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the story line in the rachid clip i posted above is quite sobering. and there are many elements to it, so the best thing is to watch it--the talk itself is about 25 minutes followed by a q & a session, which has some interesting bits to it---but it also has That Guy, the Guy who always shows up at ay given conference and under the pretext of posing a question rattles on for an extended duration about himself. yes yes, but let's talk about me. anyway:
you can bookend this as he does, by noting, as he does, that right now in kabul people still only have electricity about 4 hrs/day.
once upon a time, i remember that it was meet to refer to the bush people as mayberry machiavellians. but had they actually read the prince, they'd have understood that invading is easy--the problems really start once you've invaded. you have to establish legitimacy and it is simply the case that the main way an existing order establishes legitimacy is via the continuity of basic services....he argues that as of the time of the speech, june 08, about a third of afghanistan was under taliban control....and this is not even the Problem.
the focus of the talk is really the situation on the border between afghanistan & pakistan.
the outline goes:
after the initial invasion of afghanistan, the coalition went into what amounts to a 3 year holding pattern. everything just kinda stopped. can you say iraq?
it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see in the wreckage that is now unfolding a consequence of the iraq debacle.
the relationship with musharraf undertaken by the bush people was such that despite the fact that pk offered sanctuary along its borders to al qeada, to the taliban(s) etc., and allowed it from the highest levels of government, and despite the fact that everyone--and i mean everyone--knew this was the case, what musharraf said went and so these sanctuaries were allowed to operate, dig in, expand.
he outlines the relations between pashtoons across the afghan/pk border--the extent to which this was a very old kind of relation, one that shaped much about afghanistan as a largely fictional western-style nation-state, how it rendered the notion of foxed borders absurd because it's a similar pattern that you see everywhere.
he outlines the dynamic in which the afghanistan taliban was able to fashion a pk correlate of itself, which is what you see now moving into swat, which is just outside the national capital.
he outlines a brief flurry of american activity just before the 04 election and the way that flurry petered out.
in the q&a, he talks about an ancillary problem, one related to the bookend narrative, which concerns the lack of co-ordination between the various militaries that occupy afghanistan in a kind of jurisdictional mosaic...
the storyline he unfolds ends as does that of the book he's hawking, with the assassination of benzir bhutto.
the results of the actions--more non-actions---that he describes points to what looks like an unfolding strategic catastrophe.
what you're seeing in the string of articles that have been appearing about this situation over the past week is a kind of giant what the fuck? moment.
i still dont see any obvious move that can be made here, but maybe i'm thinking about it too much through the process of trying to make sense of how this happened.
what's clear is that while charlatans point is excellent in principle, in fact, at the moment, the shit may be about to hit the fan and while it nonetheless makes sense for the strategy he outlines to be adopted in other contexts, in this one the time may be passed.
i don't know.
how do you parse this?
i hope i'm missing something....
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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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