Afghanistan – Page 2 – Antiwar.com Blog

The Only Conspiracy is Media Complicity

Those kooky Afghans, with their crazy Eastern views. Look at them say silly things like:

“The Americans will never leave Afghanistan,” said Mohammad Ali, a 36-year-old shopkeeper in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, one of seven areas due to move to Afghan security control this week. “They are withdrawing a few thousand of their soldiers as a cover for their long-term plans… They have invested a long time in Afghanistan and will not leave that easily.”

Yes, that’s positively… um. Actually this is pretty sharp. The Military-Industrial-Political Complex needs endless war for endless profit at the expense of the peaceful productivity of the unconnected. That’s not really up for debate. This leaves us to wonder why the piece is called “Afghan conspiracy theories as US drawdown begins.”

Other Afghans interviewed did indeed have some bizarre things to say, like that the US has taken all the natural resources and is now done with them. We know this isn’t true because 1) an entire country can’t be emptied of resources in 10 years and 2) the US is the worst, most bumbling empire ever, when we talk about extraction. The Brits, the Spanish, they knew how to rape countries. America just blows everything up at its own expense.

And then we’re treated to the boastful Afghans, those who say America lost the war and is fleeing. While there is some truth to this — the US hasn’t won anything — it’s because of utter incompetence and the plain economic impossibility of a successful occupation.

Finally, we have the “collaborators.” Those whom (we’re supposed to believe) want the US to occupy Afghanistan forever.

“My big fear after the withdrawal of the US forces is the return of the former armed groups,” said shopkeeper Ahmad Jawed in the western city of Herat. “They will come back and destroy everything that has been built over the past 10 years.”

Oh yes! All that magnificent infrastructure that began crumbling before the paint dried. Never mind the stuff the US has itself bombed into rubble. What else might be destroyed with the departure of the Americans? How about the most-corrupt state on the planet? Yes, it seems the Karzai bubble will be popping soon enough.

By mixing kooky quotes with some quite astute observations, and tossing in some alarmism à la last year’s Time cover girl — whatever will happen to us without our Great Protectors!? — AFP is the only one engaged in a conspiracy. That’s the one that makes a psycho out of anyone who wants this expensive, destructive war to just end already.

Diplomats Are the Danger

I won’t go into too much detail as to exactly where I read The Economist, but a few minutes after my first coffee this morning, I was staring incredulously at a quote in a column about Afghanistan. I re-read it four times to make sure I hadn’t missed something.

No, there it is in black and white. Discussing rapprochement with the Taliban, “Banyan” notes that while the US is in talks, it is also trying to assassinate as many of the Pashtun movement’s leaders as possible. And then:

In what one Western diplomat calls the Taliban’s “madrassa, linear-thinking sort of way” this does not infuse talks with mutual trust.

Get OUT. Those infant-minded, one-track Islams, with their strange dislike of being drone-bombed. What barbarians!

It’s like a mob boss, wiping his hands on his vest, says “eyy, it ain’t personal, it’s just business.”

This is the kind of solipsist delivering “diplomacy” for America, literally unable to imagine why anyone would not trust the United States of America, light unto the world, even as it sent bombs to dismember their families.

WikiLeaks’ revelations of US diplomatic cables are said to have done harm to diplomacy. Is this not proof the diplomats themselves are the harm? Taking narrow-minded dingbats and the machine they serve like this down a peg can only be a good thing. After all, “diplomacy” is always the cover used to get otherwise civilized, peaceful people on board a war.

Can we stop pretending our envoys are thoughful peacemakers, necessary to defuse war? Time and again in the recent past they have been the (willing?) tools of the War Party, some wool to hide the real goal of invasion, as was done by the Bush regime for Iraq. And, come on, they work for the firebreathing Hillary Clinton, who periodically threatens Iran with nuclear annihilation and recently commanded her minions to steal their foreign colleagues’ credit card numbers, for God’s sake.

If that’s still not enough, I leave you with another diplomat, Madeleine Albright, who in 1996 told Lesley Stahl the price of pretending to squeeze Saddam Hussein — five hundred thousand dead children — was “worth it.”

And after all that, America still attacked and destroyed Iraq. Diplomacy is a lie. Any earnest true believers in the ranks of the State Dept. are pawns, dupes, patsies. Stop respecting them. We need more Bradley Mannings to expose this.

Dubya was right??

From film-maker Oliver Stone’s interview with former Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, we discover:

Oliver Stone: "Were there any eye-to-eye moments with President Bush that day, that night?"

Nestor Kirchner: "…I said that a solution to the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan. …He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war and that the United States has grown stronger with war."

Stone: "War. He said that?"

Kirchner: "He said that. Those were his exact words."

Stone: "Was he suggesting that South America go to war?"

Kirchner: "Well, he was talking about the United States. …All of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by the various wars. He said it very clearly. –Fmr. Argentine President Kirchner Dies of Heart Attack, Democracy Now!, Oct. 28, 2010

So, WAS Dubya right?

"War" [1] is indeed a key part of the U.S. economy. Some folks call this "military keynesianism."

Consider: Despite one of the most defensible geographic situations on earth — unless you fear the Canadians — the U.S. Government spends more on "defense" than almost the rest of the world combined. AND, not surprisingly, U.S.A. is the biggest arms merchant in the world.

So, Mr. Bush was exactly right.

