IN AFGHANISTAN I AM, THEREFORE I WIN
Abstract: The war in Afghanistan does not seem to have started as a conspiracy (after all Osama bin Laden was only a very high level employee of the CIA, so “9/11” could only have been an accident). But the question that presents itself, eight years later, is whether it is becoming one. You judge.
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From the New York Times: "A new report by the top commander in Afghanistan detailing the deteriorating situation there confronts President Obama with the politically perilous decision of whether to deepen American involvement in the eight-year-old war amid shrinking public support at home."
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Politically perilous? Is "politics" all there ever is? What about morally devastating, philosophically self defeating and strategically erroneous?
The war in Afghanistan is so blatantly absurd at this point that one cannot escape a feeling that it is a deliberate distraction, among other things. Another possibility, explored here, is that some deeper computation is at work, and it has nothing to do with Islamist terrorists, or the construction of an oil pipeline from Central Asia to the Indian ocean, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, as far as possible from Russia and China (as many have suggested).
It is a curious spectacle to see Obama, a past drug user himself, make a big deal about the planting in Afghanistan of plants that can be used for making drugs. As if it were his business, what Afghans grow for their sustenance living.
Afghan GDP per head per year is $800, forty to sixty times less than Obama thinks is reasonable to spend renting for a few days for his family of four, on vacation. OK, it’s his choice, how he spends is vacation, but then, if one respects that, Obama spending lavishly as he wishes on his own family, how come he takes away from Afghans their main income? And gives them nothing in exchange? Is that how he intends to win the war there, by injuring, starving and oppressing the population, because he has a sudden pet drug abstinence project of the year? What about that "blow", Obama? Not “cool” anymore? Is incoherence all the “cool” there should be?
This is a new height in hypocrisy. Poppy planting is legal, for medicinal purposes, all around the world, including Turkey, France and Australia. It would be easy to incorporate Afghanistan in that worldwide medical system.
(I never have used drugs myself, not even alcohol, or tobacco, so I am relax handling the hypocrisy of someone who confessed using "blow", as Obama said about himself. OK, I drink coffee, although, with No-Drama-Obama to make me scoff, with a new absurd decision a day, I should not need any plant to get my passions up…)
This war in Afghanistan is going nowhere nice. The fact that it is going nowhere allows to justify lots of military spending, looking forward, forever, though… So maybe there is a method behind Obama irritating the farmers of Afghanistan to no end. Maybe he wants them to fight, forever… I am just wildly speculating here, trying to find some logic in this mess of deliberately contradictory and insensitive, not to say inhuman, tactics.
Having a full grown man such as Obama in constant need of "handlers" to tell him which fight to engage in is not just pathetic. It leads to deep questions of principle.
Why so much bravado in Afghanistan, and so little with insanely greedy bankers and health care vultures?
Now, of course, there may be deeper reasons to stay forever in Afghanistan. Western Europe and the USA are exocentric, they lie on the fringes of the main population center, which is South and East Asia. To have Western forces smack in the middle of Eurasia is a way to control everybody, not just Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India, China, and the Middle East.
One strong reason to camp in Afghanistan forever is that it would put NATO in the front line when the unavoidable thermonuclear war between India and Pakistan occurs, 15 years down the drain… But then it may be more clever, democratic and civilizationally progressive to say it, that such a war is coming, that 100 million people will die to start with, and then much more, except if the West is ready to strike everybody like a coiled rattlesnake, in the midst of it all.
To talk about that coming war is the way of the philosopher, not that of the warrior, I must admit.
To exert his art, the warrior will prefer the present strategy of taking deliberately erroneous decisions so that the war in Afghanistan last another 15 years is a freely chosen tactic to make a bad situation worse. Instead the philosopher will prefer the truth, and even the truth of the most avid compulsions in full evidence from irrational acts of apparently calm, but secretly deranged politicians.
Peoples, in Europe and America, may not approve much longer a strategy the aim of which has not been exposed… And for which, come to think of it, less bloody alternatives are readily available. But, of course, we do not have "handlers" to tell us what to think.
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Patrice Ayme
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Note 1: The Western force in Afghanistan will soon be 108,000 soldiers, under American command. The total population of Afghanistan is 34 million (2009). Hence clearly Obama cannot irritate Afghans by forbidding them to grow drugs for survival, when he personally used drugs for entertainment and relaxation. There are just plainly too many Afghans to irritate them, and win.
Note 2: Americans are often told, early on in life, that there are no such things as conspiracies. The powers that be in the USA consider this piece of disinformation to be extremely important, since they, themselves, form a conspiracy whose effectiveness depends upon it staying together as a “together-breathe” (“con-spirare”).
Young Americans know little history, thus they are not aware that most of the tragedies of history started as conspiracies. Anyway, my title was a deliberate provocation. However, when does a subconscious conspiracy becomes something one whispers about?
It cannot be that American strategists have not thought about he preceding…
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