Understanding Afghanistan
March 8, 2011
Kandahar, Afghanistan
At this hour, a few thousand miles from here, Moammar Gadhafi is using helicopter gunships to confront a CIA-staged rebellion that the rest of the Arab Awakening is closely monitoring. While the regimes in Egypt and Tunisia seem to have been successfully removed by an internet-savvy generation of Middle Eastern youth movements, there is no reason to believe that it happened organically, or that any of the other governments in the region will quietly step down.
And the idea of young, idealistic and well-educated revolutionaries banding together to overthrow the suffocating, corrupt monarchies and dictatorships of a bygone era is so exciting it makes one almost believe that Western intelligence agencies have nothing to do with it, that maybe it really is a grassroots effort.
Maybe.
But expecting anything of this nature to catch on here in Afghanistan is woefully naïve. This is not even a country. It’s a treacherous and inhospitable scorpion pit riddled with ethnic tribes, remote villages and conquering warlords. There is no infrastructure. Unless you’re on a military installation of one of the occupying forces or a guest at Hamid Karzai’s house, good luck finding anything resembling paved roads, electricity or running water.
These people are still living in the 11th century and they’re happy to be there. I’m speaking primarily about the men, of course. I have little doubt that the women of Afghanistan would gladly give up the majority of their traditions in exchange for the right to be treated like actual human beings.
Were it spoken of more often, the everyday barbarism inherent in many Afghan regions would surely cause the average American to question the real reasons for our extended occupation of this country.
Rather than a long list of the cultural abominations that abound in Afghanistan, let me tell you about a typical transaction that takes place here. Let’s say you and I are both Afghani men living in neighboring villages. One day you accidently kill my goat by running over it with your cart. Well, there are no policemen or courts or anything of the sort where we live, so I take you to a local village elder to decide what kind of compensation I am due for my dead goat.
A common outcome to this type of scenario is that you will have to give me your eight year old daughter as payment, and I, in turn, will immediately make her my third wife.
This is the cornerstone of horror in Afghanistan - women and children are nothing more than property, bought and sold like Grand Funk albums at a garage sale.
Does anyone really expect change in a country like this? I was here just after 9/11. Now it’s almost 10 years later and I can assure you that once you step off the military installations and get into the countryside it is obvious that NOTHING has changed. These people are who they are. They have no intention of mimicking our behaviors just because it’s politically convenient for us.
And every month more American men and women come home in body bags; a steady stream of dead Americans and a multi-trillion dollar defense budget that has bankrupted America.
Why?
Bush Administration apologists and Obama administration financiers will tell you that the main reason we are still in Afghanistan is because we can’t give al Qaeda a safe haven to plan attacks against America. This argument is so ludicrous it shouldn’t even require a response.
Anyone who has ever flown across Afghanistan in a Blackhawk or a Chinook, as I have many times, can tell you that it is an absolutely impossible landscape with, literally, millions of places to hide, and this persistent lie about the NEED to sacrifice thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of American dollars every year trying to keep a few lunatics from having a bad guy meeting is stupid and insulting.
But the American people have swallowed this gibberish year after year, for 10 goddamn years, and the madness continues.
There is a particular, knee-jerk, redneck, nationalistic point of view that one arrives at after spending some time in this shit hole, and that is: why don’t we bring all our troops and hardware and money back home, defend our own country, and just let these crazy motherfuckers kill each other?
The reason we don’t do that, of course, is because the political leaders in the Legislative Branch who could actually make that happen keep their seats by accepting favors and campaign contributions from the same multi-national corporations that rely on the U.S. military to protect their interests abroad.
And that is the ugly secret about the war in Afghanistan. Pushing the Taliban into the mountains every year only to have them fight their way back down again in the spring seems to act as a Three-card Monte trick, keeping Americans from noticing the real reason for a U.S. military presence in this region: to provide low cost security for the corporate contractors and energy companies responsible for draining this area of its resources, while reaping enormous profits for the arms industry that sells weapons to both sides.
That’s what this is really all about.
By the way, it should be made clear that the average soldier on the ground here has little interest in any of this, and that’s probably a good thing. Understanding the gravity of the corruption involved in having him here would certainly not help him do his job, and doing his job is what keeps him and his brothers alive during each deployment. I would also like to mention that I have been imbedded with members of the U.S. military many times (in Iraq, Afghanistan and a few other nasty places) and they are absolutely the most bad-ass force on Earth. They also do extraordinary humanitarian work, providing food, water, clothing and medicine to local communities ravaged by the monstrous atrocities committed by groups like the Taliban.
That said, the foreign policy of the United States, real or pretended, should never be regime change and nation building. Our geopolitical overextensions have left us with a severely damaged moral credibility. That’s fixable. But our unconstitutionally created central bank, the Federal Reserve, has destroyed our financial credibility. That may not be so easily fixed. Wars are paid for by deficit spending, a practice that has already reduced the U.S. to second world status.
The naked truth, simply put, is that if the Legislative Branch were to force the Defense Department to bring all of its operations back home and focus solely on the protection of U.S. citizens within their own borders, corporations that have long relied on taxpayer-provided, international security would be forced to decide between financing their own private armies or re-establishing their manufacturing bases on U.S. soil. Most companies would choose the latter, and this would provide an unprecedented employment boom as well as the triumphant return of a vibrant American middle class - the financial and spiritual foundation of our successful Republic.
Copyright 2011 John Bizarre
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