You really have to wonder whether history teaches politicians anything at all. Actually, perhaps that’s the wrong statement. Whether they do or don’t, I don’t think they really care. They don’t have to. Not while they can collect taxes at gunpoint, brainwash a couple of million people into donning uniforms and carrying weapons, and then do whatever they want with the whole cookie jar like a bunch of irresponsible spoiled little brats.
In a recent ABC News article, “Is Afghanistan Impossible for Obama?”, it states:
“In an ABC News/Washington Post poll released today, just 31 percent of Americans believe President Obama has a clear plan for dealing with the situation in Afghanistan, while 63 percent think he does not.”
It’s those 63 percent who actually have a handle on things. Never before, from the time of Alexander the Great, has a nation or empire emerged victorious from Afghanistan. In fact, Afghanistan may serve as a kind of object lesson when it comes to challenging the notion of “nationhood” altogether: It is nothing more than a loosely knit amalgam of various tribes, ethnicities, and religious sects all occupying one broad geographical region at any given time. And since there is of yet no dominant central force for U.S. and NATO troops to overwhelm, this effectively reduces the entire equation to strictly guerilla warfare.
Let’s set all the moral issues about invading other societies with military force in order to affect a desireable outcome for the invader aside for a moment. As for highly centralized government militaries engaging guerilla fighters on the battlefield, the track record isn’t good. There are numerous examples of this from history, but let’s keep it simple: The American Revolution showed that redcoats marching in formation in hugely overwhelming numbers and with a far greater source of supplies were no match for hit-and-run militiamen wearing plain clothes that blended in with the surroundings and local population. True, England was at war with France over in Europe at the time (of which the New World was but one front), but the tide probably still might not have been turned at all, had the colonists not employed unorthodox tactics.
An example nearer in time is Vietnam, where once again, forces less heavily armed and more poorly equipped still ground the American goliath down to a humiliating defeat. And there’s the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan itself in the 1980s – a situation where a direct land campaign was possible, entirely without having to move millions of pieces of equipment, and tens of thousands of men halfway around the world; such as in both Vietnam and the current U.S./NATO effort.
This never seems to daunt the statists, however, and anyone who truly understands the nature of government should not be surprised. Equally unremarkable to anarchists should be this additional statent from the ABC News article aforementioned:
“White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Wednesday that the administration is not concerned by the poll results showing sliding public approval of the President’s handling of Afghanistan.”
No, of course not. The people forced to pay for all this at the hands of the IRS’s guns be damned. Be damned as well, in spite of the haughty nomenclature, all those who die: Americans, Afghans, Europeans, Canadians – any and all human beings. They don’t matter. Just stop scrutinizing the situation and hand me my Nobel Peace Prize, thank you very much.
More from ABC News:
“Nearly half of Americans surveyed, 47 percent, now say the war has not been worth fighting, according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll. And the question of sending more troops to Afghanistan brings the same stark divide: 47 percent of Americans favor a surge, while a sliver more – 49 percent — say no.
“Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has denied a rift between the Pentagon and the White House on the troops issue, but there is reason for the White House to be concerned.
“With the insurgency in Afghanistan continuing to rage, U.S. service members are dying every day. One U.S. soldier was killed by an IED in southern Afghanistan overnight, bringing the total U.S. casualties in October to 30.
“Obama is also facing more pressure from Republicans to send the additional forces that the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanely McChrystal, and other military leaders have said they need.
“Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., an advocate for fulfilling McChrystal’s request for more U.S. troops, told ABC News, ‘The longer we delay in sending the necessary additional troops, the longer it will be that our troops are unnecessarily in danger, in my view.’”
The troops are “unnecessarily in danger” right now, have been all along on this insane wonderland quest, and McCain and others want to send in more; the poll numbers mean nothing.
This is government: An engine unto itself, accountable to no one. Your vote is not only irrelevant, it is damaging. It implicitly – if not explicitly – endorses this. And all the while you’ll pay “your” damned taxes, all right; or you’ll end up either in a cage or dead.
