A long time ago I floated an idea in a blog that if the United States taught its soldiers basic American sign language for the deaf then when these soldiers entered the homelands of others to ALLEGEDLY help them, they could easily teach the distressed residents this useful, easy and elegant language and it would enhance communication and thereby reduce some of the massive stress evoked among all involved.
An additional BIG advantage would be that that one language would be flexible in all countries, as opposed to having the soldiers have to learn or not learn and endure the clumsy and often fatal consequences of not knowing enough of one challenging language and dialect after another with each deployment to another country.
Silly, naive, obtuse me. What was I thinking? How counter this idea is to what our military is actually doing around the globe, including Afghanistan, conquering and claiming land and resources for the profit-making of oligarchs. Communication with the residents of these lands would simply slow down or obstruct the oligarchical predatory amoral agenda. A high level of empathy among the cannon fodder troops and the victimized and doomed foreign citizenry would reduce the capacity of the troops to easily demonize them, kill them, terrorize them, incarcerate them, torture them, exploit them, whatever.
Of course, not as close-up-and-personal deadly drones rather than physically and psychologically vulnerable troops are being relied on more and more by the Obama regime and its ambitious imperialism. I mean, too many troops have just become too broken and unusable, with their traumatic brain injuries, their PTSD, their physical disabilities, their drug and alcohol addictions, their suicides, their homicides and/or domestic violence, whatever, to continue on with those mercilessly infinite re-deployments!
So, now that it is the anniversary decade of the Afghanistan War a lot of horrifying statistics are getting deserved attention. Again, what am I naively saying? I meant to say the "alternate" media is giving them deserved attention. Having the corporate media seriously rallying for governmental morality and sanity? We can dream on.
Malalia Joya is a brave, legitimately bitter and articulate Afghanistan woman. She writes:
But after a decade, Afghanistan still remains the most uncivil, most corrupt, and most war torn country in the world. The consequences of the so-called war on terror has only been more bloodshed, crimes, barbarism, human rights, and women’s rights violations, which has doubled the miseries and sorrows of our people.
Joya relates that during these ten “bloody” years, tens of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed by occupation forces and terrorist groups. She discloses that during Obama’s administration civilian death tolls increased by 24% and that per the Afghanistan Right Monitor in 2010, 7 civilians were killed everyday.
Joya doesn’t buy the U.S. and NATO assertion that they plan to leave Afghanistan by the middle of 2014. The building of permanent bases over there certainly belies such a promise. The war lords of Afghanistan and the US and NATO-enabled corporate war lords have found amoral common cause. She writes:
They will not leave our country soon. They are there for their own strategic regional and economic interests. That is why they want to change Afghanistan into a military and intelligence base in Asia.
Eric Margolis inventories ten years of violence in Afghanistan:
All the claims made about fighting “terrorism and al-Qaida,” liberating Afghan women and bringing democracy are pro-war window dressing. CIA chief Leon Panetta admitted there were no more than 25-50 al-Qaida members in Afghanistan. Why are there 150,000 US and NATO troops there?
Washington’s real objective was clearly defined in 2007 by US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher: to “stabilize Afghanistan so it can become a conduit and hub between South and Central Asia – so energy can flow south.”
The Turkmenistan-Afghan-Pakistan TAPI gas pipeline that the US has sought since 1998 is finally nearing completion. But whether it can operate in the face of sabotage remains to be seen.
Margolis produces his own sobering statistics. 10 years in Afghanistan has cost us $450 billion, 1,600 dead and 15,000 seriously wounded soldiers. Each of our soldiers costs $1 million per year. The CIA employs 80,000 mercenaries there as well, and that black ops budget is of course SECRET.
As for leaving any time soon, why is Obama building the BIGGEST EMBASSY IN THE WORLD in Kabul? A “fortress” costing $800 MILLION (how the 99% of America could use that as a bail-out for their own lives -- do the math -- incredibly each of us 99% of the over 300 million Americans could be given an incredible $2 million plus a piece if this obscenely massive embassy were not built!!!! Can you wrap your mind around that?). The embassy, according to Margolis, will employ 1,000 personnel and “a small army of mercenary gunmen.”
Margolis also declares that the United States is “now the proud owner of the world’s leading narco-state and deeply involved with the Afghan Tajik drug mafia.”
