We Will End No War Before Its Time (And It's Never Time)

The rapid collapse of the US client government in Afghanistan is getting heavy coverage in the corporate media, and the party line is predictable: Oh my god, they're taking over, how can this be happening, it must be Afghan corruption, what about our helpers, what about the girls and women, it's going to be terrible, whose fault is it, and so on.  

These aren't bad questions in themselves.  I am worried about the safety of the Afghans who worked for the US, and I am worried about what girls and women will face under Taliban rule. As we've seen, the Biden administration dawdled about getting our helpers out, ignoring well-known precedents, and it's probably too late now.  But the Beltway perspective, based in US propaganda about the war with its historical amnesia and the inviolable assumption that the US can do no wrong, dominates most of the reporting and commentary on the Taliban's victory.  The best I can say is that it makes me turn off Morning Edition sooner than I would otherwise.

Except for one segment that aired this morning.  Host A. Martinez interviewed Sarah Chayes, a former NPR reporter who spent years in Kandahar and speaks Pashto.  She filled in the historical background of the original Taliban takeover and went off in a direction that I don't think NPR expected.

And so my question is, what democracy did we bring to Afghanistan, you know? Meanwhile, we're building a banking system during the very same years that we were incubating, you know, the crash of 2008. By 2010, the Afghan banking system crashed because it was a Ponzi scheme. And so I think the painful thing I have to ask myself is American democracy - is that what we brought or is cronyism, you know, systemic corruption, you know, basically a governmental system where billionaires get to write the rules - is that, in fact, American democracy as we are now experiencing it?

"Wow," says Martinez, and that's the end of the segment.  There may have been more, these bits are usually not broadcast live, they're edited, but I'm surprised NPR aired this interview at all.  At that, I wish they'd let Chayes talk a lot longer, but you know: concision.

And by the way: as with so many hot issues, it appears that a solid majority of Americans, including Republicans, support US withdrawal from Afghanistan.  Which, of course, is why the corporate media are trying to scare them.

Uh, What?

I was in the library this morning, trying vainly to get anything constructive done, when a middle-aged couple came into the Fireplace Room with their son, who was in a powered wheelchair, and began talking to an older woman they evidently knew.  First they talked about the boy, and then switched to politics.  The younger woman said that she objected to people who say that Trump isn't their president, she didn't like Obama but she never trash-talked him like some people did, and Trump is the president so he should be respected, he's the president.  I share her distaste for the Not My President Resistance, but that never stopped me from criticizing Obama or his predecessors, and it doesn't stop me from criticizing Trump.  Her husband remarked quietly that Obama was a "puppet of Congress" (what?). 

Next she said how glad she was that Trump had killed "that terrorist" (presumably Soleimani) - when Obama killed "that terrorist" (presumably Bin Laden) everybody thought it was great, and it's not fair.  We Do Not Negotiate With Terrorists, we kill them.  Perhaps she's just too young to remember Ronald Reagan negotiating with Iran to free American hostages, or again to get money for Nicaraguan terrorists.  It was a long time ago.  Frankly it's a stretch to claim that Trump's critics thought it was bad to kill Soleimani.  The objections from corporate media and the Beltway were not to killing Soleimani per se, everyone agreed that he was a Bad Man and a Terrorist who deserved to die in fire and fury, but because Trump didn't say "Mother May I" to Congress first.  There was also concern -- well, panic -- that the assassination might lead to war with Iran, which was not a consideration in the execution of Bin Laden as I recall.

But then I saw the video clip I embedded above, which reminded me that the Trump administration has been openly negotiating with the Taliban, the Evil Terrorists Responsible for 9/11, which drove America to invade Afghanistan to defend America against terrorism.  We did remove the Taliban for awhile, but they are back, and now we have to negotiate with them.  This will have no more impact on true Trumpians than Reagan's negotiations with Iran hurt him with true Reaganites, of course.  I wished I could have asked this woman about these little matters, but I stayed in my corner and held my peace.  Sometimes I romanticize my new/old town, and an episode like this is a bracing reminder. These people were perfectly nice, they didn't froth at the mouth, they were equable and mild, but they were still scary.

The Birth of Propaganda

I had a very interesting exchange on Facebook the other day.  Someone had posted a link to a PBS News Hour story about six US soldiers killed, and two more wounded, by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.  Judy Woodruff reported, "Defense Secretary Carter said the Bagram attack is a 'painful reminder' of the dangers U.S. troops face in Afghanistan."

I regret the deaths, though they're far fewer than the "More than 90 Afghan soldiers [who] were killed in Helmand in two days of fighting" at around the same time, to say nothing of the Afghan civilians we're killing with abandon.  But we could get out of Afghanistan. We have no business being there. There's no good reason for US troops to "face danger" there.

I said so in a comment, and got this reply:

Actually, we did have business there. We were part of a UN assistance mission that the was sent in to help the Afghan government deal with the Taliban. We sent additional troops, with the UN's blessing, at around the same time in order to go after bin Laden. He was in Afghanistan at the time. The operations merged and the UN is still there, according to their website. So is the Taliban and they sound like they're just as bad as they were 20 years ago.