The situation is not entirely hopeless. Let Obama, McCain, and all of the rest of these insane parasites play their deadly, hateful games. Just don’t you and I support them any longer. Don’t feed them the awe and respect they need to continue using you as a pawn and a slave. One day, after countless more corpses are produced; after even more still are maimed, wounded, and broken; after immeasurable suffering, pain and loss has been endured; this war, along with Iraq, will end. Then you and I, clear thinkers, can survey the wreckage, assess the damage – and know precisely who is responsible. We can also see that all of it was for naught – for it will have changed nothing.
Except perhaps the hearts and minds of a few more like us who will refuse to go along any more. Those who will have seen through the State entire, and will come to realize that its machinations are nothing but lies through and through, all the way, in every solitary part.
And this, good friends and neighbors, is precisely where the real battle lies
"Never before, from the time of Alexander the Great, has a nation or empire emerged victorious from Afghanistan".
That happens not to be the case. Not only did Britain succeed to great effect in both the Second and Third Afghan Wars, many previous conquerors like Tamerlane and the Moguls got all they wanted there (usually, successfully holding open communications to campaigns in India). And, of course, the Hellenistic kingdoms Alexander the Great set up there and on either side of it flourished for centuries, lasting longer than anywhere else.
"As for highly centralized government militaries engaging guerilla fighters on the battlefield, the track record isn’t good".
Actually, it is – when they are willing and able to use suitable methods. To turn your own words back on you, there are numerous examples of this from history, but let’s keep it simple: The American Revolution did indeed show that redcoats marching in formation in hugely overwhelming numbers and with a far greater source of supplies were no match for hit-and-run militiamen wearing plain clothes that blended in with the surroundings and local population, but that simply isn't the usual method. There, there was disruption by outsiders (who were active in that theatre too) and by local regulars, meaning that troops had to be kept as regular formations to avoid defeat that way, and there were serious compunctions about treating the locals in more effective ways – the sort of techniques that had been used successfully in Scotland and Ireland well within living memory, and even in North America (Acadia); the French pacification of Corsica was practically a current event, even though the Genoese had failed from having their resources constrained by circumstances. "Hell or Connaught" works, if only it can be applied – it did against the "civilised tribes" in the USA. Or just look at how effective British methods were in the British-American War, when circumstances and objectives were different.
To put it in perspective, it would be straightforward to conquer Afghanistan by depopulating then repopulating it, "spill and fill". Just ban agriculture and settlement outside reconcentration areas, enforcing it from the air with occasional patrols, then move the reconcentration areas elsewhere, say to some other of the -stans, and walk away from them. Resettle from India or somewhere a generation later after a fallow period, as the Romans did when they eradicated Carthage and Corinth. It's not as if the US powers that be want anything from the Afghans specifically, they only want the strategic location and maybe some natural resources and to eliminate a safe area that could be used against them.
I just checked with some friends who live there, and find that the British do not currently occupy all of Ireland. In the centuries since 1653, many hundreds of thousands of Irish have fought bravely against various usurpers and invaders, murderers and thieves. As did many Scots.
But if it works for you, there are people who can make London into a lake of glass, resettle all the English and British civilians, and do a right job of it this time. I regret very much that John Paul Jones didn't complete the work he started during the American Revolutionary war of taking the war to your homeland, Lawrence, you sick, twisted, authoritarian filth.
Planetaryjim, you are a tiresome, obnoxious, one-eyed obsessive who won't pay attention to what I actually tell people and don't even realise that you are advocating done to me the very things you claim you find disgusting.
