What's to be said? We've known from the first year that this thing cannot end well. The Taliban will win, if only because the majority of Afghans hate us more than they hate them.
How could we ever have been so deluded as to think that we could win hearts and minds in that part of the world? They simply don't like us. They don't like our religion, they don't like our culture, they don't like our skin color, and they don't like the fact that we're there.
Bob Woodward and David Sanger have both produced worthwhile books on Obama's Afghan adventure. If you read those works, it soon becomes clear that we have been kidding ourselves. For all of our military's pretentious talk about counterinsurgency theory, the fact is that the Afghans want nothing we have to offer. Hamid Karzai was and is no leader -- in fact, he was always a laughingstock.
Let's have no illusions: When the Taliban returns to power, they will plunge that nation back into a despicable barbarism. But what can we do? We can either destroy Afghanistan utterly or we can let the Afghans choose their own pathway to hell. There is no third choice. For more than a dozen years, we've been telling ourselves a third choice exists, and we've been kidding ourselves.
The only piece on Afghanistan you really need to read is the one published a few days ago by Eric Margolis:
Afghanistan’s national election held this week is a sham. A group of candidates, handpicked by the US, will pretend to compete in an election whose outcome has already been determined – by Washington.
The candidates include US groomed politicians, and drug-dealing warlords from the Tajik and Uzbek north. Chief among them, Rashid Dostam, a major war criminal and principal CIA ally who ordered the massacre of over 2,000 Taliban prisoners.
Such is the rotten foundation on which Washington is hoping to build a compliant Afghan “democracy” that will continue to offer bases to US troops and warplanes. Afghanistan’s majority, the Pashtun tribes, have little voice in the election charade.
The largest, most popular party in Afghanistan, Taliban, and its smaller ally, Hisbi-Islami, have been excluded as “terrorists” from the current and past elections. They are boycotting the vote, rightly claiming it will be rigged and run by the western powers and their local collaborators. We see this same pattern of faux democracy across the Mideast.
As US troops and heavy bombers attacked Taliban position, I wrote in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers that invading Afghanistan was a terrible mistake, a war that would not be won. Not surprisingly, I was widely denounced.
My column of 26-years was blacklisted by a major newspaper chain after I dared to say the war was lost and a waste of blood and money.
This is one big reason why the war in Afghanistan has so far cost the US $1 trillion dollars. Billions have disappeared due to massive corruption. Without a steady stream of US dollars, the Afghan regime in Kabul would collapse. Pakistan has been paid over $18 billion since 2001 to fight its own Taliban and allow US military operations.I'll add this. Sanger and Woodward detail the way a newly-elected Barack Obama, terrified of seeming a neophyte, sought the aid of CIA experts and conventional Pentagon thinkers. It would have been better if Obama had been a true naif. In Afghanistan, the conventional wisdom was never very wise.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama’s efforts to cut US occupation forces in Afghanistan are being openly and brazenly challenged by his own insubordinate military commanders who cannot face admitting defeat at the hands of Taliban – the ultimate humiliation for the high-tech US forces.
8 comments:
The Russians tried to warn us. As one of their generals described it, “We won every battle but lost the war.”
And for the United States, we’re fighting a Frankenstein monster of our own creation. We freakin created the Taliban to give the Soviets their own Vietnam. What a great idea by Zbigniew Brzezinski. And he’s still in the game giving advice to Obama. The US funded the jihadis and set up their religious schools, the madrassas, to convert the youth to radical Islam. Because of the war with the Soviet Union, Afghanistan was left with a horrendous number of orphans. So countless parentless boys grew up without experiencing the love of a mother, and all they knew about women was what they learned from their radicalized school instructors.
Global Research has an incredible article up now, “From Afghanistan to Syria: Women’s Rights, War Propaganda and the CIA” which goes into the formation of the Taliban:
“Education in Afghanistan in the years preceding the Soviet-Afghan war was largely secular. The US covert education destroyed secular education. The number of CIA sponsored religious schools (madrassas) increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000 [in 2001].
