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Only the Fake Turkey was Missing
Obama in Afghanistan
By DAVE LINDORFF in Counterpunch 29/03/2010.
How pathetic a scene was this: The president of the United States, commander- in-chief of the mightiest war machine the world has ever known, sneaking into one of the poorest countries in the world and meeting with the corrupt leader of that country, where he has committed 100,000 troops to battle (180,000 private contractors), to beg with that corrupt leader to “clean up” his corrupt and profoundly inept government.
(Misleading phraseology.....it suggests the Americans installed Karzai in good faith in two elections won fair and square, and that the Americans were wholly naive as to Karzai's "background"..NOT. One also doubts Obama will be begging, more like lecturing him with pointed fingers.....Karzai ex-employee of UNICOL is a weak character given often to crying when Western officials speak to him aggressively, and this is well known by all including "naive" Americans. And if the Americans knowingly chose two times such a leopard, who is not going to change his spots....then one can deduce that the Americans never intended for clean effective government in Afghanistan from the beginning.
Because?
If the American mafia are making $50--$80 billion each year from Afghan Opium, then obviously you don't want a clean effective government in Kabul investigating such criminal behaviour by the occupying power )
Already, a thousand American soldiers as well as many civilian aid workers, not to mention tens of thousands of innocent Afghans, have died in an eight-year war that the US launched in 2001, originally with the intent solely of ousting the existing Taliban government and destroying the bases of mostly Arab fighters who had been assisting the Taliban in their fight against Russian-allied warlords.
(Yes this is a better description of the Arab fighters in Afghanistan just before the 2001 invasion. Though one should add that these foreign fighters also included significant numbers of Uzbeks, and other non-Arabs...about 5,000 in 2001, and no there was/is no "al-Qaeda" just Islamic zealots fighting in Muslim countries, against non-Muslim forces as in the case of Bosnia, and anti-Taliban forces in the case of Afghanistan. More often than not guided like sheep by the ISI for America/Israel's agenda)
Over the years, with the Al Qaeda fighters destroyed or pushed out of Afghanistan, the war has grown and morphed into a grinding and so far losing battle against indigenous Taliban fighters and Afghan nationalists and tribalists who are trying trying to drive out the US. But after eight years of fighting, the goal of the war, on the American side, has only become less and less clear.
That goal now appears to be: crushing the Taliban and creating a modern, functioning nation state with a government that at least has the grudging respect of the populace.
(NOT going to happen with the Karzai government, or any puppet government America installs in Kabul..........because of the primary American mission in Afghanistan is to make money through Opium, and at the same time look diligently busy whilst doing it...aka fake unnecessary wars like the recent ops in Marjah. Only solution is for America to leave and fix their narco agents in power in Kabul.....from a criminal perspective that would be a solution for America. For Afghans the correct solution would be to win a heroic military victory against the Americans and make them leave Afghanistan with their tail between their legs......since the Taliban are armed with AK-47 that is not going to happen)
But none of that is really likely to happen.
The US military recently staged a fake, movie-set battle in a rural area of southeastern Afghanistan, claiming it was assaulting a large town of 80,000, allegedly infested with Taliban fighters--an alleged center of the insurgency. With the support of an either duped or incredibly corrupt US press corps, the military went into the area, which was actually a group of scattered farming villages with a central market, claiming it would operate under new rules of engagement designed to protect civilians, and then, after clearing out the Taliban, set up a model government administration.
(The lie was patently obvious)
Things went badly from the start, when the Marines fired a rocket salvo into a home and killed 12 innocent civilians, including children. In the end some 30 civilians were killed, very few actual Taliban fighters were killed or captured, as they fled the scene in the weeks leading up to the highly advertised offensive, and to cap it off, the Afghan soldiers who hung behind as the Marines went into the area, when they did finally enter the battle zone themselves, proceeded to strip the market area, stealing anything of value.
