Taliban Close to Retaking Pre-War HQ In Kunduz

And why not, given what the Germans are doing there? And you know, not just the Germans, but everybody else taking orders from the American masters in Afghanistan.

OK, sure, you care more about Oprah quitting, than about someplace you never heard of in Afghanistan, called Kunduz. Hell, "Kunduz" sounds rather comical anyway, right, like it would be a comic book name of someplace, maybe where cousins of Borat might live.

But Kunduz, as you can relatively painlessly discover by clicking the link to the Wikipedia article, was "the last major city held by the Taliban before its fall to US-backed Afghan Northern Alliance forces on November 26, 2001."

Also, even more interesting, it was the hub of what is known as the "Airlift of Evil", which again you probably never heard about, given the Bush Regime's censorship of its idiocy and crimes. Turns out one of the US's chief allies in the Terror Wars, was actually training and fighting alongside of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001. It was buddy-buddy with Qaeda also. And when it looked like Kunduz would fall, and the Pakistani-backed alliance would collapse and maybe some Pakistani military and intelligence people would be captured or killed, the Pakistani government made a deal with Bush (or Cheney) to get their people out. "Their people" ended up being Pakistanis, Taliban, and oh yeah, a bunch of Qaeda guys too.

One other thing about Kunduz, it is "strategically important because it is the only way connecting Takhar and Badakhshan provinces, which play a critical role in the existing government." In fact, Kunduz is called "the hive of the country."

Now, you might think a place with all that history, and with such an important strategic position in the country would be good to protect, and with sufficient forces that you wouldn't have to, oh, act like a bunch of stormtroopers, desperate to kill the whac-a-mole.

But an article this morning in the NY Times tells us that in fact, Americans and their corrupt puppet-regime in Kabul felt things were safe from the Taliban and Qaeda in Kunduz, and had committed only "a few thousand German peacekeepers" to hold the area around it. Those forces are now embroiled in yet another controversy over NATO occupiers committing and covering up killings of Afghan civilians.

Meanwhile, "...over the last two years the Taliban have steadily staged a resurgence in Kunduz, where they now threaten a vital NATO supply line and employ more sophisticated tactics."

And worse for the Americans, the insurgency in the north of Afghanistan is employing "much better fighters, capable of complex attacks".

Western officials report being surprised at "how easily people capitulate when [the Taliban] come".

Yeah, that's a real head-scratcher. Why wouldn't they instead go ask their German protectors for some help?

Oh, because their German "protectors" can't tell one towelhead from another and would probably call in an airstrike on them or something.

But that's OK, because if Germans (or Americans or British) need to blow up something in Afghanistan, it is OK, really, because bad people were doing something bad there—and EVERYBODY who was killed was an insurgent! You know that is the truth, because NATO generals said so! And also, their governments run the war crimes commission, so no problem.

Next, NATO will be claiming they had to destroy Kunduz to save it.

Kunduz, Fallujah, whatever. Again, these idiot Terror Wars are not making anybody safe. Just dead—or filled with incredible amounts of hatred for Westerners, and Americans in particular. And that's nothing that started on September 11, 2001.

It's the product of a centuries-old European and American tradition of pissing on the entire world for profit.

Have some cranberries with your blood. It'll go down prettier, and sweeter.

Hey, did you hear Oprah is going to make Gayle the next Secretary of her Interior?

(jk)

NATO General Explains Wisdom Of An American Insurgency

From the Right, From the Left (all two of you), from the Center, everybody has been so fed up for so long, and they all blame the government, whether it is run by corporate-cum-sucking Democrats or corporate-cum-sucking (but also Bible-looney hate-speaking) Republicans. They all wear their capitalist uniforms, sell you a load of shit you just love to complain about, but still gobble up year after year.

Well, here's a clue for you, provided by that brand of government employee EVERYBODY loves, some dumbass general (hey a Brit no less slaving for the USA or NATO—whatever) giving us another rendition of "It doesn't matter if you trust our judgment—we have all the tanks and planes and nukes, losers." Or, specifically, it was another verse in the "There's got to be some way to make it look like we won the Terror Wars!" canticle.

This time, the Spartan happy-talk concerned Afghanistan and how, once again, if the USA cannot militarily defeat their enemies, they can bribe them.

