Just because you aren't paying attention to Afghanistan, doesn't mean it went away

U.S. special forces won a "glorious victory" in Afghanistan recently.
It seems that to defend themselves from Taliban snipers, they only had to kill 33 unarmed civilians, including women and children. A U.S. military investigation has cleared the U.S. forces of wrongdoing yesterday.

The day before this ruling the U.S. Special Inspector General for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan (SIGAR) gave a status report on the war.

“The Afghan national defense and security force has not yet been capable of securing all of Afghanistan and has lost territory to the insurgency," SIGAR reported.
"Last August, the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan … said only 63.4 percent of the country's territory was under government control -- compared to the 72 percent that the military said was controlled by Kabul in November 2015,” SIGAR noted.

It you dig down into the SIGAR report you will find an interesting gem.

The government forces, Sopko said, are plagued by poor leadership, which leads some officers to bolster their ranks with “ghost soldiers” whose salaries they pocket; others sell equipment and fuel to the Taliban.
In speaking to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Sopko quoted former Afghanistan NATO chief Gen. John Allen as saying that “corruption — not the Taliban — (is) the existential threat to Afghanistan.”
Sopko noted that Transparency International had ranked Afghanistan the third-most corrupt nation in the world.

This comes only one month after the Pentagon's discouraging assessment.

The sum of the assessment basically amounts to two ideas: The scale of the problem is much larger than the current U.S. commitment, and the pace of the solution — training Afghan soldiers and then keeping them alive — is faltering dramatically.

Many politicians are in denial of the scale of the problem, but at least one Afghan general's proposal highlights just how bad things have gotten.

If you are unsure of just how bad the security situation is inside Afghanistan, this report from AFP should tell you everything you need to know. Afghan officials are calling for the establishment of a Taliban “safe zone” that presumably would allow the group to ween itself off of Pakistani influence and enter the much discussed and ever elusive peace process.
Normally this type of report could easily be dismissed out of hand as the musings of some ambitious or naive Afghan politician. But given that it originated from General Abdul Raziq, the chief of police for Kandahar who, as AFP put it, is “one of the staunchest anti-Taliban figures,” it must be taken seriously....
If Raziq is describing the Taliban as his countrymen and “sons of this soil,” then it is clear he doesn’t believe he can hold the line in the south in the medium to long term.

Meanwhile, 300 Marines are being deployed to Helmand province, the opium-growing heartland of Afghanistan.

“Helmand is the main source of poppies for Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade, which is worth an estimated $4 billion a year, much of which funds the insurgency,” The Associated Press reported on Sunday.

While the United States has spent over $7.6 billion to eradicate opium poppies in Afghanistan, production actually surged after the start of the U.S.-led war. Rumors persist that the CIA is involved in smuggling the narcotic drug, which is the main ingredient in heroin, into the West. Numerous photos released by the U.S. military depict forces openly patrolling poppy fields, leading journalists like Abby Martin to question U.S. motives in the region.

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didn't the leadership of the Free World just buy the entire crop and destroy it? (or whatever)

"You want to grow poppies, I'll pay double what you usually get" - Hell our "fighting men and women" can't account for $125Billion which just disappeared so what's buying opium poppies compared with that.

(and where's the outrage at a massacre of 33 men, women, and children?)

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

afghan.png

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Steven D's picture

off drug laundering money for all sorts of illegal drugs from meth to coke to heroin. This is all about business. A large and very profitable business.

And of course the MIC makes money as well and gets to test drive their latest toys.

Yes, it's a damn sickening world we live in.

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"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott

sojourns's picture

That adventure has yielded nothing but sorrow. Nothing.

As to this "Sopko noted that Transparency International had ranked Afghanistan the third-most corrupt nation in the world."

Who is ranked first? Could it be, should it be -- The United States of America?

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"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage

Corruption is too expensive in the US. Only the very wealthy can afford it.

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Arrow's picture

Laying wide awake at 4 in the morning

Sometimes it just happens. You wake from a dream and you start thinking.

I thought about endless war(s) and the moribund Neo-Liberalism that needs them to keep a grip on power.

I had a Frank Luntz moment.

WAR IS FAILURE

Preparing for war is failure
Training for war is failure
It is political failure
It is a moral failure
It is a failure of ones basic humanity

“thank you for your service”
My reply is: I'm so sorry that we as a country encouraged/coerced you to forsake your basic humanity and learn to kill other humans under someone else's command.

“Freedom isn't free”
Yes it is. It resides in all of us. In the space between our ears and in our hearts. One throws that freedom away when one picks up a gun.

“Support our troops”
Bring them home. Help them unlearn the 'military' mindset that is so destructive.

War is failure Everything about it is.

Let me leave you with one of the greatest anti-war performances ever:

Before 100000 at Wembly Stadium Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits played this in 1988

“ one humanity...one justice”

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I want a Pony!

sojourns's picture

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"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage

Creosote.'s picture

Electrifying in its ilumination of depth.