Worse, US-run Afghanistan now produces 93% of the world’s most dangerous narcotic, heroin. Under Taliban, drug production virtually ended, according to the UN. Today, the Afghan drug business is booming. The US tries to blame Taliban; but the real culprits are high government officials in Kabul and US-backed warlords.
A senior UN drug official recently asserted that Afghan heroin killed 10,000 people in NATO countries last year. And this does not include Russia, a primary destination for Afghan heroin.
After so much carnage and destruction of quality of life of the Afghan War survivors, both troops and Afghan citizenry and Afghanistan heroin recipients globally, the US has not come seriously close even to its own amoral profit-making strategic aims. In fact, it is likely that this war is lost, though chronic media and governmental mendacity would never allow that reality be acknowledged.
Margolis:
Washington’s goal was a favorable political settlement producing a pacified Afghan state run by a regime totally responsive to US political, economic and strategic interests; a native sepoy army led by white officers; and US bases that threaten Iran, watch China, and control the energy-rich Caspian Basin.
snip
Meanwhile, Washington has been unable to create a stable government in Kabul. The primary reason: ethnic politics. Over half the population is Pashtun (or Pathan), from whose ranks come Taliban. Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities fiercely oppose the Pashtun. All three collaborated with the Soviet occupation from 1979-1989; today they collaborate with the US and NATO occupation.
Most of the Afghan army and police, on which the US spends $6 billion annually, are Tajiks and Uzbek, many members of the old Afghan Communist Party. To Pashtun, they are bitter enemies. In Afghanistan, the US has built its political house on ethnic quicksands.
We are pouring massive American blood and money, ten years plus, along with even more massive amounts of Afghanistan blood into “ethnic quicksands.”
Matthew Rothschild in “End the Afghan War”:
General John Allen, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, told CBS’s 60 Minutes: "Well, the plan is to win. The plan is to be successful. And so, while some folks might hear that we're departing in 2014 as a result of the Lisbon Conference and the process of transition, we're actually going to be here for a long time," Allen said.
What is “winning” going to look like? There is no way the United States is going to “win” unless it engages in genocide because the U.S.-puppet government in Kabul is corrupt and extremely unpopular, and the Taliban has a large base of support among the people.
The Afghan War has become Obama’s War. He tripled the number of U.S. troops there (if John McCain had done that, imagine the outcry among Democrats?), and for all his talk of withdrawing troops, the United States is on a pace to have between 60,000 and 70,000 troops in Afghanistan by Election Day—nearly twice as many as when Obama took office.
The underlying reasons those troops are there have nothing to do with Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Rather, they have to do with controlling oil pipeline routes to the Arabian Sea, surrounding Iran, and putting military bases on the western edge of China.
But Obama has never leveled with the American people about these reasons because they aren’t sufficient to persuade us to keep paying for this war in our blood and treasure.
And now he’s pulling a lethal switcheroo by preparing to stay beyond 2014.
“Genocide” is the unspoken but seemingly bottom-line solution for the US and NATO to arrive at their corporate agendas. How long will we, the 99% disenfranchised and marginalized citizenry, enable that covert plan with our collective indifference?
In “Afghanistan's Energy War” Shukria Dellawar and Antonia Juhasz address in detail the energy and mining privatization/exploitation happening to Afghanistan by predatory corporations thanks to their colluding imperialist governments:
But while the effort to transform Iraq’s oil sector has played out on a fairly public international stage, no such attention has been focused on Afghanistan. Compared to Iraq, Afghanistan’s populace remains poorly educated, its civil society and public sector workforce underdeveloped, and its government not only weak and challenged by corruption, but also lacking in both energy sector expertise and infrastructure. Under such circumstances, a radical redesign of the nation’s energy development model cannot take place in a manner that ensures fairness, equity, sustainability, or safety.
snip
Unknown to most Afghans, in January 2009 the government implemented a new Hydrocarbon Law that transforms its oil and natural gas sectors from fully state-owned to all but fully privatized. In April 2011, the Afghanistan Ministry of Mines launched the first of what it expects to be “several tenders for Afghanistan’s oil and gas resources over the next few years.”
snip
The Norwegian government recently concluded an analysis of Afghanistan’s hydrocarbons, finding that “most Afghans express a high level of suspicion about the motives and intentions of neighboring countries and, increasingly, also of the international community. Further, “[M]any Afghans point out the risk of a lack of political willingness to ensure that such benefits [from hydrocarbon development] will have a fair distribution.”
