roachboy

slims...that's a peculiar delegitimation move you decide to make. it hardly seems necessary. but whatever.
i expect that the rhetoric of "i-am-here" vs. "you-are-political" was to nuke anything i might say.


on the other hand, i forget that you're there. when i read your posts i assume you were there but are sitting around at home amusing yourself on a messageboard. so first of all, your perspective is interesting and keep writing it here if you're so inclined. disagreements are just that.

but mostly to you and your comrades: be safe.


that said:


there's no doubt gap between the types of information that we respectively have access to. it's not real clear to me what kind of information you've got about the karzai government and the extent to which it is not in control of much of anything outside of kabul. but of course things change...the extent to which (from what i understand anyway) political legitimacy is mostly about protection and other basic--like real basic---service delivery type arrangements---and the karzai government can't deliver them. the us et al is--from what i can put together---seen simultaneously as allies of karzai, so a military arm of a particular faction in a fight against another faction...like a party within a civil war....and as an outside invasion force, which hands the opposition to kabul (the taliban) an easy trope to use to mobilize people. basic service delivery doesn't happen or is erratic...foreign invader....machiavelli saw this as a no-win situation. read the prince if you haven't.

all this and i don't doubt--at all--that the taliban are not swell guys.

and i do not doubt--at all---that in some alternate universe you and everyone else there would rather be doing things another way. but you're boxed in. you're boxed in by the situation you're in.

(the question then becomes what are we doing there? how thought out was it, getting involved there? i don't think it was thought out at all (preponderance of evidence: remember the wolfowitz "plan" for iraq?))



it's good that in some places for some periods things seems better. i assume that things on the ground move around all the time and that statements from people who read while sitting in a chair thousands of miles away seem quite removed from what is for you the reality of afghanistan.

the stories i know more more slowly. they're more general. they're products of the fog of war too. but it's not that difficult to see the basic political incoherence on this side that gets translated again and again into questions of what the us should do there, what the us is doing there and (most important to my mind) what is the direction to go in order to get out of there.


in your posts is this sense that you see the military as having some alternate possible mission that they can't do (hands tied behind the back and all that) that has objectives which are clear to you but not to people who have the power to create strategy (and still less to those of us who sit in chairs reading)...but that will never happen. and so long as that won't happen, the situation is such that the us cannot leave. so the logic is that this is an endless war.

the only people who win in that kind of situation are the people selling hardware and supplies. so contractors. no-one else. not you, not anyone who's actually there fighting, not the civilians around you, not the government of afghanistan such as it is...no-one.

and that's alarming.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite