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but who exactly is the war in afghanistan against?
i understood that the bush people justified the action as a response to the 9/11/2001 business, so logically the objective would have been al qeada. but somehow along the way it turned into the taliban. in that, the us and its dance partners are basically both a colonial occupation force and a war band amongst others in a civil war context that has little in the way of patronage to offer and in the main doesn't speak the languages--so is uniquely ill-equipped to play the game that it has slid into there.
now the only reason i can imagine that the united states slipped into this situation in the first place is the utter lack of clarity about what the forces were there to do from the inception of this ill-advised, ill-considered adventure.
it seems in retrospect that the bush people only thought it out to the extent that they wanted to appear to do something--but at times, particularly given what's been coming out in the investigations into the iraq war that have been carried out in the uk, some results of which have appeared in the guardian over the past 10 days, at times i think that the entire afghanistan adventure was basically a smoke-screen set up to enable the iraq debacle, which was the central policy objective of the neo-con set within the bush squad **before** 9/11/2001 (pace the project for a new american century)...
it's astonishing to me the way this afghanistan thing has and has not been carried out---the phases of official interest followed by phases of not much happening, asleep at the switch for the most part, all of which is squarely in the lap of the bush administration...
be that as it may, it still seems to me that the disasters of the bush period have really damaged the obama administration, and afghanistan is just another gift from those glorious days of yore than keeps on giving.
it doesn't help that obama basically accepted from early in the campaign the "logic" of this "war on terror" nonsense as a whole...and decided for whatever reason that afghanistan was where the "real" war on terror was happening.
it really makes no sense.
anyway, it seems to me that this is basically a face-saving move designed to enable a withdrawal without having to face a defeat--which the military command warned was most assuredly a possibility a few months ago if something were not done. given the advantages that the taliban has in the countryside (different areas) and the absurdity of the karzai "government" as a state in anything like the centralized western sense of the term (it seems more a grouping of rivals to the taliban who are now not in a position to play the patronage game effectively, so their participation in the government is self-defeating and so on)....and the fact that the united states is part of the dynamics of a civil war and not at all, except in some alternate fictional television for americans world, actually engaged in anything like the "war on terror"---the only sane option is to get the hell out. and the only way to do that is by way of some face-saving move. and the option appears to be that the face saving move is going to be kill alot of people on the way out in some vague hope that it will inflict enough damage on the taliban that they won't sweep into power directly behind the american aircraft that take folk home.
i mean, you can read this all over the place, but all the taliban has to do in this situation is wait in pakistan.
so it's a mess, and a bush people mess to boot.
personally, i think it's a disastrous situation no matter how you look at it, and i do not envy obama or his administration at all for being put in this position by the incompetence of his predecessor.
it's easy to say in principle get the fuck out, but were i in his position, trying to balance the various modes of deterioration of american political and economic power against the costs of basically conceding "this was a terrible idea" in afghanistan and leaving, i don't know what i would do.
but i do know that i am opposed to this move on principle.
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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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