Stupid Is As Stupid Does
I hate the fact that a blue collar lower than average IQ guy such as myself is smarter than the people in charge of finding a solution to the Afghanistan conflict. I am sure they have access to the same history books that I do. I am sure that they have even better intelligence sources than I can tap into. So why is it so difficult to understand the situation there? After mucking about for eight years over there the decision is made to escalate the conflict now. I suppose we just haven’t made enough enemies over there so we need to try a little harder.
Expect US troop casualties to start increasing. We lost four Marines yesterday and can expect to continue a steady stream of returning caskets as we expand military operations in Afghanistan. Interesting though, the people are turning to the Taliban as they cannot trust their own government. A report from Antiwar.com:
Corrupt, Brutal Police Led Afghans To Welcome Taliban As Liberators
US and British troops continue their offensive into the Helmand River Valley, chasing Taliban out of vilalges in the southern province and returning them to control of the Western-backed government. Far from being welcomed with open arms, the international forces are finding that most of the anxious villagers are terrified at the prospect that the troops will bring with them Afghan police.
The Taliban’s de facto control over the area came after a string of bombings and attacks which caused considerable collateral damage among civilians. Despite this, after years of dealing with what they described as “brutal and corrupt” police, they welcomed the Taliban as liberators.
Corruption in Afghanistan has been a growing problem since the 2001 US invasion, and the society virtually runs on bribery and graft at this point. But Helmand villagers tell stories of police rounding up small boys and taking them to police camps to be raped, and robbing elderly villagers’ homes at gunpoint.
And this is what we have given the people after all of our efforts, money and sacrifice. And we are not alone in this sacrifice that is yielding no positive fruits. The conservative Daily Express of England reports:
Time For The Government To Decide On Afghanistan
IN case anyone hadn’t noticed, there is a war on. And when this nation is at war it has a tradition of pulling together in support of the troops. But as far as the campaign in Afghanistan is concerned there is precious little sign of that. The death toll of British troops there this week is horrendous.
And yet the Government has been put under almost no pressure to explain what our soldiers are doing and when it expects their mission to be completed.
Nor has ours. It is just full speed ahead with the lesson that no matter how far down the wrong road you’ve gone you must turn back lost a long time ago. And the following assessment mirrors mine exactly.
This newspaper’s assessment is that the chance of outright victory in Afghanistan vanished the moment US and British forces went into Iraq. The focus on Afghanistan was lost and the coalition against terror broke up. There is now little prospect of the rest of Nato committing wholeheartedly to the fight against the Taliban. In a war of attrition, such as is presently being fought, victory will not be achieved, but heavy losses will certainly be sustained. Our brave soldiers deserve far better than that.
The emphasis in the above is mine. We have waged a half-assed campaign with the distraction of Iraq drawing focus away from solving the conflict from early on. We have the CIA picking targets out in Pakistan without the input of the US military and wreaking massive collateral damage….dead civilians… and we are not slowing down the Taliban at all. In fact they have grown stronger since our initial invasion in 2001 when we drove them out of power. We have seen each year a new bumper crop record of opium production as the money from those crops finances the struggle against us and our allies and takes its toll on the lives of European and Americans that are consuming the end product of the tears of the poppy-heroin.
I was in a conversation with a prototype Dittotard Saturday who was bemoaning the cost of health reform here in the US and was targeting the usual suspects of the right wing, minorities, immigrants, lazy people that just won’t work, and so forth. I told him that if we weren’t pissing away a couple billion dollars a day between Afghanistan and Iraq for the past eight years we could easily fund many of the programs that he was whining about.
The wars are a drain on our collective resources and are damaging us still in the eyes of the world. We are stuck on stupid and wasting so much money, lives and good will as we struggle for…what? What is victory? Every last would be terrorist dead? A complete and thoroughly corrupt US puppet government insulated and protected against real democratic opposition…well, that seems to have been accomplished already. The wars do not get the in depth coverage that they should for us all to make informed decisions. And not just daily body counts but real debates and analysis of why we are even in these conflicts and what does a realistic “victory” look like.
I heard the phrase this morning that turned my stomach. It was a quote from the military commander in Afghanistan. He said that “the next 18 months are going to be critical for the future of Afghanistan.” Never mind the last eight years of pissing up a rope. It is the next 18 months that matter.
President Obama, regardless of what his intentions are, is making an all too familiar mistake. Whether he wants to gain stature in the eyes of the military and their supporters, the intelligence community, hawks on both sides of the aisle or actually thinks he can beat the Kobayashi Maru that is Afghanistan, he is wrong. He can’t get in the matrix and reprogram it for a win. He can only prolong the inevitable.
And the inevitable does not have “victory” any where in its description.
