Tag Archives: taliban

Political Rants

Big words.

No time to think, less to write, so this is right off the top of my head.

Food Fights. Those are the words that come to mind when I think of this year’s political campaigns. I remember 2006 being similarly acrimonious, but honestly, this year is worse. It seems like there are nothing but attack ads. Even the nice-nice “Hi, I’m blankety-blank and I want to be your blank” ads have a poison pill embedded in them for the opposition. The California gubernatorial race has descended to an exchange of “He’s a liar!” and “She’s a whore!” in something reminiscent of my junior high lunch room. The New York race is, if anything, even more surreal in its nastiness. I’m anticipating a crush of toxic direct mail in the closing weeks – lookout, mailbox!

Imperial Prerogatives. There has been a lot of reporting on Pakistan the last couple of weeks. Their military closed a crossing to U.S. convoys on the Af-Pak border in response to a range of disagreements, not least of which are disputes over U.S. and NATO (essentially U.S.) incursions into Pakistani national territory. There is a kind of impatience to the reporting, communicating the administration’s and the military’s frustration with Pakistan’s failure to adequately support their seemingly endless war in Afghanistan. It’s reminiscent of the official line during the Vietnam war, when American officials would complain about “sanctuaries” in Cambodia and Laos, while they confidently flew devastating bombing runs out of their own “sanctuaries” in Thailand and elsewhere.

This week starts our tenth year in this war, and we seem – if anything – farther from the end than we were when it started. We are more than seven years into Iraq, and now appear to be fighting in Pakistan. Where does this end? Does anyone still think that we are accomplishing anything besides investing in generations of people who hate our guts? That fact is already manifesting itself in Iraq, where the new legions of Al Qaeda fighters are internal refugees, disaffected and ready for revenge. Our dismal performance in the wake of Pakistan’s recent disastrous floods – barring refugees from the sanctuary of one of our air bases; failing to press our military helicopters into disaster relief operations; and some say worse – will gain us the love of very few survivors. This war itself is a disaster, perpetuated by us. And it is one we have the power to end.

Summers Out. Larry Summers is off to make more millions consulting for the investment banks he defended in the White House. High time, too.  

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Jihad-jitsu.

How are we our own worst enemy? So many ways, it seems. 9/11 – much referenced by conservative politicians – can be seen as an example of extremists using our own flawed technology and screwed up national infrastructure against us. (And with national assets like the Minerals Management Service and a toothless Securities and Exchange Commission, we hardly need Al Qaeda… As Richard Pryor might have put it, we’re kicking our own ass.) 

 Here are, it seems to me, a few obvious ways we facilitate those we are supposedly fighting:

The “Ground Zero Mosque” Controversy. This is an unexpected bonanza for jihadi recruitment. It validates much of the propaganda about an America at war with Islam. It demonstrates the depth of our political pathology and our willingness to scapegoat more than 1 billion people because of the actions of a handful of criminally insane zealots. And it does so at the worst possible time, when expectations in the Islamic world are already being deflated by Obama’s Bush-like foreign policy. Jihadi leaders hope that this controversy will drag on, I’m sure, or that the Park 51 center will be forced to relocate in Staten Island so that its detractors, flush with victory, will expand their campaign against Muslims.   

Drone Strikes in Pakistan. Let me set aside, for a moment, the notion that extrajudicial murder, domestic or foreign, is just plain wrong and criminal. This CIA and private paramilitary-driven effort should be named the “Hothead Jihadi Promotion Program.” Every time we kill some functionary in the Taliban, he (and it likely is a he) is most likely replaced by someone younger, more zealous, and less open to compromise. Killing senior leadership means that inexperienced hotheads straight out of Kill! Kill! camp will be making all the decisions. Add to that the fact that we’re also killing hundreds of civilians, thereby generating more and more young people who hate us like fire… enough to, I don’t know, join the Taliban?   

Iraq’s Forgotten Refugees. There are still millions of disaffected Iraqis living in squalid conditions in Jordan and Syria, two of the poorest nations in the Middle East. Their homes have been destroyed, their country is a bloody mess, and their future is grim. We are doing next to nothing to recompense these folks in some way. Where do you think this is headed?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Resistance.

It had been reported for months that the folks behind Wikileaks were in possession of a large number of documents relating to the Afghan war, and this past week they posted a large portion of them. I haven’t been able to review the documents as of yet, but I have heard some reporting on the content, and it sounds as if it confirms some suspicions once thought of as borderline treasonable when given voice by anti-war activists and the like. (Note to activists: don’t wait to be thanked.)

Thus far the most consistent criticism of the release of these documents has been the familiar claim that they reveal “sources and methods” – that Afghans who cooperate with the U.S. are named and that they will pay a heavy price. Admiral Mullens went so far as to say that Wikileaks may already have blood on their hands. Mullens and his colleagues would know something about that, of course, as the documents apparently demonstrate. I suspect, in cases such as these, that most if not all of what is secret is merely a secret from us (i.e. the American people); that military operations of the kind deployed in Afghanistan are very porous in the sense of who is working for whom. Sure, it would be better not to put people needlessly in harm’s way. But that’s what the Afghan war is all about, from what I can see.

The protestations about this are similar to the grilling those Arlington National Cemetery officials received from Senators this past week. Yes, they fucked up big time and lost track of remains. Very frustrating for the families, no doubt. But the outrage in these hearings is coming from the very body that keeps reauthorizing this endless war. For chrissake, these Senators are helping to produce the remains, and they are angry with people who merely misplaced them? If they had done what was right from the beginning instead of what they considered politically expedient, these Arlington managers might not have been overwhelmed with remains from two bloody wars – more military dead than they have seen, I’m sure, since the early 1970s.

Like Iraq, the Afghan war is a very mean conflict. People are dying there every day, including yet another 3 American servicemembers just yesterday, making this the deadliest month of the war for the U.S. If Gates, Mullen, and Obama are determined to avoid needless deaths, they might want to think seriously about ending this fiasco sooner rather than later.

luv u,

jp