Hearfelt, irreplaceable.

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Steven D's picture

Who in their right mind believes this war makes any sense at this point other than those who are making money off its continuance?

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"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott

That - and all of the other attacks/invasions in progress or planned - make sense in the context of corporate/military global subjugation, and of draining the American people and those of allied countries into impoverished submission.

Charitable Foundations owned by The Right People just can't provide enough from interested countries/large donors/the duped to do much more than help funnel funding to terrorist 'Freedom Fighter' groups sometimes acting as useful idiot bogeymen and excuse for such invasions/attacks on other people's countries.

(Link previously posted on another thread by CB and reposting much of my reply again)

http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/west-marches-east-part-one.html#.WHajC...

The West Marches East, Part 1: The U.S.-NATO Strategy to Isolate Russia
Andrew Gavin Marshall I Geopolitics I Analysis I April 17th, 2014

...The U.S. Ambassador to the USSR from 1987 to 1991, John F. Matlock Jr., later noted that the end of the Cold War was not 'won' by the West, but was brought about "by negotiation to the advantage of both sides." Yet, he noted, "the United States insisted on treating Russia as the loser ." The United States almost immediately violated the agreement established in 1990, and NATO began moving eastwards, much to the dismay of the Russians. The new Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, warned that NATO's expansion to the East threatened a 'cold peace' and was a violation of the " spirit of conversations " that took place in February of 1990 between Soviet, West German and American leaders.

In 1990, President Bush's National Security Strategy for the United States acknowledged that, "even as East-West tensions diminish, American strategic concerns remain," noting that previous U.S. military interventions which were justified as a response to Soviet 'threats', were - in actuality - "in response to threats to U.S. interests that could not be laid at the Kremlin's door," and that, "the necessity to defend our interests will continue." In other words, decades of justifications for war by the United States - blaming 'Soviet imperialism' and 'Communism' - were lies, and now that the Soviet Union no longer existed as a threat, American imperialism will still have to continue.

Former National Security Adviser - and arch-imperial strategist - Zbigniew Brzezinski noted in 1992 that the Cold War strategy of the United States in advocating "liberation" against the USSR and Communism (thus justifying military interventions all over the world), " was a strategic sham, designed to a significant degree for domestic political reasons... the policy was basically rhetorical, at most tactical."

The Pentagon drafted a strategy in 1992 for the United States to manage the post-Cold War world, where the primary mission of the U.S. was "to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union." As the New York Times noted, the document - largely drafted by Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney - "makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy."

This strategy was further enshrined with the Clinton administration, whose National Security Adviser, Anthony Lake, articulated the 'Clinton doctrine' in 1993 when he stated that: "The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement - enlargement of the world's free community of market democracies," which "must combine our broad goals of fostering democracy and markets with our more traditional geostrategic interests."
Under Bill Clinton's imperial presidency, the United States and NATO went to war against Serbia, ultimately tore Yugoslavia to pieces (itself representative of a 'third way' of organizing society, different than both the West and the USSR), and NATO commenced its Eastward expansion . ...

...The 'Orange Revolution' in Ukraine in 2004 was - as Ian Traynor wrote in the Guardian - " an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing," with funding and organizing from the U.S. government, "deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-governmental organizations." ...

And this was prior to the 'legalization' of US government propaganda for the purpose of conning the American people. And, speaking of the Clintons (bolding mine):

...Mark Almond wrote in the Guardian in 2004 that, "throughout the 1980s, in the build-up to 1989's velvet revolutions, a small army of volunteers - and, let's be frank, spies - co-operated to promote what became People Power." This was represented by "a network of interlocking foundations and charities [which] mushroomed to organize the logistics of transferring millions of dollars to dissidents." The money itself " came overwhelmingly from NATO states and covert allies such as 'neutral' Sweden," as well as through the billionaire George Soros' Open Society Foundation. Almond noted that these "modern market revolutionaries" would bring people into office "with the power to privatize." Activists and populations are mobilized with "a multimedia vision of Euro-Atlantic prosperity by Western-funded 'independent' media to get them on the streets." After successful Western-backed 'revolutions' comes the usual economic 'shock therapy' which brings with it "mass unemployment, rampant insider dealing, growth of organized crime, prostitution and soaring death rates." Ah, democracy! ...

Two 'political' parties with but a single pathology... no wonder that the two-party trade-off trap is so strictly enforced by TPTB against the American people.

