The U.S. is running a “counter-insurgency” campaign in Afghanistan on the heels of the mostly-successful one in Iraq. Such campaigns are brutal and can be devastating for local populations. They involve targeting and murder of people hostile to U.S. occupation, and terror. The terror is brought about by indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians, as seen below, and Gestapo-like house-to-house raids in the early morning hours, and, of course, torture as seen at Abu Ghraib.
The objective is to kill as many young men in resistance forces as possible, and to terrorize those who might consider joining. Those who make it through the Abu Ghraib compounds (there are many such compounds) are sent back to the neighborhoods with tales of indecency, terror and indignation. Word spreads among the young, and joining the resistance is thereby discouraged. Large segments of the population flee – over two million people fled Iraq, and another 2.7 million were uprooted. In Vietnam, hundreds of thousands were put in concentration camps, known in propaganda parlance as “fortified villages,” or “secure hamlets,” and in counter-insurgency as “draining the swamp.”
It’s Orwellian. The peasants were protecting the insurgents, and so the U.S. sought to remove the protection the insurgents were getting from the local populace. Hence, concentration camps.
In the meantime, at least of what we know, The CIA was conducting “Operation Phoenix,” in which suspect insurgents were murdered. The number commonly given is 40,000 murders. I think it is just a number.
Terror works.
The ability to engage in such behavior requires a concerted effort to lie to us, and to keep images of the reality of war from entering the mainstream.
In Vietnam, it was the occasional image (tiger cages, little girl fleeing a napalm attack, the bullet-in-the-brain boy) that undermined the terror effort there. Part of the problem was returning conscripts and their stories. Conscripts are notoriously weak when it comes to inhumane activity. Hence a decision by Nixon in the early 1970’s to eliminate conscription.
Beginning with experiments in the attack on Granada under Reagan, the Pentagon reformed the management of the media during war time. Reporters who covered that invasion were “mushroomed” – kept in the dark and fed shit, and were not allowed to take pictures until the business at hand was done. This was also the model used for the first Gulf War. It was largely successful, as the U.S. public to this day knows little, if anything, of the barbaric nature of that 1991 attack.
In the second Gulf War, pictures and images again were strictly controlled (even censoring flag-draped coffins), but the Pentagon also experimented with the idea of “embedding” correspondents. The idea was that the reporters themselves would become part of the band of brothers, and would be part of the war effort. It worked: The public wrongly perceived that it was getting actual on-the-ground coverage of the war, and images were still contained.
Still, the war effort requires total control of information flow. All mail and Internet activity from Iraq and Afghanistan is monitored, and returning soldiers are kept in line by threats of loss of benefits. (There is no mainstream outlet for their stories anymore anyway.) Further, more than half of the boots-on-the-ground in those countries are private Blackwater-like mercenaries. They present no security threat, as killing is their business.
____________
In Afghanistan, the counter-insurgency proceeds largely as scripted. But there is a nettlesome problem in the form of President Hamid Karzai. He has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. is killing too many civilians in his country, and has further stated that Iran is a friend of his country. He doesn’t get it at all. Killing civilians is the terror objective, and Iran can never be talked about in a positive light.
Karzai’s days are numbered.
So now we learn that the U.S. is concerned about his personal drug use, and also that the election that brought him to office was not legitimate.
The leaders in the Pentagon, the Obama Administration, do not give a rat’s ass about a man’s personal habits so long as a man does what he is told and cooperates. The U.S. does not care about the fairness of an election so long as the election produced results that the U.S. can tolerate.
And so it is necessary to connect the dots … this, and this. Karzai is being afforded the courtesy of a warning. If he does not step down, and soon, he will be assassinated.
Expect him to leave office soon, either to retirement or the next world.
_____________
Update: Hillary Clinton on Face the Nation tells us that Karzai is “reliable.” Much to make of this: She is either saying he has capitulated, and will be a team player, she could be reading a death warrant, or there could be an internal split between intelligence and the White House. No way to know. There are many factions here, and frankly, Obama has little to do with it, despite the title above.
Piece of Mindful 
