Karzai, stoned

A rather large portrait of Hamid Karzai, affixed to a wall in some dusty town in Kumar province, Afghanistan, was the target of a few stones thrown by an American soldier.  The portrait was large enough so that the stone thrower could not have missed, according to the New York Times.  Local officials, who heard of the stone throwing, were upset.

Karzai is thoroughly corrupt, and my guess is that the local officials who complained about the stone throwing are as well.  It is fitting, I suppose, that we are leaving behind a kleptocracy in Afghanistan, shaped in our own image, but with a bit less subtlety.  I sincerely hope the stone throwing soldier is on his way back home now, and never again will have to participate in "training" the Afghan "police" in methods of suppressing popular anger against their president.

If our government gives that soldier a hard time for exercising a little free speech, then we are no better than Afghanistan — or China, or Russia.  Barack Obama has not been, exactly, the civil liberties president.

There is a movement in the British Labour Party to get back to its socialist roots.  Wouldn't it be nice if there were a movement in our own Democratic party to get back to its liberal roots?

(I guess the real liberals just don't have enough money.)

The Kandahar Massacre

A 38-year-old Army sergeant and a father of two (according to sources for the New York Times) left his base in Kandahar, kicked down the doors of a bunch of people who lived about a mile from the base, and killed sixteen of them. Most were children.

Afghanistan's vox populi doubts the "lone gunman" theory, but most likely it was one guy driven batshit crazy by his service — three tours in Iraq, and a final tour in Afghanistan. Needless to say, he had to be batshit crazy, but that little factoid should not be allowed to invoke any no-fault insurance policies. The blame should fall exactly where it belongs — on the United States military. Only the military had the opportunity to drive him batshit crazy, and only the military had the responsibility to notice he was nuts.

Except for a few psychopaths, who rise rapidly either to the middle ranks of the military or the upper echelons of government, even young men have inhibitions about killing. One of the inevitable objectives of military training must be dehumanizing "the enemy." It's a damned shame that the only options available to basic training personnel consist of either teaching the gung-ho youth sophisticated and nuanced ways to discriminate between "the enemy" and potential friends, or just teaching them to hate all "towelheads"

We all know which approach they take — the easy one.

The video of American soldiers pissing on the corpses of dead Afghans (who may or may not have been Taliban — it doesn't matter), and the "accidental" burning of a stack of Korans at Bagram should have provided ample proof that whatever the US military is doing to train its troops is inadequate at best, more likely counterproductive or, at worst, suicidal. The Kandahar murders just put the cherry on top.

Considering that the main thing we've been doing in Afghanistan for too, too many years has been propping up the corrupt Karzai government, I suggest it's time to tell America's ignorant masses we won, and just get the fuck out. (As a matter of fact, I think that's exactly what Obama plans to do. I wish him luck.)

Lesson for Today

Military leaders in the field should not go drinking with reporters from Rolling Stone, much less bring their asshole aides along to the party.

In the meanwhile, on the ground, the casualties keep mounting, the Karzai family continues to enrich itself at the expense of the American taxpayer, and Al Qaeda is blithely training its operatives in Yemen, Somalia, and probably other places around the world that most Americans never knew existed.

We can't police the world anymore — we can't afford it, and it just doesn't work.

Meanwhile, back in Marja...

Last February, I grudgingly allowed that General McChrystal should get his chance at pacifying Marja. Well, he's had his chance. Before we escalate even further and move on to Kandahar, maybe it would be a good idea to see how Marja turned out.

The Taliban actually left for a while, but now they're back. The Afghan national police push the locals around during the day, and the Taliban do it by night. Oh, and remember that "government in a box" that was all ready to move in as soon as Marja was reclaimed? It seems the box must have leaked, because a good many of the officials never made it to Marja — they're still back in Kabul, although they are collecting their government salaries for doing such good work down south.

So the schedule for Kandahar has been pushed back a bit. I suppose there's no need for a "government in a box" there, because Ahmed Wali Karzai will continue to run the place just as he always has.

Making things even more interesting, U.S. geologists estimate close to a trillion dollars in mineral wealth is just waiting to be dug up in Afghanistan. Just think of all the splendid corruption that will bring. Hell, we couldn't even keep rampant corruption out of our own Minerals Management Service — and I really don't see a pack of Karzai cousins taking too much trouble to preserve the environment when the mining begins.

Well, at least they don't have an ocean to pollute.

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.

Hooray for Dennis!

Arguably, Dennis Kucinich is America's least corrupt politician. No plutocrat ever benefits from the actions Kucinich takes in the House, so it's pretty obvious he hasn't been bought.

His bill to end American involvement in Afghanistan, as everyone expected, went down to resounding defeat in the House yesterday, and Afghan corruption king Hamid Kharzai's tongue kiss with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (as documented on the front page of the New York Times) does not seem to have changed the numbers at all.

I'm still anxiously awaiting McChrystal's "government in a box" for Marja — not yet installed in the newly "liberated" town. When Karzai showed up there a couple of days ago, he was not exactly greeted with enthusiasm, and easily could have been run out of town on a rail had he not been in the company of U.S. Marines. One certainty, however, is that nobody in Marja wants the unabashedly corrupt and brutal Afghan police around, no matter how "well" they've lately been trained by American contractors.

Call me a cynic — everyone does — but I'm still inclined to believe that the main reason we remain in Afghanistan is because the usual war contractors continue to rake in vast profits, and use those profits to elect compliant politicians who will keep the profits flowing. Afghanistan's corruption is blatant and shameless. Our system is more subtle, but no less corrupt.

Corruption!

I don't have much to say about yesterday's elections, although I suspect that John Corzine's tenure at Goldman-Sachs didn't do him much good. Hell, even fat-cat Mike Bloomberg didn't do as well as everybody who counts the money expected.

Actually, I was thinking about the non-election in Afghanistan. If there were something less prestigious than "third world," I guess Afghanistan would qualify, and if there is a country more corrupt, well...

Okay — so what is corruption? In Afghanistan, the men with wealth and power buy and coerce their way to more wealth and more power. Hmmm... does that sound a little familiar? And if your Supreme Court says that strong-arming the political class with vast infusions of money is not corrupt — that, in fact, it is free speech — does that make it any less corrupt?

Obama told Karzai he has to clean up the Afghani government. Yeah, right. Let's see if Karzai takes any action against his brother — or, if family ties are too strong, Abdul Rashid Dostum, or Muhammed Qasim Fahim. Wake me up when it happens. I need a long nap — a very long nap.

You also can wake me up when the government steps in to stop Goldman-Sachs from buying tax exemptions — at deeply discounted prices — from Fannie and Freddie.

Face it: capitalism and corruption are inseparable, and it doesn't matter if the source of wealth is opium or derivatives, nor if the country is first world or third. All hail the plutocrats!

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.