When the briefing was finished, McChrystal looked around the room. "Gentlemen, I am coming into this job with 12 months to show demonstrable progress here — and 24 months to have a decisive impact," he said. "That's how long we have to convince the Taliban, the Afghan people and the American people that we're going to be successful. In 24 months, it has to be obvious that we have the clear upper hand and that things are moving in the right direction. That's not a choice. That's a reality."
In a tour of bases around Afghanistan, McChrystal repeated this mantra to all his field commanders: Time is running out.
Yet even if McChrystal's plan succeeds, even if he can turn the Afghan venture around, neither he nor anyone else in the upper echelons of the military believes that the job — the one President Obama has given them to do — will be finished then.
"It feels like Iraq in 2004," said Michael Flynn, McChrystal's deputy. "Part of it is that the insurgency is stronger — we didn't realize how strong it was. What we are trying to do is make sure everyone understands what it is we are facing — a much stronger insurgency, certainly much more capable. Their capacity to lay I.E.D.'s on the battlefield, for instance — it's just stunning."
I asked General Flynn to imagine the future here. "We are going to go in and ask for some resources," he told me. "If those resources are brought to bear in a timely manner, I believe that it's probably going to take us three years to really turn the insurgency to the point where it's waning instead of waxing. To do that we have to fix the Afghan security forces, we have to build their capacity and capability, and we have to absolutely culturally change the way they operate. And then I think beyond those three years, we are looking at another two years when the government of Afghanistan and the security forces of Afghanistan begin to take a lot more personal responsibility. The challenge to us is: What can we do in 12 months? What should we expect? If people's expectations are that we are going to have the south turned around, for instance, it's not going to happen."
The strategy that McChrystal, Flynn and the other senior commanders want to employ in Afghanistan has two main prongs: one hard, one soft.
In the military arena, McChrystal wants to put as many of his men as close to the Afghan people as he can. That means closing some of the smaller bases in remote valleys and opening them in densely populated areas like the Helmand River valley. Here, at least, military force will play a central role, at least in the early phase of his strategy, as the Americans fight their way into areas they have not been in before.
"The insurgency has to have access to the people," McChrystal told me. "So we literally want to go in there and squat among the people. We want to make the insurgents come to us. Make them be the aggressors. What I want to do is get on the inside, looking out — instead of being on the outside looking in."
"There will be a lot of fighting," McChrystal added. "If we do this right, the insurgents will have to fight us. They will have no choice."
And that's the rub: the population-focused strategy requires more troops — as many as 40,000 more. This is the decision that confronts President Obama and his advisers now.
The other part of the military option is one with which McChrystal is familiar but does not completely control. It's his old portfolio — killing and capturing insurgents and terrorists. Much of that is being carried out in Pakistan, where Al Qaeda's leadership has gathered in havens just across the border from Afghanistan. Both bin Laden and Zawahiri are believed to be hiding there.
In Pakistan, a C.I.A.-led program using Predator drones to hunt down and kill leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban has proved remarkably successful, even if controversial inside Pakistan itself. To date, American officials say, they have killed 11 of the top 20 Al Qaeda leaders, without having to launch large-scale military operations across the border.
With its 180 million people, several dozen nuclear warheads and havens for Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Pakistan is one wild card in McChrystal's campaign. "If we are good here, it will have a good effect on Pakistan," he told me. "But if we fail here, Pakistan will not be able to solve their problems — it would be like burning leaves on a windy day next door. And if Pakistan implodes, it will be very hard for us to succeed."
The softer side of McChrystal's strategy has two main thrusts: training Afghan soldiers and police and persuading insurgents to change sides. It is here where the best chances of long-term success in Afghanistan may lie.
The first of these is a vast, expensive and painstaking project. In the ninth year of the war, Afghan forces are neither large nor able enough to take over for NATO. The Afghan Army has about 85,000 soldiers, and the police force has about 80,000 men. McChrystal wants to boost the size of the army to about 240,000 and the police to 160,000. "I think we can do it," he told me.
But experience suggests that it won't be easy. In Iraq, the building of the security forces was fraught with disaster: in 2004 and 2005, Iraqi soldiers and the police disintegrated whenever they came under attack. In later years, Iraqi forces became more sectarian, with some Shiite-dominated units carrying out massacres of Sunni civilians. It was only much later — by early 2008 — that the Iraqi Army and the police began to show promise.
And Iraq was an urban and literate society. Afghanistan is neither. The Afghan police are widely seen as corrupt and complicit in the opium trade — the world's largest. And while many Afghan soldiers have shown themselves willing to fight, it usually falls to the Americans and their NATO allies to pay them, feed them and support them in the field.
Earlier this year, Maj. Gen. Richard Formica, who oversees the training of the Afghan security forces, spoke to me about the difficulties of creating an army in a country where only one in four adults is literate. "What percentage of police recruits can read?" Formica asked when we met at his headquarters in Kabul. "When I was down in Helmand, where the Brits were training police officers, they said not only could none of them read but they didn't understand what a classroom was. How can you train officers if they can't write arrest reports?"
Perhaps McChrystal's most intriguing idea is his belief that he can persuade large numbers of Taliban to change sides. Coaxing insurgents back into the fold was, after all, one key to pulling Iraq back from the brink of apocalypse. Beginning in late 2006, tens of thousands of Sunni tribesmen, many of them former insurgents, agreed to stop fighting and to come onto the payroll, usually as policemen. Almost overnight, the Iraqi insurgency was reduced to Al Qaeda fanatics and a handful of others who could be targeted by McChrystal's commandos in JSOC. This shaky — very shaky — arrangement is still keeping what peace there is in Iraq today.
McChrystal says he intends to begin a similar effort in Afghanistan. The idea, he said, would not be to try to flip the Taliban's leaders — that's not likely — but rather its foot soldiers. The premise of the program, McChrystal says, is that most of the Taliban's fighters are not especially committed ideologically and could be brought into society with promises of jobs and protection. "I'd like to go pretty high up," McChrystal said, referring to the Taliban's hierarchy. "It could be people who are commanders with significant numbers of troops. I think they can be given the opportunity to come in."
The effort, McChrystal said, is based on his own reading of the Taliban and of Pashtun culture: most of the people fighting the United States, he argued, are motivated by local and personal grievances. They want more of a voice in local governance, for instance, or they want jobs. "Historically, the Pashtuns are very practical people," McChrystal told me. "Pashtun culture adjudicates disagreements in a way that mitigates blood feuds. The Pashtun people go out of their way not to do things that cause permanent feuds. They have always been willing to change positions, change sides. I don't think much of the Taliban are ideologically driven; I think they are practically driven. I'm not sure they wouldn't flip to our side."
To help him achieve this, McChrystal recruited his old friend Graeme Lamb, who played a similar role in Iraq. The trick in Iraq, Lamb said, was timing: by late 2006, many Iraqis, even the insurgents, had grown tired of fighting. "What we did in Iraq in mid-2006 — had we tried to do it in mid-2004, it would have crashed and burned," Lamb told me. "Because at the end of the day, people hadn't exercised their revenge. They hadn't stood at the edge of the abyss and looked into it."
Lamb said the time may have arrived for something similar in Afghanistan, if only because everyone is exhausted by so much war. "Now is a good time," he said, "because people are very serious on all sides."