So, what price Clinton Foundation involvement, considering what we've managed to learn, as far as I can see, mostly via whistleblowers leaking, WikiLeaks and the tellingly bizarre 'explanations' of various agency heads and other public officials for extremely corrupt-appearing transactions and communications between/regarding the Clinton Foundation and large donors who happened to be in, acting for or connected to various foreign governments and financial institutions shuffling 'secret' money around for the ultra-wealthy, a group I'd confidently expect to be voted most likely to produce those very few actually benefiting from the overthrow of democratic governments/any Heads of State working for the public good to any extent and of the installation of destructive puppet governments draining and industrially poisoning their people, ecologies and countries for ever-increasing corporate/billionaire profits?

Now that government propagandization of The People of America has been illegally and unconstitutionally 'legalized' by corrupt public officials, with investigations and charges against corrupt public officials illegally and unconstitutionally stymied by such illegal and unconstitutional 'laws' passed against the public interest by such corrupt public officials and Homeland Security has taken control over the long-rigged US elections, shutting out any shriveled hope of independent/citizen oversight/verification of accuracy in reported electoral results, will the American people continue to accept even this degree of blatancy employed by their selected government in their own ongoing dispossession and expendability and the extinction-for-profit of virtually all life on the planet in the near future in order to enable a relative few - however briefly - to claim totalitarian planetary power and control?

I'd suggest (re-)reading this interesting refresher in full at source, ideally right after doing the same with CB's linked paper, if at all possible.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/foreign-governments-gave-million...

Foreign governments gave millions to foundation while Clinton was at State Dept.

By Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom HamburgerFebruary 25, 2015

The Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, including one donation that violated its ethics agreement with the Obama administration, foundation officials disclosed Wednesday.

Most of the contributions were possible because of exceptions written into the foundation’s 2008 agreement, which included limits on foreign-government donations.

The agreement, reached before Clinton’s nomination amid concerns that countries could use foundation donations to gain favor with a Clinton-led State Department, allowed governments that had previously donated money to continue making contributions at similar levels. ...

... The Washington Post reported last week that foreign sources, including governments, made up a third of those who have given the foundation more than $1 million over time. The Post found that the foundation, begun by former president Bill Clinton, has raised nearly $2 billion since its creation in 2001.

Foreign governments and individuals are prohibited from giving money to U.S. political candidates, to prevent outside influence over national leaders. But the foundation has given donors a way to potentially gain favor with the Clintons outside the traditional political limits. ...

... A review of foundation disclosures shows that at least two foreign governments — Germany and the United Arab Emirates — began giving in 2013 after the funding restrictions lapsed when Clinton left the Obama administration. ...

...Foundation officials said last week that if Clinton runs, they will consider taking steps to address concerns over the role of foreign donors.

“We will continue to ensure the Foundation’s policies and practices regarding support from international partners are appropriate, just as we did when she served as Secretary of State,” the foundation said in a statement. ...

... Foundation officials said Wednesday that the ethics review process required under the 2008 agreement for new donors — or for existing foreign-government donors wishing to “materially increase” their support — was never initiated during Clinton’s State Department years. ...

And the proof is in the pudding! Just look at how many tainted and ineffective AIDs drugs those billions bought and how many luxury hotels that 2 billion - presumably accumulated by 2013/2014, going by the date written and depending upon how recent the available data was at the time - had enabled for suffering people around the world stricken with disaster! Although administrative costs are, indeed, high...

Now the craze for 'charitable Foundations' amongst certain of the politically-connected super-wealthy can potentially be viewed with 20% more perspective!

Looks to me as though the corporate/billionaire terrorists have been partially 'charitably' funding themselves tax-free, as well as using the public money and resources of the people of various countries, en route to global corporate/military theft and destruction of the Earth itself and it all essentially rests on letting faked elections, appalling appointments to public service positions with the clear intent of abuse and unconstitutional 'law-making', as well as law-breaking, for the few and their lackeys, stand as a 'done deal to be fixed later', until it's too late.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFs-ycSo-14

Ellwood - Sunshine Garden

Edited to remove a word I cleverly typed twice as my trademark of authenticity and to expand my official title to:

The Typo/Booboo Queen.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Azazello's picture

but it seems relevant here too. They don't intend to leave Afghanistan, ever.
From Shadow Wars by Christopher Davidson:

Speaking in November 2001, just weeks after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan had begun, Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Jones effectively confirmed that the real reason for the intervention had little to do with al-Qaeda: “When the Afghan conflict is over we will not leave Central Asia. We have long-term plans and interests in this region.” Moreover, as Mark Curtis notes of the eventual military campaign, it soon became less about mopping up Taliban remnants and much more about establishing a new chain of Central Asian US military bases that were to form a Russia-bordering arc from Georgia up to Uzbekistan. Although eventually serving as the US-approved president of Afghanistan for ten years after office in 2004, in one of Hamid Karzai’s first post-retirement interviews in 2015 he told Al-Jazeera in no uncertain terms that al-Qaeda’s purported presence in his country in 2001 was practically non-existent and a “myth”. He also stated his certainty that that the 9/11 attacks were neither executed nor planned from Afghanistan.

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We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.