Other readers, he is lying about the British behaviour and results in the Second and Third Afghan Wars, and about the efficiency and effectiveness of "Hell or Connaught" methods. He lies that I proposed it, I warned about it. Charitably, he may not be lying but simply not know what he is talking about when he claims falsely that "Killing the Irish or sending them to Connaught did not pacify Ireland, did not keep Cromwell on the throne, did not prevent the restoration of Charles II, and did not make the empire last a single day longer" – which it demonstrably mostly did. He certainly does not realise that I am male when he writes "PM Lawrence should be forced personally to crawl over broken glass on her hands and knees to the heirs and descendants of every person killed by that policy to apologise in person", and neither knows nor cares that I am one such heir and descendant – my great-uncle Leopold was even one of de Valera's ministers, and his son was de Valera's godson. That means that "How many of your family members should we send to hell, PM Lawrence" is actually advocating… sending Irishmen to Hell or Connaught! (Elsewhere he mocked the Falkland Islanders, no doubt ignorant of the fact that my Scottish grandfather lived and worked there.) For what it's worth, he vastly overstates British behaviour in most cases.
Warnings of rocks ahead or of "here be tigers" are not advocating wrecks and devouring. Wishful thinking that drives refusal to believe in what is out there is more a recipe for it coming to pass than preventing it, and denunciations and hatefulness make him the very thing he denounces. He knows nothing about me or what I seek, and probably still will not once he has been told.
The evil vicious brutal thuggish British did not succeed in pacifying and occupying Afghanistan. They fled in terror. Their dreams of world empire were crushed, and many of them were slaughtered, properly, or horribly wounded, by the people they deliberately sought to oppress.
All British soldiers in foreign countries should be sent home. Either voluntarily by the British government, or in body bags by the service to the world provided by freedom fighters in occupied countries. Every British embassy should be closed, and every British company bankrupted. Again, either voluntarily, or by compulsion. There is no limit to the defensive and retaliatory force that is justified in these cases. The British are an evil empire, evil colonialists, evil butchers, evil tyrants, evil thieves, vicious, violent, and fraudulent.
If every British slave were freed, if every British politician killed, if every British bureau-rat laid end to end, it would be the best thing that could happen in the world.
Technologies have changed quite a bit since Alexander’s time, and since the vile, despicable, spit-worthy British assaulted human freedom in various Afghan wars of decades and centuries gone by.
Hell or Connaught does not work, and is an evil, violent, brutal, despicable, hateful policy. PM Lawrence is a nasty authoritarian shithead for proposing it. Killing the Irish or sending them to Connaught did not pacify Ireland, did not keep Cromwell on the throne, did not prevent the restoration of Charles II, and did not make the empire last a single day longer. It did kill many men, women, and children, and PM Lawrence should be forced personally to crawl over broken glass on her hands and knees to the heirs and descendants of every person killed by that policy to apologise in person, as an act of contrition for such a disgusting policy pronouncement.
How many of your family members should we send to hell, PM Lawrence, you despicable shit? How many times should British redcoats rape you before you come to grips with the idiocy of your disgusting authoritarianism? I suggest we find out.
I suggest we bomb your family home, repeatedly, from the air, by Predator drone, and follow your family members around to kill them, individually. How would you like that you vile bag of scum?
No, I'm pointing out, rhetorically, that the things you eagerly enthuse about happening to my ancestors are disgusting, to you, only when someone points out that the state can do them to you, too. Apparently you are one of those despicable hypocrites who can talk glowingly of slaughtering children in Ireland, Scotland, or Afghanistan, but cannot see yourself being tormented the same way. How sad. What a pathetic excuse for a human being you are.
Of course you proposed it. You eagerly asserted that Hell or Connaught was the way for the state to triumph against insurgents. You insisted that it was just and good. Now, when someone has called you on your pro-British-imperialist evil, you pretend that you were warning about it. You've made it clear that you love everything British and imperialistic from their units of measure down to the most recent slaughter of children by British forces.
I don't find your maleness to be very manly. You seem like a baby killer. Not a manly nor a courageous activity, at all.
Cromwell did not remain "protector" of England. There is no Cromwell heir on the throne now. Ireland was not pacified, even in the same century as Hell or Connaught – as James II illustrated just a few decades later. Ireland still isn't pacified to the British occupation. But British scum like to mock the "troubles" and pretend they aren't of any consequence.