If you are still with me (and as depressed as I am by all of this at the end of 10 years of obscenely amoral and incompetent futile warfare) Brian Terrell writes of the nightmare of the Bagram prison situation in Afghanistan:
After gutting its own constitution in the name of a “war on terror,” the United States is now adding to the injury and insult of a brutal occupation by demanding of the Afghan government that it pledge to be as lawless as the U.S., to continue our oppression of its people in our absence before we will give them sovereignty over their own judicial system.
snip
The number of Afghans detained at Bagram has tripled over the past three years to more than 2,600 and the new construction will raise the capacity to 5,500 prisoners. Capt. Kevin Aandahl, a spokesman for the U.S. task force that oversees detention operations in Afghanistan, told the Post that the expansion was necessary to “accommodate an increase in the number of suspected insurgents being detained as a result of intelligence-based counter- terrorism operations, which we conduct with our Afghan partners.”
Many of those held at Bagram have been there since the U.S. occupied the former Soviet air base in 2001, and some two thirds of prisoners there have not been charged with or convicted of any crime. Corruption is rampant in Afghan courts and among police there as it is in many other places but the major fear of the United States is not that the Afghan courts will not function according to their constitution and accepted norms of law, but that they will. In order for Afghanistan to take sovereignty over its own judiciary and prison system, the Afghans must first fix the “cracks of an undeveloped legal system” and adopt essential “reforms,” including adoption of the U.S. practice of detaining suspected insurgents indefinitely without trial.
Included among the “weaknesses” of Afghan law that the United States needs to see addressed is a guarantee that a prisoner in Afghanistan must be formally charged with a crime within three days or be released. To be convicted of a crime, Afghan law requires that evidence against a defendant be presented in open court and that hearsay evidence and evidence gained by torture be excluded. (How primitive is that!) Such protections exist, on paper at least, in most countries, and the U.S. Constitution guarantees these rights as well.
snip
Just as with the detainees held for these past ten years at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo in Cuba, few of those held at Bagram would be convicted in a fair trial. Most have been captured on the strength of tips by informers and other hearsay and with no forensic evidence. “Right now,” a senior U.S. official is quoted in a January 30, 2011 article published in the Guardian, “if we turned them over to the Afghans tomorrow, they'd be in a position, under their laws and their constitution, that they may be released.”
While the number of prisoners held at Guantanamo is slowly decreasing, the number of those held at Bagram is skyrocketing, due to increased “intelligence-based counter- terrorism operations,” a euphemism for what are more accurately called night raids. The Open Society Foundations and The Liaison Office in Kabul released a report on September 19, “The Cost of Kill/Capture: Impact of the Night Raid Surge on Afghan Civilians.” In their Executive Summary, the reports’ authors state, “Nighttime kill and capture operations (“night raids”) by international military have been one of the most controversial tactics in Afghanistan. They are as valued by the international military as they are reviled by Afghan communities. Night raids have been associated with the death, injury, and detention of civilians, and have sparked enormous backlash among Afghan communities. The Afghan government and the Afghan public have repeatedly called for an end to night raids.”
This report cites a sharp escalation in raids that has “taken the battlefield more directly into Afghan homes sparking tremendous backlash among the Afghan population.” While civilians not directly participating in hostilities are supposed to be protected from such attacks by the Geneva Conventions, these raids are often “heavily (if not primarily) motivated by intelligence gathering.” One U.S. military officer responsible for authorizing night raids explained, “If you can’t get the guy you want, you get the guy who knows him.” Often in night raids, all male adolescent and adult members of a household or even of a whole village are bound and held, and techniques such as masked informants giving thumbs up or down, noting who has a beard or who lacks the calloused hands of a farmer, are used to decide who is taken to a U.S. base for further questioning. Such are the “intelligence-based counter- terrorism operations” that are taxing the capacity of the U.S. prison at Bagram.
