"The
winds in Chicago
Have
torn me to shreds;
Reality
has always
Had
too many heads."
--
Bob Dylan, "Cold Irons Bound"
So
now we know the grand plan of the Peace Laureate (and his wag-tail
pack of lapdogs in
NATO) for the people of Afghanistan: civil war.
As
many have observed, the NATO summiteers sent out an array of mixed
messages at their
meeting this week in Chicago: the Afghan war is
over, the Afghan war is going forward,
NATO forces are withdrawing
from Afghanistan, NATO forces are staying in Afghanistan for
years to
come. This confusion of tongues led some cynics to believe that the
gilded gaggle
of brilliant statespersons nabobbing together in the
locked-down Windy City actually had no
earthly idea what they were
doing in Afghanistan and were saying whatever they thought
might
satisfy their paymasters and keep themselves perked and porked in
power for as long
as possible.
But
in the end, the gaggle came up with a "unified vision"
for
their
"irreversible course" in Afghanistan:
facilitating an all-out, full-scale, never-ending,
hydra-headed civil
war to tear the country to shreds.
The
"plan" (if one can dignify this stew of blind hormonal
impulse, psychological wound
seepage and wilful ignorance with that
term) calls for the American-led NATO forces to hand
over all "combat
operations" to the Afghan Army in 2013 (except, of course, for
the combat
operations that US forces will continue to carry out, like
night raids and drone strikes,
).
Then, we are told, the "bulk" of the 130,000 foreign troops
now occupying Afghanistan will
be withdrawn. Except, of course, for
the unspecified number of foreign troops who will
remain -- for more
than a decade, at the very least -- to "train" and "assist"
the
But
here's a funny thing: The Afghan army has been given billions of
dollars worth of
American training and weaponry over the past decade;
yet we're told that only 1 percent of
these forces are now capable of
undertaking operations on their own. But the opponents of
the
occupation -- without these billions, without a bristling
international military alliance
behind them -- have somehow managed
to wield a military force that grows more effective
with each passing
year. Could it be possible -- just going way out on a limb here --
that
people fighting to rid their native land of foreign invaders are
more motivated, more
dedicated and more effective that people who are
being paid (usually a pittance) to fight for
the foreign invaders?
It's
obvious that the Afghan "national army" will not be able to
stay in the field against the
Taliban and its allies without the
continuing and direct assistance of the American military. It
is
equally obvious that the Afghan army won't be able to defeat the
Taliban in these
conditions; indeed, the combined forces of NATO have
been unable to defeat the Taliban in
10 years. So the upshot of
Obama's "plan" will be an interminable civil war, with a
weak and
demoralized "national army" given just enough
support to stave off total defeat, while the
war profiteers on every
side continue to gorge themselves sick.
Pretty
much the status quo of the last decade, then, with some slight
repackaging, and a
lower profile for the American role.
However,
it is unlikely that this "plan" will actually go according
to, well, plan. At some point,
the profit margins on corpse
production in Afghanistan will fall too far due to the Taliban's
intransigence, and the Potomac poobahs will finally pull the plug on
the whole pointless
endeavor. This will doubtless happen well before
the 2024 mark bruited in the recent
"agreement" (yes, we're
running amok with quote marks here, but what else can you do
when
there's so much mendacity about?) between the kleptocracies in
Washington and
Kabul.
You
remember that agreement, don't you? Signed a few weeks ago with much
fanfare during
Obama's furtive drop-in to the satapry, and pledging
American support for Afghanistan for
the next 12 years, with options
to re-up. (In olden days, of course, these kinds of solemn
pledges of
alliance had to be affirmed by a treaty and ratified by the U.S.
Senate, but in our
bold new Commander-in-Chief state, the Leader can
pledge America's blood and treasure
wherever and for however long he
or she sees fit.) The "agreement" was largely forgotten
by
the time of the Chicago summit, although its very notional, highly
provisional time limit of
2024 still wafts faintly around the
zeitgeist. But again, we will likely see American forces
doing
the old Saigon Roof Dance long before that.
Meanwhile,
the Afghan civil war which Nobel Peace Laureate Jimmy Carter helped
facilitate
by arming the uprising of jihadi extremists back in the
1970s will run on and on, given fresh
impetus by the American
invasion of 2001 and accelerated further by the "surge" of
troops
and brutal tactics by Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama. And
further thousands upon
thousands of Afghans will be slaughtered and
ruined, their nation -- already cratered by the
decades of Big Power
gaming -- plunged deeper and deeper into suffering, for generations.
But
our seepage-sodden NATO summiteers don't give a damn about any of
that. Buried
alive inside their security bubble, cut off from the
world and common humanity, all they can
see are their own
reflections; all they can hear are their own lies.
