Still Refusing to Live in Reality

W wasn't the only one.

According to the official narrative, poverty, ignorance, and isolation from modernity are the reasons for the stubborn refusal of the Afghan people to support their American and NATO liberators. The solution, by this administration’s lights, is to construct what has never really existed in Afghanistan: a unified, modern nation-state. Building "infrastructure," it seems, is the liberal-progressive answer to humanity’s problems worldwide, and in Afghanistan, too, where roads, hospitals, schools, networks of mass communication, and the very fabric of modernity itself must be built from the ground up.

The sheer arrogance of American policymakers and military theoreticians blocks them from recognizing the simple reality of the insurgents’ motivation, which is nothing more nor less than aversion to the conditions of military occupation. Short of withdrawing all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, there is no way to satisfy the central demand of the Afghan insurgents – who resist the American-NATO occupation not because they are ignorant savages who hate us for our freedoms, but because they seek their own version of freedom – which, understandably, does not involve kowtowing to an American viceroy.

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The nation-building program advanced by advocates of COIN [counterinsurgency doctrine] – one leading enthusiast exulted that COIN has the potential to "change entire societies" – is derived from [the option of] building a "political machine" to rival the insurgency for the affections of the people. In the case of Afghanistan, however, this "machine" is oiled by drug money and lorded over by the Karzai brothers, whose names are veritable bywords for corruption in the region.

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Indeed, the great problem in building up a government in Afghanistan is that the Taliban and their sympathizers are likely to take it over from within.

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[Sending] in troops in sufficient numbers to annihilate or drive out the main body of insurgents, and reinforce these with enough to keep the enemy from returning – are what’s behind Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s call for 40,000 more troops. The stage is then set for [...] sending these soldiers into the villages and hamlets of Afghanistan to live side-by-side with the people, thus presumably gaining their confidence.

  Justin Raimondo

If you haven’t already, you really must see “Obama’s War” to understand how this is simply pie in the sky. In that documentary, you can see American garrisons where no Afghanis will interact, due to fear of reprisals and lack of cultural understanding. Wherever the American troops have set up camp to ‘protect’ markets, the markets become deserted and shopkeepers go elsewhere.

[T]he same narrative informs a certain view of the Vietnam War, where – or so the legend goes – once again defeatist politicians got in the way of a military leadership that was on the verge of defeating the enemy. Obama is deathly afraid of being characterized in this way by Republicans – and pro-war Democrats – and this underlies much of the rhetoric about Afghanistan being a "war of necessity," i.e., a political necessity.

Obama better grow some cojones before, by continued military spending, he destroys our country, in addition to two in the Middle East. At this point, even laying waste to them entirely, which is what an army is really designed for, would not work, because the whole of the world has now been involved.

We could have paid for the oil we are trying to control many times over with the money we have spent trying to control it.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.