That's quite a nice distortion of history, and it's not even ancient history.  It was written by someone around my age, who's old enough to remember the actual course of events.  Bush's invasion of Afghanistan was his own decision, based on the pretense that the Taliban were responsible for the September 11 attacks because some of the al-Qaeda leadership were based there.  The Taliban had offered to extradite Bin Laden if the US provided evidence of his guilt, an offer the US spurned.  Who did these ragheads think they were, calling for due process?  The United States is above all law.  The UN was brought in to ratify his agenda, though the US' main allies were the Northern Alliance, Islamist fanatics so vicious that the Taliban had at first been welcomed as liberators when they defeated them.  (The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan was founded in March 2002, after the US invasion.) The US installed Hamid Karzai, whose government is the one the other commenter had in mind that needed help "deal[ing] with the Taliban," but he only came to power after the Taliban had been defeated.  At which point the Bush regime lost most interest in Afghanistan and Bin Laden as Bush moved to invade Iraq.  Despite the Obama regime's escalation of the war after his election, the Taliban have gained back much of their territory and their influence.  True, they are as bad as they were twenty years ago, but the takeover of Afghanistan by Islamists in the first place was largely the work of the US, which supported them in overthrowing Afghanistan's Soviet-backed secular government and then fighting against the Soviet forces who really were asked in by the government for help against the jihadists.  Even after Gorbachev withdrew Soviet troops, that secular government managed to fight on against the Islamists for some time before it fell.

I pointed out to the other commenter that her fantasy version of history was rather like the distortion involved in the US invasion of Vietnam.  The more I thought about it, I realized that it was virtually cut from the same mold.  The propaganda justification for the US invasion of Vietnam had been that the government of Free South Vietnam, under attack by Communists in the pay of Moscow and "Peiping," had asked for our help to defend Vietnamese freedom.  This was a complete lie: the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem was installed by the US in 1954 to keep an anti-Communist foothold there, and US support including weapons, money, and American "military advisors" had grown steadily ever after, years before North Vietnam got involved after 1960.  Before then, the rebellion against the Saigon regime was almost entirely fought by Southerners, with no external support.  When Diem finally became interested in negotiating with those rebels, the US had him removed -- so much for the claim that we were standing by our allies.

Out of curiosity I looked at the other commenter's own Facebook page.  One of her recent posts claimed that Thanksgiving celebrates "the arrival of a group of people who were fleeing religious persecution. They were refugees, just like the people from Syria who are fleeing violence and oppression, looking for a new lives in new lands."  Thanksgiving isn't about the arrival of the Pilgrims, it's about their survival, celebrating a successful harvest.  But the Pilgrims were not refugees: they were refugees in the Netherlands, where they lived before they decided to try the New World, but they had freedom of religion there.  What they wanted was a place where they could be the persecutors, and they got one -- ironically enough from the same British government that repressed them at home. And there the parallel breaks down totally, for the Syrian refugees have not been granted land in the US by the Assad regime to start their own colony.  I credit the lady for having her heart in the right place and defending the acceptance of refugees in this country, but her distortions of history are not innocent.

It's hard for me to understand how someone who lived through the past fifteen years as an adult could have produced such a garbled version of US involvement in Afghanistan, but I'm not really surprised either.  And maybe "garbled" is the wrong word: her version was coherently written, it was just false.  I'm mostly intrigued that the propaganda narrative she'd absorbed was structured so much like the one used to justify the war in Vietnam, though I suppose most invaders and aggressors have used similar stories.  The United States often has.

The Costs of Empire; or, Close But No SIGAR

Jim White doesn't draw any explicit conclusions in this post, but it makes me a bit nervous.  It's about the recently released audit report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR.

What SIGAR has found is that the massive investment that we have made in building military bases and training facilities is likely to be wasted because Afghanistan will be incapable of maintaining those bases after they have been handed over into Afghan control.

This follows up a post from last summer, on "the US counterinsurgency strategy that is based on the assumption that building a Western type of 'infrastructure' will produce an Afghan populace that develops such adulation for the purveyors of such cultural 'improvement' that they will immediately in fall in line with all other desires of the West."

The writers at emptywheel, where White writes, have done a lot of good writing about "green-on-blue" attacks, where Afghan security forces have attacked NATO forces.  (Just for snark's sake, notice the repeated typo in the headlines of this article from a distinguished UK publication.)  Aside from more recent parallels to Iraq, all this reminds me of similar concern during the US invasion of Vietnam: were the South Vietnamese troops ready to defend their nation against South Vietnamese communists, or would we have to stay there for another century or so to protect them?  Just for their own good, of course: the US has always been willing to spend blood and treasure protecting peasants and shepherds from those who would oppress them. We're just too good, you know?  This kind of rhetoric in mainstream media usually betrays a certain amount of racist contempt, with much more lurking below the surface, for the hapless wogs who can't even take responsibility for their role in the American imperium, despite all the devastation we've given them, and the billions of dollars we've spent through American contractors on "reconstruction."

So I'm always of two minds when I read stuff like this.  Part of me is properly contemptuous of the huge waste of money by the Bush-Obama regime for no good end.  But another part of me goes "Oh noes!  The invaders and occupiers are going to lose their massive investment!  Poor babies!" Though Schaedenfreude is in my DNA, I have to remind myself that whether I like it or not, the invaders and conquerers are primarily my own government and its minions in NATO.  Wheeler and her co-bloggers at emptywheel are not gung-ho fans of US aggression, so I know they know better.

But not everyone does.  Try this comment, the first one on White's post:

Not only have we wasted our fortunes, we have also extracted tremendous human costs, especially the attacks on UN troops by “loyal” afghan troops.

"Especially"?  Call me disloyal and uncaring, but I think the human cost inflicted on the Afghan people has been more "tremendous."  Would the commenter say the same thing about the human cost "extracted" on the Soviet troops who fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s?  While I sympathize with them as I sympathize with the American troops now, I think the suffering of the people whose homes were bombed and whose families were butchered by invading armies counts for more.  And if the American people are willing to back presidents who 'waste our fortunes' building military bases and armored embassy compounds, it's our lookout.  We can always vote the rascals out, after all.

