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TechnoratiPouring Gas on the Afghanistan Bonfire
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind forward with their terrible human toll, even as the press and many Americans play who gets thrown off the island with Barack Obama. Coalition forces carried out an airstrike that killed up to 95 Afghan civilians in western Afghanistan on Friday, 50 of them children, President Hamid Karzai said. And the mounting bombing raids and widespread detentions of Afghans are rapidly turning Afghanistan into the mirror image of Iraq. But these very real events, which will have devastating consequences over the next few months and years, are largely ignored by us. We prefer to waste our time on the trivia and gossip that swallow up air time and do nothing to advance our understanding of either the campaign or the wars fought in our name.
As the conflict in Afghanistan has intensified, so has the indiscriminate use of airstrikes, including Friday’s, which took place in the Azizabad area of Shindand district in Herat province. The airstrike was carried out after Afghan and coalition soldiers were ambushed by insurgents while on a patrol targeting a known Taliban commander in Herat, the U.S. military said. Hundreds of Afghans, shouting anti-U.S. slogans, staged angry street protests on Saturday in Azizabad to protest the killings, and President Hamid Karzai condemned the airstrike.
The United Nations estimates that 255 of the almost 700 civilian deaths in fighting in Afghanistan this year have been caused by Afghan and international troops. The number of civilians killed in fighting between insurgents and security forces in Afghanistan has soared by two-thirds in the first half of this year.
Ghulam Azrat, the director of the middle school in Azizabad, said he collected 60 bodies after the bombing.
“We put the bodies in the main mosque,” he told the Associated Press by phone, sometimes pausing to collect himself as he wept. “Most of these dead bodies were children and women. It took all morning to collect them.”
Azrat said villagers on Saturday threw stones at Afghan soldiers who arrived and tried to give out food and clothes. He said the soldiers fired into the crowd and wounded eight people, including one child.
“The people were very angry,” he said. “They told the soldiers, ‘We don’t need your food, we don’t need your clothes. We want our children. We want our relatives. Can you give [them] to us? You cannot, so go away.’ ”
We are in trouble in Afghanistan. Sending more soldiers and Marines to fight the Taliban is only dumping gasoline on the bonfire. The Taliban assaults, funded largely by the expanded opium trade, are increasingly sophisticated and well coordinated. And the Taliban is exacting a rising toll on coalition troops. Soldiers and Marines are now dying at a faster rate in Afghanistan than Iraq. In an Aug. 18 attack, only 30 miles from the capital, Kabul, the French army lost 10 and had 21 wounded. The next day, hundreds of militants, aided by six suicide bombers, attacked one of the largest U.S. bases in the country. A week before that, insurgents killed three foreign aid workers and their Afghan driver, prompting international aid missions to talk about withdrawing from a country where they already have very limited access.
Barack Obama, like John McCain, speaks about Afghanistan in words that look as if they were penned by the Bush White House. Obama may call for withdrawing some U.S. troops from Iraq, but he does not want to send them all home. He wants to send them to Afghanistan, or to what he obliquely terms “the right battlefield.” Obama said he would deploy an additional 10,000 troops to Afghanistan once he took office.
The seven-year war in Afghanistan has not gone well. An additional 3,200 Marines were deployed there in January. Karzai’s puppet government in Kabul controls little territory outside the capital. And our attempt to buy off tribes with money and even weapons has collapsed, with most tribal groups slipping back into the arms of the Taliban insurgents.
Do the cheerleaders for an expanded war in Afghanistan know any history? Have they studied what happened to the Soviets, who lost 15,000 Red Army soldiers between 1979 and 1988, or even the British in the 19th century? Do they remember why we went into Afghanistan? It was, we were told, to hunt down Osama bin Laden, who is now apparently in Pakistan. Has anyone asked what our end goal is in Afghanistan? Is it nation-building? Or is this simply the forever war on terror?
Al-Qaida, which we have also inadvertently resurrected, is alive and well. It still finds plenty of recruits. It still runs training facilities. It still caries out attacks in London, Madrid, Iraq and now Afghanistan, which did not experience suicide bombings until December 2005. Al-Qaida has moved on. But we remain stuck, confused and lashing about wildly like a wounded and lumbering beast.