(Many Afghan soldiers currently are in fact former Northern Alliance troops whose kith and kin had suffered the brutality of the medieval Taliban occupation in Northern Afghanistan. So for far too many its pay back time.........if you want to "win" the locals, then using Tajik soldiers in Pashtun areas is not the solution......the best thing is to show/use Pashtuns in the regular army fighting for the central government in ops such as Marjah. Finally Afghans aren't the most educated people on earth, but like most people around the world they do possess basic village common sense....they can read between the lines without relying on American military filtered propaganda....they ARE Afghans, who happen to live in Afghanistan)
A new “mayor” brought in from outside to administer the “liberated” Marjah region, turned out to be a killer and a thug.(Precisely the sort of guy you need to look after your Opium narco scam) So far, a month after the end of the fighting in Marjah, there is no clean new administration there, and there probably never will be. The focus of the US military is now on the one-million population city of Kandahar.
Good luck to the civilians living there.
(Ahem...we hope the USA is not stupid enough to conduct a Fallujah like operation in Kandahar which looks good as a motion picture. By all means make your fucking doe in Afghan heroin....it is your choice, but don't go around killing dirt poor fourth world citizens as an elaborate cover for your criminal enterprise)
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the war in Afghanistan, scraped together a cheering section of 2500 US marines and soldiers to give some “Boo-yahs!” to the visiting commander-in-chief, but it’s hard to believe that the rest of the over 70,000 US troops in the country are cheering. (And forget the NATO “allies,” most of whom are preparing to pack it up and go home.)
(The Dutch are going this year, the Canadians next year.........and between now and 2012 a few more, who don't want to be around posing pointlessly whilst a few criminals make lots of money from Afghan Opium)
The government US forces are propping up is so weak and corrupt that it doesn’t really “rule” anything but the capital city of Kabul, and it, and its police and army enforcers, are largely viewed by the majority of Afghans as little more than an official mafia. (If as occupier you are running an Opium narco state, that is precisely the type of police and army you need) It is well known that President Hamid Karzai stole the last election and thumbed his nose at world opinion (his opponent simply quit the race in disgust during the ballot counting).
(Stealing elections and vote rigging is not an uniquely Afghan phenomenon; in American occupied Japan they for 60 years elected the same party over and over again.......until the scandals in the ruling LDP became appalling obvious for everybody, and the same with Zardari Pakistan in 2008........BUT.....what is at issue is the true intentions of the USA in Afghanistan, and why they persist with such poor caliber men like Karzai in power in Kabul, who has to be continually reminded to be effective and less corrupt. It is the idea that the best America can offer the Afghans is this type of man after 8 a half years of occupation, and that the only thing Afghans exist for is to toil as Opium growers earning a pittance in return, under American occupation. Finally to cover this true criminal activity, America must conduct "military" ops in Afghanistan from time to time which harms Afghan civilians mostly)
And it was this usurper Karzai whom the visiting Obama was left to plead with to clean up the mess of a government he runs. Clean up how? Karzai’s own brother is a leading warlord and opium baron. Even the country’s opium crap is being left untouched by US forces, for fear of alienating the country’s farmers, so we’re actually in there fighting to defend the world’s leading producer of opium for the heroin trade! How on earth do you “clean up” a government in a country like that?
Incredibly, as stupid and pointless and immoral as was the war in Iraq, Obama has found himself mired in an even more stupid, pointless and immoral war in Afghanistan. And because he has chosen, in his first year in office, to escalate that war instead of wind it down and end it, and has doubled the rate of US casualties in that war, President Obama now cannot do the right thing and end it even if he wants to, because then, how to explain all those pointless deaths? Instead, he is forced to clap soldiers, perhaps some of them already doomed, on the back in the cafeteria at Bagram Air Base, and tell them, in an echo or George Bush’s famous sneak visit to Iraq, “I’m proud of you. You guys are doing great work, each and every day.”
What a pathetic joke. The only thing missing was the plastic turkey. But then again, at least there was a turkey there.
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Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com