"Oh PLEZ be nice, towelheads!...can't we just get along? Here's an iPhone and a debit card and a shiny new AK, Mr. Taliban, PLEZ just go farm some poppies and stop shooting our hapless soldiers, OK?"

This is how Lieutenant-General Sir Graeme Cameron Maxwell Lamb, British head of US General Stanley McChrystal's "Bribe the Taliban" program, explained the simplicity of bribing insurgents:

"This is not rocket science...Insurgents have been reconciling and reintegrating back into society for centuries. This is about entering a dialogue where they can see opportunities, because the way you counter an insurgency is with a better life."

Now, just think for a moment, YOUR life needs to be better, doesn't it? Sure it does. Hey, a lot of you have lost jobs, homes, spouses, hope. You're probably on the brink. But, is your government helping you? No. They're bailing out Wall Street and Detroit and making sure all the lobbyists and politicians are happy as usual, but the people—who the hell cares about them? After all, it's not like they're the Taliban or something, right?

The US government CARES what the Taliban needs, because after all, "the way you counter an insurgency is with a better life."

Got it?

I figured you would.

(jk)

Questioning "pride in the deeds of blood"

I can well understand the fear and hatred that mordant words inspire in the reptilian complex of the American mind. Nobody likes a boat-rocker, a loose cannon, a freely thought and given opinion, which might be a sneer rather than a cheer for Captain Crocodile and the home hoplites. But it is now out of guilt (from dumping the duty-to-defend on poor proxies) rather than an understanding of what the martial wing of the republic perpetrates, that makes people single-mindedly daft when it comes to assessing the support-worthiness of their military.

There is nothing new in this tendency to ignore certain realities of heroes, as we can read in this rebuke of warmakers and their warriors, written by William Makepeace Thackeray, in his book The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844):

Such knaves and ruffians do men in war become! It is well for gentlemen to talk of the age of chivalry; but remember the starving brutes whom they lead—men nursed in poverty, entirely ignorant, made to take a pride in the deeds of blood—men who can have no amusement but in drunkenness, debauch, and plunder. it is with these shocking instruments that your great warriors and kings have been doing their murderous work in the world.

Recalling part of that murderous work done in the service of the person known to history as Frederick the Great, Barry recounts the following:

I can recollect a certain day, about three weeks after the battle of Minden, and a farmhouse in which some of us entered; and how the old woman and her daughters served us, trembling, to wine; and how we got drunk over the wine, and the house was in a flame, presently; and woe betide the wretched fellow afterwards who came home to look for his house and his children!

Woe has fallen upon so many people in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, who came home to look for their houses and their children after being visited by the mercies of the US military.

But then, with censorship of the brave deeds of the brutes now the fashion in the USA, no patriotic sheep need fear that its baa will come out diminished in any way by a doubt or an insurgent mood.

"[Telling the truth] would pose an unacceptable risk of danger to U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq."—Barack Obama

And it might ruffle some fleece back home.

(jk)

Heroes—Always A Dangerous Fantasy

I have occasion to post a certain speech from a certain movie, that being the anti-hero speech written by the great screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, and put into the mouth of James Garner in his role as the quintessentially American coward, Charlie Madison, in The Americanization of Emily.

The Photogenic American Killing Machine (& Hero)—Audie Murphy

In this speech, Charlie Madison is explaining to a mother who has lost her son and her husband in WWII, and who is trying to keep a positive mental attitude about the lost heroes, what heroism is really about:

"We shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It’s the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows’ weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices. My brother died at Anzio – an everyday soldier’s death, no special heroism involved. They buried what pieces they found of him. But my mother insists he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud."

Charlie goes on to explain that in spite of his mother's insistence of pride in her son's heroism, she is terrified because her youngest son wants to run off to be a "hero" now too.

As Charlie says: "It may be ministers and generals who blunder us into wars, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution."

There is a way in which every hero is fake, or a myth anyway. After all, even men sporting the Congressional Medal of Honor honorably, i.e. they actually earned it instead of pretending to, have it on the basis of a story, an "after action report" and a recommendation by one or a few people who may or may not have seen the events alleged to have occurred.

And the thing is, usually in war "hero" means exposing oneself to the imminent danger of getting killed by enemy fire, and preferably doing that in order to kill lots of the enemy.