But as always, it's about us, first foremost and only: it's only about us.

Doomed to Repeat It

What with one thing and another, I never got around to writing a blog post yesterday.  (I did, however, manage to finish reading Connie Willis's Lincoln's Dreams, which had been my priority for the day anyhow.)  It turned out to be just as well, though, because I picked up some more information this morning that came in handy.

President Obama gave a Memorial Day speech that added another dollop to my contempt for him.  Speaking at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, he addressed Vietnam War veterans (or maybe just the veterans in his head):

"You were often blamed for a war you didn't start, when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor," Obama told a crowd gathered at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, which lists names of those who died in the conflict.

"You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened. And that's why here today we resolve that it will not happen again," he said to applause.

The president noted that many Vietnam War veterans have gone to airports to personally greet soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom joined the military in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks that triggered the now-unpopular wars.

According to the same Reuters story, he also "promised as commander-in-chief not to send U.S. troops back into harm's way without a clear mission and strategy."  What was our "mission and strategy" in Libya again?  What was our mission and strategy in Iraq?  In Afghanistan?  The US had a clear mission and strategy in Vietnam, as far as that goes: to stop the spread of World Communism by aiding a loyal ally in South Vietnam.  It was as transparently fake as our missions and strategies since then, of course, but we had one, and you work with the mission and strategy you have.  Considering that Obama continues to lie about what the US military is doing and why, I don't suppose he's breaking his perfect record this time.

But what jumped out at me from his remarks was the claim that returning Vietnam veterans "sometimes were denigrated", seconded by the article's writer, who said that many "of those who survived brutal fights in the Southeast Asian jungle faced derision when they got home in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of public opposition to that Cold War battle."  I didn't want to jump to any conclusions, but it sounded like Obama was repeating the false claim that the antiwar movement demonized Vietnam veterans, which in its purest form says that hippies spat on them.  There is no evidence that anything of the kind ever happened. The antiwar movement worked with soldiers and veterans, denigrating and deriding the politicians who had sent them to Southeast Asia to kill and die.  The group Vietnam Veterans Against the War soon emerged, and if anyone denigrated or attacked Vietnam veterans, it was the political establishment.  Nixon's vice president Spiro Agnew fag-baited veterans who participated in demonstrations against the war, for example, and ultimately there emerged an official discourse of Vietnam veterans as unstable and dangerous.  It didn't help that the US economy was having trouble, and returning veterans had trouble finding or keeping jobs.  As VVAW member John Zutz wrote, "There is no place in the American memory for the factually accurate image of vets throwing their medals back at Congress."  Or at NATO.  And nobody who's anybody suggests that it was shameful and disgraceful to send American forces to destroy a country that hadn't attacked us in the first place.

Part of the elite contempt for Vietnam-era veterans was shown by the initial media and Beltway reaction to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall: they hated it, and there was even some attempt by the right to gin up some racist hysteria because the designer was (American-born!) Chinese.  Only when it became clear that the public liked it did the elites suddenly remember that they'd really recognized its greatness all along.  But if you want to talk about neglect of American veterans, consider Korean War veterans, who didn't get a memorial in Washington until 1995, although 36,000 died there (along with a million or more Koreans).  As with Vietnam, the willed amnesia came largely from the fact that the Korean War ended in a truce, not the glorious unconditional victory that Americans are promised by birthright.  (I mean, isn't it in the Constitution?  We always win?)  Returning Vietnam vets found that people -- not dirty hippies, but their school classmates -- just didn't want to hear about their experiences; it seems to have been even better for Korean War veterans.  I must have known some as a child in the 1950s, but I don't remember hearing anything about that war: it was World War II that was all over the place, as American interference in Vietnam gradually increased.

Still, I didn't want to accuse Obama of saying something he didn't mean, so it's a good thing I put off writing this post until today, when VastLeft linked to this takedown of The Audacity of Hope, which quotes Obama committing the lie to print on page 29: "the burning of flags and spitting on vets."  So he evidently believes it.  (An apologist could argue that in context, Obama was just describing the beliefs "white ethnic voters" to explain why they voted for Reagan, but his use of the trope this weekend shows that he believes it -- or else he was just pandering.)

The Reuters story kicks off with another piece of Obama propaganda, referring to his "own efforts to wind down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars started by his predecessor, George W. Bush."  Korea and Vietnam may be ancient history, but Obama has only been in office for three and a half years.  It shouldn't be necessary to go to the archives to remember that Obama campaigned on his intention to escalate the war in Afghanistan (a promise he actually kept), or that Bush-Cheney had already begun winding down the war in Iraq with a negotiated Status Of Forces Agreement that Obama tried to ignore.  But he wasn't able to persuade the Iraqi government to cooperate, partly because of revelations by Wikileaks of US crimes which made the Iraqis unwilling to grant US troops legal immunity; so he had to wind down the US war (while still keeping thousands of regular forces and mercenaries in place).

Vast Left summed it up well, writing of Americans who served in Vietnam:

The horrors we subjected them to, and the ones we sent them to visit upon so many others, are not—or by gum should not be—something to celebrate.

Pity, learn from, heal from, yes. But to use the language of disgrace to describe some Americans' reticence to celebrate Vietnam troops as conquering heroes is a vulgar display of pandering for the head of a nation that remains ready, willing, and able to repeat the sins of that war as long as our empire has bullets, bombs, and Selective Service and military volunteers.

