WHEN CONSPIRACIES KILL.

 

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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AFGHANISTAN: NO, YOU CAN’T.

 

AFGHANISTAN IS A TRAP SET UP BY THE EVIL TEAM OF BIN LADEN AND BUSH, AUDACIOUSLY CONTRIVED TO CHEW UP HOPE. THE OBAMAMMOTH SHOULD NOT FALL INTO IT. NEGOTIATE FOR REAL, AND GET OUT.
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Once Barack Obama decides to try a greater military approach to Afghanistan, his presidency is finished. The time to strike and finish the war in Afghanistan was 2002-2003. Obama does not know this.

Instead, as we know, Bush invaded Iraq. Bush and his allies (mainly the UK, Canada and France, since Germany played it safer) opted to NOT develop the Afghan army. The Afghan army is about a tenth of the Iraqi army (and less well trained). The Western allies under Bush leadership had decided Afghans could not be trusted. So no army for Afghanistan, the Allies decided to do it all, and that meant mostly aerial bombing. Thus now there is no Afghan army although the country is larger than Iraq in population and area, and hundreds of times more mountainous (both in height and extent). Afghanistan together with Pakistan, have more than 200 million people, millions of them potential young fanatics.

The aerial bombing campaign has set up new standards of propaganda for the Taliban. Bush did all this, because his aim (or that of his brain trust) was obviously to spread war, not necessarily to win any. It is a mess they were after. They got it. It is now a secret Neoconservative asset.

The guerilla has a sanctuary in Pakistan. Attacking Pakistan significantly is not an option (whatever Mr. Obama said). The situation has changed, on the ground and in Pakistani politics: Pakistan is nominally a democracy now. To deal with Pakistan, one has to use the Pakistani army. Attacking a democracy (even in an Islamic republic) which is nominally an ally, is not an option (especially considering it has thermonuclear weapons, and a Machiavellian intelligence service familiar with the American methods, the ISI).

The Bush administration has set up a trap, and Mr. Obama seems ready to fall into it. Mr. Obama’s slowness to express outrage at the massacre of civilians in Gaza has already allowed Al Qaeda to identify him with Bush. Doubling the US armed forces in Afghanistan (this seems to be the plan, at this point) and threatening to attack Pakistan would allow Al Qaeda to brand him as worse than Bush.

So the last thing to do is for the USA to escalate militarily. One needs to escalate diplomatically, and that means talking directly to Pakistani leaders, and Pakistani intelligence operatives, and reasonable Afghan guerilla leaders. The obvious trade to propose to the guerilla in the South is to LEGALIZE THE POPPY TRADE (only a fraction of the world uses medicinal opiates, there is a pent-up demand, so Afghanistan should be proposed to join the likes of Turkey and France in legal opiate production). Landlocked Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest countries, opiates would boost it out of its dismal economic state. It is an offer tribal leaders cannot refuse. Then why not let little girls go to school? Is it not what Muhammad would have done?

The definition of reasonable here is dynamical: one talks with an open mind until one can find a way to persuade enough tribal leaders to switch to the Western side.

Barack Obama does not know his presidency will crash and burn in Afghanistan if he does not think quickly out of that box, or more exactly, that coffin. It is Bush’s secret little trick, his poisoned gift. Sending 30,000 soldiers right away in Afghanistan is the first step into that infernal machine. What the Neoconservative republicans did was to set up Afghanistan as their long term insurance: they knew that democrats would try to win it, like Johnson did with Vietnam, to show they have what it takes, and they are not soft on defense. Well, they don’t. Nobody has what it takes. The war in Afghanistan CANNOT be won. It’s way too late for that. It is time to negotiate seriously.

Patrice Ayme.

Patriceayme.com
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P/S 1: Bob Herbert published a thoroughly excellent analysis “The Afghan Quagmire” in the New York Times, Tuesday, January 5, 2009. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/opinion/06herbert.html). The present essay is in complement (and a version of it was published by the NYT on 01/05/09).

P/S 2: Afghanistan was successfully conquered by Alexander “the Great”, and 16 centuries later, the Mongols. Other invasions, and there were many, failed. In both cases, the entire army was thrown onto the country. In their times, the Macedonian and Mongols were armies no one in the world. So, if Obama wants to win in Afghanistan, he would have to thrown in the entire US army (a bit more than half a million, roughly the size of the Iraqi army). But that of course will not work. For example the Nazis could not control the French resistance at the end of their occupation (1944), in spite of occupying the country with 300,000 German soldiers (plus dozens of thousands of Vichy fascists and hundreds of thousands of theoretically collaborating French police). France is nowhere as mountainous as Afghanistan, and the French knew well that the Ally armies (US, British, Canadian, French, Commonwealth, Soviet) were probably going to win, even if they did nothing about it. Nevertheless, the French resistance inflicted such huge losses on elite Nazi formations that they engaged in holocausts of entire villages, in a (failed) attempt to rush to Normandy. Something similar, just worse for all concerned happened in Yugoslavia (the Nazis could never control that mountainous country, however much atrocity they deployed).

P/S 3: War from the air is an atrocity. Casual French military reports, east of Kabul, have shown that it is the local villagers that do the resisting. French officers, with a very revealing backwards logic claimed that the very fact that only women and children died in villages when the Western allies bombed, proved, by itself, that the men were resisting out there, since they were not caught by the bombs. I wonder if that makes the women and children guilty as charged. War from the air is the US method, by the way, the French are just amateurs in that art (launched at Guernica, and celebrated by Picasso).

P/S 4: The 30,000 new US soldiers the Pentagon wants to send to Afghanistan are to be deployed south of Kabul (the French are east on the crucial Khyber pass road). This, per se, shows how much out of control the war has got: the Western Allies have to protect the capital desperately, and that is reminiscent of desperately protecting Saigon during the last stages of the Vietnam war.

P/S 5: After more than seven years of dealing with Afghanistan as if it were their own private hunting preserve, to shoot and bomb Afghans from the sky, the Western Allies have reduced moral standing. Canada’s right wing government, just reelected, made the campaign promise to withdraw militarily by 2011. The Canadians have had the largest relative losses (more than 100 dead). Once they get out, expect the Europeans to follow shortly, leaving President Obama all alone, with his hope and his audacity, facing jihad for no good reason. That also means that the USA will then have to double its force: the Europeans represent presently half of the Western force in Afghanistan, and European public opinion is getting upset with playing increasingly bad guy out there.

P/S 6: Some may wonder how consistent the preceding is with the author’s strong disagreements with the Qur’an on many points. Well, there is no contradiction, and it is not subtle. The West should behave as the senior mental and moral partner. But that it has not done so for several years, in several important ways. Mass murdering people in the light of this is not excusable, and strategically promised to an ominous fate.