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
I won’t run through the particulars of the story. For that, I suggest you listen to the podcast. Suffice to say that Bergdahl suffered grievously over his five years as a guest of the Taliban. He attempted to escape several times, once for as long as nine days, escaping barefoot into the Hindu Kush, injuring himself severely, eating grass, etc. He was beaten badly, cut with razors, kept in a cage not fit for a chimp, threatened with beheading – you name it. He was the first P.O.W. held for anything like this long since the Vietnam War, and under conditions that rival any horror stories from that conflict. Frankly, it’s a testament to his physical and mental strength that he survived.
The media, as always, is in the tank for this war. On the morning after bombing began in Syria, the first voice you heard on NPR’s 6:00 a.m. newscast was that of a retired general who had “crafted” America’s bombing campaign during the Gulf War – a man who thought we weren’t bombing Syria hard enough. That’s NPR, no surprise, but don’t expect any better from the liberal media. Rachel Maddow, while a war skeptic, gave a thumbnail recent history of the Iraqi Kurds and the Gulf War that might have been torn out of a Bush campaign media release. Our only role in that saga, according to this telling, was liberating freedom-loving Kuwait and helping the Kurds preserve evidence of Saddam’s pogrom against them.
The motivation behind this is pretty obvious. Attempts to ban abortion have always run into three exceptions that block an outright ban – rape, incest, and saving the life of the mother. Of these three categories, anti-abortion fanatics see rape as the least problematic to game. They keep trying to find ways around that exception, resorting to narrowing the definition of “legitimate” rape, junk science theories about female reproductive biology, and so on. Aiken got his theory from a crackpot preacher that served as a surrogate for Romney during the last election. This same guy has met with both Romney and Ryan this year.
Imperial Prerogatives. There has been a lot of reporting on Pakistan the last couple of weeks. Their military closed a crossing to U.S. convoys on the Af-Pak border in response to a range of disagreements, not least of which are disputes over U.S. and NATO (essentially U.S.) incursions into Pakistani national territory. There is a kind of impatience to the reporting, communicating the administration’s and the military’s frustration with Pakistan’s failure to adequately support their seemingly endless war in Afghanistan. It’s reminiscent of the official line during the Vietnam war, when American officials would complain about “sanctuaries” in Cambodia and Laos, while they confidently flew devastating bombing runs out of their own “sanctuaries” in Thailand and elsewhere.
The “Ground Zero Mosque” Controversy. This is an unexpected bonanza for jihadi recruitment. It validates much of the propaganda about an America at war with Islam. It demonstrates the depth of our political pathology and our willingness to scapegoat more than 1 billion people because of the actions of a handful of criminally insane zealots. And it does so at the worst possible time, when expectations in the Islamic world are already being deflated by Obama’s Bush-like foreign policy. Jihadi leaders hope that this controversy will drag on, I’m sure, or that the Park 51 center will be forced to relocate in Staten Island so that its detractors, flush with victory, will expand their campaign against Muslims. 
will pay a heavy price. Admiral Mullens went so far as to say that Wikileaks may already have blood on their hands. Mullens and his colleagues would know something about that, of course, as the documents apparently demonstrate. I suspect, in cases such as these, that most if not all of what is secret is merely a secret from us (i.e. the American people); that military operations of the kind deployed in Afghanistan are very porous in the sense of who is working for whom. Sure, it would be better not to put people needlessly in harm’s way. But that’s what the Afghan war is all about, from what I can see.
Why the hell are we in Afghanistan? Our leaders say it’s to disrupt and destroy Al Qaeda so that they cannot plan new attacks on us. But to the extent that people like Osama Bin Laden are involved in operational planning for global terror attacks, all he and his pals need is a room (or a cave, but I suspect a room) big enough for a white board. Can anyone claim that we have denied him that in nearly nine years of war? Did our drones stop the Times Square bomber? (Fact is, they helped push him over the edge.) Where’s the story on that, kids?