The reconciliation plan might end up bringing into the fold some disreputable characters, but neither Lamb nor McChrystal has much of a problem with that. "In my view," McChrystal said of the insurgents, "their past is not important. Some people say, 'Well, they have blood on their hands.' I'd say, 'So do a lot of people.' I think we focus on future behavior. They can enter the political process if they want to."
The notion that large groups of Taliban fighters could be persuaded to quit is not new. Previous efforts have ended in failure, often because neither the Americans nor their allies were able to protect people who changed sides.
Earlier this year, for example, a local Taliban commander in Wardak Province named Abdul Jameel came forward with a group of fighters and declared that he wanted to quit. Wardak's governor, Halim Fidai, accepted his surrender and told him he was free to go home. Two weeks later, Taliban gunmen entered Jameel's home and killed him, his wife, his uncle, his brother and his daughter.
"We had nothing to offer him," Fidai told me.
In another case, Gulab Mangal, the governor of Helmand Province, told me that during a recent American military operation he got a telephone call from a Taliban commander. "He wanted to surrender," Mangal said. And then the military operation was over — and the American troops went back to their bases. "He never called back after that," Mangal said.
With more American troops, McChrystal told me, he would be better able to squeeze the insurgents into changing sides. "I think a lot of them need to be convinced that they are not going to be successful," he said.
So many things could scuttle McChrystal's plans: a Taliban more intractable than imagined, the fractured nature of Afghan society and, no matter what President Obama does, a lack of soldiers and time. But there is something even worse, over which neither McChrystal nor his civilian comrades in the American government exercise much control: the government of Hamid Karzai, already among the most corrupt in the world, appears to have secured its large victory in nationwide elections in August by orchestrating the stealing of votes. A United Nations-backed group is trying to sort through the fraud allegations, and American diplomats are trying to broker some sort of power-sharing agreement with Karzai and his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah.
But increasingly, McChrystal, as well as President Obama and the American people, are being forced to confront the possibility that they will be stuck fighting and dying and paying for a government that is widely viewed as illegitimate.
When I asked McChrystal about this, it was the one issue that he seemed not to have thought through. What if the Afghan people see their own government as illegitimate? How would you fight for something like that?
"Then we are going to have to avoid looking like we are part of the illegitimacy," the general said. "That is the key thing."
A GROUP OF American Marines were bumping along a sandy road in their Humvee as the twilight turned to dark.
"One guy lost his legs," Sgt. David Spaulding said, riding in the front passenger's seat. "They were walking in a field."
The Humvee bounced along some more.
"You know the guy who got shot in the head?" Lance Cpl. Jeremy Dones said, from a seat in the back. "They got him to Germany. His parents flew to Germany. They took him off life support."
A moment passed.
"Apparently a guy got blown to pieces, and they can't find all of him," Spaulding said. "They don't know if they have all the pieces."
The men rode together in silence.
McChrystal's plans come to earth along the banks of the Helmand River, where members of the 2/8 Battalion are trying to retake a 20-mile stretch of orchards and villages around the city of Garmsir. The 2/8 Battalion, about 800 men, is part of the 10,000 Marines dispatched to Helmand by President Obama earlier this year.
Since arriving in early July, the 2/8 has lost 13 men, most to homemade bombs. About five times that number have been wounded. The Marines here fight nearly every day.
Yet for all their difficulties, the battalion's progress has been real. Garmsir, a district of about 90,000 people, boasts a functioning government with a governor and a local council. About 300 Afghan soldiers are deployed here, led by an Afghan colonel educated at the United States Army's school for its best junior officers. About 250 Afghan police officers are stationed at bridges and checkpoints. An array of public-works projects is under way.
Most important, the town of Garmsir and the villages around it are quiet. They are part of an area, roughly six miles wide and six miles long, that has been secured by the Marines along the east bank of the Helmand. They call the area "the snake's head" for its oblong shape. Outside of Garmsir, the Taliban roam and attack. Inside, life for local Afghans is remarkably sane.
Garmsir is a devastated and impoverished place; 30 years of war has seen to that. None of its roads are paved, leaving the farmers unable to sell their grapes and corn in markets outside of town. There are no cellphones, no electricity, no running water. Building a city here that could function on its own would take many years. But in Garmsir's calm, the first hints of normal life are beginning to show.
One day in August, I tagged along with a group of Marines to the monthly meeting of Garmsir's district council. Our leader was Capt. Micah Caskey, a civil-affairs officer from Irmo, S.C. At 28, Caskey had already done two tours in the hardest years of the Iraq war. In 2007, he left the Marines to begin a dual graduate degree in law and business at the University of South Carolina. He spent the summer of 2008 studying law abroad. But he stayed in the Marine Reserve, and a few months ago they called him back.
"I had a job all lined up for the summer," Caskey said. "And now I'm here for seven months. I can't tell you it was easy. Sometimes it really makes me wonder."
Garmsir's governor, Abdullah Jan, arrived ahead of the meeting, and he and Caskey and a group of Marines sat in the courtyard of the district headquarters in a circle of plastic chairs. Governor Jan is the beneficiary of Afghanistan's strangely centralized political system; he was appointed by Helmand's governor, Mangal, who was directly appointed by Karzai.
Caskey's experience in Iraq shows immediately. He is unfailingly polite, even deferential, to Jan. And each time one of the councilmen enters, he stops the conversation and rises to shake his hand.
"Peace be upon you," Caskey said to Jan. "It's very nice to see you after so long."
Jan, who grew up in the district, told Caskey not to worry about local support for the Taliban — there wasn't any. But in the absence of a stable government, and with no guarantee of safety, ordinary Afghans were often forced to go along. "I can assure you that the people of Garmsir appreciate what you are doing here," Jan said. "Unfortunately the people are held hostage by the Taliban."
An Afghan — one of Jan's assistants — arrived bearing a tray of tea and cakes while Jan talked.
"Ninety percent of the local people support the government," Jan told Caskey. "Maybe 10 percent really like the Taliban."
That seemed an overstatement; there were too many roadside bombs in the area — even inside the snake's head. But the point Jan was making seemed valid enough: once there is law and order, public opinion begins to change.
"You guys," Jan said, looking at Caskey and the other Americans, "you come in, you help and then you leave. The Afghan people are not 100 percent sure that you are going to stay. They are not sure they won't have their throats cut if they tell the Americans where a bomb is."
The council's meeting began with its 16 members taking their seats on the floor of a large, airy room. Caskey and the other Americans sat in the back. The agenda for the meeting was to decide on a list of development projects, which the Americans would pay for. As Caskey explained, the Americans didn't want to direct the projects — they wanted to strengthen the Afghan leaders by funneling the money through them.
"The Americans are only going to pay for projects that we decide on," Jan announced. "It's up to us."
The Afghans — all men — began to talk. Their first choice was unanimous: the main sluice gates that lead to the irrigation canals off the Helmand River, built by American aid workers in the 1950s, were badly in need of repair. Some of the fields were going dry.
"It's been 30 years since anyone did any work on that canal," Hajji Anwar, one of the councilmen, said.
With the meeting under way, Caskey and the other Americans got up to leave. "I have one request," Caskey said to one mullah. "Would you be willing to record a message that we can play over the radio station saying that fighting the government violates the idea of jihad — that it's not jihad?"
Jan thought for a second and nodded. Caskey and the other Marines strapped on their helmets.
"May you have a son just like yourself," Jan told him.
