STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Afghan War Down, Freedom Up?
By admin - June 23, 2011

Troop withdrawals don't solve weaknesses in Afghan strategy … Given all the economic, political, and military considerations President Obama had to juggle in deciding on the size and pace of troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, his compromise of starting slow but removing all 33,000 of the original surge forces by the end of 2012 is the least bad option. Still, success in getting US forces out of Afghanistan will depend less on troop numbers and timetables than on a sound strategy for generating a political resolution to the insurgency. – Boston Globe

Dominant Social Theme: Afghanistan needs a new beginning and the US will provide one.

Free-Market Analysis: How do dominant social themes collapse? In this case, when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. The memes of the elite are endlessly inventive and insistent, but the Afghan war has not allowed the fruition of the meme that "the West is Good, the Pashtun are Bad and that Afghanistan needs to be rescued from Islamic extremism."

Now another Western power elite sub dominant social theme is being floated: The US, nobly defeated by Islamic fanatics, will do what it can to salvage freedom on behalf of the Afghan people.

In fact, not surprisingly, this Boston Globe article (see excerpt above) rehearses almost exactly the predictions we've made in the past – that Afghanistan is destined for partition. And this is exactly the same outcome as the last time the British (Anglosphere) tried to defeat the Afghan/Pashtuns – partition.

The plan, you see, was to finally eradicate the independence of the stiff-necked Pashtuns and to drag them into the West's orbit of "civilization." To this end a central government was re-established in Kabul, a central bank was established, taxes were raised and collected, a parliament was convened and a private banking system developed.

The result? The central bank is dysfunctional, taxes have gone uncollected, the government is corrupt, the parliament is powerless and the private banking system has collapsed as a result of embezzlement. This is the enlightened system that Western elites tried to push on the Pashtun and their Taliban fighters.

Now the Globe, a pre-eminent mouthpiece for the Anglo-American power elite, provides us with a blueprint for the next series of justifications regarding the war. The article peers forward in time to a "negotiated settlement" between the Taliban and the West and talks bluntly of a partitioning of Afghanistan between the northern Non-Pashtun alliance and the southern Pashtun Taliban.

It is like watching someone blurt out the truth. Suddenly we learn that the "north" is different than the south, that the US has not been fighting the Taliban after all but that this has been a regional war. Of course, the protagonists are STILL not named. The article refers to the non-Pashtun ethnic tribes of the north as "northerners." It refers the Pashtun as Taliban. Even now the nomenclature is purposefully confused.

But the intent is clear – and merciless. The Anglosphere in its desperation and vindictiveness intends that its enduring legacy to Afghanistan will be civil war. The Globe is clear about this and one assumes, given the Globe's position and the cold-blooded fury of the editorial itself that it represents positions from on-high.

The Globe continues its enumeration of the "new" strategy. The capital, Kabul, will have to be "off the table," we learn, as it has become a hub of economic activity and modernization. Another justification: Today there are about 2.5 million girls in school in the Kabul area and northern regions, and, tolerant, urban life of the capital, "they must not be handed over to Taliban fanatics."

To this we can only add that the concern shown by the West – after blowing up Afghan women and children by the hundreds for the past ten years – is truly remarkable. In Kenya, adjacent to Nairobi, there is a two-million person slum and most of these people live on about a dollar a day, including young women. This is the state of the world generally, at least in Africa.

The West's protestations regarding the education of women in Afghanistan would be more believable if its leaders had shown concern for impoverishment and illiteracy elsewhere. Within this context, it strikes us as opportunism – a justification for continued occupation. Here's some more from the article:

By the time all combat forces are withdrawn from Afghanistan, whether in 2014 or sooner, the US military's counter-insurgency strategy should be replaced by a counter-terrorism mission based on paying Afghans for actionable intelligence on Islamic extremists. A credible Afghan partner will be indispensable for any such transition. But Karzai's government, which functions more as a criminal enterprise than a true government, cannot be that partner.

