Afghanistan update

Last week, Our President pardoned two turkeys and three war criminals.  Then he flew off to Afghanistan, where he announced resumption of peace talks with the Taliban.  The Taliban's response: "Huh?"

Presumably, this means negotiators will take up where they left off, with the Taliban agreeing not to attack NATO forces as they fully withdraw; and to hold separate peace negotiations with the Afghani government – in China.  While this is not good news for more westernized, urban Afghanis – particularly women – the frequently innocent victims of US bombing raids won't mind at all.  Anyway, nobody seems to have a better idea.

Clearly, the Taliban must recognize that a treaty with the United States may not be worth much, given US withdrawal from the Iran pact; and it's unlikely that Taliban leaders will feel any great obligation to follow through on their own commitments once foreign troop are gone from their country.  It's also unlikely that they will see a bitterly divided Afghani government as a credible negotiating partner, given the ongoing dispute between Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah regarding who actually won the past couple of elections.

Of course, most Americans really don't care what happens in Afghanistan once our troops come home: so America's longest war finally may be coming to an end.

Some Catch-up

Bowe Bergdahl

No, he wasn't a hero.  Also, he wasn't a traitor.

How emotionally disturbed does a young man have to be to walk off a base in a very active war zone, leaving his weapon, armor, and night vision goggles behind?  Maybe it was some sort of psychotic episode.  Maybe it was moral outrage.  Maybe the two are not mutually exclusive.

The five Taliban "leaders," out of the loop for thirteen years, are not likely to present much of a problem to the USofA.  Their successors will not be inclined to step aside to accommodate their return.  Maybe they are propaganda victories, but I suspect their only other use will be as suicide bombers — and I'm pretty sure they won't be volunteering any time soon.  Suicide bombing is for kids.

The Palestinian "Merger"

Bibi is jumping up and down like Yosemite Sam.  I am amused, of course.  Bibi wants the USofA to end all contact with the Palestinians now that Hamas has reconciled with the PLO, but that's not happening.  Abu Masem is a sly old bastard, and I think he's making some good moves right now.

Obama's "War on Coal"

Let the wild rumpus begin!  Okay, it's not Obama's war on coal — the real war is being waged by the natural gas industry.  Natural gas is a much cheaper means to generate electricity than, at the very least, Appalachian coal.  Montana's coal is even cheaper than that, but mostly exported to China, where it brings higher prices.

I guess the "War on Coal" might have some small impact on the midterm elections, but I don't think it will matter all that much.  Employment in the coal industry already has been decimated by natural gas and heavy equipment mountaintop removal.

Obama and the Generals

It is heartening to see Obama taking some time before responding to McChrystal's request for another 40,000 troops for Afghanistan. The Biden proposal apparently has been altered a bit, to my disappointment, in that troop reductions seem to be out of the picture at the moment; but it seems we truly are lucky not to have President McCain, who seems to believe that anything a general asks for should be delivered immediately.

My guess is that the real holdup is the lack of a viable Afghanistani partner due to Karzai's almost laughably transparent manipulation of the election results. Can Obama hang in there and do little or nothing until that mess is straightened out? Maybe.

His first order of business, though, must be pulling back the undermanned, isolated outposts in the south to cut back the alarming increase in American fatalities. The Taliban — or whoever is organizing the attacks on those outposts — is demonstrating considerable military skill and determination, with well planned assaults rather than spontaneous raids.

As for McChrystal and the generals, Obama must bear in mind that they are military men who automatically think of military solutions for every problem — and as the Soviets learned some years back, a military solution might not be a solution at all.

The Road to Obamastan

It certainly is a wonderful moment in history not to be Barack Obama. His approval rating is down to about 50%, and I wouldn't be surprised is a lot of those who still approve are sticking with him out of pure cognitive dissonance, having made significant emotional and public investments in him during the campaign. Trapped by conventional thinking, many of the news media seem to assume he's losing people from the center, and hence losing them to the right.

Maybe they're right, but I don't think so. There is a vast amount of anger on the left, and the decline in his numbers started well before the health care fiasco was fully formed. The peace movement, civil libertarians, the LGBT groups, and plenty of others on the left were sick of him well before he let Rahm & The Boys convince him that any health insurance legislation would be better than none – and that one that kept the contributions flowing from major health industry lobbies like AHIP and PhARMA would be best of all.

I despise what's become of American politics over the past thirty years, and I'm just too pissed even to vent my feelings right now. Instead, I'll head straight to the latest impending catastrophe: Afghanistan.

