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.
Comments
If the USA spent $7.6Billion to eradicate opium why
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?)
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
poll
Banks around the world make "bank"
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.
"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott
The U.S. should have never ever gone there to begin with.
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?
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage
It's not the US
Corruption is too expensive in the US. Only the very wealthy can afford it.
Perhaps this best belongs here
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”
I want a Pony!
Bravo~
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage
Superb video
Electrifying in its ilumination of depth.
Hearfelt, irreplaceable.
Time to declare victory and leave.
Who in their right mind believes this war makes any sense at this point other than those who are making money off its continuance?
"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott
That - and all of the other
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...
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):
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...
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.
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.
I've already put this in another thread,
but it seems relevant here too. They don't intend to leave Afghanistan, ever.
From Shadow Wars by Christopher Davidson:
We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.