No One Expects a Model Democracy

Last Sunday's massacre of sixteen Afghan civilians by a disgruntled American soldier has been handled about as I'd have expected. The American corporate media think it's all about us and our mission. FAIR did much of the legwork, citing an NPR story headlined "Afghan Killings Could Complicate U.S. Mission", among others. Says "Rajan Menon, an international relations professor at Lehigh University":

Just about every commander we've had there has said this is fundamentally about winning the confidence of the Afghan people ... When you have incident after incident, you can do that only so many times without wearing out the Afghan public's goodwill.

The same story has a section devoted to "U.S. Public Opinion."

"This is not worth one more American life," says Rep. Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat who has been one of the most persistent critics of the war. "This is not worth one more American dollar, to support one of the most corrupt regimes in the world."

American public opinion about the war has been slowly souring for some years now. Public support in the U.S. could go further south if there are reprisals — particularly if Afghan security forces seek revenge against American troops, Menon says.

"Members of Afghan security forces have murdered far more of their American mentors than the number of Afghan civilians this guy killed," says Ann Marlow, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute.

But even if most Americans oppose the continuing war, they have mostly been quiet about it. If you ask people their opinion, they'll say we should leave, Biddle says, but they're quiet about acting on such beliefs, in terms of public protests.

I suppose it wouldn't work if Ann Marlow had compared the number of American "mentors" killed by Afghan security forces to the total number of Afghan civilians killed by their mentors, instead of just the victims of this one atrocity. (Alexander Cockburn provided a helpful summary today.)

About Representative McGovern's remarks, I'd like to know where he gets his ranking of the most corrupt regimes in the world. After all, Hamid Karzai is our creature, so the U.S. can't be totally innocent. I'd be surprised if an honest accounting wouldn't find us in the top ten at least. But as I said, for McGovern, it's all about us, and whether this war is worth American money and lives. Whether it's worth Afghan lives is of no concern.

You can tell how advanced American corruption is by the way the U.S. has to keep changing its account of Why We Can't Leave as expediency (or the phase of the moon, I dunno) requires. First we were there in self-defense, because we were attacked, and the masterminds of that attack were (maybe, who knows or cares?) in Afghanistan. The attackers were mostly Saudi, and the planning was done in Germany among other places, but Shut Up! Shut Up! Then we were there because the Taliban oppressed women, something that had never bothered the US government before; and the Northern Alliance, our allies against the Taliban, were also Islamofascists who oppressed women no less harshly, but since they were the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers, and the enemy of our Enemy is our friend, we can overlook such details. Or we have to help the Afghan government become more stable, and the Afghan security forces more capable of defending themselves against ... who, exactly? Big scary Al-Qaeda, presumably. More realistically, other Afghans. Oh, and Iran! Don't forget Iran! Which is just waiting to overrun Afghanistan and turn it into a Muslim state, which it is already, but you know the United States, we won't tolerate foreign armies overrunning other countries; that's why our foreign army has to keep overrunning them.

Listening to Obama and his henchmen tell it, you'd think the US was in Afghanistan purely out of the goodness of our hearts, as if the Afghans had asked us to come over and help them, but our resources of blood and treasure won't endure forever. No, don't cling to our ankles and beg us to stay, our mind is made up ... The Iraqis implored us to stay past December 2011, but we stood firm. That's just how we are. Well, maybe a little longer. If you insist. If you're sure.

Besides, as the New York Times put it memorably (via), "Many observers say, the Americans have had a lot of practice at apologizing for carnage, accidental and otherwise, and have gotten better at doing it quickly and convincingly." It would be a shame to let all that expertise go to waste. As Bill Clinton's Secretary of State might have put it, what's the point of having all this beautiful expertise in apologizing for carnage, if you're not going to use it?

We've been told that the soldier who committed the killings had been deployed repeatedly, and badly injured, in Iraq and Afghanistan. His new defense lawyer "also said the accused had witnessed his friend's leg blown off the day before the killings." His neighbors back home just couldn't believe it, he was just such a nice quiet guy who'd never done anything like this before. Meanwhile, "The US has stressed it remained committed to Afghan reconciliation." And if Afghans don't reconcile, we'll just have to keep killing them.

I sympathize with American soldiers who've been abused by their own government and military. But this soldier went after Afghan women and children. (That's accepting the US claim that he was a lone nut who did it alone, over the villagers' report that there other soldiers involved. I believe the villagers, and I wonder how long it will take for the American story to spring leaks and fall apart, as most of our coverups do.)

More intriguing, but also disturbing, was a segment on Democracy Now! this morning, interviewing Neil Shea, an American journalist who's been covering Afghanistan for years. Shea said, correctly enough, that

When we cycle our soldiers and marines through these wars that don’t really have a clear purpose over years and years...we expect light-switch control over their aggression ... We expect to be able to turn them into killers and then turn them back into winners of hearts and minds. And when you do that to a man or a woman over many years, that light-switch control begins to fray.

That bit about "wars that don't really have a clear purpose" bothered me a bit, though. Aggressive wars like Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and the like probably fall into that category, because the actual purpose can't be admitted, so the invader state has to keep cycling through a list of high-sounding but false reasons. Fighting a defensive war probably produces just as many atrocities. And I think Shea is overlooking the psychological damage done to soldiers even in "good" wars like World War II.

But anyway. Shea seemed a bit uneasy in the interview.

I found that during one of my last trips to Afghanistan, I met up with a group of soldiers who were the first I had ever come across who made me feel pretty nervous about what I was going to see while I was with them. And I spent a few days with them and came to just really understand that they had gotten to the edge of violence, as we understand it, in Afghanistan, and they seemed ready and capable of doing some pretty bad things. I didn’t actually witness them do anything too terrible, but the way that they talked and the way that they acted toward Afghan civilians and animals and property in the country was sort of stunning to me. And that’s what I describe in the article. It’s talking about these—this group of soldiers and sort of their mental state during a multi-day mission in a central part of Afghanistan that was supposed to be a Taliban stronghold. Many of these guys seemed like they had reached the end of their rope in terms of stability and controlling their aggression.

