Recently I had a brief discussion on drones with an Iraq veteran turned reporter who said he had been in Special Ops. For him, the reason reporters are prevented access to drone "pilots" was a matter of security, while for me it was a matter of moral embarrassment. The secret technology isn't what's interesting; it's the mental human condition of these men (and presumably women) as they ponder the moral implications of this new field of remote warfare.
But drone pilots are part of the tactical aspects of the war. Like their physically vulnerable brothers and sisters on the ground in Afghanistan, they are just doing their jobs. For our deployed soldiers in Afghanistan, insurgents who see them only as "foreign" troops want them to leave and are trying to kill them. And nothing focuses the mind like someone trying to kill you.
But when Mullah Lodin talks about American dishonesty, he's talking on the level of strategic policy making. And, in this ethereal realm, he could not be more correct. The dishonesty operates at such a profound and widely accepted level it's become a national tragedy. The double-speak employed by US leaders concerning our future presence in Afghanistan is like passing through the looking glass to a land of giant toadstools and mad hatters.
As the great reporter Rod Nordland points out in The New York Times [1], it's now being called "Great Game 3.0," following the Russian and English Great Games of the past. Before that you could include Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. Like them, we are in Afghanistan because it's central in SW Asia and we insist on projecting our imperial power into the region.
As the US insists on building what appear to pretty much everybody as permanent bases, Stepan Anikeev, a political adviser in the Russian embassy in Kabul, asks the obvious question: "How is transition possible with these bases? ... We have no guarantee they're not permanent."
"One [American] says we are not building bases, another says we are building them, and it's very confusing." That's Mullah Attullah Lodin, again, from the Afghan High Peace Council.
The issue is a document called the Strategic Partnership Declaration for US-Afghan relations after 2014, the date the US declared it will remove its forces from Afghanistan, a date that replaced the original date, which was the end of this year. So, now -- if I have this correct -- US forces are negotiating how long to stay beyond 2014, the date they say they are going to leave.
For some reason, these negotiations have informally gotten the name "The Permanent Bases Agreement."
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