THE ABANDONED ELEMENTARY school in Mian Poshteh that houses the 240 Marines of 2/8's Echo Company has no bedrooms, no beds, no electricity, no water. It's a vacant, dirty building filled with tired and dirty men. They sleep on the floor, a dozen to a room, or they sleep in the dirt outside, shirtless in the heat. They fight every day. When the Marines don't attack the Taliban, the Taliban attack the Marines.
No Americans have ever come this far south before, at least not permanently. With fewer than 8,000 British troops covering all of Helmand, there never were enough to go around. Garmsir is 12 miles up a single dusty road, where Echo Company's supply convoys get bombed nearly every day.
Mian Poshteh is like Garmsir but worse. There is no government: no mayor, no city council, no police. Thirty Afghan soldiers live here, only 10 of whom leave the base at any given time. As in Garmsir, the Marines in Mian Poshteh have come to build a government — but they have to defeat the Taliban first.
"We're not going to clear anything that we can't hold onto," said Capt. Eric Meador, Echo Company's commander.
Even with 240 men, they can't hold onto much. By the time Echo Company and the rest of the 2/8 leave at the end of October, Meador said, he would like to control a perimeter that extends perhaps a mile and a half around his fort. "I'd be doing pretty well," he said. To the south, there isn't another Marine base for miles.
When you see a place like Mian Poshteh — wild, broken and isolated — it's not difficult to see why McChrystal believes he doesn't have enough troops to do what President Obama has asked him to.
One of Echo Company's typical days unfolded in late August, when the Marines set out on foot for a village named Tarakai. Led by a young lieutenant, Patrick Nevins, 24, from Chapel Hill, N.C., Echo Company's First Platoon walked through a vast field of shoulder-high corn. The fields had been flooded recently, so they were filled with muck. The trek might have been easier had the Marines taken the farmers' raised footpaths, but the Taliban had taken to laying land mines in those, so the Marines waded straight into the field itself. The mud below was crisscrossed by gullies and rows of broken ground. The helmets of the Marines bobbed above the top of the corn.
The fields, deep and green, were eerily empty of other men.
"I guess all the farmers took the day off," Nevins said, hacking his way through the corn.
Helmand's summers are long and merciless, and on this day the temperature hovered around 120 degrees. Crossing the fields, with all the muck, it was hotter still. Nevins and his men tromped through the corn in full gear, including helmets and flak jackets. In the heat, my own boots fell apart.
As he walked, Nevins talked a little about himself. He seemed an unlikely presence in the fields of Helmand. His father is a cancer researcher at Duke University. "My dad is really good at what he does," Nevins said, hacking and pushing his way through the mud and corn. "I guess I didn't want to compete with him."
An hour later, Nevins's platoon popped out on the other side. Behind them were trails of toppled corn. "Sorry about your field," Nevins said to an Afghan man standing nearby.
"It's O.K.," he said.
We arrived at Tarakai. A group of Afghans lined up. They were talking about the Afghan presidential election, to be held only a few days later.
"We can't vote," said Hakmatullah, who, like many Afghans, has only one name. "Everybody knows it. We are farmers, and we cannot do a thing against the Taliban."
The others said much the same. The Taliban had passed word that they would cut off the right index finger of anyone caught casting a ballot. Not that there was much chance of that: the area around Mian Poshteh was so anarchic that the Afghan government didn't send anyone to register voters. The closest polling place was in Garmsir.
But there was more to talk about. "The children are frightened," one of the men said.
And so were the adults. The Taliban owned Tarakai; they taxed the corn and kept watch over the town.
"When you leave here, the Taliban will come at night and ask us why we were talking to you," a villager told Nevins. "If we cooperate, they would kill us."
"They will cut out our stomachs," another man said.
"Is there anything I can do for you?" Nevins asked.
"Don't come close to our houses," the first villager said. "Don't try to negotiate with us."
Nevins was polite but insistent. The Americans were here now, and they were going to stay. "I will try to be respectful, and I will try to keep my distance," Nevins told the men. "But I have a job to do, and I need to be able to come by from time to time."
An old man with a long white beard stepped forward. "We're afraid you're going to leave this place after a few months," the old man said. "And the Taliban will take their revenge."
"I promise you," Lieutenant Nevins said, "we will be here when the weather gets cold, and when it gets hot again."
Nevins shook hands with the Afghans and said goodbye. Then he turned, and his men disappeared into the cornfield.
IN AMERICA, the chorus is insistent and growing: scale back the Afghan mission. It's too hard and too expensive, and we've overstayed our welcome.
George F. Will, the columnist, recently said as much. So did Rory Stewart, the British scholar-diplomat who has spent years in the region. Vice President Biden is said to favor such a choice.
The exact shape of a scaled-down commitment is not clear, but it goes something like this: American Special Forces units, aided by Predator drones, can keep Al Qaeda off-balance, while American soldiers stay on to train the Afghan Army and the police.
It's an attractive argument, of course: it offers the hope that the United States can achieve the same thing — American security — at a much-reduced cost. (The fate of the Afghan people themselves is basically left out of this equation.)
Last month, I visited Richard Haass, one of the idea's chief proponents, at his office in New York, where he is president of the Council on Foreign Relations. (Before that, through June 2003, Haass was director of policy planning at the State Department under President George W. Bush.)
Haass is particularly persuasive, in part because he does not pretend to have easy answers. After eight years of mismanagement and neglect, Haass says, every choice the United States faces in Afghanistan is dreadful. The weight of the evidence, he says, suggests that curtailing our ambitions is the option least dreadful.
"It's not self-evident that doing more will accomplish more," Haass told me. "And I'm skeptical about how central Afghanistan is anymore to the global effort against terror. I'm not persuaded that you can transform the situation there."
The bulk of Al Qaeda's leadership, Haass pointed out, is now in Pakistan. That's where the United States should really be focused — in Pakistan, with a population six times larger than Afghanistan's and with at least 60 nuclear warheads. "No one wants Afghanistan to become a sponge that absorbs a disproportionate share of our country's resources," he said.
General McChrystal and most of the rest of the Pentagon say that Haass's argument is essentially an illusion. If the United States drew down substantially in Afghanistan, they say, much of the country would quickly be overrun by the Taliban, rendering the other things — training and counterterrorism — impossible. Al Qaeda would return, possibly to the place it had before the 9/11 attacks, and Pakistan would be likely to follow.
When I pitched McChrystal's counterargument to Haass, he said he was glad that he wasn't in Obama's shoes. "Let's not kid ourselves," he said. "We're not going to find some wonderful thing that's going to deliver large positive results at modest costs. It's not going to happen."
Haass went on to say: "I keep going back to Yogi Berra. You know: 'When you reach a fork in the road, take it.' I bet there are days when Obama wakes up and sees the fork in the road and decides he's not going to take it. Because both choices are so bad."
DURING HIS TRIP to Garmsir, Stanley McChrystal took a moment to meet with Abdullah Jan, the governor. The two sat down in the same council chambers where Jan had met with Captain Caskey.
"Tell me how we can do better," McChrystal said.
Jan thought for a second, then offered an unusual answer.
"You need to live in a building, not a bunch of tents," he said.
McChrystal gave him a quizzical look.
"Everyone in Garmsir sees that you are living in tents, and they know that you are going to be leaving soon," Jan told McChrystal. "You need to build something permanent — a building. Because your job here is going to take years. Only then will people be persuaded that you are going to stay."
McChrystal nodded.
"We'll stay as long as we have to until our Afghan partners are completely secure," he said. "Even if that means years."
