President Obama sneaked into Afghanistan last night, in Bush-like manner, to sign a “post-war” agreement with Hamid Karzai. “Post-war” is beyond 2014. Since the US knew in 2001, when it first attacked Afghanistan, that the conflict would still be going on ten years later, it’s easy to see why they can rely on 2014 as a get-out date.
Karzai is in a tough spot. As the sovereign leader of Afghanistan, he has to take the offer. Otherwise he’ll be killed.
Obama said nothing about the mission. We’ve never had it spelled out for us. At first it was to get Osama bin Laden, but Osama refused to cooperate, kicking the bucket in late 2001. After that, the enemy became the Taliban, and the ally the “Northern Alliance,” a group of terrorists that we trained and funded during the Soviet occupation. If you were to ask any American who the “Taliban” are, you’d get a wide-eyed shrug. We don’t’ know. We just know they are evil.
As with “Al Qaeda,” a group of ragtags without any real power or popularity, Taliban is amorphous – they are whoever we happen to be attacking. The thousands of civilians killed in the process, well, they just had bad days. It is said that Al Qaeda pulled off 9/11, but it’s really hard to imagine that a small group of ragtags could pull off a sophisticated operation. But 2/3 of the public believes that, and are still pissed, and so in the mind of the public, Taliban=Al Qaeda=Saddam=Qaddafi=Chavez . They all have one thing in common: They have faces, and as we learned to hate their faces, we learned to hate the people we were killing.
Propaganda 101: Put a face on the enemy, so that the public can focus its hatred.
Nonetheless, 9/11 had to have spawned rooms full of boners in the Pentagon, as it gave them the ability to attack anyone, anytime, for any reason. The American public, never known for bravery or brains, knows no better than to be afraid and go along.
Our real duty, as vigilant citizens, is to try to understand what is real, what is not. They are not fighting evil – they are fighting local constituencies who want their countries to be left alone. We call them “insurgents,” “militants” and “terrorists” but these are just agitprop words. We are the insurgents, we are the militants. We terrorize innocent people. We are attacking and killing people for unstated reasons. They are merely defending themselves.
If we were to pull out tomorrow, peace would break out, there region and the world would be safer, and only one thing would be wrong: The US would not have achieved its unstated objectives.
Among those objectives, and this is just repetition of speculation, is encirclement of Iran, security for a gas pipeline from the Caspian Basin, and access to resources, among them rare earth minerals that China currently has a monopoly on. Also, Iran and Pakistan want to engage in commerce, the former selling natural gas to the latter. We are free-market-free-trade through and through and would do anything for free markets and free trade, but we won’t do that.
Piece of Mindful 
“Taliban is amorphous – they are whoever we happen to be attacking.”
Nonsense.
Apparently, your knowledge of the Taliban is extremely limited or nonexistent, but informed Americans have been following their exploits since at least the mid-1990s when The New York Times began a series of reports condemning the Taliban’s treatment of women. Three or four stories were published each year, all of them essentially the same pro-feminist propaganda about how badly women were being treated in Afghanistan, and of course with a very strong implication that the US ought to do something to help the girls in the burkas.
We have over 20 Times articles in our archives from that period, showing anti-Taliban tilt, pro-Taliban tilt, and anti-Taliban tilt again.
The New York Times fell silent about the girls in the burkas after the embassy bombings in Africa. The Clinton Administration needed Taliban support to find bin Laden.
Ultimately, The New York Times, being essentially a liberal-pacifist newspaper and opposed to all Republican policies, dropped all its denunciations of the bad Taliban when the US invaded Afghanistan. Now that President Bush had actually started to do something about the Taliban, The Times reversed itself and opposed the invasion.
[Under Clinton.]
“U.S. Seeks Way to Pry Suspect from Afghans” — WASHINGTON — As United States officials focus on a Saudi exile, Osama bin Laden, as a prime suspect in the embassy bombings in Africa, they are considering strategies for how they might negotiate his capture with the Taliban, the fundamentalist Muslims who control Afghanistan, officials said.
In Afghanistan, a high-ranking official of the Taliban opened the door Wednesday to such discussions.
Any deal could be complicated — or short-circuited — by Washington’s longstanding complaints with the Taliban. Those include their harsh treatment of women, other human-rights questions and their involvement in narcotics trafficking
.
Still, American officials are deliberating whether they can provide incentives to the Taliban to win their cooperation in helping to bring bin Laden to face any charges that may be filed against him in the bombings. No such charges have yet been brought, but senior Clinton Administration officials say he is their leading suspect.
[The New York Times, August 20, 1998]
///
[Three years later under Bush.]
“U.S. Warns Taliban Amid Fears of More Attacks” WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – The United States broadcast its growing impatience with Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban on Sunday and told Americans to brace for retaliatory attacks once its “war on terrorism” moves beyond tough talk.
[Reuters, September 30, 2001]
–PassTheBucksMax
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I’ll humor you for a while, but if you overrun this site, as you tend to do (manic high? – just curious), your posts will disappear again, not for content or because I disagree, but because you are too damned voluminous.