The greatest American hero, Audie Murphy, was mainly honored for killing well over 200 human beings, close up and personal, not hidden away in a bomber or missile center. He undoubtedly had great courage, and a seething penchant for incredible violence, but does that make him a hero?

Well, it does to most people. After all, they made a movie out of his heroism, so it must be true, right?

And that brings us to the story of Jessica Lynch, whose heroism was at one point much promoted by the Pentagon and the American news media. Lynch's unit was ambushed in the initial invasion of Iraq by US forces, and she was wounded and taken prisoner by the Iraqis. About a week later, on April Fool's Day, Lynch was rescued by US Special Forces, and the whole ordeal (for Lynch) was packaged as a great heroic exploit.

Lynch was reported to have bravely gone down fighting at the initial battle, and then survived the treatment by Iraqi medical personnel until more American heroes rescued her from that horror.

At least that was the story the US military wanted people to believe.

It sounded better than the truth, which was that the American unit Lynch was serving with, got lost, got ambushed, got shot up badly, and Lynch never fired a shot, as her weapon jammed, and she was knocked unconscious when her vehicle crashed. The Iraqi medical personnel seemingly treated her kindly, and they say shielded her from Iraqi military. Also, most troubling, there are allegations that the whole "rescue" was staged, since American forces knew in advance that Iraqi military had abandoned the area around the hospital, and that they faced no opposition.

Lynch was so bothered by what had happened, she wrote a book, telling the truth about what had happened and how she felt used by the US military's propaganda machine.

That machine of course has spewed so many lies during the Terror Wars, and during all wars, that it is amazing anybody pays any attention to anything it says about anything, including its alleged heroes.

Now, a week ago, the bloody massacre at Fort Hood took place, and once again, out of the carnage, some heroes had to be manufactured and pretty quickly.

Once again, a woman was chosen, a police officer, Kimberly Munley, who with her partner, Mark Todd, rushed into the building in which the killer, Major Hasan, was committing his version of jihad. Munley was shot by Hasan and went down, but reportedly kept firing and put the jihadist on the ground, and stopped the killing.

She has been proclaimed a hero. She was on Oprah. The Secretary of Defense visited her. The military was desperately trying to make another woman into a heroic killer—or shooter anyway. The Lynch thing hadn't worked out too well, so maybe the Munley thing would.

But, once again, their story seems to be unraveling. The military itself is still investigating the shooting, but it looks like they once again jumped the gun, so to speak, on who is the heroic shooter. While Munley's story was compelling, she had gone down with three bullet wounds, but continued to fire, people sort of forgot she had a partner, who wasn't wounded, who was also firing, and who had actually reported seeing Hasan buckle from his fire, and who was the one who approached Hasan when he was down, kicked away his weapon and handcuffed him.

People just kind of brushed Todd aside. Why?

Like Salon pointed out: "it's more interesting if "Mighty Mouse" saves the day".

Right, because apparently America, having seen a glut of stupid movies where tiny women beat up big men, wanted a diminutive mother to be the one who bitchslapped the Muslim nutcase.

And hey, that's fine, equal opportunity "heroes" all around.

At the end of The Americanization of Emily, Charlie Madison faces the absurd choice of playing along with the US military's plan to make a fake hero out of him, or to nobly tell the truth to the press and go to jail for deserting on the battlefield. At first he wants to do the right thing and go to jail. Then his girlfriend points out this would be totally heroic and violate his coward's code. He thus chooses to be a coward, and to play the hero.

Yesterday was of course the day everyone is supposed to "honor the institution", or those who perpetrate it. Originally, Veteran's Day commemorated the end of that ghastly monument to human idiocy, World War I, although they decided to let the day represent all the stupid military human tricks and be about all the wars and vets.

I just wonder how people will feel during the wars to come, when they start hanging medals around Predator Drones and their nuclear children. Will that satisfy your lust for blood as well as seeing Mighty Mouse be thanked for her mythic exploits, or Audie Murphy for his real ones?

One might think it wise to offer the advice: GROW UP!

But that is the problem. America has. Into a violent, hero-sucking toddler.

---

UPDATE

Now, Mark Todd himself, backed by a witness, is claiming he is the one who actually shot Major Hasan, and put a stop to the incident at Fort Hood.

