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greg--thanks for that post--it's very interesting.
the main argument that i have to contextualize what you say comes from the paper that i linked to in the op. i run through the points that struck me, but the paper is itself better and more informed.
before that, i had framed the thread away from what i thought of the rationale for going into afghanistan in the first place for a few reasons, one of which is that the taliban were never a great bunch of guys., and there is a side of me that would have probably been more ambivalent about the campaign if the argument had been that the americans were intervening on politico-humanitarian grounds with an organization that the americans, pakistanis and saudis had armed and trained in the 80s in order to fight against the soviets---the taliban is itself another consequence of american stupidity, in a sense. this would have pushed me into an objection to the entire covert operations modality of policy implementation/defense that the americans have used since the 1950s--school of the americas and all that. which to my mind points back the the national-security state. so you see how it would have gone.
within all that, the other problem is the entirety of this "war on terror"---but that's another matter.
there's something kinda overwhelming and really not helpful in terms of one's mood or outlook in thinking about the extent to which the latest policy debacles are of a string of them, and that among the consequences of these policy-level and strategy-level debacles is not only the deaths of civilians, but also of folk like yourself, who did not invent the logic that landed you there, who are not responsible for it, but who are among the human beings who suffer the consequences of it, directly and indirectly. for what it's worth, when my posts get angry or my actual politics start to surface, this kind of information generally lay behind it. so much pain this has caused, and for so little reason.
the article outlines a series of problems.
initially, there's no doubt that folk in the countryside and kabul were all pleased to be rid of the taliban. the problems, the article argues, began when karzai's government, which never controlled much of anything outside kabul, could not deliver basic services, was skimming off money that was earmarked for state-building into the pockets of colleagues in kabul, the incoherence in the training of a police force and consequent inability to provide basic security (ugh--that miserable word) to folk outside kabul---problems of food complicated by the campaign over opium, which failed--and the generation of cash through that trade in large amounts, which led to alternate mechanisms for providing basic services etc.---the fact that the taliban had several years to rebuild in pakistan, that they did rebuild---that the occupation continued, karzai government came to be percieved as corrupt and inept and the occupation continued so that *it* became an explanation for everything bad that was happening so that the taliban--who remain pretty whacked out in terms of their ideology and practices--have been able to attract alot of support again.
this is the scenario outlined in the article, and the steps along the way are documented in the afghanistan watch page that i posted below it.
so have a look, if you havent (don't rely on my plot summary, please--it's nothing more than that) and let us know what you think of it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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