Your comments rely, as I see it, on several internal beliefs: that foreign policy is partisan; that the US government is in anyway concerned about human rights or dignity, anywhere or anytime, and that foreign policy is constrained by the American news media. In addition, you are basing your opinions on the notion that Osama bin Laden is guilty of any of the crimes for which he is charged. (He was, indeed, as I understand it, found guilty in
abstentionabstentia of the embassy bombings, and then only under RICO statutes, and since they needed an organization to use that statute, the name “Al Qaeda” became OBL’s operating arm.)Three of those are easily disproven by abundant evidence, the latter called into question by lack of evidence.
Get on with your day, then.
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Mujahideen. It’s Mujahideen. As David Byrne so elequently said,”Same as it ever was.”
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Karzai is not a really a sovereign ruler we put him there. His sovereignty extends to the Kabul city limits only and even then only to the extent the US enforces it for him. Peace would not break out if we left. The civil war would continue we just would no longer be part of it.
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They used to say the same thing about Vietnam – that it was a civil war. The baggage that carries is immense, basically saying that we didn’t start the fire.
There are always conflicts everywhere, most of which do not concern us. When we choose to invade a country for fictitious reasons and impose a government of our choosing, and murder people by the busload, and then resistance comes about, to say they’d be fighting anyway if we left is nonsense. Maybe there is some underlying truth, but that is not an exculpatory clause for the US.
Remember, there was never in recorded history a suicide bombing in Afghanistan, until the US arrived. What is it about our inherent goodness that turns people evil?
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Not trying to exculpate the US. There is a civil war happening there. It was happening before we invaded although the Taliban were dominating. It will be happening after we leave. Afghanistan is a failed state. Its not really a state its a bunch of militias and warlords funded by competing foreign interests and drug sales. Its a shame because it used to be a peaceful civil society prior to the communist takeover and soviet invasion. We probably have made things worse im sure. Its not going to get better when we leave though there will probably be less conflict after the initial blood letting of the people who co-operated with us but lack the resources to leave when we do. Other states, particularly indian and pakistan, will continue to interfere and use it as a proxy battleground.
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“it used to be a peaceful civil society prior to the communist takeover and soviet invasion…”
The Soviets were virtually invited into Afghanistan according to ZBig. In the summer of 1979 the US sent special forces into Afganistan with a virtual certainty that it would draw a Soviet response. The purpose, as I understand, was to give the Soviets their own Vietnam.
After that conflict, the Soviets withdrew, the Mujahadeen (later known as Al Qaeda) stood down, and the US completely skidaddled without an iota of concern about rebuilding. I would bet, by the way, that the Soviets were more well-received in that country than the US. I read one time where the most popular political figure there, even after the Soviet withdrawal, was the former Head under the USSR.
But perceptions are hard things to break … Communists are bad, by definition, and have bad intentions, while Americans, even when we do bad things, have good intentions.
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I don’t believe your perception of the soviet presence or them being well received Is accurate at all. They were far more brutal than the us military. They were not invited in by the people or any legitimate govt of Afghanistan. Some of the worst excesses occurred in the civil war between the mujahideen factions after they withdrew. Even when the Taliban finally took control they could still not consolidate and take the north from the militias sponsored by Iran India Russia and others. I read a book long ago a diary written by a soviet soldier I wish I could remember what it was called. Very good stuff. The us should have learned a lesson from it.
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I said “more well received than the US.” If you are saying that the US is well-behaved and well-received, you’re merely reflecting that attitude that Americans have that I mentioned above – no matter how much evil shit we pull off, we always imagine ourselves well-intentioned, while everyone else has evil on their agenda. This reflects in your comments.
Yes, there was loads of violence after the US left, but it was mission accomplished, Soviets defeated. Do you really think anyone here cared? That was another point I made – that we blew the place up and walked away.
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Well behaved in comparison to the soviet union in Afghanistan yes, there is no serious room for debate on that. Nobody in the us govt cares what happens in Afghanistan unless they think it benefits or is a detriment to ‘us’. They still have to answer to us public opinion and bad publicity though to an extent the soviets did not and regardless of whether the soviet tactics were effective the us could not duplicate them. You are an apologist for the soviet dictatorship and a Marxist rogue.
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I simply don’t view the world through the lens of US propaganda. I have a distinct advantage here in that I need to apologize for praise no one. I simply don’t see mean meaningful differences between US and USSR foreign policy. Each defended its own sphere and blamed the other for its many internal wars to keep colonies in line, for the Soviets Hungary in 1956, Chechnya in the 1980’s, Czechoslovakia n 1968, and on the US side, scores of wars which we blamed nonexistent communist subversion.
When the USSR imploded a vacuum was created, and very soon the US was at war in Iraq, the Balkans, later Afghanistan, and soon to come Iran. You’re right that India and China are seen as rivals, and the US is now In the process of conquering Northen Africa.
All of it well-intended, of course.
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On a personal level everyone believes their own intentions are honorable you’d probably need to have a mental defect to think yourself evil and proceed on that basis. many people translate the same to the intentions of their country. I do not and have not said anything about the intentions of the us or soviet union in Afghanistan. What I said is that the soviet union was demonstrably more brutal than the us in the waging of their war. They were not any more welcome than the us, as you said there were not any meaningful differences between us and soviet foreign policy from the standpoint both were (and are) simply trying to do whatever they can get away with to advance their own interests and impair those of their rivals without any real regard to the interests of third parties or civilians.
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But what is the impulse that allows you to say this with such certainty? It is certainly not evidence-based, as American media will show us the violence committed by our enemies, but not our own.
Evidence?
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