We do not have the power or the knowledge, nor do we have the right under international law, to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan. We are vainly trying to transplant to these countries a modern system of politics invented in Europe. This system is characterized by, among other things, the division of the Earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship. The belief in a secular civil government is to most Afghans and Iraqis an alien creed. It will never work.
We have blundered into nations we know little about. We are caught between bitter rivalries among competing ethnic and religious groups. We have embarked on an occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan that is as damaging to our souls as it is to our prestige and power and security. And we believe, falsely, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war.
We divert ourselves in our dotage and decline with images and slogans that perpetuate fantasies about our own invulnerability, our own might, our own goodness. We are preoccupied by national trivia games that pass for news, even as the wolf pants at our door. These illusions blind us. We cannot see ourselves as others see us. We do not know who we are.
“We had fed the heart on fantasies,” William Butler Yeats wrote, “the heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”
We are propelled forward not by logic or compassion or understanding but by fear. We have created and live in a world where violence is the primary form of communication. We have become the company we keep. Much of the world-certainly the Muslim world, one-fifth of the world’s population, most of whom are not Arab-sees us through the prism of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. We are igniting the dispossessed, the majority of humanity who live on less than two dollars a day. And whoever takes the White House next January seems hellbent on fueling our self-immolation.
19 Comments so far
Show AllChris Hedges makes great sense as do most of the posts. Mostly, though, we are preaching to the choir. I hope all posters also send letters to the editors of their local papers. We have to try to reach others.
The antiseptic war parties are all glitter and no substance. I was almost in tears last night listening to Michelle Obama talk about her lovely darlings. Measured against the juxtapostion of Obama's sword rattling about Iran, the Afgans, and Pakistan and the subsequent killings of non combatants strikes me as disingenuous. I will be voting for Nader or McKinny. Meanwhile, Obama can infiltrate further into the corporate owned military industrial establishment that owns him and continue dotting over his own kids while sanctioning US military might and wiping out incocents around the world. Piss on him.
Afghanistan is the perfect example of how to bungle an endgame. That happened after the Soviets left in 1989, and after the Taliban were defeated in 2001, the West was handed a rare chance to redo the endgame. Unfortunately, Dubya, Cheney, & Co. were in office and we all know what happened there. Flash forward to the present day and the Taliban are inching towards an achievement that not even the Khmer Rouge accomplished, returning to power after being thrown out by the West. That would be the biggest disaster of all.
Afghanistan has been swallowing foreign armies since the time of Alexander. Afghans are well skilled in the arts of war and have been taught to use modern weapons by the CIA, first so they could take on the Russians, whom we apparently conned into attacking Afghanistan, just to wear their army down.
After the Russians were gone, we abandoned Afghanistan to its fate, until the need for an oil pipeline surfaced.
As to the Opium Trade, I imagine one of the best dealers is the CIA. They got lots of practice during Vietnam, with Air America shipping drugs out, to be sold to our kids, to supply arms for the Contras and other outlaw groups we support, to destabilize governments that aren't in our pockets.
My God! This goes on forever, through all of our so-called changes of administration. It doesn't matter which of the puppetocracy gets "elected," the same string pullers will run things to build their wealth and power and impoverish the peoples of the world, including "We the People of the United States."
Watching the four day Infomercial going on in Denver is a joke. That isn't a convention! It is four very expensive days, paid for by special interests, to allow a bunch of politicos to pass gas on the national propaganda networks. Any "Democrat" who wishes to exercise his first amendment rights gets to do so, isolated in a wire cage in a warehouse. The streets are lined with Imperial Storm Troopers in their black armor and tinted shields with weapons and truncheons at the ready, to make sure that nothing democratic happens at or in the vicinity of the convention.
The special interests will get their rewards after the "election," with more tax breaks, more no-bid contracts, and more poverty to the people.
American Sheeple, either wake up and change course, or follow the nice goat with the bell right through the door into the abattoir.
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VOTE NADER 2008 !!!!!!
End this war
Bring the troops home
http://www.votenader.org/index.html
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just a matter of time before a terrorist hit again on the us; we've build up huge reservoirs of hatred that will take thier toll eventually. then watch this whole thing start all over again...
I am so sick of war. I think of all the good that could be done in this world, if resources were used to educate, feed, clothe, and provide the basics for all people as well as address the life-threatening issues and justice issues that plague all of us.