Unknown to the American public, the US spread the teachings of the Islamic jihad in textbooks “Made in America” developed at the University of Nebraska:
… the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books…”
What is truly amazing about this article is the photographs of university students in Kabul in the 1960’s and 70’s. Everyone, including the women, have western dress. The photos could have been taken at a college in America. It’s dumbfounding. And this was all reverted back to a medieval fundamentalist culture to create a proxy to fight the Soviets.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/from-afghanistan-to-syria-womens-rights-war-propaganda-and-the-cia/5329665
when the country is nothing much more then an industrial military complex, what is it supposed to do/ may as well spread the structure around the globe and think of creating mayhem while helping loot the different region of whatever resources and assets they might still have.. how convenient that just as the war in afgan is supposed to be winding down, they are right next door to the one they want to get going in ukraine.. pathetic how anyone could think the usa had some good reason for being in afgan, or that the thought of them their for any good was ever entertained by anyone.. that makes no sense whatsoever, except if i opt to read the nyt, wapo or silly propaganda rags like that, at which point my mind is like a bowl of jello..
Now that we've restarted the Cold War with Russia, withdrawal from Afghanistan might become more complicated than planned. The US depends on cooperation with Russia to transport heavy equipment across Russian territory to reach Afghanistan. If we lose the right to use this Northern Distribution Network to withdraw, then the equipment would have to cross the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, which could prove problematic.
http://thediplomat.com/2014/03/how-ukraine-spillover-could-complicate-the-us-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/
The same type of arrogant and incompetent military and political asses who gave us the defeat in Vietnam have now engineered a similar and potentially much more costly humiliation in Afghanistan. I think the reasons why the people of the country don't like us is because we invaded their country on the basis of trumped-up lies, created a puppet government made up largely of hired stooges and drug-peddling warlords, and then proceeded to bomb villages at will, kill, rape and torture people just for fun, and machine-gun children from helicopters for sport while they are trying to gather firewood. And then of course lie brazenly and deny that any "mistakes" had been made. And we wonder why they don't like us. The ingratitude of these people!
The only way to win this war is to make the people more afraid of us than they are of the Taliban. The comparable is Lidice. Do we really want to become like the Nazis?
Seems that wherever the CIA goes the drugs begin to flow. The Taliban originally banned opium production in Afghanistan. Since the US invasion that situation sure has changed.
"Heroin use increased nearly 70 percent in the USA between 2002 and now."
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-politics-of-heroin-Tr-by-Samuel-Vargo-Addiction_April_Breaking-News_Criminal-140407-855.html
As Timothy Leary said of the CIA, "They're the world's best mafia."
Looking up the heroin use numbers quoted above I came across a really interesting article from 2011; Whistleblower: Libya "Vampire War" is About Oil, Lockerbie and CIA Heroin Op.
This might be old news to some of you, but much of it's new to me.
"About July, I started hearing that Gadhaffi was exerting heavy pressure on U.S. and British oil companies to cough up special fees and kick backs to cover the costs of Libya's reimbursement to the families of Pan Am 103. Payment of damages for the Lockerbie bombing had been one of the chief conditions for ending U.N. sanctions on Libya that ran from 1992 until 2003."
"The Lockerbie conviction was full of holes to begin with. Anybody who knows anything about terrorism in the 1980s knows the CIA got mixed up in heroin trafficking out of the Bekaa Valley during the hostage crisis in Lebanon. The Lockerbie conspiracy had been a false flag operation to kill off a joint CIA and Defense Intelligence investigation into kick backs from Islamic Jihad, in exchange for protecting the heroin transit network."
"On the day it was blown out of the sky, Pan Am 103 was carrying that team of CIA and FBI investigators, the CIA's Deputy Chief assigned to Beirut, and three Defense Intelligence officers, including McKee and Gannon, on their way to Washington to deliver a report on the CIA's role in heroin trafficking, and the impact on terrorist financing and the hostage crisis. In short, everyone with direct knowledge of CIA kickbacks from heroin trafficking died on Pan Am 103. A suitcase packed with $500,000 worth of heroin was found in the wreckage. It belonged to investigators, as proof of the corruption."
http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Libya-s-Blood-for-Oil-The-by-Susan-Lindauer-110327-21.html
Ah, now I remember Susan Lindauer, as one who has told so many stories as to make one think of rabbit holes. But still ...
It's not so much of winning every battle and losing the war. There aren't battles it's not a war.
Karzai was always known by the disparate peoples in the "country' of Afghanistan as Our Man. He's got no pull and his brother was running heroin for the CIA since the beginning.
*Sigh*
The last 12 years or so of occupation has been a massive transfer of wealth into the MIC.
Sadly, everyone who has died there has died for the "biggest nothing".
Obama probably could have gotten away politically with pulling us out in his first term and won a second because as much as the conservatives would have howled about cutting and running it's the blather of keyboard commandoes and would have been just another noisome emission into the Right-Wing Internet Fart Bubble.
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