McChrystal started to get up, but Jan wasn't finished yet.
"The Afghan people are impatient," he said. "We've been waiting for 30 years! We don't want to wait any longer. We're impatient!"
McChrystal held back a smile.
"Believe me," he told Jan. "I work for a lot of impatient people, too."


text:
Deer Trail's town board will vote Aug. 6 on an ordinance that would create drone-hunting licenses and offer $100 bounties for unmanned aerial vehicles.
"We do not want drones in town," said Phillip Steel, the resident who drafted the ordinance. "They fly in town, they get shot down."
Even though it's against the law to destroy federal property, Steel's proposed ordinance outlines weapons, ammunition, rules of engagement, techniques and bounties for drone hunting.
Drone-hunting licenses would be issued without a background investigation and on an anonymous basis. Applicants would have to be at least 21 years old and be able to "read and understand English."

subset: commoncrawl


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Aer's skillful debut album set the bar for the Boston duo's innovative and engaging songs. The album, The Bright Side, revealed two musicians with something to say and a unique way of saying it, earning notable accolades and acclaim. Now, the group's sophomore effort, Aer, reveals an exciting step forward in the evolution of the pair's music.
David von Mering and Carter Schultz formed Aer in Wayland, MA, combining rap, reggae, pop and indie rock aesthetics to create their own brand of music. The duo's first two mixtapes, Water On The Moon and The Reach, were released in 2010 and 2011, and Aer unveiled their debut EP What You Need in late 2011. The EP landed at No. 1 on the iTunes Hip-Hop chart. The Bright Side, followed in July of 2012, earning the No. 1 spot on the iTunes Albums chart and working its way into the Billboard's Top 200. Music from the album has appeared on the NFL Network, an Etnies advertisement featuring Ryan Scheckler and three episodes of MTV's The Real World.
Following the success of The Bright Side, Aer began working on their self-titled sophomore effort in late 2012. David began working on the instrumentation last November and the pair settled in to record the music in February of 2013. The musicians worked primarily in their homes in Boston and spent 10 days working in a rented house in Los Angeles over the summer, all with David at the production helm. The aim was to showcase a broader range of stylistic and tonal adaptability.
"We're taken as a very fun, light, airy, bright band," Carter says. "But we wanted to show our versatility and stray away from that a little bit with this new album. And we did that – it's darker, more hip-hop and rawer. It's definitely got a darker sound to it."
"We wanted to make something that had a little more mystery to it and a little bit more depth," David adds. "We felt that our next album should have the full spectrum sound and subject matter."
Aer also wanted to convey a more honest sensibility in the lyrics, which is fully on display in songs like first single "Won't Laugh." The actual themes haven't shifted away from the musician's own experiences but they're delivered with notable bluntness rather than veiled in metaphor, something both artists feel was important this time around. Carter's spitfire rhymes unpack the ups and downs of life in a real way, giving the listener a sense of personal conversation. "This album is like hanging out with us in a living room and just talking," David says. "It's about being a lot more honest as opposed to someone just saying 'Oh yeah I've been good, how are you?' It opens everything up."
"Won't Laugh" is a moody number that meshes the musicians' indie rock and hip-hop influences, showcasing the natural evolution from The Bright Side. The number emerged from a jam session between the two musicians, who fostered it into a compelling single that Carter feels is a statement about following what you're passionate about without concern for external criticism. "I'm Not Sorry," a raw rap number, is what David calls a "good fuck you song" while "Ex" combines acoustic guitar lines and reggae tones to grapple with unfortunate backslide to a former flame. The songs find cohesion even as the musicians play with various musical styles, all coming together to create a markedly impressive collection.
"We see this album as our first very complete project where we're 100 percent on the same page," Carter says. "To us, it's a statement and we want to keep that as simple as possible so we decided to self-title it. We just want to keep it very focused on the name and not dilute it too much when we're confident about what we have."
The musicians also considered their live performance while creating the new songs. Aer has performed around North America and Europe with artists like Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Slightly Stoopid, Action Bronson, Iggy Azalea, ASAP Rocky and Hoodie Allen, and cultivated a dynamic live show that augments their recorded tracks. The band will tour extensively on Aer, and will embark on a headlining tour in early 2014 surrounding the album's release. Ultimately their goal is to create interesting, well-crafted songs that they can share with as many people as possible.
"I just want to be able to play really great shows and really celebrate with people," David says. "At every show I see as a celebration of life in general. I want our fans to know us as their friends. Know the good and bad sides of us and know that we're real people. And when we have a concert they get to enjoy that aspect of it. For me, with bands that I'm a fan of, I geek out and want to know everything about them. I want our fans to feel the same way."
Song List
Floats My Boat
Says She Loves Me
Like The Way
Feel I Bring


text:
olivierbo wrote:Hello,
Which NVIDIA driver are you using? EVGA or NVIDIA? Also, any bloatware installed that can create issues?
If you switch to GLSL using AV3 RC3, are you able to render without any crash?
Finally, are your footages located on the primary drive?
Thanks in advance,
DJW wrote:Hi Michel
Not a solution for you I'm afraid, but I do see a possibly related issue.
Essentially my desktop PC runs with an EVGA 980ti and has trouble running CUDA preview on AVP 3.0rc3 (and previous v3.0 releases...), I just get a blank preview window and frozen timeline. My Alienware laptop runs an Nvidia 980M processor and has no issues at all, which is kind of irritating as my desktop is a 64Gb custom monster full of M.2 drives, and its currently a poor second to my laptop when processing with AVP 3.0 as its forced to OpenGL.
Your issues with a 1080 and CUDA may be related to what I'm seeing. I've tried rolling back the Nvidia driver several releases, made no difference at all. And all of the same Nvidia drivers are fine with the laptops 980M...
My full story is here: viewtopic.php?f=124&t=36545
Best regards
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text:
The 2014 NFL Draft is in the books, but the work for scouting departments across the league isn't over yet. Only 256 players heard their names called over the weekend but hundreds more will show up for work with teams as undrafted free agents and if recent history is any indication, a number of them have a chance to not only make a roster, but contribute on the field.
» Gil Brandt's top undrafted free agents
Here are the top 10 undrafted free-agent signings through Sunday afternoon, and how each player can fit onto his new team:
1. Isaiah Crowell, RB, Cleveland Browns
Analysis: It wasn't a huge shock to see Crowell go undrafted, considering the off-the-field concerns teams had, but one can't deny he's a talented back. A former SEC freshman of the year at Georgia, he's proved to be a strong runner who can take it the distance. He's not as adept as others at catching the ball out of the backfield, but he's a nice overall player who could stick as a backup behind Ben Tate.
2. Shayne Skov, LB, San Francisco 49ers
Analysis: Not hearing the Stanford linebacker's name during the draft was a bit of a surprise considering how good of a player he was for the Cardinal. Skov was projected to go in the middle rounds by most but his slow 40-time seemed to hurt his stock tremendously. He's got outstanding instincts and has a knack for finding the football so he'll be a perfect fit on the team with several of his former college coaches. Given the situation surrounding NaVorro Bowman's rehab, Skov has a good chance at making the team in some capacity as a backup.
3. Jackson Jeffcoat, DE, Seattle Seahawks
Analysis: If you hadn't heard it already, a Texas player failed to get drafted for the first time since 1937. Of all the Longhorns eligible, Jeffcoat's name was the most likely to get called after he had a terrific senior season in which he was named Big 12 co-Defensive Player of the Year. Injuries took a heavy toll on his stock, but he's got the size, speed and instincts to be a contributor for the Seahawks' front seven. Pete Carroll once recruited Jeffcoat heavily and finally gets him as a free agent.