If you’re a U.S. Citizen, approximately 43% of your income taxes go to pay for wars, past and present. And that’s before Uncle Sam is forced, kicking and screaming, into officially admitting PTSD is nearly universal in combat veterans, lasts a lifetime, and is expensive to treat. According to former IMF Chief Economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the two current "wars" will eventually cost U.S. taxpayers between four and six trillion dollars. That’s trillion. With a "T."

And don’t fret about the militaryindustrial budget. While Mr. Obama isn’t yet responsible for killing as many men, women and children as Mr. Bush — and hasn’t spent as much doing so, give him a chance — he’s not even two years into his presidency and he’s already sent at least 60,000 new U.S. troops into Afghanistan and has plans to escalate the U.S. presence in Pakistan, and the largely ignoredU.S. presence in Yemen too.

With these kinds of numbers — that 43% of your income tax spent for “wars” for example — maybe a bit of money invested in antiwar.com to stop them might be a good investment, not only for you, but for your kids, grand kids and the yet unborn. What do you say?

Notes:

[1] The U.S. Government hasn’t been at war according to its Constitution since the end of World War II. That would require the U.S. House of Representatives to vote for war, which it hasn’t done. This means the so-called "wars" — the Korean "War," the Vietnam "War," The Iraq "Wars," the "War" in Afghanistan, etc. — must be something else. Or, since they insist on calling them "wars" anyway, unconstitutional. But as George W. Bush is reported to have claimed, "The constitution is just a damned piece of paper." So, who cares? return

Blackout?

Can YOUR card do this?

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you how war fits into this. I mean, you co-wrote the book with Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War. How does war fit into our problems with the economy?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, war fits in because you’re creating a liability, you’re spending money. And when we went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, we already had a deficit. And so, these wars were the first wars in America’s history financed totally on the credit card. So, you’re creating a liability, but you’re not creating an asset. So that’s the kind of spending that does weaken the economy, because it’s one-sided. … The numbers now are much more like four to six trillion.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, across this country, as the debates for various congressional and Senate seats[go], war is almost never raised [as an issue]. –Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz: Foreclosure Moratorium, Government Stimulus Needed to Revive US Economy

Blackout??

PRECEDENT? According to a "Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting" two week study, during the lead-up to the Iraq war, a period of particularly intense debate (Jan. 30 to Feb 12, 2003), U.S. mainstream media, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS Evening News, conducted 393 interviews about the pending war. Only three of those interviews were with peace leaders.

OOPS! Again.

…allegedly "hacked" software, in the case of the CIA, is now being used to guide killer drones to their targets, according to IISI’s legal pleadings, despite the fact that the modified software doesn’t function properly… –CIA Drone-Code Scandal Now Has A Big Blue Hue

Pakistani Gen. Gul on Why the US Cannot Win in Afghanistan

This interview with Pakistani General (ret.) Hamid Gul, by Bonnie Faulkner, took place on Wednesday, September 8, 2010 on the radio show â€œGuns and Butter,â€ KPFA-FM. To read the full transcript and hear the clip, scroll down for more info.

In this important interview, Gen. Hamid Gul explains that the US war in Afghanistan was doomed from the start. As a military professional with a distinguished career, he identifies the key factors that determine success or failure in war, and shows that the US is failing in almost every area.

Gen. Gul outlines the precariousness of the lines of communication depended upon by US forces (logistics), due to their length from Karachi to Afghanistan and susceptibility to frequent attack by a hostile population in Pakistan. He then surveys the intelligence failure, recently exposed in the WikiLeaks Afghan war materials, due to the almost total lack of reliable human intelligence and the uselessness of signals intelligence in a country like Afghanistan. He is especially critical of the increasing mixture of military and intelligence personnel, with their different training and skills, in the intelligence-collection effort, and the desperate resort to private contractors for intelligence.

Gen. Gul criticizes the failure on the part of US war planners to assess the nature of the enemy in Afghanistan, a people who never give up. He concludes that the resolve and resilience of the Taliban was seriously underestimated by the Pentagon. Further, the US has supported and tried to utilize corrupt elements of Afghan society to pursue its war aims, but that these people are completely unreliable. His principal example is the US employment of a local warlord, Hazrat Ali, which resulted in the escape of Osama bin Laden from Tora Bora.

Gul shows that the objectives of the US military have changed. The first objective, the capture of Osama bin Laden, failed. So a new objective was declared, to defeat the Taliban. Gul argues that all military thinkers from Sun Tzu to MacArthur have insisted on the selection and maintenance of a single objective, and that to change the goalposts is to guarantee defeat.

He then shows that the US cannot use its superior firepower because it cannot locate targets to attack; that it has a great disadvantage in manpower, as fighters are flocking to the resistance forces because they â€œsmell victoryâ€; that the Taliban control the countryside, with the US forces squeezed into garrison towns from which â€œthey dare not ventureâ€; and that time is on the side of the resistance, as the US cannot stay there forever. He makes a strong case that the Taliban are fully supported by the population throughout the country, and therefore the US cannot defeat them without defeating the entire Afghan people.

He goes on to compare the US occupation to that of the Soviet Union, and shows the considerable advantages the Soviet Union had over the current NATO forces. Yet, the Soviet Union was trounced. Gul says that if instead of 40,000 additional troops, the US were to send 400,000, it would still lose the war.

He concludes with a description of the corruption of the Afghan puppet government and the US reconstruction efforts, and the astonishing resurgence of opium production in the country, surmising that the opium is flown out of the country on US transport planes to Europe and the United States with the full knowledge of the highest US government officials.

To read the full transcript, go to gunsandbutter.org. To listen to the audio of the show, go to http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/63837.