In Afghanistan President Karzai has
declared that foreign spies and the foreign press created election fraud
that kept him from winning the presidency outright, whereas the truth is
his own people organized fraud in his favor, keeping his opponent from
winning a majority, as everyone knows.
(click here for article) Obama recently feted Karzai at the
White House without any mention of his burst of dubious creativity, or
the fact of the election fraud. (Click here for
article) They don’t want to upset him or he
might get really weird. Meanwhile Maliki, Prime minister of
Iraq, has denied reports from Human
Rights watch about torture at Muthanna prison.
(click
here for CNN article) To the extent that the media are correct in
saying this is Shiites torturing
Sunnis, and regardless of that aspect, this
is one of various signs that Maliki
doesn’t care about fairness,
human rights, or avoiding civil war. There
is no war that the U.S. can win in Iraq
or Afghanistan
because the wars will continue without the U.S. Neither the Iraqi
nor the Afghan government
is going to last after the the U.S. military is not there to prop them
up. Obama is telling the same lie Nixon told when preparing to exit Viet
Nam........ In
Afghanistan the
people hate their own government, they hate the
U.S. forces
and they hate the Taliban, although at first, according to some U.S.
soldiers, they
embraced the U.S. presence because they were happy to be rid of the
Taliban. But the U.S. allied with the despised Kabul government, rather
than cultivating local allies, a mistake other occupiers of Afghanistan
have made, and the U.S. has killed civilians with air attacks in a wanton
and callous manner. After all these years the U.S, under
McCrystal, has
called for less civilian deaths and more local support with food,
medicine, education, infrastructure and so on, but the rate of civilian deaths has
actually increased, while the recently "secured" Marja area is already
reverting toTaliban control. And even if it isn’t too late to make an impression with a
new, friendlier approach, without a decent, respected government to oppose the
Taliban there is no hope. In Afghanistan
the military and police are both corrupt and know they can’t beat the
Taliban. No one wants to be a hero for a corrupt force and a lost cause.
For an article about Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, which paints a lurid
picture of the kind of government the U.S. is supporting,
click here....... Even if the U.S.
military secures Kandahar, which is doubtful with Marja already slipping away,
they will only be able to hold it by turning it into a garrison. Those who think
the U.S. would be faring better in Afghanistan if it hadn't diverted it's
principal energy to Iraq are
missing the point. Only by allying with local governments and helping
with schools, clinics etc. can the U.S. have prevail over the Taliban.
Relying on a consumately corrupt central government in Kabul is a plan that
never had a chance no matter how many soldiers we send there. There were
recent sporadic efforts to enable local anti-Taliban groups, but the U.S. backed
off because they could not control these groups as well as they would like.
Unfortunately that is a necessary trade-off. The local power brokers are going
to be corrupt and self serving, but when Afghanistan is not occupied, as by the
British or the Soviets or the U.S., power has always been with local groups,
until the Taliban. The local leaders maintain a sort of mafia-style connection
to the local community that Kabul cannot maintain, unless perhaps if there were
something about the Kabul government for people to respect. The local groups and
warlords hate the Taliban and, in a loose confederation, have a chance, with
U.S. help, to beat the Taliban. It is the only chance the U.S. has, but we
(the U.S.) are such control freaks that we would rather stick with the illusion
of control over Karzai than accept partnership with diverse local governments
which clearly are going to exercise independence. ...... In
Iraq, in 2003, General Petraeus tried to start a politically friendly,
local empowerment process in Mosul
where he led the 101st airborne, but no one followed his
lead. (click here
for article)
Mosul soon went the
way of the rest of Iraq,
exploding with militant violence, but the
U.S.
might have generated a very different situation in Iraq if it followed
the Patraeus model. Instead the U.S.
military bashed down doors and trashed housed of innocent people, killed for no reason, put people in jail for
no cause and refused communication with their families, and generally
made a good case for militant backlash. It is insane, what we have been
doing in these two countries.
(For this site's page on U.S.
policy in the Middle East click here.)