Out in the "stans"

I'm a little more pissed than usual today. Either pardon my profanity, or stop reading now.

First, a note on Kyrgyzstan — apparently, the autocratic asshole we've been supporting in order to keep our airbase (serving Afghanistan) open has been forced out of power. The new autocratic asshole now taking over is making nice with the Russians, so it's likely to cost us a good deal more (in bribes) to keep the base open.

When you consider that there is no real strategic purpose for "winning" in Afghanistan, it's all a goddamned waste. I was willing to give McChrystal a chance a couple of months ago, but he's blown it. We're still killing as many (or more) civilians as ever, the locals continue to hate our guts, and even our official asshole buddy Hamid Karzai is shitting on us (and probably is, as Peter Galbraith suggested, strung out on the dope that is Afghanistan's primary export.)

I've written to my Congressdork and both Senaturds, urging them to reject further financing for the war in Afghanistan. They'll ignore me, of course. Fuck all three of them. None will ever get another cent in campaign contributions from me. (I'll let you all know the contents of the form letters they send me within the next month or so. They always reply, inevitably with bullshit.)

Let's just pay the warlords more than Al Qaeda can to buy their cooperation, and get out of there. If there's one thing we know about Afghan "leaders," it's that they can be bought.

Afghanistan, again...

Well, I sure was wrong about Hillary!

My mistakes include a couple of retrospectively dumb assumptions: first, that a reasonably intelligent person who remembers Vietnam would not want to repeat it; and, second, that since Hillary's chance of ever being President is down in the low single digits now, she no longer feels obliged to be so goddamned butch.

Silly me. It's not as if I never heard of cognitive dissonance theory — it's just that I wanted to think better of her than she deserves. Look back at my pre-election posts, and you can explain it with cognitive dissonance theory.

So, now, the rational elements of the Democratic party find themselves wondering if lining up behind a majority of their constituents and doing the right thing in Afghanistan remains rational if it means lining up behind Joe Biden. Joe Biden is not nearly as butch as Hillary. Joe Biden, unlike his boss, is not terribly adept at working the press. Joe Biden is just... he's just right.

...

Meanwhile, here on Long Island — and, to be sure, everywhere else in the United States — our public schools and suburban neighborhoods are being flooded with cheap, high quality heroin. For some odd reason or another, nobody in the mainstream press seems to be relating that to the vast increase in opium production in Afghanistan in recent years. Maybe I'm wrong, but it just kind of seems like the two might be related.

Some who are familiar with my solution to both the Afghanistan problem and the heroine problem — going directly to the warlords and outbidding all competitors for the raw opium — seem to think it's just my characteristic cynicism in action. Okay, I am characteristically cynical — but this idea can work.

So, over the weekend, I'll send out another batch of fax messages to various Persons in Power, for all the good that will do. Mostly, though, I'll hope that somebody that somebody in power actually might listen to came up with the same idea — and that somebody in power actually listens.