When will we learn? Voting for McCain means remaining in Iraq and Afghanistan indefinitely, despite the growing opposition to our presence there. Voting for Obama means shifting our military presence from Iraq to Pakistan and remaining in Afghanistan indefinitely. Not much of a choice it would seem.
It is long past time for the American people to demonstrate their wisdom and compassion, their love of democracy and freedom by rejecting the sad, sick system we have allowed to be created in our name. These wars serve only to strengthen the already far too large influence of the corporations on our government and our politician's decision making by distracting through appeals to testosterone rather than appeals to decency, while creating vast profits for a very few. These profits do not even "trickle down" to the working class any longer.
I urge all people who love this nation, all those who abhor the violence done in our name to think hard about third party politics, to understand that supporting the Democratic Party is to support the status quo. I challenge each of you to link to the Ralph Nader website, votenader.org, and read his platform, read his position papers, read his speeches and then decide which candidate truly represents your wishes.
We see things, not as they are, but as we are.
Anais Nin
Spreading democracy - sounds like a Wilsonian position. Remember folks, It was Wilson who first tried to make the world safe for democracy. Time to let the rest of the world fight their own wars and battles. Mrs. Smith's kids from Des Moines don't want to fight other peoples battles anymore.
There was never any need for us to stay and fight in Afghanistan except for another in a long list of Bush's failures. We had Osama bin Laden trapped in the Tora Bora mountains when Bush pulled the troops that could have prevented him from getting away and redeployed them to Iraq.
Lobo Gris
It all makes "sense" if you just remember the real goal: permanent global war that ever-increasingly empowers the tyrants at home. With ultra-rare exceptions that's all war was ever about---
The U.S. Military Industrial Complex is running like a well oiled machine, thank you. (the irony is: we boomers are perpetuating the warmongering with investment in stocks, 401Ks, mutual funds. take your bloody portfolio out in the street and burn it. now!
Wouldn't investing only in "green' or people friendly stocks be a more sensible approach?
It would be more "sensible" to abolish the stock market entirely. The concept is repellant & bogus from top to bottom. Its implementation can't be carried out without fantastic levels of corruption, & its very existence enshrines the money god more irreversibly. Making such a vile institution a central element of the national economy opens the door to soullessness & materialistic fanaticism. It's like saying, "Please, God, make us even more stupid and corrupt. And please let our lives be controlled by a class of greedy & unscrupulous sharpies & parasites."
It sounds like America used to be so good. This is a myth. It is, however, a little more obvious now what America really is all about--lizard
I'm sick and tired of the total disaster we've made of the middle East, and the waste of lives and money. Most people probably are. But as long as men are in control, we'll have these stupid wars for all the wrong reasons. It's time for women to unite and put a stop to the stupidity of it all. WHERE'S BODICCA WHEN WE NEED HER?
Hasn't Bush already declared war on Mother Nature? It's sure seemed that way to me with all the restrictions he's lifted.
It's hardly a matter of gender. Are you familiar with Condi Rice, Nancy Pelosi, or Margaret Thatcher? Mary Matalin, Ann Coulter, Peggy Noonan, Cokie Roberts, or Hillary Clinton?
As I read this articvle, I was listening to Ms. Pelosi sound like Reagan/Bush lite. The contrast was so striking--happy talk Nancy compared to blunt talking Chris Hedges who has actually traveled and spent considerable time in the Mid East. So what will America embrace, happy talk or the painful truth no matter how unpleasent? Stay tuned, we should know in a little over 2 months.
Poet
Chris Hedges makes an argument based on BUYING the whole bogus PR campaign, that is, the "democratization" of a nation. Nonsense! As anyone with even a remote understanding of the US economy and the corporate agenda sees with spellbinding clarity, it's about $/oil/owning a position central to where the energy resources are.
If you look at a map, it's a straight line between Israel to India, with the areas under conflagration--Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan--pretty much in a row. It reminds me of a straight line map a warrior from another time would draw up in his wish to "rule" the world.
Time travels in circles. The same ones who brought to us the productions of numerous past conflicts are back at the wheel... until mankind rises above its own martial impulses, and stops sitting in the bleachers watching the raw Roman spectacles that only reinforce the WORST in human nature (en masse) the same redundant outcomes will result.
Anyone tired of it? Tired of the $ harpooned into weaponry, when climate is the thing rocking and rolling? Perhaps Bush will declare war on Mother Nature, see her weather events as another form of terrorism. Based on his base, I believe it would be believed...