4. Anthony Johnson, DL, Miami Dolphins
Analysis: LSU has produced a ton of good defensive tackles over the years, so it was interesting to see Johnson's name was not called in the draft. He's got good size and quickness and was productive during his time in Baton Rouge. Some folks thought he could be a second-day draft pick, but his lack of consistency seemed to catch up to him. The Dolphins need some help along the defensive line, and Johnson can earn some playing time if he lives up to his potential.
5. Kelcy Quarles, DL, New York Giants
Analysis: Everybody focuses on his South Carolina teammate, Jadeveon Clowney, but Quarles had a solid final season with the Gamecocks, too. It's hard to remember the last time a first-team All-SEC defensive lineman didn't get drafted, but here we are with Quarles. He's got good size and quickness and can blow past interior linemen. He could be a nice addition to the Giants' rotation.
6. Josh Mauro, DL, Pittsburgh Steelers
Analysis: George Uko out of USC might have been the higher profile Pac-12 undrafted free agent along the defensive line, but Mauro could be the one who has the better NFL career if things break his way. He's certainly got the size and motor to be an end in a 3-4 and could wind up taking over for Brett Keisel down the road if he sticks with the Steelers.
7. Brandon Coleman, WR, New Orleans Saints
Analysis: Drew Brees isn't lacking for weapons on offense, but Coleman could give the team a nice backup to Marques Colston. Coleman is a big receiver at 6-foot-6 who really can develop into a red-zone threat like he was at Rutgers. A knee injury might have hurt his stock for some teams, but New Orleans might have a steal in Coleman, considering he has second-day talent.
8. Antonio Richardson, OL, Minnesota Vikings
Analysis: The top offensive tackle on Gil Brandt's list of undrafted free agents, Richardson brings outstanding size to the Vikings. A knee injury before the season seemed to bother him, but he's a multiple-year starter for the Vols who can overpower smaller opponents. His effort has been questioned by some, but if Minnesota coaches can get him to play to his abilities, they might have a nice right tackle in the coming years.
9. Anthony Steen, OL, Arizona Cardinals
Analysis: Steen's flexibility in playing all of the interior-line spots will help him on the limited rosters of NFL teams, as will his ability to control talented defensive tackles. He's a tad undersized and has short arms, but he can play and was one of the most reliable offensive linemen while at Alabama. He might not start right away, but he should be able to find a home in the NFL.
10. Max Bullough, LB, Houston Texans
Analysis: Another tough, strong and smart linebacker to come out of Michigan State, Bullough went undrafted despite carrying mid-round grades from some. He's not a quick-twitch athlete but makes up for it by being one of the most instinctive linebackers to play the game in college. He's got good size and tackles well and can be a nice backup for Brian Cushing if he doesn't take over for Jeff Tapinian. He should also contribute a lot on special teams.
Follow Bryan Fischer on Twitter @BryanDFischer.


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WASHINGTON, D.C.- James A. Johnson, Chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, announced today that American architect Rafael Viñoly has been selected by the Board of Trustees of the Center to design the two buildings on the eight-acre plaza in front of the Center that will be constructed over the next decade.
"I am delighted to announce the selection of the acclaimed architect Rafael Viñoly for the Kennedy Center Plaza Project," said Johnson. "His concept for the Plaza clearly reflects his understanding of the Center and its mission. After an exhaustive search the Architect Selection Committee unanimously selected Mr. Viñoly."
Mr. Viñolys initial concept for the project includes a streamlined Plaza, two new curved steel and glass buildings set beside a central fountain that runs from 23rd Street to the Kennedy Center, a pedestrian walkway and a connection to the waterfront. Mr. Viñoly will work with the Department of Transportation to design and implement a comprehensive plan for the new Plaza.
"The Kennedy Center is a living memorial which needs to re-establish its connection with the city and its river," Mr. Viñoly stated, "The creation of these two major complementary structures will enhance its already unparalleled cultural relevance and will redefine its symbolic quality in the same fashion in which the nations capital has always honored the memory of our heroes."
The Plaza Project will make the Center more accessible to pedestrians and tie it to the memorial center of Washington, while the new buildings on it will house the Centers extensive education programs, interactive exhibitions focusing on the performing arts in America and expanded rehearsal and office facilities for the Center and The Washington Opera.
"Rafael Viñoly is a pre-eminent architect of our time and the Kennedy Center is fortunate to have him," Senator Edward M. Kennedy declared. "He has an impressive vision for the new expansion, and Im sure my brother would be proud of the way the Center is fulfilling its mission as a national performing arts center. I commend Jim Johnson and Michael Kaiser for their skillful approach and diligence in guiding the selection process. Their leadership is serving the Center well."
Washington D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams remarked "I welcome Rafael Viñolys vision for the Plaza Project. It will bring more green space, new interactive exhibitions, easier access from the Center to the rest of the city, and great availability to the performing arts."
The Plaza Project was conceived as a public/private partnership. In September, Congress authorized the expenditure of $400 million to the Department of Transportation to improve access to the Center and to create the Plaza itself. It also allowed the Kennedy Center to privately fund the construction of two new buildings. The Center estimates that these buildings will cost $250 million. The first major gift of $100 million, for the construction of the privately funded buildings was made by the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation in December 2002.
Rafael Viñoly has been practicing architecture for nearly 40 years and has built work all over the Americas, as well as the Far East. He founded Rafael Viñoly Architects PC in New York City in 1982 and has since completed critically acclaimed public architecture that has been characterized as having a sustained structural originality that transcends the passing fads of architectural movements. In 1996 he completed the Tokyo International Forum, the largest and most important cultural center in all of Japan, and has recently completed the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, which has already been confirmed as one of the citys most successful civic gathering spaces, along with a world-class concert hall for the Philadelphia Orchestra. His current work includes major biomedical research facilities all over the U.S. as well as a new performing arts center for Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, Leicester City in the UK, and museums in Cleveland, Tampa, and Raleigh, NC. His firm employs more than 170 people in New York and London.
"I look forward to working with Rafael Viñoly to create a unique arts environment," commented Kennedy Center President Michael M. Kaiser. "His proposal emphasizes the importance of the existing Center building and acknowledges our role as a Presidential memorial. He has carefully thought through the needs of the diverse set of the Kennedy Centers constituents and facilitated our expanded mission in a truly delightful setting."


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On their own no one can change very much, but by coming together disabled people can have a stronger voice.
Campaigning together disabled people can raise awareness, change attitudes, change laws.
DAA were the initial promoters of the International Day of Disabled People on December 3 (designated by the UN) through promotional material, for example our Resource Kit on the Day.
We promoted the UN Standard Rules on the Equalisation of Opportunities for Disabled People (see our info kit) and were involved in the European Year of Disabled People (2003).
DAA can help you campaign by giving you information on what you want to achieve and help with how to campaign. We can provide evidence to support your arguments and examples of other campaigns around the world.
The DAA publishes the following papers on subjects related to Campigning:
Strategies and tactics for effective campaigning.