(jk)

Major Hasan And His Colleagues

One thing is clear, when it came time for Major Malik Nadal Hasan to kill, he had no problem doing it, morally or otherwise, and he had no confusion about which side was the enemy.

If, as this article suggests, American Muslim sentiment about the US military is "split down the middle", with one side being opposed to it, there is good reason to suspect that a portion of that opposition has the will and the means to express it violently. It is estimated there are somewhere between 3500 (Pentagon's figure) and 20000 Muslims in the US military.

Yesterday, I noted that there will be some Muslims in the US military that will find inspiration in the violent actions of Major Hasan, and they will seek to emulate them. We cannot know how many people will be drawn to take such actions, and if the US military pressures Muslims in its ranks with loyalty questionnaires or investigations of their political views, it is going to communicate loud and clear the the military thinks Muslims might be questionable in their loyalty.

Many Americans think the "might be" is ludicrous, and that we should operate from the position that Muslims need to prove their loyalty, perhaps like they do in the Mafia or something, by having to randomly kill a fellow Muslim. Of course, Major Hasan could have done just that yesterday, which just highlights the insanity of what are essentially wars of religion—certainly from the Muslim perspective.

Many Muslims view the increasingly godless culture of the USA in the way religious conservatives in the USA view it, as a basic, Satanic, defect of American character, which is deeply offensive in the eyes of God, and which threatens the souls of Muslims (and others) everywhere it is allowed to flourish.

In addition, the USA and the West in general have exploited Muslim lands and peoples, taking fantastic wealth out of them while leaving in place manageably despotic regimes and unhappy, and often violently angry, populations. If that weren't bad enough, let's just say the US part in the Terror Wars has not won many hearts or minds in Islamic countries, especially not in the occupied lands, Iraq and Afghanistan. To the contrary, US war policy has fed the growth and fanaticism of terrorists and insurgencies around the world, and now all through the West there is growing fear that the backlash from Muslims over the West's Terror Wars (or modern Crusade), and violence in accord with this, will be homegrown.

Homegrown terrorists are much harder to track, not the least because if you do what seems the obvious and easy thing, simply distrust all Muslims and essentially downgrade their citizenship to something just a little better than "illegal alien", you will incur considerable wrath from civil libertarians and (we would hope) the judicial system, and also provide the very provocation that may push more Muslims into the fold of the terrorists.

So, what to do?

As we said yesterday, the festering boil in all these issues and the calculations that have attended them is US Terror War policy, which has repeatedly devalued the lives and wellbeing of thousands of innocent Muslims all around the world, but particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, in pursuit of objectives that have ranged from murky to downright dishonest. And all along, there was the view on the American side that it was all necessary to protect our security.

Whatever process underlay construction of the policy allegedly pursuing that objective, it was not merely hopelessly in error over the most basic assumptions, but it was also of a kind of mythic arrogance one sees in states seeking a fast route to decline and fall.

Obama had talked in his campaign a lot about the need for a change in the war policy. Unfortunately, all along, while emphasizing his view of the Iraq war as a basic mistake—one from which he has yet to show any real interest in recovering—he bought into the myth of Afghanistan as a "good war", one worth fighting, and presumably winning (for a change).

Of course, what exactly was going to be won there, and how it was going to be won, Obama said he would leave to the time he was president and could consult with the generals over the next best move. Unfortunately, the next best move ended up sounding a whole lot like a major Vietnam-style escalation of a war most Americans neither understand or support—which makes them pretty much like most soldiers fighting the stupid war.

The generals and the pols of course cannot ever admit defeat, not of the USA. It would look bad, wouldn't it? And it might negatively affect the USA's prestige in the world. And hey, it would only aid the cause of the terrorists.

Well, the nasty little secret, which is not so little or secret, is that fighting on in these stupid Terror Wars, as if there is something to win, looks bad in the world, negatively affects the prestige of the USA, and definitely aids recruiting for anti-American terrorist groups (which have grown far more numerous and widespread than al-Qaeda).

The best we may hope for is that these wars will just fade away, like a bad television series, given a few more episodes to try to obtain some face, and then cancellation, barely noticeable on a US radar dealing now with the worst employment picture in at least three decades!