The generals are whining for more troops. The Afghani police and army are useless and corrupt, and the numerous militias are loyal to local leaders, not the central government. The Karzai government is even more corrupt than the police and the army, and its legitimacy rating is hovering somewhere around zero. The Taliban, also corrupt, looks honest by comparison.

If the US pulls out its troops, the right will accuse Obama of "knuckling under to terrorism." If the administration sends more troops, assuming they ever can be successfully withdrawn from Iraq, our NATO "allies" can be depended on to extract their troops as rapidly as ours go in. The current proposal for "winning" in Afghanistan is to "protect" Afghani villagers against the Taliban. Needless to say, there are far too many villages and there never can be nearly enough troops – especially since what the villagers want most is for everybody to go away and just leave them alone to grow their opium.

Isn't there anybody who has Obama's ear old enough to remember Vietnam? The notion of "protecting" villagers sounds a hell of a lot like the Vietnam "pacification" program – which was an abysmal failure, of course, and wouldn't work in Afghanistan either. Doesn't anybody around the president remember how debilitating the escalation of the Vietnam war was to the Johnson administration? Isn't it time to bring Hillary Clinton home from Africa or Latin America or Antarctica or wherever they have her now and get some advice from an adult?

The route out of Afghanistan is, in my opinion, fairly simple. In Afghanistan, what we call "corruption" is called "standard operating procedure." Let's forget about "democratization" and all its associated bullshit, and just bribe our way to peace. Provide the tribal leaders with Hummers, Viagra, and whatever else will keep them happy, and stop trying to "unify" a geographic region that never even remotely resembled a modern state, and is not likely to become one any time in the foreseeable future.

And the Taliban? Bribe them too. I'm sure we can offer them considerably more than Al Qaeda can – and it's bound to be a hell of a lot cheaper than fighting a war that can't be won.

"Prolonged" Detention

Triangulation is a political strategy,
not a national security strategy.
-Dick Cheney, 21May2009

It's not often that I find myself in agreement with the former VP, but he's right on that one -- and, I might add, triangulation doesn't serve very well as a model for ethical behavior either. Cheney argues that if we are only partly safe from the terrorist boogie men, we're not safe. I argue that if our actions are only partly ethical, they are unethical.

(That bastion of ethics, the Roman Catholic Church, might disagree with me, having recently pointed out that "most" of the boys molested by the Christian Brothers in Irish institutions over the years were victims of "inappropriate touching" rather than, say, anal penetration -- but does that mean the boys who were diddled a bit rather than forcibly raped should be happy about it? And, anyway, is being locked up for the rest of your life with no trial more analogous to a diddling or an ass fucking? You decide.)

Yes, I know. Our President now has read all the secret documents, and somehow has concluded that there are a number of Guantanamo detainees who could not be convicted, by a federal court or even by a newly revamped military commission, due to absent, insufficient, or tainted evidence. How could such a situation come about? Let's see.

If the evidence is insufficient or nonexistent, we can assume that some "trusted asset" of the CIA or the military said something like, "Oh, that fellow, he's a really bad guy!" In the unlikely event the "trusted asset" was asked to back up his assertion, he told a few unverifiable stories that were swallowed, hook, line, and sinker, by the eager agent or officer. (Somebody with the proper security clearance should count up how many times the "trusted asset" took over the "bad" guy's farm, or celebrated victory in a longstanding family feud.)

If the evidence is tainted, we can assume the poor bastard was tortured until he confessed to whatever his interrogators thought he might have done. As for egomaniacs like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- who would happily have confessed to every high-profile attack for the past fifty years even without waterboarding -- we can count on them to confess once again, in open court. Hell, they totally want to be martyred, and will be unhappy with anything less than the death penalty.

How many detainees will fall into the "prolonged detention" category? Twenty? Thirty? Fifty? Last week, we were told that one out of seven Guantanamo detainees released so far has "returned" to terrorism, but let's look at a worst case scenario. Let's say there are fifty of these genuine "bad guys," and we put them back more or less where we found them. Let's say we release them near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where all fifty immediately join up with the 10,000 Taliban already fighting there. That would, effectively, increase the ranks of the Taliban by one-half of one percent.

To me, that is a small price to pay for maintaining our standards of justice. Consider, too, that the chance of a released detainee gaining access to the United States is virtually zero. We have their fingerprints, retinal scans, physiognomic profiles, DNA, and more. The Cheney-Obama argument for keeping them in detention disappears.

Fear eats the soul.
(R. W. Fassbinder; 1974)