A video of the meeting of disabled people in the European Parliament on September 16th as part of the European Network on Independent Living's (ENIL) Freedom Drive is available on YouTube.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VdaWd29-C4&feature=player_embedded#


text:
Forms Jobs
A dry extended detention basin temporarily stores incoming stormwater, trapping suspended pollutants, and reducing the peak discharge from the site. As the name of this Best Management Practice implies, these basins are typically dry between storm events. A low-flow outlet slowly releases water retained over a period of days. This BMP can be applied in residential, industrial, and commercial developments where sufficient space is available. The primary purpose of dry extended detention basins is to attenuate and delay stormwater runoff peaks. They are appropriate where water quality issues are secondary to managing peak runoff, since the overall pollutant removal efficiency of dry extended detention basins is low. The dry extended detention basin system is defined as the dry detention basin, outlet structure, pretreatment including forebays and the vegetated filter if one is provided.
O&M_Dry Detention Operation and Maintenance Agreement,_Rev 3. [pdf/80kb/4p]
Receive E-Mail Notification When New Information is Posted on this PageAs a member, enjoy the benefits of MyCityofWS, including your choice of newsletters, and notifications about events and site updates. Login and Manage Your Subscriptions Now.


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Nooxo: Nourishing Soups, Smoothies & Grain BowlsPosted: May 28th, 2017 | Author: LumDimSum | Filed under: Foodies & Dining Scene | Tags: Broccolicious, Canvas Bar, Caveman, GLO Kitchen + Fitness, Grainbow, Healthy, healthy desserts, Le Fromager De Pekin, Mangoconut, MOKA Bros, Nooxo, Quinoa, Smoothie Bowls, smoothies, soups, The Crib, Tribe | No Comments »
Slurp It Up: Smoothie Bowls at Nooxo
Comparisons between Nooxo and Moka Bro's are inevitable. The healthy bowls, the smoothies, there are vegan and vegetarian friendly options, there are a lot of similarities between the two. But Beijing is a big city and we could all use some more options for our "healthy options" dining list. Oh, did I mention that all of Nooxo's dishes are also dairy free?
Nooxo does however stand on its own merits and is worth a visit.
"Nooxo started with a really simple idea: to create a lifestyle brand that focuses on building a healthy and active community with our signature smoothies and Nooxo bowls." – Nooxo
Continue Reading » Nooxo: Nourishing Soups, Smoothies & Grain Bowls


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Another specific day in valentines week is hug day. You are living around your love ones but the sad thing is this you don't know to show your love for them as you are busy in your daily life and you also know that the best and only thing your love ones demand is your time and your attention. By doing this we can make them happy and let them to fee important people of your life. Some times they just want you to let them allow to live near you, to live in your army, to die in your rooms, they just want you to let them love you as they want.
You hold them, love them and hug them on happy valentines day week, that hug include bundle of feelings that you can't express but your this step will help you to be understandable to them. As we all know that in this world and life there is a rule give and take, either that is respect or love. You respect someone they will give you respect and same on the hug day if you will show your love and hug your love ones then by following the rules and feelings they will also love and hug you back. Don't be late to show your love and hug them because if you have the chance and someone gives you the right then you should hug that special one. If you can do something today then why are you waiting for tomorrow.
It's the day, the day of February 12, the day which is called the hug day. Hug your love ones and let them to hug you back, someone are the love on who can't express their feelings first. They need someone to take an initiative step. Don't think that you are far from your love ones, the day is actually a hug day and that don't need present too. Your feelings can express your hugs feelings. These love ones include your friends, your love and the most important your family. So tell them you love them and be that hug day your best day.
1.Sending you a Hug to say you a special Happy HUG day.
2.A hug delights and warms and charms, That must be why God gave us arms. Happy Hug day.
3."I didn't tackle him. I gave him a flying hug. Sometimes love is up in the air until it hits you." Happy Hug Day!
4.A hug is a great gift… Its fits to all.It can be given for any occasion & it's easy to exchange.Happy Hug Day.


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This Buizel is a Water-type Pokémon owned by Ash. It was caught by Dawn, but later traded to Ash for Aipom because Buizel preferred battles over contests.
Buizel is proud and very confident in his strength. This is due to his long record of winning battles. Unfortunately his pride can get him into trouble. Just like Sceptile, Snivy, Hawlucha, and Greninja, Buizel is very cool, calm, collected and serious.
Buizel also has a strong rivalry to Crasher Wake's Floatzel which is its evolved form and becomes fierce when he encountered it, similar to Brock's Croagunk, who has a fierce rivalry with Saturn's Toxicroak.
Buizel gained a reputation for being a very powerful Pokémon and proved capable of defeating Dawn's Piplup, Zoey's Glameow and Ash's Pikachu. However, because he focused on strength, Buizel was unprepared for contest moves and Dawn managed to capture him.
While Ash and Dawn where preparing for their gym and contest battles, Buizel was showing more interest in what Ash was doing than the contest, while Aipom was doing the same with Dawn's training. Ash and Dawn traded Aipom and Buizel.
In DP068 Buizel battled Maylene's Lucario and learned Water Pulse. After blowing a hole in the ceiling when his Water Pulse collided with Lucario's Aura Sphere, it started raining and Buizel's Swift Swim was activated. The battle ended in a draw. Later Buizel competed in the Wallace Cup losing to a Lanturn in the top 8.
In DP083 Buizel was used in the Pastoria gym, beating Crasher Wake's two Pokémon, Quagsire and Floatzel whom he had a strong rivalry with.
Buizel didn't battle again until DP102 where he defeated Fantina's Gengar and lost to Drifblim.
In DP108 Buizel battled Byron's Steelix, but despite the type-advantage as Water-types is strong against Ground-types, Buizel was stunned Steelix's Screech, tied in Steelix's Bind and is defeated in one hit by Steelix's Iron Tail.
Buizel's first battle with Paul. He first uses Aqua Jet and hits Magmortar, gaining the upper hand. But when Magmortar was switched to Ursaring, Buizel was defeated by Ursaring's Focus Blast.
Buizel's battling style has included a few moves that would be useful in contests. Ice Aqua Jet and Counter Shield have been used in battles such as Fantina, Crasher Wake, Team Rocket and Paul.
Buizel battled a trainer's a Mr. Mime and lost the first battle. Buizel then learned Ice Punch. Buizel won the second battle by activating Swift Swim.
Buizel battled Flint's Infernape and lost with a single hit and also lost to Kenny's Empoleon's Drill Peck .
Ash used Buizel against Paul's Gastrodon and won with Ice Punch. He also battled Paul's Drapion who was attacked with a powerful Pin Missile, but Buizel was able to use Water Gun Counter Shield and dodged Cross Poison. While in the air, Buizel used SonicBoom, but Drapion blocked it and ensnared Buizel with its tail claw. Buizel broke free by inflating his floatation sac and then blasting Drapion with Water Gun, but Drapion launched Toxic Spikes while Buizel was still in the air. As soon as he landed Buizel was poisoned by Toxic Spikes and Drapion finished him with Pin Missile, resulting in Buizel being knocked out.
Known moves
Improvised Moves
Voice actor
Kiyotaka Furushima (Japanese and English)
- Kiyotaka Furushima, who voices Ash's Sinnoh rival, Paul in the original Japanese version, voices Ash's Buizel in both the Japanese and English-language versions of the anime.
- Buizel was the first Pokémon that disobeyed Dawn, his former trainer.
- Ash's Buizel couldn't beat any Steel Types.
- ^ DP034: Buizel Your Way Out Of This!, Buizel has two spots on his back
|Ash's Pokémon
|Ash Ketchum
|Dawn's Pokémon


text:
Comfortable room.