I know there are a lot of you out there who have good jobs, stable situations (so far), you don't think or care much about politics or social problems or anything that might rock your happy boat. And life is grand.

And I'll bet in the year 2050, when they're interviewing "oldtimers" about the Terror Wars, and the Great Recession, and what they were really like, you'll still be around, having lived your carefree life for far too long, and they'll pick you to tell everybody those times weren't so dark, weren't so bad really—you did OK after all.

(jk)

An Inspirational Massacre

Many interest groups will find inspiration in the massacre of US troops at Fort Hood yesterday.

Not the least of these will be any other US troops, of certain faiths and predilections, who will now also want the pleasure of yelling "Allahu Akbar" as they gun down their formerly fellow soldiers.

Also seeking a boost in their faiths will be the right-wing nuts of America, who will note that the US Army is now spinning this as some kind of anti-war protest on the part of the perpetrator, Major Malik Nadal Hasan.

The math from that will be easy to figure:

Anti-war = terrorist suspect or collaborator.

The pro-war right has argued that position right from 9/11, through the lunacy and failure of its Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures. And now they have their posterboy to make that point for them: Major Hasan.

Of course this story is still developing, and it may turn out that the reluctant warrior was in fact a terrorist plant or convert, and that the story is therefore more complex than is presently being reported.

The US Army of course would prefer Hasan to just be a fellow who went crazy at the thought of being deployed to a war zone where he might end up directly aiding the killing of fellow Muslims. That is one thing.

What they likely will not want to do is admit their officer corps, and if so no doubt the enlisted ranks as well, are infiltrated by home-grown terrorists. That would be such a disaster, nobody wants to go there, even if they may need to.

One thing, which now is going to be perhaps harder to say than it was 24 hours ago, but these insane Terror Wars are still needlessly filling up ghastly numbers of body bags all over the world.

US strategy in dealing with terrorism is a failure, and chiefly because the notion that killing a bunch of innocent people to make the West safe was always a dumber-than-dirt policy, and has now inspired home-grown hatred of Crusader mentality that is only likely to grow in numbers and destruction of people and property.

Chickens, meet the roost.

---

An additional point, in light of the following comment, reported here:

"A former co-worker told Fox News the Army major opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 'He said maybe the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor,' Col. Terry Lee said. 'At first, we thought he was talking about how Muslims should stand up and help the armed forces in Iraq and in Afghanistan, but apparently that wasn't the case.'"

Yeah, apparently not. People in the US military are so blinded with propagandistic thinking that they can have somebody plainly tell them that Muslims are sick of the aggressor, and they actually imagine to themselves they are NOT meaning by that term the USA and its military.

And that attitude, of blindness to the truth, helped to kill and wound a lot of people yesterday at Fort Hood, as it kills and wounds so many all over the world every day in the Terror Wars.

Not understanding your enemy, and why he might have cause to be your enemy, is stupid.

(jk)

Reading The Fine Print

While this is a tiny bit of good news, this is definitely not good news at all.

And if you read the fine or buried print, you see some of the reasons that the Great Recession is being made even more painful for people than it needs to be.

For example: “I just sent in my form requesting my last unemployment check,” Jim Schmitt, 58, of Apple Valley, Calif...“I have always voted Republican, and now I'm reading the Republicans are holding up the vote to extend the benefits. I might not be voting Republican again, even though the Democrats are no better.”

Well Jim, the Democrats are better in the sense they don't despise unemployed Americans, like the stinking Republicans do.

I think the real problem for Republicans is that they have a basically Old Testament view of people's worth, which is to say that if you are a good person, God will reward you, and if you are not a good person, you will find yourself doing things like sending in your form to collect your last unemployment check. Why should the good, still employed people, have to keep helping the clearly bad people, who can't or hey probably won't find another job?

Republicans, rotten to the core with religious fanatics who would actually rather bulldoze the poor into a giant landfill, HATE helping Americans in need—especially when the idiot Republicans were largely responsible for putting those people in need in the first place. Instead the bad, unemployed, people can just go live in tents where they belong, or they could just die and stop bothering good people for handouts.

So, yeah, the Dems are pretty worthless, and actually pretty cowardly in my view. But their basic inclinations on some fundamentally important issues are wildly better than those of most Republicans.

(jk)