... They’ll insult Iraqis or Afghans behind their backs, and that’s sort of the very mild beginning of it. And then they sort of move up the chain, if we can call it that, into more serious acts of aggression, where they’ll kill animals or they’ll beat somebody or treat them roughly, and it sort of builds up from there.

What I saw with these guys in Afghanistan when I was with them was that several of them had already been through multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they had reached a point where they hated Afghans, they hated the country, and they were really not interested in doing any of the hearts and minds stuff anymore that’s a crucial part of the mission. So by the time I reached these guys, they had already been sort of—they had been building up anger and aggression in strange ways for a number of years. And when I saw them, they had just shot a dog that had been a pet in an Afghan home that they had confiscated during the mission, and they treated Afghan civilians fairly roughly, and they took a few prisoners and treated them very roughly, as well. Nothing that would rise to necessarily the—sort of a crime at that time, but the way that they talked about things and the way that they sort of handled themselves was really aggressive. And it was only—it seemed to me only to be barely kept in check.

Now, imagine that Afghan forces invaded the US and occupied us for a decade. Imagine that the invading soldiers treated American civilians fairly roughly, and took a few prisoners and treated them very roughly as well. Imagine that they shot animals, including pets but also farm animals needed for part of our food supply. Imagine that this sort of thing only rarely rose to "crimes" in the sense Shea means, presumably massacres like the one in Kandahar last week, and that when it did, the Afghan government and military brass issued prompt apologies and monetary compensation. Would Americans under occupation feel friendly toward the Afghan forces that had come over to help us achieve stability, to keep us from threatening our neighbors, and to defend Afghanistan itself against further attacks from the evil terrorist masterminds based in the swamps of Washington, D.C.?

We Were Only Trying to Help!

In a follow-up to its story on the killing of two American officers in the Afghan interior ministry building this weekend, the BBC reports that "At least 30 people have been killed in violence over the last five days." By "violence" it clearly means "violence by Afghan rioters," not "violence by NATO troops against Afghan civilians around the rest of the country in the course of their normal duties," which right-thinking journalists and news consumers know isn't really violence at all.

Glenn Greenwald has a good related post at Salon this morning, pointing out that the protests in Afghanistan aren't simply about the burning of Korans. He quotes this New York Times story:

Protesters in Kabul interviewed on the road and in front of Parliament said that this was not the first time that Americans had violated Afghan cultural and religious traditions and that an apology was not enough.
“This is not just about dishonoring the Koran, it is about disrespecting our dead and killing our children,” said Maruf Hotak, 60, a man who joined the crowd on the outskirts of Kabul, referring to an episode in Helmand Province when American Marines urinated on the dead bodies of men they described as insurgents and to a recent erroneous airstrike on civilians in Kapisa Province that killed eight young Afghans.
“They always admit their mistakes,” he said. “They burn our Koran and then they apologize. You can’t just disrespect our holy book and kill our innocent children and make a small apology.”

I've noticed that Americans have trouble remembering what the US is doing over there. It's reminiscent of the US invasion of Vietnam in this respect: One one hand, we're only over there to help the "Afghanis," because if we leave the Taliban will oppress their women (never mind that the Northern Alliance, our allies in the overthrow of the Taliban, also are patriarchal Islamic fundamentalists who oppress women), we're only trying to help them, okay, and they should at least appreciate that, instead of rioting over trifles. On the other hand, the "Afghanis" are a threat to American security and we can't leave until we've made sure that they'll never attack us again, we are over there primarily to protect and defend ourselves, and the sooner they put down their arms and stop fighting us, the sooner we can leave that godforsaken wasteland (except for the bases and troops and mercenaries we'll certainly want to retain, for our own security, and they wouldn't begrudge us such trifles, would they?).

I think this might be the place to use, finally, this quotation from an educated liberal commenter on a lesbian-feminist blog a couple of years ago, as one example of "folks who are angry and upset with their own lives, and who, for some reason, attribute all that is wrong in their lives to the actions and influences of others":

Ask an Afghani Taliban peasant why his family is impoverished, and he’s likely to blame Israel, the US, or the West. Ask him to show you those places on a map and chances are he can’t do it. Gee, ya think his support of a system of corrupt tribal warlords, a corrupt weak government, and the lack of decent free education might have something to do with his poverty?

(Other examples proffered by this commenter included black -- "urban" was the commenter's adjective, which as you'll see was dogwhistle code -- men who sit around drinking Colt .45s and blaming "The Man" for their inability to get a job, and angry white male Limbaugh fans who blame all their "economic and personal woes" on gays, feminists, and people of color. Quite even-handed, you see.) The complacent ignorance displayed about the situation in Afghanistan that led to the US presence there still amazes me; certainly the commenter is in no position to cast the first stone. And how many Americans can find any country on a map?  (That Afghan peasant doesn't need to find America on a map, by the way: the American invaders are right there in his country, killing people.)

Greenwald also points out that Americans have our own little totem that you had better not mess with: the Flag.

Beyond all these points, it’s perversely fascinating to watch all of this condescension — it’s just a book: who cares if it’s burned? – pouring forth from a country whose political leaders were eager to enact a federal law or even a Constitutional amendment to make it a criminal offense to burn the American flag (which, using this parlance, is “just a piece of cloth”). In fact, before the Supreme Court struck down such statutes as unconstitutional in 1989 by a 5-4 vote, it was a crime in 48 states in the nation to burn the flag. ...