So a crucial component of American strategy must be to work around Karzai and to help open up a space for real politics in Afghanistan. A way to bring younger, more honest, and more competent political actors forward would be for Obama to announce that Afghanistan's constitution must not be flouted — that when Karzai's term ends in 2014, he will leave office.

The prospect of a post-Karzai democratic succession could open up possibilities for power — and the authority to cut local deals with the Taliban — to flow to regional governors and district chiefs. Even the least noxious outcome in Afghanistan is likely to be messy and morally compromising. But a supple and determined political strategy may avoid the worst — so that more of Americans' attention and resources can be redirected to nation-building at home.

This is the plan: Replace Karzai, support the Northern Alliance, build further redoubts in "free" Afghanistan and harry the Pashtun/Taliban in the south. This does NOT deal with the underlying issue, which is that the power elite had to pacify the country if it wished to proclaim viable world government. Without the pacification, there is no larger, unitary governance to be had.

The Anglosphere elite is now engaged, from what we can tell, in a frantic effort to pacify the REST of the region – including Northern Africa to compensate for its apparent defeat in Afghanistan. None of this will likely make any difference. The issue is Afghanistan. It has been for centuries, for millennia in fact. This is the third time that Western powers-that-be have tried and failed in their attempts at "Westernization" of this region.

Over the next decade, one of heartache and violence to be sure, we predict we shall hear less and less about Afghanistan. Like Vietnam, it shall drop from the propagandists' playbook. America lost 50,000 men with 500,000 wounded in Vietnam and did so to keep the Red Menace from arriving at America's shores. But after the war was done and lost, the Red Menace never showed up.

Not once, that we know of, did the mainstream media conduct a real post-mortem of that war. The arguments that animated the Cold War were never effectively examined. That's because they would not stand up to scrutiny. Turns out the Red Menace was over-exaggerated. Russia is the same thuggish state it's always been; China has embarked on a hyper-socialist expansion and Vietnam most recently requested American military aid to stand up against Chinese expansionism.

Western history is mostly a fairy tale. The wars, the economic expansions and contractions, "representative government" – all these are a kind of phantasmagoria, spun for the delectation of those who squat around magic boxes willingly imbibing such electronic fairy tales. The reality is much as it has been for the past 300 years (at least). A ruthless band of plutocrats – elite banking families with a base in the City of London – have been engaged in a remarkable mission to take over the globe.

They have used war (mostly war), regulatory terrorism and central banking/monetary devastation to advance their cause. They have not hesitated in our view to plunge this miserable planet and its hapless citizens, especially in the West, into repeated recessions and depressions to consolidate power and advance centralization.

They have built up a skeleton of world governance authorities – the UN, NATO, BIS, World Bank, IMF and global courts (ICC); they are still at it; they do not easily retreat; their will to conquer and destroy is vast. In their lust for power they have perverted every legacy of the long-ago Western Renaissance, from science, to art, to governance itself. And yet … one region has escaped them. They have tried over and over – as Alexander the Great did before them – to crush resistance at the Navel of the World. They have not succeeded … again.

There are many who will say that the war will continue under another guise, with mercenaries instead of a formal army. But this does not ameliorate what has just occurred. The "surge" has seemingly given away to a campaign of defense rather than offense. Something substantive has changed. After thousands of American and NATO casualties and millions of dead, wounded and displaced Afghan civilians, this horrible, useless, bloody war has begun to subside.

After Thoughts

The elites, desperate as they are to finish a job that cannot be completed, will fight on. And the real job is the construction of a new world order (You can listen to Henry Kissinger blather on about that here: Kissinger Interview). In the meantime, more Afghans (and Western troops) will die in the civil war that the West now plans for this region. Further economic ruin and bloodshed are doubtless on the way. But having left the job incomplete in Afghanistan, and increasingly in Pakistan, the prospect of world government recedes. Today, there is a bit less bloodshed in the world. Tomorrow, perhaps, a little more freedom.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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