It is surreal to read some of the Soviet opinion about their Afghan war that ended in 1989. And don't forget the Brit Afghan war before that. How the U.S.A. and Canada allowed themselves to get into the same situation the Soviets were in, in the 80's, will be one of the great ironies of history. Peacenik would love to search the newspaper archives to read some of the contemporaneous U.S. and Canadian opinion about the Soviet attack on Afghanistan. The U.S. and Canada were so outraged that they did not compete in the Moscow Olympics. And now, like the Soviets, the U.S. and Canada are spending money they cannot afford on a war they cannot justify, while their social saftey nets are torn to shreds and eliminated. Bring the troops home now.
Washington, the Pentagon, and the U.S. military need to enter rehab for their addiction to waging war and empire across the planet.
If, as 2011 begins, you want to peer into the future, enter my time machine, strap yourself in, and head for the past, that laboratory for all developments of our moment and beyond.Just as 2010 ended, the American military’s urge to surge resurfaced in a significant way. It seems that “leaders” in the Obama administration and “senior American military commanders” in Afghanistan were acting as a veritable WikiLeaks machine. They slipped information to New York Times reporters Mark Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins about secret planning to increase pressure in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, possibly on the tinderbox province of Baluchistan, and undoubtedly on the Pakistani government and military via cross-border raids by U.S. Special Operations forces in the new year.
In the front-page story those two reporters produced, you could practically slice with a dull knife American military frustration over a war going terribly wrong, over an enemy (shades of Vietnam!) with “sanctuaries” for rest, recuperation, and rearming just over an ill-marked, half-existent border. You could practically taste the chagrin of the military that their war against... well you name it: terrorists, guerrillas, former Islamic fundamentalist allies, Afghan and Pakistani nationalists, and god knows who else... wasn’t proceeding exactly swimmingly. You could practically reach out and be seared by their anger at the Pakistanis for continuing to take American bucks by the billions while playing their own game, rather than an American one, in the region.
Read on...
