President Obama is committing another 17,000 soldiers to the war in Afghanistan, we learned this week. 
Characterized even by liberals as “the good war” some time back, our occupation of that sorry place has begun its eighth year. That’s reaching Iran/Iraq war duration, and lord knows that conflict went on way too long. Only 18% of Afghans are in favor of this escalation, along with 34% of Americans (predictably higher, since we’re not the ones being surged upon). So why the hell are we still in Afghanistan, anyway? I’ve heard a lot of arguments, but none seem all that convincing, frankly – no more so than the ones I heard back when Bush decided post 9/11 to descend upon the basket case his predecessors left behind years earlier, after bankrolling fanatics like Gulbeddin Hekmatyar and their terror-league allies for a decade or more. In 2001, Bush Jr. traded one set of war lords for another. What’s Obama’s plan?
I think before we as an imperial nation (don’t fight it – that’s what we are) can make that decision, we need to get used to the notion that we have no right to be there in the first place, and that occupying that country does not make us safer. Yes, yes… Osama Bin Laden lived there when 9/11 took place, but the essential planning and preparation for that hideous crime occurred not in the mountains of Afghanistan but in Germany and the United States. To this day, our government still doesn’t understand the nature of these decentralized terror groups. Our C.I.A. brags about killing senior leadership and decapitating the organization, as if Al Qaeda were organized like General Motors. It’s not. Preventing 9/11-type attacks is going to take something other than an endless supply of drone-fired missiles. For one thing, it will require more creative thinking at home with respect to prevention. Those fuckers used our own ramshackle air transportation system and our own lax building standards against us on that fateful day. My guess is that they’ll try to do the same again – identify a weakness and drive a metaphorical (or not) truck bomb through it. Just the other day, I heard the owner of nuclear power plants in my part of New York State complaining about NRC requirements for hardening new reactors against plane-crash attacks. Then there’s food safety. Yikes.
There is also the supply side of the equation to consider. We’ve got to stop making more terrorists. The Iraq war has created four million refugees – more than two million of them 
are stuck in squalid quarters in Jordan and Syria. Most will never see their homes again, since their neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed. That mass of dispossessed people provides fertile ground for future extremist attacks against us and anyone allied with us. They and the millions of Palestinians still rotting in refugee camps are understandably angry with the Middle East order we worked so hard to build. I’m not talking about the fantasy Middle East George Bush used to wax poetic about – I mean the actual one we’ve invested in over the past sixty years, through our deep involvement in regional affairs, our support for despotic regimes, our bankrolling of Israeli expansionism in the West Bank and adventures in Lebanon. For so many, we have been the enemy for many years – Bush merely sealed the deal. What we do from this point forward is crucial to any chance for peace in this already bloody century.
The best way to be safe is not to incentivize violence against yourself. Sending more troops, more drones, and more bombs is exactly the wrong way to go about it.
luv u,
jp
back on Earth. Lawd, no. I’m cracking my skull on the roof beams of our beloved abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, here on terra firma. I and my Big Green colleagues are being subjected to yet another one of Mitch Macaphee’s haywire mad-science experiments involving gravity, sunlight, air thickness, blah-blah-blah. I don’t know what all else, as they say. In any case, he’s got the gravity component of it right… in as much as we ain’t got any. Somehow Mitch has stumbled upon a formula (or process) for selectively negating gravity without the aid of, say, a jet pack or motorized propeller beanie. I think he does it with dominos… stacks them end-to-end. (Don’t ask me how it works, ’cause I just don’t know.)
little s.o.b., I must admit. I guess after a few years you get used to these little experiments. This one’s irritating, but not as bad as some of the other things Mitch has tried over the years. There was that one time he worked on turning standard bricks into uranium 235. (Note: this whole freaking building is made out of bricks.) Then there was that time he found a way to turn air into fire. (Though that may have been a natural gas leak – we’ve never been quite sure.)
over again, and I still don’t know what those crazy mo-fo’s are talking about.) Nonetheless, selections from 
democracy under our protective and nurturing (right) wing. Though the official results may not be in for some time, the winner appears to be Prime Minister Maliki’s Dawa party, at the expense of the more religious Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an exile group formed in Iran during the Iran/Iraq war, now enjoying close ties to both Washington and Tehran). Probably the most interesting thing about these provincial elections – something underreported in the U.S. press – is the degree to which this was a vote for an end to the U.S. occupation. The status of forces agreement that Maliki negotiated with Bush late last year pretty strongly rejects any enduring U.S. presence on Iraqi soil – no permanent bases, etc. If that agreement is acted on as drafted, we’ll be out in a matter of months. Bush essentially signed what he termed a “cut and run” pact, and Maliki is seeing some of the benefit of that. He’s also benefiting from the reduction in violence and his preference for maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity. But it can be seen as yet another referendum on Bush. Good grief.
Israel’s right to exist, and 3) abide by all past agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinian authority. Sounds great… except that we consistently fail to ask the same of Israel. They have never renounced violence – quite the opposite, to the point where it has eroded their national character in a very sorry fashion. They have never recognized the Palestinian’s right to exist within any reasonable borders – like the 22% of historic Palestine that is not in Israel proper. Not satisfied with nearly 4/5 of a loaf, they have continued to build settlements and related infrastructure in the West Bank in violation of all agreements with the Palestinians, through good times and bad. When will they abide by those agreements?