American dominos falling across the globe, shock and awe dominos ensuring lawlessness and perpetual violence. Afghanistan is one more example of how hammering, hyper-militarized faux-democratic America is not spreading genuine democracy globally but ZEALOUSLY discouraging it, especially in its puppet victim states.
Robert Naiman encourages all of us of the 99% to make phone calls to our Congressional representatives demanding the end of the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I will oblige despite my intense cynicism toward Congress and the President. Will Congress' 11% rating, the pressure of the 99 percenters and any molecular remnants of conscience among most of them possibly provoke them to give decency at long last a chance in US global and domestic behavior? Naiman:
The Friends Committee on National Legislation has set up a toll-free number for us to call Congress: 1-877-429-0678. A Congressional "Supercommittee" is charged with coming up with $1.5 trillion in reduced debt over ten years, and the wars and the bloated Pentagon budget dangle before the Supercommittee like overripe fruit.
A recent CBS poll shows how far out of step with the 99% the Pentagon's plans are. 62% want U.S. troops out within two years.
But the Pentagon wants to stay for at least thirteen more years.
So what else is new, you may say. The Pentagon wants to stay everywhere forever.
But here is a key political fact about the world in which we live: the Pentagon does not always get what it wants.
It is high time the Pentagon did not get what it wants. Along with government representatives pimped out to the oligarchy. Can we as the 99 percenters seriously push back for ourselves, for the rest of humanity and for our and all our descendants’ collective future against the obscene inertia of American war-mongering?
Or will we enable another decade of American genocidal behavior?
[cross-posted at correntewire and sacramento for democracy]
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it was so much more fun - when they were dedicating full strength to reworking the domestic political landscape - but after that got the neocons control of the pocket book and all hell broke loose - having destabalized the us to the point they could and have secured the future for both their oil and heroin cartels. yes - both! the black budget provides the juice that makes the Dallas cartel look so damn smart all the time. No its not a conspiracy - its SOP!
great post!
Great post. IMHO, here's the thing about the huge fortress compound "embassy": both the official and the privatized black ops/special ops teams (a la Blackwater) will be operating out of that compound under the cover of diplomatic immunity--immune from scrutiny, from any law, from any accountability. They will no longer be "foreign occupying troops", they will now be rebranded as members of America's "diplomatic mission," as "embassy officials,", immune from any prosecution under international law.
I forgot to say "rated." Yes, these truths are depressing and discouraing to read, they make even me want to turn away. It just gets worse and worse the deeper you did, but the truth needs to come out and be publicized. Thanks, Libby.
Excellent post! A must read; relevant and informative. R
wow! greatly admire your energy, and enthusiasm.
but as ever, we know enough, it's time to act.
but as ever, we know enough, it's time to act.
snowden, thanks for the support on this. oil and heroin cartels certainly says it. American war lords! black budgets, also, and black ops behaviors are sop. no accountability is also sop,.
Donegal, good points -- the "divine right of American thugs" re the Blackwater diplomatic immunity -- though not new, what not small but deadly "mischief" such as rapes and physical violence our military bases have brought to foreign communities. We don't kmow so much of what is going on. Blackwater not even called out for raping that American woman. Thanks for echoing the insane levels of perversion and depravity of US military policy and behavior.
thanks once again Thoth!
al, if only enough of us did know enough. willful denial seems to be the citizen way to go in minimizing or denying war crimes and acts of genocide. still, they say, the Repubs would be worse so we will not call out a Dem president being even more constitution shredding and murderous than Bush. Where is respect for the family of man and woman. For humanity????
libby
Donegal, good points -- the "divine right of American thugs" re the Blackwater diplomatic immunity -- though not new, what not small but deadly "mischief" such as rapes and physical violence our military bases have brought to foreign communities. We don't kmow so much of what is going on. Blackwater not even called out for raping that American woman. Thanks for echoing the insane levels of perversion and depravity of US military policy and behavior.
thanks once again Thoth!
al, if only enough of us did know enough. willful denial seems to be the citizen way to go in minimizing or denying war crimes and acts of genocide. still, they say, the Repubs would be worse so we will not call out a Dem president being even more constitution shredding and murderous than Bush. Where is respect for the family of man and woman. For humanity????
libby
they care nothing - becuase they know nothing - because we taught them nothing -
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