Along those lines, just imagine what would happen if a Muslim army invaded the U.S., violently occupied the country for more than a decade, in the process continuously killing American children and innocent adults, and then, outside of a prison camp it maintained where thousands of Americans were detained for years without charges and tortured, that Muslim army burned American flags — or a stack of bibles — in a garbage dump. Might we see some extremely angry protests breaking out from Americans against them? Would American pundits be denouncing those protesters as blinkered, primitive fanatics?

Probably not, but I'm sure that pundits for the country that invaded us would do so.

Does Not Compute

An unidentified gunman shot and killed two senior NATO officials in the interior ministry building in Kabul. The killer is still at large.

Nato commander Gen John Allen condemned the attack as "cowardly".

Thus saith the BBC. Also that the building "should be one of the safest in the capital, and that any Afghan who carried out the attack would have had the highest clearance."

So, some individual managed to enter a secured building belonging to the occupiers of a country at war -- which means not just security gates but probably armed guards -- reached the "command and control centre," killed two American military officers, and escaped. "Cowardly" doesn't seem like le mot juste, pardon my French. If Navy SEALs did something similar, like breaking into a compound to take out one of America's enemies, it would be a bold, daring, heroic exploit that would have American news anchorpersons wetting their pants with admiration, and brave American citizens dancing in the streets. Liberal Hollywood would want the movie rights.

For purposes of comparison, killing civilians from afar with remote-controlled predator drones isn't "cowardly." I'm kind of used to this sort of doublethink after so many years of having it shoved in my face, but every now and then an especially blatant case brings me up short.

Bonus BBC Fun Fact: Spiders are bigger when you're afraid of them.

Second Bonus BBC Fun Fact: Men may not become extinct after all. It had been feared that men might die out in five million years or so, which meant I was going to have to stock up. But fortunately, it's not going to happen, so I can let all those hoarded men go.

War In Our Time

In July a BBC reporter in Afghanistan was killed during a battle between NATO forces and Taliban insurgents. NATO, of course, claimed that he was killed by the Taliban. Now an official inquiry has confirmed his family's belief that Ahmed Omed Khpalpan was shot by a NATO soldier. Eleven times.

Naturally, the Professional Left has been spreading this news around. Here's the response from a pro-Obama "grassroots political action committee established to aide [sic] in getting out the vote in 2012."

This is about as viciously demented as anything you'd see from the Republican Right. (This, for instance. I'm counting down until RWA1 links to it.) But after all, Greenwald has blasphemed the Obama devotees' God-king so many times, it's not surprising. It's a good reminder that for so many Democrats the trouble with Bush's crimes was that he was a Republican; once a Democrat commits them, they're not crimes anymore. Therefore it was perfectly legitimate for Democrats to criticize Bush, but not for anyone of any party to criticize Obama.

He's One of Them

I'm still swamped with other things I have do, so I thought I'd pass this along:



Thanks to this very funny review by Band of Thebes --

Give or take, it's about two pretty dancers in 140 A.D. (the stars of Step Up and Billy Elliot) both of whom are into leather (thus the title) and fight about who's going to be whose slave. In the first half, the buffer, more built 30 year-old muscle stud Marcus rescues the skinnier, cuter 24 year-old Esca from a brutal top in a helmet mask and makes him his slave. Fine. Lucky them. But -- and this is always a mistake -- they decide to go to Scotland a Burning Man Festival except they don't have a car or a place to stay and it rains a lot and everybody's high and howling and covered with mud or blue paint and mohawks or really dirty long hair and the bonfire isn't that much fun and the food is bloody awful, so nerves are frayed, right? When they could have gone to Rome? Well, Esca's not having it. He totally flips and is all NO, you're MY slave now! So hot, hot Marcus gets tied up and led around on a leash by a twink. Fine. Lucky them again.

-- (and there's more!) I now realize I have to see it.

And while I'm at it, Whatever It Is I'm Against It shreds Obama's Afghanistan speech. A sample:

WHAT WE STAND NOT FOR: “We stand not for empire, but for self-determination. That is why we have a stake in the democratic aspirations that are now washing across the Arab World. We will support those revolutions with fidelity to our ideals, with the power of our example, and with an unwavering belief that all human beings deserve to live with freedom and dignity.” Unless they live in Bahrain or someplace with oil or US military bases, obviously.

WHAT WE MUST RECAPTURE: “And most of all, after a decade of passionate debate, we must recapture the common purpose that we shared at the beginning of this time of war.” Revenge?

ITMFA.

Who's On First?

You know, I have trouble nowadays keeping up with the revolving-door series of supreme US commanders in Afghanistan, but apparently it is presently General David Petraeus who's directing the killing of women and children and goats over there to keep America safe.

Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution passed along this charming story today, though. In a closed-door session, Petraeus suggested to some of Hamid Karzai's aides that "Afghans caught up in a coalition attack in northeastern Afghanistan might have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties, according to two participants at the meeting."

That's a perfect incitement to liberal handwringing over how we're ever going to win hearts and minds over there if such things keep happening. But what I liked best in the article was a comment by the reporter, Joshua Partlow: "The anger greeting this message showed the political challenges inherent in dealing with allegations of civilian casualties, particularly in remote and dangerous areas where investigations prove difficult."

It's all about us, you see. Remember that. It's all about us, and the challenges we face in a remote and dangerous country. If only the Afghanistanis would think for a moment about somebody other than themselves, and give some consideration to us and the sacrifices we are making for them! General Petraeus said he was sorry. What more do they want from him?

