Basil Venitis asserts those inclined to give credence to the siren song of a Pax Americana must confront reality. Though America may be the world's mightiest nation, it cannot achieve the grandiose goals of the interventionists. If the goal of universal peace under American domination is unrealizable, the attempt to achieve it has imposed heavy costs. Most obviously, the wars undertaken to secure this chimerical goal have caused death, destruction, and resentment against the United States by the people subjected to American assault.
The Obama administration is seeking to rechristen the Afghan debacle it inherited from the Bush administration. Obama's efforts to legitimize the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan simply ignore the previous record of American actions in that nation. But the past debacles ensure the failure of Obama's ramped-up interventions.
Venitis, twitter.com/Venitis, points out Afghan president Hamid Karzai bites the hand that feeds him, doing his best to irritate the Western countries which keep him in power. Wily Karzai shows his independence, in order to survive the post-NATO era. Karzai is a drug addict, and his brother, Ahmad Wali, is the leading drug lord of Afghanistan, the greatest opium producer in the world. 95% of the opiates originate in Afghanistan!
Afghanistan is the third most corrupt nation on Earth. The only places in the world that are more corrupt are Greece and Somalia. One of Afghanistan's top ministers took a $30 million bribe to give a special deal to a Chinese mining company. Everything seems to be for sale: public offices, access to government services, even a person's freedom.
Many Afghanokleptocrats have purchased expensive villas in Dubai. These include Hamid Karzai, brothers and cousins of Karzai, Karzai's past and present vice presidents and many kith and kin of Mohammad Qasim Fahim, one of the country's two current vice presidents. Asking prices for the stylish Greacoroman houses built along the beaches of the man-made island Palm Jumeirah start at three million euros. This is money robbed from the American and European aid, from the hard-earned income of Westerners.
A cabal of Afghan hustlers who have milked connections to high government officials to earn illicit fortunes have turned Afghanistan's capital into a vampire city, in which the elite live off of drug or Western money. No Afghan politician could long survive without taking care of his family and friends.
And yet, Americans are supposed to believe that sending in more troops will morally redeem the Karzai regime. Unfortunately, that is the message that the American media often trumpet, following the White House script, the way they have done since 2001.
U.S. government handouts have enabled the Afghan government to increase repression of the Afghan people. The U.S. government has poured billions of dollars into building up the Afghan army. But Afghan soldiers are often a pox on their countrymen. Human Rights Watch reported that government troops and police in many parts of the southeast region, and parts of Kabul itself, are invading private homes, usually at night, and robbing and assaulting civilians. By force or by ruse, soldiers and police gain entry into homes and hold people hostage for hours, terrorizing them with weapons, stealing their valuables, and sometimes raping women and girls. On the roads and at proliferating official and unofficial checkpoints, local soldiers and police extort money from civilians under the threat of beating or arrest.
Basil Venitis, an Athenian orator, asserts Pakistan is playing a double game of astonishing magnitude in Afghanistan. Terrorist Pakistan is actively collaborating with the Taliban in Afghanistan while accepting U.S. aid! Pakistan is providing Taliban and global terrorists with a haven, and the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI is training insurgents and supplying them with weapons. ISI was even involved in a plot to assassinate Karzai. ISI is not only aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan, but is actually represented in the Taliban's governing apparatus.
Most Afghans, complete with their corrupt, incompetent government in Kabul, no longer seem to have an interest in the success of the Americans and their allies. In fact, today it seems that the Afghans would like nothing more than to see all of the foreigners disappear from their soil and go back to where they came from, even if it comes at the cost of a new Taliban government.
Civilians are helpless and indecisive, caught between NATO forces and the insurgents, and thus unreliable. They might help you in the morning, then help your enemy in the evening. In fact forces are worried about protecting locals from them too, because there's so much collateral damage. When you do anything that harms the locals, you just have a huge chance of alienating the population. Soldiers trap Taliban fighters in residential compounds, then allow them to send out the women and children, only to discover the fighters had slipped in burqas and walked out as well.
You have to be able to distinguish between the armed enemy and the unarmed enemy, the population that supports the enemy and the population that doesn't support the enemy. The soldiers who don't know how to distinguish friend from enemy wind up multiplying the enemy. The NATO forces are the invader, the outsider, that's not going to change, and you add to this problem with your own record of human-rights violations. Soldiers cannot convince the locals they can protect them from the insurgents, after all, if the soldiers look like they are not sure they can protect themselves. The locals just ask the soldiers why are there in the first place, and the soldiers blank out!
It is not the sound of music NATO soldiers have become accustomed to nearly every time they go out on patrol, but the noise of Afghans sounding their car and motorcycle horns, warning the insurgents the Americans are on the move. As the soldiers maneuver forward, insurgents chicken out and disappear into the thick vegetation. Apart from the occasional soldier who might take a bullet and is airlifted to safety, small battles pass without incident and finish as quickly as they started. A couple of hours into the patrol and the even more familiar crack of gunfire breaks the mundane silence. The soldiers dive for cover, bullets whistling past their heads, as they work out where the shots are coming from. Country road take me home!
Basil Venitis, venitis@gmail.com, points out Uncle Sam and Fourth Reich(EU) now spend two trillion euros every year on the military, homeland security, and intelligence. There are 5,000 active terrorists in the world. This works out to spending 400 million euros per terrorist per year. Fear of terrorism drives growth in government and has led to involvement in multiple little wars and some bigger ones as well as subsequent exercises in nation building, all of which have been unconstitutional, and none of which have turned out well.
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