Sunday, February 14, 2010

THE NEW AMERICAN OFFENSIVE IN HELMAND AFGHANISTAN FINDS LITTLE ORGANIZED RESISTANCE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Why would the Americans meet organized resistance from the Taleban?

First, the Taleban are poorly-fed peasants in sandals and turbans, carrying WW11-vintage weapons like AK-47s.

The Americans, and their assistants, are beef-fed monsters in Kevlar armor and high-tech combat boots, carrying costly weapons and supported by satellites and radars and communication systems and missiles.

It isn’t a war in any sense, unless you count Hitler’s Wehrmacht in 1939 rolling over Polish horse cavalry with Panzer Divisions supported by dive bombers and powerful artillery by Krupp, but even that infamous event was less lopsided than this kind of unleashing of hell.

I do think by now, the Taleban have learned a few things, too, over the years of facing such forces. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong didn’t defeat America by going at it in conventional battles.

Only Americans believe that fleets of helicopters and Hellfire missiles and thousands of armored men and armored vehicles can genuinely change anything anywhere.

Of course, they can kill plenty of people, in many cases innocent civilians, as they killed eight just the other day.

The people being killed are native Afghans, although the press likes to blur that truth by using the phony word “insurgents.”

The people doing the killing are occupiers.

There’s nothing to cheer for here.

It's all simply naive and stupid and pointless.