The Destruction Was Mutual

An excellent article at Counterpunch by William Blum. Here's what he has to say about the US and Afghanistan:

In their need to defend the US occupation of Afghanistan, many Americans have cited the severe oppression of women in that desperate land and would have you believe that the United States is the last great hope of those poor ladies. However, in the 1980s the United States played an indispensable role in the overthrow of a secular and relatively progressive Afghan government, one which endeavored to grant women much more freedom than they'll ever have under the current government, more perhaps than ever again. Here are some excerpts from a 1986 US Army manual on Afghanistan discussing the policies of this government concerning women: “provisions of complete freedom of choice of marriage partner, and fixation of the minimum age at marriage at 16 for women and 18 for men”; “abolished forced marriages”; “bring [women] out of seclusion, and initiate social programs”; “extensive literacy programs, especially for women”; “putting girls and boys in the same classroom”; “concerned with changing gender roles and giving women a more active role in politics”.

The overthrow of this government paved the way for the coming to power of an Islamic fundamentalist regime, followed by the awful Taliban. And why did the United States in its infinite wisdom choose to do such a thing? Mainly because the Afghan government was allied with the Soviet Union and Washington wanted to draw the Russians into a hopeless military quagmire -- "We now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War”, said Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser.

The women of Afghanistan will never know how the campaign to raise them to the status of full human beings would have turned out, but this, some might argue, is but a small price to pay for a marvelous Cold War victory.

Brzezinski has denied this allegation, but it's certain that the US sided with the Islamists against the modernizers in Afghanistan.

The whole article is worth your attention -- see especially the section on Cuba.

When Corruption Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Be Corrupt

(image)

We hear a lot about how corrupt Hamid Karzai's government is, and I imagine much of it is true: Karzai is, after all, our creature, our man in Kabul. Almost by definition, a leader installed by invaders is going to be corrupt. If the US had thought Karzai would have too much of a mind of his own, we'd have looked for someone else. It's also useful that such a person should be at least somewhat dirty, so we'll have an excuse for taking him down (or letting him fall) when we choose to do so.

So, when Democracy Now reported this morning that

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered an investigation into a recent NATO air strike that reportedly killed as many as fifty-two civilians, including women and children. Karzai called on NATO troops to "put into practice every possible measure to avoid harming civilians during military operations." Afghan officials say the civilians died when a NATO helicopter gunship opened fire on a compound where they had taken shelter after fleeing an expected firefight between Taliban fighters and NATO troops. US military officials have rejected the claims of the Afghan government, saying there is no evidence civilians were injured or killed.

I had to snicker derisively. The US denial is of course tantamount to an admission of guilt, since the US military always lies about its atrocities. (So does every military and every government, of course, but there's all this American Exceptionalism around.)

The same thing goes for the Obama administrations's efforts to downplay this weekend's release by Wikileaks of a huge batch of documents about the US war in Afghanistan, which "provide a devastating portrait of the war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, how a secret black ops special forces unit hunts down targets for assassination or detention without trial, how Taliban attacks have soared, and how Pakistan is fueling the insurgency." The White House first complained that this was a threat to US security, citing a "potential national security concern" and then declaring that "there’s no broad new revelations in this". All quite familiar. (It's not just the White House, of course. The AP reports that Senator Jane Harman, D-CA, claimed (via) that "Someone inadvertently or on purpose gave the Taliban its new 'enemies list.'" That's a lie, since no one in the US government could have vetted all the material in the time before Harman's remark, and the newspapers which reported on it collaborated with the White House to remove identifying details. Not that I could get all that excited if it were true, since those collaborators provide the US with information for our atrocities.)

(P.S. July 28: The London Times claims that it found identifying details in the documents; Julian Assange of Wikileaks denies it; "Robert Riegle, a former senior intelligence officer, said: "'It's possible that someone could get killed in the next few days.'" Of course, people are getting killed in Afghanistan all the time, often by US troops or predator drones using intelligence given by Afghan informants.)

Amy Goodman's interview with Guardian editor editor David Leigh shows another familiar pattern: the White House worried that the released material would endanger Afghan collaborators, people who had worked with the US. But as Leigh says,

Well, I’ll say it again: we had already decided, on Spiegel, on the New York Times and on The Guardian, what we were going to do, and we were going to take out names that we thought might be in danger of reprisals. And we decided not to publish certain intelligence reports that describe that kind of thing. So all those decisions had been taken. So the White House was pushing at an open door when it said, "We don’t want people to be in danger." So they’re not—they’re congratulating us for something we had already decided to do.

As Glenn Greenwald says, "Yes, leaking classified information is against the law - so is improperly classifying evidence of crimes or other wrongdoing" (via).

But best of all was DN's report of an appearance by former hacker Adrian Lamo, who'd turned in Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower for Wikileaks' earlier release of the video of a US massacre in Iraq. Lamo spoke at a Hackers on Planet Earth conference and got a rough reception:

ADRIAN LAMO: I think that the government behaved themselves better than a lot of people would give them credit for. To set the record clear, I am not an informant. I’m a witness in a criminal case. It’s not that different, in my eyes, from being a witness in any other case that could involve potential loss of life.


EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Adrian, I mean, you say it’s—you know, it’s been a pleasant experience for you, you know, working with the government on this, I guess. But Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker, is currently sitting in prison in Kuwait, I believe, and he could be locked up for the rest of his life. How do you feel about that?


AUDIENCE MEMBER: Tortured!


ADRIAN LAMO: I think that it’s a little bit ludicrous to say that Bradley Manning is going to be tortured. We don’t do that to our citizens.


AUDIENCE MEMBER: Guantánamo!


