Turkey
in Afghanistan: Obama Sneaks into Kabul to Beg Karzai to
Clean Up His Act
03 April 2010By Dave Lindorff
How pathetic a scene was this: The president of the
United States, commander- in-chief of the mightiest
war machine the world has ever known, sneaking into
one of the poorest countries in the world and meeting
with the corrupt leader of that country, where he has
committed 100,000 troops to battle, to beg with that
corrupt leader to “clean up” his corrupt and
profoundly inept government.
Already, a thousand American soldiers as well as many
civilian aid workers, not to mention tens of thousands
of innocent Afghans, have died in an eight-year war
that the US launched in 2001, originally with the
intent solely of ousting the existing Taliban
government and destroying the bases of mostly Arab
fighters who had been assisting the Taliban in their
fight against Russian-allied warlords.
Over the years, with the Al Qaeda fighters destroyed
or pushed out of Afghanistan, the war has grown and
morphed into a grinding and so far losing battle
against indigenous Taliban fighters and Afghan
nationalists and tribalists who are trying trying to
drive out the US. But after eight years of fighting,
the goal of the war, on the American side, has only
become less and less clear.
That goal now appears to be: crushing the Taliban and
creating a modern, functioning nation state with a
government that at least has the grudging respect of
the populace.
But none of that is really likely to happen.
The US military recently staged a fake, movie-set
battle in a rural area of southeastern Afghanistan,
claiming it was assaulting a large town of 80,000,
allegedly infested with Taliban fighters--an alleged
center of the insurgency. With the support of an
either duped or incredibly corrupt US press corps, the
military went into the area, which was actually a
group of scattered farming villages with a central
market, claiming it would operate under new rules of
engagement designed to protect civilians, and then,
after clearing out the Taliban, set up a model
government administration.
Things went badly from the start, when the Marines
fired a rocket salvo into a home and killed 12
innocent civilians, including children. In the end
some 30 civilians were killed, very few actual Taliban
fighters were killed or captured, as they fled the
scene in the weeks leading up to the highly advertised
offensive, and to cap it off, the Afghan soldiers who
hung behind as the Marines went into the area, when
they did finally enter the battle zone themselves,
proceeded to strip the market area, stealing anything
of value.
A new “mayor” brought in from outside to administer
the “liberated” Marjah region, turned out to be a
killer and a thug. So far, a month after the end of
the fighting in Marjah, there is no clean new
administration there, and there probably never will
be. The focus of the US military is now on the
one-million population city of Kandahar.
Good luck to the civilians living there.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the war in
Afghanistan, scraped together a cheering section of
2500 US marines and soldiers to give some “Boo-yahs!”
to the visiting commander-in-chief, but it’s hard to
believe that the rest of the over 70,000 US troops in
the country are cheering. (And forget the NATO
“allies,” most of whom are preparing to pack it up and
go home.)
The government US forces are propping up is so weak
and corrupt that it doesn’t really “rule” anything but
the capital city of Kabul, and it, and its police and
army enforcers, are largely viewed by the majority of
Afghans as little more than an official mafia. It is
well known that President Hamid Karzai stole the last
election and thumbed his nose at world opinion (his
opponent simply quit the race in disgust during the
ballot counting).
And it was this usurper Karzai whom the visiting Obama
was left to plead with to clean up the mess of a
government he runs. Clean up how? Karzai’s own brother
is a leading warlord and opium baron. Even the
country’s opium crop is being left untouched by US
forces, for fear of alienating the country’s farmers,
so we’re actually in there fighting to defend the
world’s leading producer of opium for the heroin
trade! How on earth do you “clean up” a government in
a country like that?
Incredibly, as stupid and pointless and immoral as was
the war in Iraq, Obama has found himself mired in an
even more stupid, pointless and immoral war in
Afghanistan. And because he has chosen, in his first
year in office, to escalate that war instead of wind
it down and end it, and has doubled the rate of US
casualties in that war, President Obama now cannot do
the right thing and end it even if he wants to,
because then, how to explain all those pointless
deaths? Instead, he is forced to clap soldiers,
perhaps some of them already doomed, on the back in
the cafeteria at Bagram Air Base, and tell them, in an
echo or George Bush’s famous sneak visit to Iraq, “I’m
proud of you. You guys are doing great work, each and
every day.”
What a pathetic joke. The only thing missing was the
plastic turkey.
But then again, at least there was a turkey there.
©
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