Once in a somewhat long while, there are those moments when the forces that animate our society can’t help but reveal themselves. The late Alexander Cockburn once described it as being like turning on the kitchen light in the middle of the night and seeing all the cockroaches before they scatter. It’s a bit like that.
The epic fail of the Afghanistan adventure is one of those. The Taliban has been running the country for a little over a week, and what are we hearing? That a third of the country lives in abject poverty and half of the children are severely malnourished. That, my friends, didn’t happen over the last ten days. Where was that news a month ago? Two months ago? Fifteen years ago?
The wrong ordinance
In the first glorious year of the reign of Trump the Malodorous, our dear, fat leader made a point of dropping a big bomb on Afghanistan. It was one of those “daisy cutter” bunker-buster type bombs – I did a post about it back in 2017. This “mother of all bombs” was the largest non-nuclear bomb ever exploded, supposedly, and was used for demonstration purposes, mostly.
Of course, it was just the latest in a long line of ordinance dropped on Afghanistan since 2001. 2018 and 2019 saw a lot of bombing, and a lot of civilian casualties, as the Trumpists cynically sought to bring the Taliban to the table. Given that half of the nation’s children were starving even then, the things we should have been dropping were pallets of food and water. Is this what Tony Blair came out of retirement to tell us? No, I thought not.
Play it again, Uncle Sam
Amazingly, I have heard more than one T.V. commentator suggest starting all over in Afghanistan. What I mean is, I’ve heard them suggest that we start supporting insurgents against the Taliban. This is literally how we started this bullshit back in the Carter administration. Back then, we were using Afghans as bludgeons against the Soviets so that they would pull back from eastern Europe.
What is our imperial game now? Veto power over the mineral reserves in Afghanistan, so we can deny it to, say, the Chinese if we have a mind to? Lord effing knows. All I can be sure of is that we are not finished with Afghanistan, even if we have zero interest in Afghans. And with the recent attack that killed 13 U.S. troops and a bunch of civilians, the bleeding hasn’t stopped either.
Bring them here
I’ve heard Tucker Carlson and other racists complain about bringing Afghans to America, describing it as an invasion, etc. That sounds like a good reason to bring them here – if only to make Tucker unhappy. We’ve got a refugee center here in Utica, NY – why not process some of them through there? Sounds like a good idea to me.
Side benefit: it would probably make Claudia Tenney’s head explode, too.
luv u,
jp
And clearly, there is a solid, institutional consensus on American foreign policy. It’s a relatively small box that contains, on one end, the Obama approach, then the center-left liberal interventionist school (Clinton, Samantha Power, etc.), followed by the center-right establishment Republicans (James Baker, Kissinger, etc.), the hot-head interventionists (McCain, Graham, Cotton), and the neocons (Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Elliot Abrams, etc.). In terms of blowing things up and killing people, there isn’t a lot of distance between any of these groupings, and they all share a common imperial worldview. The encouraging development for the Morning Joe crew is the notion that Trump has now put himself in that box.