COMMENT POSTED TO ARTICLE IN UNREPORTED TODAY
Sending more troops to
Afghanistan isn’t the answer
Sending any troops to Afghanistan has never been an answer
to anything. It is vicious lunacy at best.
The original invasion was a brainless response to something
the country had nothing to do with.
Yes, as devout Muslims, the then-government of the country,
the Taliban, had permitted bin Laden to reside there.
But when the US high-handedly demanded his extradition
without providing a shred of evidence against him – quite simply, the normal
procedure in all international extraditions – the Taliban refused, making it
clear that they would extradite if provided evidence.
Well, the US never provided any evidence. And you know what?
It has never provided any evidence to Americans either of bin Laden’s
responsibility for 9/11. None. All we have is the corporate press making the
same assertions that it made all those years ago without any real evidence.
So they invaded, and in truth achieved nothing.
American troops have behaved brutally there for years,
creating many atrocities.
Their early approach involved going from village to village,
using stun grenades, knocking down people’s doors, holding whole families at
gunpoint, and taking away the men almost the way Stalin’s secret police did in
the USSR. Can you imagine the fears and bad feelings this generated in an
old-fashioned rural society?
That horrible behavior was compounded by a whole series of
slaughters in villages as trigger-happy, nervous American kids who didn’t understand
the language or the customs and who hated the heat and dust they were consigned
to, kids with big guns decided they did not like something and simply blasted
away. It happened dozens of times. The same for air attacks on some perfectly
innocent villages by trigger-happy American pilots.
When you treat people horribly, you make enemies.
Another “benefit” of America’s shabby invasion was to
release poor Afghanistan farmers from the strict prohibition the Taliban had
imposed on growing poppies. Before long a flood of opium-based drugs was back
on international markets. Prices fell, consumption increased, and local
American street-gang violence grew. Truly wonderful result, don’t you think?
The Taliban is not and never has been a terrorist
organization as it is widely misunderstood in the US.
It is simply one of the basic divisions of that society, as
it were, Catholics versus Protestants. It is extremely old-fashioned and
fundamentalist and unenlightened, but then so are a small host of clans or
religious groups of every description in the world in many lands. You don’t
invade people for that.
It is impossible to make them go away, unless of course you
are prepared to slaughter people en masse.
The Northern Alliance – representing another basic tribal division
in the society, it was an alliance formed long ago within the country to vie
for power with the Taliban - that the US allied itself with in the original
invasion, has always itself been an unattractive grouping too. It had some
genuine monsters in it, including mass-murderer, General Dostum.
It never was the good guys versus the bad guys, a false idea
that America’s government promoted. It always resembled a gigantic national
feud between the Hatfields and McCoys in West Virginia and had nothing to do
with issues Americans care about.
The Pentagon and CIA always like to promote simplistic
explanations, providing sound-bite summaries for the nightly corporate news
broadcasts, stuff for the soccer moms and others back home to accept readily.
In this case, it was the repression of women, something that
in fact goes on still in Afghanistan as it does in every poor, rural place on
earth, including Mexico, Brazil, India, Kuwait, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines,
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Turkey, and scores of other places.
No, the reality of the great swirling mass of humanity in no
way resembles, or relates to, life in Celebration, Florida, or in Ozzie and
Harriet’s fantasy suburb of the 1950s. The very essence of propaganda is to fix
on a truth and treat it as though it were only a truth for the place you are
discussing.
America’s phony efforts even on that front achieved nothing –
the Burka is still worn widely and little girls are still not educated and
people remain dirt-poor – but, while all the bloody stuff was going on, talk
about it put America on the side of the angels in the eyes of the uninformed.
The many, many killings of women and children by Americans received little
press.
But the US didn't care, just so that it could defeat the
Taliban without sending in vast numbers of its own troops. Using air power with
massive bombing above with local forces doing most of the fighting below,
followed by a limited number of Americans to occupy, to torture, and to terrorize
into submission
This is a poor, backward country, and its customs and social
structures do not resemble Celebration, Florida, and they will not do so for
centuries.
To expect that bombing and occupation would alter that is
the very essence of arrogance and the blind brutality we see from America’s establishment
today, working away in a half-dozen places to achieve nothing beyond death and
dominance. It is a one-way trip to nowhere.
Afghanistan’s people pretty much mind their business, so why
on earth the US thinks it must dominate and decide who governs is beyond me,
and it is beyond reason.
It’s just part of a rather sick tendency we see in America’s
Deep State, the need to control everyone.