ADRIAN LAMO: I mean, obviously it’s been much worse for him, but it’s certainly been no picnic for me. And I knew from the get-go that it was going to be a low point in my interactions with the community. And I—


UNIDENTIFIED: Yet you could have ignored him. When he first contacted you, you were not obliged to ever answer him. You could have simply ignored him, and none of this would have ever happened.


ADRIAN LAMO: And Mr. Manning could have ignored the diplomatic cables, and he could have ignored the collateral murder video, but he followed his conscience, as I did mine.


AUDIENCE MEMBER: From my perspective, I see what you have done as treason.

It's best if you watch the clip and hear it for yourself, though. When I listened, I echoed the audience response to Lamo's claim that the US doesn't torture its citizens:

Compare, Contrast, Liquefy

This status was posted by one of my Facebook friends from high school:

A Soldier is missing their family while caring for yours. In the minute it takes you to read this, Soldiers all over the world are saving lives. It's Military appreciation week....Repost if you are a Military, love a Military member, hold memories of a Fallen Hero or appreciate the Military

Or rather, re-posted, since it's evidently another one of those chain texts that people pass along. It took me less than a minute to read it, and only twenty-five muscles to start typing up this post.

I wonder if this person noticed that the word "American" is missing from the text. Would she agree that Taliban soldiers are saving lives? Soldiers are "all over the world", right? I didn't think about it right away myself, because my blood pressure went right up at "saving lives." Yeah, right.

The US military has reprimanded six operators of an unmanned drone, which mistakenly attacked a civilian convoy in Afghanistan killing at least 23.
Warnings that the convoy was not an attacking force were ignored or played down, while the ground-force commander was not sure who was in the vehicles, an investigation found.
The deadly assault took place in Uruzgan Province in February.
Civilian deaths in strikes have caused widespread resentment in Afghanistan. ...
The commander of the international forces in Afghanistan, Gen Stanley McChrystal, said letters had been issued reprimanding four senior and two junior officers in Afghanistan.
He said: "Our most important mission here is to protect the Afghan people; inadvertently killing or injuring civilians is heartbreaking and undermines their trust and confidence in our mission.
"We will do all we can to regain that trust."
The botched strike happened despite Gen McChrystal's introduction of much tougher rules of engagement in a bid to minimise such casualties.

Militaries don't save lives, they take lives. Can Americans be excused for ignoring this basic fact just because it's Memorial Day there? Anyway, General McChrystal said he was heartbroken, and the perpetrators have received letters of reprimand; the President says he takes civilian deaths very seriously. Remember, it's about us, it's all and only about us.

You Say That Like It's a Bad Thing

I found this photo(shopped) at Lenin's Tomb. The whole posting (which isn't that long, ya lazy gits) is worth reading, including his Modest Proposal about 3/4 of the way through. (Just search the post for the words "Modest Proposal".) But really I just wanted an excuse to post this picture.

This morning's daily snark from Jim Hightower is pretty good too, a reminder that the Bush/Obama/Frank/McCain bailout was not the only thing "we" could have done. "We've got to do something" is generally a cover for doing, if not the worst possible thing, then at least the worst someone can think of until something worse comes along.

Chris Floyd's got a good post on the war in Afghanistan:

The ostensible reason given for the seven long years of continuous death and destruction in Afghanistan -- and the justification for its escalation for many years to come -- is, of course, the 9/11 attacks in the United States. But even if for some reason you took the official account of 9/11 as the gospel truth in every respect, Afghanistan played no role in it at all. We are told that the attack was masterminded by bin Laden's Karl Rove, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- who operated in Pakistan. We are told that the other conspirators operated mostly in Germany -- and the United States. There has never been any evidence presented that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan had the slightest operational role -- or even the slightest knowledge -- of an attack on the United States.

On the other hand, there is a good deal of credible evidence that the United States promised to attack Afghanistan -- months before 9/11 -- if the Taliban didn't play ball on oil deals and other issues. There is evidence that even before the attacks, the Taliban offered to turn bin Laden over to international justice, if evidence of his involvement in terrorism was presented. This offer was repeated even more frantically after 9/11. But as for evidence of Afghan involvement in 9/11, there is none.

And more, all of it worth your time to read. You know, the reason I started reading "left" media and writers, back about 40 years ago, was that, allowing for human error and general fallibility, they were almost always more accurate and more right than the "mainstream."

Finally, this message from the Hockey Imam herself, channeled by a commenter on Sam Adams's review of the new David Zucker film An American Carol:

Well, y'know, by golly I thought it was a heckuva movie. (Winks.) Not like those elite, y'know, Hollywood movies that try to make ya think and everything. Like Ghost or that one where the Die Hard Guy finds out he's dead. (Winks again. Loosens top button on blouse.) I think it's about time that real Joe Six Pack Americans, regular, y'know, maverick types who have to put on sunscreen when they go to the beach... (Winks, chuckles, removes blouse, revealing black half-bra.) ...I think it's time those kinda fellas, the real Americans, the mavericks, the Joe Six Packs, had their own kinda movie, kinda like Fox News only it's a movie and it's--God Bless them-- it's funny, not like the filtered liberal entertainment elite media...y'know, not the real Americans who go to church every Sunday and accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior (Removes skirt, now clad only in black bra, panties, and high heels.) Get a load of these, Connie Chung!!! So yah, y'know, I mean, anybody that gives it an F or bad review or whatnot, I mean, that's just so...annoying? Like, un-American, and maybe a little bit palsy-walsy with the terrorists, like Barack Obama, who ya know, personally flew one of those planes into the World Trade Center, then sold the plane on eBay...for a profit... (Winks, chuckles, juggles puppies, and as she begins to remove her undergarments before a red white and blue pickup truck, the screen, thankfully, goes black.)

Take that, Osama Bin Laden!