What if we let the Afghans determine their own future by either fighting the Taliban or letting the Taliban rule there? If they don't want them, they will have to fight them. That may be difficult since right now, the Taliban gets income from Opium poppies. Thus it can hire locals for foot soldiers when it doesn't beat and intimidate them and, at present, the Taliban controls 70 percent of the country. But that is the Afghans' problem, and shouldn't require US troops.
I fail to see how the U.S. presence in the region-- especially supporting a corrupt, weak, oil-puppet candidate who steals elections and commits open fraud when his own position as puppet to the West is jeopardized by his own corrupt practices-- I fail to see how the U.S. presencedoes anything but destabilize both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Of course, we hear people say that if we get out, that Al Qaeda will establish training bases from which they will attack Europe and the U.S. They already have such training camps in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and a number of countries I fail to see how a few more or less in Afghanistan will make any difference. Conversely, our presence there is a HUGE recruitment tool to the jihadi's who take advantage of local outrage over foreign adventurism in their country. We may indeed be CREATING more suicide bombers to attack Europe and the US by our very policies.
As for the AfghanTaliban, who has said they are not interested in doing overseas terrorism, their own Afghan nationalism might just, if the US weren't over there, might just run the Pakistani Taliban and their Al-Qaeda confederates out of Afghanistan: i.e.,if they get tired of Pakistan's interference in their own affairs.
The Pakistani government and people might also becomemore inclined to step on insurgents in the Punjab and Waziristan if they didn't feel they were useful in fighting U.S. invasion of Pakistani sovereignty with our drones. Our presence in Afghanistan and meddling in Pakistan is actually creating sympathy for the Taliban and causing there to be a hookup between Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban that might not be there were it not for common enmity toward the US presence and interference. The Afgani local Taliban might be moved to dislodge the Pakistani border crossers if they didn't need them to fight the Americans.
As it is now, the U.S. is driving both Talibans (Afghan and Pakistani) into each others' arms to fight the common foreign enemy which proposes propping up a corrupt puppet "government" in Kabul. All our presence there does it seems to me is to harden local hatred of Americans and confirm their worst fears that we are there for conquest to rape their natural resources and carry them off. We already know that the "as they stand up we stand down" is a white-wash for continued occupation. The Iraqi's haven't "stood up" as our forces are supposedly drawn down. The stongest warlord has simply taken over, getting his first foothold by being our puppet but now turning on us and wanting us out.
The forces we 'trained' in Iraq just took the money we squandered to strengthen theirownposition among competing warlords' who plan to sell the resources, the Americans had hoped to get, to the Chinese or the highest bidder. In effect, all we did was create immense hatred for America in the region and our ownblood and taxpayer money was expended to enable Iraqi warlords in the end to sell oil to the Chinese.
There is continued fighting in Iraq sporadically. But our press has moved on. Can anyone tell me whatUS nation building policies did to achieve anything positive for Iraq? We did succeed in killingmultiple thousands of people, both Iraqi and American. The Iraqi puppets have even turned on their Americanmasters and are reaching out to Iran and Turkey and would like us out of Iraq, which Obama promised to do but has been slow in removing our forces from Iraq.
Our whole policy smacks of the old Rudyard Kipling-style "white man's burden" British policies of the nineteenth century. In that scenario, local brown natives were supposed to be children incapable of self-determination apart from their white overlords'"patiently" "educating" them (to be servile colonial puppets that were to dutifully hand over local revenues and resources to the white mother country in exchange for "advancement in civilization" supposedly provided by the white colonials to the ethically and technologically and politically "challenged' little brown children natives who couldnt do these things for themselves.
Our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan and our nation building sounds like "white man's burden' cloaked in 'counterinsurgency-war-on-terror' whitewashing. An excuse for multi-nationals to build pipelines and extract oil on favorable terms. The footsoldiers and grunts made up of American kids serve as cannon fodder and their plight of being enemies to locals in a foreign land is ignored by the oligarchy here. Poor people, whether in the USA or Afghanistan are expendable .
"Capitalism" (i.e. profits for the rich) is reason enough for killing and maiming and destroying in any number of countries, while our own US government is financially bankrupt and in colonial tutelage to Chinese bankers. These same oligarchs who wish to occupy Afghanistan have also sold our own US population down the river as well. Why not BOOTS OFF THE GROUND?The American people need to rise up in tax strike and work strike and refusal to let Obama put any more resources into Afghanistan.
The problem is, the oligarchy owns the mass media in the USA and has convinced our own populace that we need to be over there for our own 'national security." These oligarchs have awell oiled little plan andsystem for world domination and local brainwashing.
But as we see in Brazil,China, India and other emerginglittle brown children countries, the brown childrenare sick of being pushed around by the white West. I have a feeling that our well laid plans for 'contractors' and 'Rambos' are going to come to an end. Even our Chinese bankers are siding with Iran against Western threats of sanctions over nuclear weapons development.
I think Western oligarchs may not be as all powerful as they think they are. The White Man's Burden may become obsolete sooner than these racist, facist pirate greed-heads think.