I don't care about the Falkland Islanders, and don't admire Lawrence for having ancestors who stole them. I'm rather glad that many British sailors were sent to their graves trying to fight the Argentine navy. More dead British are more good British.
You are British, Lawrence, just like TE Lawrence before you. I don't care what you want, and will continue to mock you and oppose your hateful imperialistic views however you choose to express them. I want you to resent everything I say about you and your ideas, for all time.
If you didn't want to be unpleasant toward me, you would not have attacked me for explaining my calculation of the mercury weight using a mnemonic common to the location where the mercury was found. But you vicious filthy fucking British imperialists attack everyone and everything in the world, you steal land everywhere you go, you fuckers stole the Elgin marbles and million other artifacts, you rape and pillage and murder, and you don't understand why everyone in the world resents you, hates you, wants to see you bleed and cry.
Which is kind of sad, in the sense that moronic behavior can produce a disappointed look.
Readers, Planetaryjim is indulging in lies and misrepresentation. As you may not be familiar with what he refers to, I shall attempt to clear it up.
“…I’m pointing out, rhetorically, that the things you eagerly enthuse about happening to my ancestors are disgusting, to you, only when someone points out that the state can do them to you, too”.
This is a lie. I never, not nowhere, not nohow, enthused about any such thing at all, let alone eagerly. He made it up.
“Of course you proposed it. You eagerly asserted that Hell or Connaught was the way for the state to triumph against insurgents.”
Codswallop. There was nothing eager about it. It is indeed a way for them to do it – but it is so self-evidently a bad thing that only a one-eyed obsessive can read “proposing” and “eagerly” into it rather than taking it as a warning. Ask Kevin Carson – I’ve pointed out similar things about repressive tactics to him long before this.
“You insisted that it was just and good”.
This is also a lie. I never did any such thing – he pretended that that was where I was coming from, with no basis whatsoever.
“You’ve made it clear that you love everything British and imperialistic from their units of measure down to the most recent slaughter of children by British forces”.
He is reading that into something I pointed out elsewhere, that something he quoted was US centric. He shouldn’t read an argument against an arrogant US mnemonic as being pro-British; it simply doesn’t support that. See below for the mnemonics and explanations.
‘Cromwell did not remain “protector” of England’.
He did, actually, even dying in bed while he was Lord Protector.
“Ireland was not pacified, even in the same century as Hell or Connaught – as James II illustrated just a few decades later”.
Er… his history is off. Pacification succeeded, in the half century or so after James II, using a range of techniques including the ones I mentioned. More trouble happened later, of course, but that doesn’t mean that that didn’t work then.
“I don’t care about the Falkland Islanders, and don’t admire Lawrence for having ancestors who stole them”.
He made that last part up. My grandfather lived and worked there as an itinerant school teacher, just over a century ago. As it happens the islands never were stolen by the British, but rather they evicted the pirates who had taken over an Argentinian penal settlement (which had been established in defiance of prior British claims) and then the vacant islands were resettled to stop fresh pirates arriving; the pirates stole them, if anyone did – but in any case, long before my grandfather’s time.
“I don’t care what you want, and will continue to mock you and oppose your hateful imperialistic views however you choose to express them”.
He made that up.
“I want you to resent everything I say about you and your ideas, for all time”.
I resent the lies about me and about what my ideas are. The ideas he made up may well be as bad as he claims – but he lies when he claims they are mine.
“If you didn’t want to be unpleasant toward me, you would not have attacked me for explaining my calculation of the mercury weight using a mnemonic common to the location where the mercury was found”.
I never attacked him; he is making that up. Rather, I pointed out the sheer US centric arrogance contained in the mnemonic he quoted, but I never blamed him for the mnemonic. It went “A pint’s a pound/The world around”. Certainly, that does apply in the USA – but it is not a simple matter of being “a mnemonic common to the location where the mercury was found”. It actually claims to be world wide which, as I pointed out, is codswallop. Imperial measures (as they are called) are different. It was quite easy to refute the arrogance of the US mnemonic (I wasn’t in any sense attacking Planetaryjim), by providing the British mnemonic: “A pint of water/Weighs a pound and a quarter”. Note that this mnemonic does not assert universality, and is protected from falsification by being common to a location – a defence that he misrepresents as being available to the US mnemonic.