Wooden furniture and subtle interiors.
A spacious suite, consisting of two rooms: bedroom and living room.
A spacious suite consists of two separate rooms, bathroom and a guest toilet.
A fully refurbished suite.
This is a magnificent comfortable two-room suite.
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Airport «Sheremetyevo»:35 km
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Metro st. «VDNH»(«ВДНХ»): 200 m
From the city centre (Red Square): 9 km
January 16-19, 2020 - Healthy Moscow Assembly
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text:
Scott Ellington is an associate professor in the School of Christian Ministries. He and his wife, Linda, received a call to missionary service while in college and taught for 14 years in Bible colleges and seminaries in Mexico, England and Germany. Linda is a veterinarian, and they have two daughters.
Scott received his B.S. in applied psychology at Georgia Tech in 1983, his M.Div. and Th.M. from Columbia Theological Seminary in 1990 and 1994, and his Ph.D. in biblical studies at the University of Sheffield in 2000.
Outside the classroom Scott's interests include writing, travel, cooking and community theater. He has recently completed his first book, Risking Truth: Transforming the World Through Prayers of Lament, and has received the 2012 Award for Excellence from The Foundation for Pentecostal Scholarship for his 2011 journal article "'Can I Get a Witness': The Myth of Pentecostal Orality and the Process of Traditioning in the Psalms" published in the Journal of Pentecostal Theology.
Click here to email Scott Ellington.


text:
Hi there!
Welcome to our wiki, and thank you for your contributions! There's a lot to do around here, so I hope you'll stay with us and make many more improvements.
- Recent changes is a great first stop, because you can see what pages other people have been editing, and where you can help.
- Questions? You can ask at the Help desk or on the "discussion" page associated with each article!
- Need help? The Community Portal has an outline of the site, and pages to help you learn how to edit.
- Please sign in every time you edit, so that we can recognise you!
I'm really happy to have you here, and look forward to contributing with you!
- -- MezzoDragon (Talk) 08:33, August 29, 2010
How to have Badges
hey Franky,
Do you know how to get Badges on a wiki,
Like i mean,
You make a new wiki and it is all new,
and do you know how to add badges to the wiki? RaceLord 04:17, January 2, 2011 (UTC)
RE: RE: How to have Badges
And how do i find a Wiki Staff? RaceLord 17:28, January 2, 2011 (UTC)
My Wiki
hey dude,
Do you think you could maybe help out on my wiki.
Message me on youtube for the wiki link. RaceLord 04:45, January 3, 2011 (UTC)
Pokemonfanon Invite -Talk To Uni! 03:23, January 6, 2011 (UTC)
Stopping By to Say Hi
Hello. Zeroblizzard 15:00, January 9, 2011 (UTC)Zeroblizzard
Episodes? Relax!
Hey Franky, just popping by to say 1. Loving the work and 2. Don't worry about the episodes - I gotcha covered. Keep doing watcha do best - keeping it real ;) Hstar 16:39, January 11, 2011 (UTC)
But do continue with the BW (they are awesome!) Hstar 21:26, January 21, 2011 (UTC)
Evanf has left and wants me to replace him in PokePower
This blogpost will explain http://pokemon.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Hstar/Replacing_Evanf Evanf told me I'm replacing him on PokePower he even left a note on my talk page. Except I'm an "Anime Tasker" Please don't be angry Hstar 17:37, January 22, 2011 (UTC)
Re:Poll Archives Template
I never thought of protecting that template, but it does sound like a good idea. Crimsonnavy (Talk·Contributions) 16:42, January 25, 2011 (UTC)
Re: Content outside Pokemon
Is there a code I need to use if I'm going to put something that doesn't exist on Pokemon? TorranceMouse 18:48, January 27, 2011 (UTC)
This just occured to me, do you want to be in a Pokemon team? Or maybe make up a new Team (Maybe Dragon) and be the captain? (But if you wanted to make a new team, you would have to ask Evanf) Meet The Dark Team Captain.. Darkraian10!!!!!!!! 18:39, January 30, 2011 (UTC)
Daikenki's Return
Hello again Franky! Its so nice to talk to you and the wiki again. Its true I have come back and I will officially "come back" on the realease of Pokemon Black and White. If there are any changes to the rules and restrictions of PokePower since I left, please fill me in. Thanks a bunch! Daikenki 02:22, March 3, 2011 (UTC)
Welcome Back
Welcome Back Franky bob! Great to see you. If you need any filling in on what Anime-Related things have happened since you left I'll tell you! I've got into PokePower, I've got a PokePower Project running thanks to Crimsonnavy and I've made some Anime Rules. If you wish to join Project Anime you're more then welcome! Just so you know, the Episode Template's changed a bunch thanks to Gaehwasan and it looks amazing! Signed Hstar Chief Editor of the Anime Department!17:47, April 10, 2011 (UTC)
Just to show you how different things are check out BW001: In the Shadow of Zekrom! go to the history and compare when you edited to what it is now.
You're back! I've wanted to meet you! I've been helping out with sprites. ANX219 17:30, April 17, 2011 (UTC)
No. But I wish to be. I'm part of Project Manga. ANX219 17:43, April 17, 2011 (UTC)
PLEASE comment on my idea for an American live action Pokemon movie.
Cloverfield monster 18:13, April 22, 2011 (UTC)Cloverfield monster
Why did you say the shiny pokemon gallery was uneeded? It could give people an idea what shiny pokemon looked like .
I still liked the gallery ... OfficialKateWolf 01:38, April 23, 2011 (UTC)
These way cool sprites
Where did you get the Samurott and Dewott back sprites animated pictures? I want to know how to make and find good sprites for the wiki. ANX219 00:27, April 26, 2011 (UTC)
Stop it!
Stop creating new episode articles!
1. Creating new episode artices is my job!
2. We're on hold until Cinnamon115 creates detailed episode plots for all the episode articles of season 1.
3. You're not following the rules.
Just a friendly warning from me to you.
Signed, Winxfan1. I am the ultimate fan of Winx Club 01:41, April 27, 2011 (UTC)
We are on a break from writing anime episode articles. Read number 2 for the reason why. Besides, you're not providing synopses for your episode articles.
Signed, Winxfan1. I am the ultimate fan of Winx Club 01:45, April 27, 2011 (UTC)
Breaking Project Anime Rules
I believe it was you that create JE001, JE002 and JE018 correct? Well you've broken Project Anime Rules. Do you see anybody else creating Episodes? No, because it's breaking an update rule.
"Nobody is allowed to create any Original Series Episodes. However PokePower and Project Anime Members (And of course Ads Bureaus Sys and Bots) are allowed only to edit the Original Series Episodes, unless given permission by Hstar to create Episodes. We need to clean them up. However Advanced Generation, Diamond and Pearl and the Best Wishes Series may carry on as usual. We're only doing this so we can clean up, catch up and refresh ourselves. Cinammon 115 will be doing her synopsis - when she finishes Season 1 then the break will end unless it takes months in which case the allowance will be changed so that you can edit any Episode except for Indigo League Episodes.We've worked hard and we've achieved a well-earned break."
I'm guessing this is because you haven't looked at Project Anime. Now that I've warned you, you shouldn't be seen breaking anymore Project Anime Rules or Updates - and you're a PokePower Member so you need to set an example. If you want to create Original Series Episodes, you must ask for my permission first.
