- (august 2008)
Losing in Afghanistan, after losing in Iraq.
In august 2008 a USA bombing strike killed 90 civilians in the Herat region of
Afghanistan, including 60 children.
(See this article or this article).
One wonders what the average USA citizen would think if a foreign country killed
60 USA children who are asleep. Well, USA citizens felt absolutely nothing:
in most newspapers the news was hidden at the bottom of the news, and tv news
hardly reported it.
Sixty dead children probably means a thousand more recruits for the Taliban.
The USA lost the war in Iraq mainly because it became extremely unpopular with
ordinary people: Bush's theory that the "insurgents" were "terrorists" and
"foreign fighters" is just not true, they were ordinary Iraqis or supported
by ordinary Iraqis. The reason that the average Iraqi turned against the USA
is that the USA didn't do much for them (no water, electricity, jobs, and,
first and foremost, security) while killing lots of them (thousands of civilians
have been killed by USA soldiers and assorted mercenaries in five years).
It looks like Afghanistan will simply be a repeat of Iraq. Almost every time
that the USA announces that it has killed dozens of Taliban, investigations
show that the USA mainly killed civilians. One wonders if the USA has ever
killed a Talib. At the same time the Taliban are growing in numbers and are
getting more and more support from ordinary Afghani. Only the crooks of the
Bush administration can miss the connection.
If the USA cannot fight a war against the Taliban, it should withdraw from
Afghanistan. It is pointless to keep exterminating mountain villages and
pretend that we are killing the enemy. The enemy is laughing at us.
If the USA wants to fight a war against the Taliban, then it should stop
bombing from the air and engage in real combat: shoot only when you see
the enemy that you are about to kill. Even better would be to win the hearts
and minds of the Afghani people by building hospitals and roads, giving them
good jobs and plenty of security. So far Afghanistan like Iraq has mainly
benefited the USA war contractors (friends of the Bush mafia) not the Afghani
people.
Another war that the USA is losing in Afghanistan is the war against drugs.
The USA has de facto accepted that opium is Afghanistan's main produce and
main export. The USA turns out to be its main customer (no other country
consumes as much heroin as the USA). The Bush administration decided that
this is the cheapest and easiest way to give the Afghanis a job. One wonders
what kind of future these jobs will provide to the Afghani masses.
It is unpatriotic that the average USA citizen totally ignores what is
happening in Afghanistan, even when its army kills 60 children.
It is unpatriotic that USA corporations export millions of jobs to China and
India but none of them to Afghanistan, where they would make a much bigger
difference.
This is a war that the USA will lose (morally and militarily) because quite
simply nobody in the USA is interested in winning it.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (february 2008)
The collapse of Afghanistan.
Power is rapidly disintegrating in Afghanistan. Reporters moving to the
Middle East from Afghanistan are bringing news of a slow but steady decline
of authority. The president, Hamid Karzai, has become an erratic and
unreliable figurehead. He specializes in grand gestures of piety that
puzzle the country and his international allies. At times he sounds like
a visionary saint, at times a senile old man, but rarely does he sound like
a statesman who is firmly in charge.
The foreign troops have lost the faith of the people because they rarely engage
the Taliban in combat. Mostly they bomb targets at random, frequently killing
innocent civilians. The foreign troops are more and more preoccupied with
protecting themselves, not Afghanistan.
Humanitarian organizations are a mixed blessing. They are totally out of touch
with reality. They want villagers to send their daughters to school, but forget
that those girls can be killed by "terrorists" who live among the villagers.
There is virtually nobody who can punish a killer, never mind preventing the
killing. The humanitarian organizations want Afghanistan to stop producing
heroin, ignoring the fact that it is pretty much the only export of the
country. If the USA wants heroin, why shouldn't they grow it? Tell the
USA citizens to consume more potatoes and maybe the Afghanis will grow more
potatoes, but, as long as the USA citizens consume a lot of heroin, the Afghanis
will grow poppies to feed their families.
The warlords have lost their traditional function of protectors of a region
because the USA and the central government have insisted that they bend to
the national interest. Unfortunately, this has not made the central government
stronger while making the warlords weaker. Therefore many of their men have
become bandits. However, the warlords make enough money out of the chaos
that none of them is likely to rise up against the deteriorating situation.
They figure they only have to gain from a further deterioration.
The only group that is steadily increasing its grip on some regions is the
Taliban. They have regrouped, rearmed, and found new support among villagers
who were bombed by the USA or betrayed by the government.
It is only a matter of time before Karzai realizes that his only chance
of surviving is to make a power-sharing deal the Taliban. The USA can preempt
that event from happening only if it quickly finds a substitute figurehead.
Alas, no warlord commands enough power to rule over the whole country.
It is yet another lose-lose situation caused by the Rumsfeld's strategy of
committing very few troops to patrol a very large country.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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Articles on Afghanistan before 2008
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