“But you vicious filthy [slur deleted] British imperialists attack everyone and everything in the world, you steal land everywhere you go, you [slur deleted] stole the Elgin marbles and million other artifacts, you rape and pillage and murder, and you don’t understand why everyone in the world resents you, hates you, wants to see you bleed and cry”.
This appears to be projection. In passing, I will mention that the Elgin Marbles were bought and paid for, and received from those in possession at the time. Nobody else has a better claim to them – the Athenians who made them are long gone and anyway did so with funds defrauded from the Delian League, and today’s Greeks are no more closely connected to the ownership as understood by the Greeks of that era than just about anybody else in Christendom (which replaced the pagans). To the pagan Greeks of that era, they belonged to the gods, not to the Greeks.
“Hell or Connaught” works, if only it can be applied – it did against the “civilised tribes” in the USA.
Emphasis in the original, just above. It reads like enthusiasm and eagerness, to me. To say that I was mistaken in supposing that you look forward to every incident of British blood shedding is one thing. To say that I'm lying is quite arrogant and evil.
Fuck you, you vicious, British, authoritarian, evil monster. Fuck yourself, and fuck all the redcoats, all the sycophants for the Hanoverian usurpation, and all of your ancestors, you disgusting shit.
Readers, Planetaryjim is lying again, with “To say that I was mistaken in supposing that you look forward to every incident of British blood shedding is one thing. To say that I’m lying is quite arrogant and evil.”
The fact of the matter is, the defence of claiming he had made an honest mistake is not open to him – although I quite honestly cannot see how anyone can take that quotation from me as indicating “enthusiasm and eagerness” rather than describing how things work, even taken out of context as it is (e.g. the context of “…when they are willing and able to use suitable methods…” [emphasis added]). I had corrected his false statements, so in repeating them he was doing so in the full knowledge that they had been refuted. It is not arrogant of me to call it as I see it, nor is it evil to warn others – here, to warn others not to be deceived by Planetaryjim.
Claiming that calling him a liar is arrogant and evil – that is itself a lie, since: he knows he is a liar since he has been caught in lying and told about it; calling exposing that arrogant and evil is to give a free pass to lying, so it is in fact worthy; and, since it is untrue that calling him a liar is arrogant and evil, and since he knows that lying is despicable (or he would not be indignant at the charge), he knows that liars cannot justly object to being called such: so he knows the charge is true and his objection false, which makes that objection a lie piled on past lies.
His last paragraph condemns only himself, for it marks him by his conduct. His repeating such slurs does not make me or anybody else guilty of them. Although why he should condemn someone’s ancestors for supporting long gone Hanoverians, when in fact they did not, is quite beyond me (or, if he supposes I support them, how he could read retroactive blood guilt onto my ancestors from that even if I did, let alone from the mere unsubstantiated accusation – he has as much or as little basis for supposing I endorse any of the other historical cases I gave by way of illustration).
What part of “go fuck yourself” did you not understand?
As a Plantagenet descendent, I have to agree with him on the Hanovarians – or their descendents in the House of Sachs Gregotha (aka Windsor), although I'm not sure P.M. deserves to be lumped in with them. The compromise they made for the throne was to let the popular mob run amok (especially when the mobsters are Tories). As Heinlein said, monarchies are the best gaurdians of civil liberty – although to really defang the state, the best method is not to shoot government employees but instead find alternative providers and funding mechanisms. In many cases, what the state does is good (educating children, making sure no one starves, caring for the insane, building roads, etc.) – how it does it is abysmal – even more so when so called libertarians short fund these operations.
