Wednesday, October 7, 2009

More on Afghanistan

I don't know what to do about Afghanistan, but no one else does either.

Lara Logan of CBS knows as much about the situation there as anybody. She was on Charlie Rose last night and laid it out pretty good. What a clusterfuck!

In a 25 minute segment, here's the upshot - the way to deal with the tribes is to get them to support you one by one. Here's how she says to do it:

"If you go with us, here's what we can do for you - (whatever).

If you don't, we will kill you."

I'm not saying I think we should do that, but it's probably true.

Charlie's videos are hard to snag, for me anyway and believe me I've been trying (ended up with five of 'em, undid that, couldn't get it again even once. Grrr...), but I highly recommend you go see it. You can access it here, as well as segments on Pakistan with David Ignatius and Shah Mahmoud Qureshi, worth watching if you have the time.

Update:

BuzzFlash

Hidden away in the Scranton Times-Tribune "Arts and Living" section Tuesday was a bombshell from former Democratic Representative of Texas Charlie Wilson.

The man whose adopted mission to save Afghanistan from the Soviet incursion in the 1980s spawned the notion of "Afghan freedom fighters," a book and a Hollywood movie now says we need to get the hell out of Dodge.

What a fuckin' mess. We dropped 'em like a hot rock when the Russians left because we weren't thinking (I could put a period right there) past the Cold War, and we probably should have stayed engaged on other than a military level and maybe the Taliban would not have come to power. Then Bush, who reluctantly picked up what by '01 was a really hot rock when what he wanted to do was unnecessarily invade Iraq and had a little temporary shock effect on al Qaeda and the Taliban at little cost, put the hot rock on the shelf thinking it had cooled off when what it really did was get so fuckin' hot that now we can't hold it without a major effort we don't want to do because his goddam imperialistic criminal effort in Iraq has tired us of all this bullshit. Thanks again, Georgie, you dumb motherfucker.

That sentence was a truly convoluted stream-of-unconsciousness, but that's the way it came out.

Update II:

Robert Scheer

It’s time to declare victory and begin to get out rather than descend deeper into an intractable civil war that we neither comprehend nor in the end will care much about. Terrorists of various stripes will still exist as they have throughout history, but the ones we are most concerned about have proved mighty capable of relocating to less hostile environments, including sunny San Diego and southern Florida, where the 9/11 hijackers had no trouble fitting in.

There is a continued need for effective international police work to thwart the efforts of a widely dispersed al-Qaida network, but putting resources into that effort does not satisfy the need of the military establishment for a conventional field of battle. That is the significance of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s leaked report calling for a massive counterinsurgency campaign to make everything right about life in Afghanistan, down to the governance of the most forlorn village. The general’s report aims not at eliminating al-Qaida, which he concedes is barely existent in the country, but rather at creating an Afghan society that is more to his own liking.

It is a prescription, as the Russians and others before them learned, for war without end. That might satisfy the marketing needs of the defense industry and the career hopes of select military and political aspirants, but it has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. In the end, it would seem that some of our leaders need the Afghanistan battleground more than the terrorists do.

We need to either a) get out of Afghanistan now and go back when it becomes necessary in a few years like we did last time and will do five more times in this century if we go that route, or b) go in there with a million troops representing every country in the world and fuck the joint up once and for all. The former is more likely than the latter.

Here's the news flash: Afghanistan and Pakistan are not going to go away, and they need to be dealt with and we're not leaving there anytime soon. The best we can hope for is that someone comes up with something that will do some good. Don't hold your breath.

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