(Also Winxfan1 is a Q.BET he's not the Episode Creator - that's not even a job. For some reason I used to create Episodes and then he started doing what I used to do - create the articles. Now all I get to do is add to galleries, help people and just oversee everything.)
Signed Hstar Chief Editor of the Anime Department! 08:08, April 27, 2011 (UTC)
If you were just editing then that's fine and that means you didn't break the rules. Feel free to continue editing! It's only when you create an episode that I'm supposed to tell you off.
Btw Your a sprites guy right? Well barely any on the Generation 3 Pokemon have got Sprites Tables? I'm guessing you're the guy to sort it out. ;)
Signed Hstar Chief Editor of the Anime Department! 13:03, April 27, 2011 (UTC)
Oh yes and your the guy who made the gallery for BW001 right? (I added a few more images for detail) but could you continue to make galleries like that with those captions please? - That was excellent. If you keep that up then I'mma definitely make you an offer to be Project Anime's Episode Artist.
Signed Hstar Chief Editor of the Anime Department! 13:06, April 27, 2011 (UTC)
- Thanks. Want to be my friend? Jello Rabbit! The Bounciest Jello Evah!
- Don't change it please. The sprites are fine as pngs. Also you messed up a lot of pages with sprites when douing that. Thank you. Jello Rabbit! The Bounciest Jello Evah!
Re:Fake Pikachu user!
I am not going to block him, the user hasn't done anything wrong, it is sort of wierd to pretend to be a Pokemon, but he hasn't done anything wrong. Crimsonnavy (C·S·B) 13:58, May 10, 2011 (UTC)
Unova Route 15
I put in the trainers on this route but for some reason only the Pokémon Rangers Sprites will show up. Thought I'd ask you since your active right now and might know how to fix it so the other sprites show up. Sorry for the trouble. SapphireWave Rain Lover :P 02:04, May 14, 2011 (UTC)
Nevermind I figured it out. You're not supposed to put the gender in ones like Battle Girl or Hiker or the image can't be found. Sorry for bugging you.
SapphireWave Rain Lover :P 02:24, May 14, 2011 (UTC)
Templates and Redirects
You do not redirect to a template because people will add the redirect to the article and then the redirect will be in the article. Also, if the template redirect gets deleted, you then have to deal with fixing up the redirects. And considering the fact that it's already moved and all the links are fixed, there's no need for the redirect. --BassJapas(Talk) 01:00, May 17, 2011 (UTC)
A word with you.
There is something I want to talk to you about.
There was a reason I had those pokemon teams on a separate page: So I wouldn't clutter up Blue's page with them, but then you come in and redirect them just as I was about to submit his teams in his seventh battle. Now, put them back, ALL of them.
Signed, Winxfan1. I am the ultimate fan of Winx Club 00:16, May 18, 2011 (UTC)
Not to worry. I managed to create a link to the pokemon Blue used. Check it out [[Blue's Pokémon Teams|Here]]. I'm sorry I blew my stack and took it out on you. Just don't do anything like that again. Signed, Winxfan1. I am the ultimate fan of Winx Club 00:41, May 18, 2011 (UTC)
Project Character
Dan and Dan's Father
Can you fix up Dan and Dan's father? We have it marked so we can only edit it for awhile. I have to make Anthony (AG) and Anthony (AG2). Just add AnimeCharacter, EpisodeAppearTop, Middle, and Bottom. Thanks! - EvanfTalk
Template needs fixing
The DP Template needs fixing. Can you handle it? Signed, Winxfan1. I am the ultimate fan of Winx Club 13:28, May 25, 2011 (UTC)
I meant the Pokemon: Diamond and Pearl episode guide template page. It won't show anything beyond DP145. How can you fix that? Signed, Winxfan1. I am the ultimate fan of Winx Club 22:24, May 25, 2011 (UTC)
It's DP145: A Rivalry to Gible On! The template won't show ant Sinnoh League Victors episodes. or DP156. Maybe we need to make the episode articles that chain DP142 and DP145 together. Then put them in the template. What do you think?
Oh and if you plan to do this, it's code first, and make an Episode Template with all the info, then a synopsis, then an anime stub template, then the episode guide template. Then once the article is created rname it with code and title. it's Hstar's rule. I don't write them I kinda eforce them. I had to o a rush job with all the DP episode articles.
Anyway, make this happen, if you dont mind and remember the order.
Signed, Winxfan1. I am the ultimate fan of Winx Club 22:45, May 25, 2011 (UTC)
I'll show you:
How's that? Signed, Winxfan1. I am the ultimate fan of Winx Club 00:22, May 26, 2011 (UTC)
Then it must be mine.
Signed, Winxfan1. I am the ultimate fan of Winx Club 00:25, May 26, 2011 (UTC)
I have a system
Ahem, Franky bob.
I don't mean to be mean but I have my way of making episodes for the BW series, and I deliver for once a week, every Thursday. It's my system. I had it all planned too. Now I have to wait two weeks to post the next article. I wish Hstar were here. She'd tell you what's what. Anyway, no more making BW episode articles until their airdate and that's every Thursday. So be patient. I'll at least add more info when the episode comes out. Signed, Winxfan1. I am the ultimate fan of Winx Club 00:12, May 28, 2011 (UTC)
Requests for Adminship
- Think you could vote for me on there? Thanks. Jello Rabbit! The Bounciest Jello Evah!
You may want to contact this user to remove all the content on his userpage. You'll see what I mean.
Bermuda Contact Me! 19:53, June 11, 2011 (UTC)
Leaving messages like this tend to discourage users to stay. So please think about what you're saying and how to say it nicely, or else you'll turn users away from the site. BassJapas(Talk)
Regardless of whether or not you're leaving wikia as a whole, you cannot remove messages, even past messages. You can, however, put a notice on your talk page saying you've left. ‐ Jäzzi 16:41, October 2, 2011 (UTC)
sorry to hear you quit, if you are reading this................idk RaceLord 10:30, December 24, 2011 (UTC)
Damn. Isn't there anything that can convince you to come back editing here? This place is (almost) nothing like the one you edited in your time. Energy X 23:13, July 20, 2014 (UTC)
Can you at least tell why? Energy X 00:17, July 21, 2014 (UTC)
A shame. Every former editor I contact here has no plans of returning. Nevertheless, anyone is welcome here, as long as they abide the rules. Energy X 00:25, July 21, 2014 (UTC)


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Ranger has announced that mixed media artist Dina Wakley is being added to their line-up of signature designers. Wakley joins a cast of Ranger signature designers that includes Dyan Reavely, Claudine Hellmuth, Wendy Vecchi, Vintaj, and of course Ranger Creative Director Tim Holtz.
Wakley is developing a line of mixed media products with Ranger which will be called Dina Wakley Media, presumably to be released at CHA in January.


text:
snooptb needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 66 designs submitted by 26 freelance designers.
German Website where you can offer and search advertisment places. http://www.werbeplatz24.com
Desired Color Scheme:
everything is welcome
Accepted File Formats:
Layered Formats (.psd or .tiff)
We need a new Logo for our new Website http://www.werbeplatz24.com
In the page is about advertising. It concerns advertising sites, which are offer or search. We do not have a fixed features! Everything is welcome.
Please use our headers you can download. The two other pictures are only very bad designs. We need a new web 2.0 style logo. Here you can download the Header: Link
Good Luck!
Sorry for my English! It is not very well ...
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