As to the matter at hand, here is what I propose:
There needs to be a peace conference to redraw borders. The Uzbek and Tajik areas of Afghanistan should go to Uzbekistgan and Tajikistan. The Pashtun area should go to Pakistan, since they have been making progress on this front. Baluchistan should become a country and get parts of Pakistan and Iran. Iran should get Shia Iraq. Kurdistan should become a country with territory from Iraq, Iran and Turkey. Gaza should go Egypt and parts of the West Bank and Arab northern Israel should either be a Palestinian state or be ceded to a newly unified Syrian kingdom under the Hashemite Dynasty (which will also include Lebanon, Jordan and Syria and western Iraq.
The final piece of the puzzle is to get the Heck out of Saudi. We should still have the Navy patrol the area, but a ground pressence is no longer necessary.
Michael Bindner, on my father’s side I am of Scottish ancestry, descended from McLarens who were on the losing side in the Jacobite Rebellions and anglicised their name, and on my mother’s side I am of Irish ancestry, with heavy enough republican involvement before and during independence that my great-uncle even became one of de Valera’s ministers and got a small footnote in the history books (he was the one who had the secret discussions with the Germans in Spain about possible intervention unifying Ireland, during the Second World War – but, as the saying is, “the Irish are neutral on our side”). Oh, and the whole Hanoverian thing was actually Whig, with some squaring of the Tories just long enough to get over the line until the dynasty was assimilated and went native with George III and his father – then it connected with Tory values and tendencies.
There are no Uzbek, Tajik and Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, just interpenetration which varies with single valleys and altitude at least as much as horizontally. Also, there is functional/class separation, with the ethnically more distinct (Persian as opposed to Turkic) Tajiks filling the roles of settled peasant farmers while the others, historically, have also been rulers and/or herdsmen – so geographical separation would not work because of interdependence, even though that was often exploitative. Something similar applies to Kurdistan with regard to the Armenians, only the Kurds have been past beneficiaries of and participants in Armenian genocide; that should not be rewarded. Egypt would neither want nor gain from Gaza alone, as that outpost only makes sense as a stepping stone to something more (the whole area was often a corridor between powers in Egypt and Syria/Asia Minor, even in the 19th century and the First World War). No Palestinian or any other state is viable on less that the whole of current Israel north of the desert (say, Beersheba to the southern end of the Dead Sea); it really is “this town ain’t big enough for both of us”. And the Hashemites know what happened with a larger kingdom last time, and that such a thing can only be held together as an empire by a core insider/elite group.
Oh, and I know perfectly well what Planetaryjim meant and how he put it – and what it says about him, both about his wilful ignorance and about his malignity; he is himself an instance of what he loathes.
Michael Bindner, follow what you're suggesting through to its conclusion. The State provides for such good works as extortionately-priced, compulsory, low-quality education, and using the subsidized control over farm production as a political weapon (during the New Deal, farmers were paid to burn excess comestible crops because of the protectionist nature of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff). If these are the desired results, then how can extortion not be an acceptable way to obtain them?
And about Saudi Arabia, the United States military presence (sea, air, land) is for training and sustaining a regime that can act as another proxy enforcer in its oil and imperial schemes. No matter how much we hear about how "backwards" the country is, its rulers are kept in place with US military aid; but the United States government has never funded right-wing forces that protect their mutual exploitation interests before. Ever. And you say, "We should still have the Navy patrol the area, but a ground pressence is no longer necessary," but it absolutely is to maintain the regime there. You can't be a half-hearted imperialist when there are so many brown people that still think they have a personal entitlement to benefit from the resources in their own "countries."
Wow… you sound smart, you really do, wisdom you have absolutely none though. The revenge of the poor, suffering and dying comes in the form of corruption and self-destruction to the conquerors. I don't think you meant that the US should actually "spill/fill" in Afghanistan, I hope not, but merely the fact that the we are willing to "put aside" our moral compunctions and start thinking in terms of genocide and how it can/should be done speaks for itself. We are corrupt, as a nation – and there is no separating those of use who actively go along with the corruption, and those who don't.