Obama has approved an expanded U.S. military role in Afghanistan. It’s against the Taliban. The administration debated this. The Pentagon won this one. They wanted an expanded mission.
A normal country is one in which people do not make constant wars in other lands and do not butt into the affairs of others with a degree of deep engagement that is reserved for how the federal government meddles with the 50 states and their citizens. From any rational standpoint of a normal country, as America once seemed to be, Afghanistan is a morass, a muddle, a swamp, and entanglement that the U.S. got into 13 years ago and counting.
An abnormal country, such as America now is, is subject to the irrational standpoint of the government, the Pentagon and a bevy of contractors and interest groups. They don’t want to get out of Afghanistan. Being there is their bread and butter. Otherwise, they’d be long gone; because from the rational standpoint of a normal country, there is no American enemy in Afghanistan.
From the empire’s standpoint which makes and breaks governments or tries to, and which has arcane geopolitical and imperial interests, any challenge to its presence, including its military presence, such as by the Taliban is to be countered and regarded as that of an enemy. That is why White House spokesman Jay Carney and the government think of the Taliban as an “enemy combatant.”
Are the Taliban terrorists? In 2010, the Taliban was not on the official U.S. terrorist list, but there was pressure to add it. It’s still not on the list. That’s because the White House refuses to negotiate with terrorists (by its label), but wants to negotiate with the Taliban. The Taliban is called an “enemy combatant” by the White House spokesman Jay Carney:
“We don’t get to choose our enemies when we go to war. We regard the Taliban as an enemy combatant in a conflict that has been going on, in which the United States has been involved for more than a decade.”
A great many Americans don’t know who the Taliban are or where Afghanistan is. To you and me and most Americans, the Taliban is not an enemy. The Taliban used to run Afghanistan. They want to run it again. They use methods of terror. This doesn’t make them foes of me and you and most Americans. They’re not in combat to us in any direct way. Their hostilities in Afghanistan do not make them enemy combatants of us.
But to the U.S. government and its military forces that chose to remove the Taliban in 2001, they are enemies because they’re still fighting back after 13 years.
To me, this conflict looks like a morass, even for the Empire. This is surely not what they expected. It surely makes them uncomfortable. They surely don’t like to keep throwing money and resources into this country, even though it’s our money and our resources, because that pool does have its limits.
Carney talks in circles, hiding the history. This conflict didn’t start by itself. It hasn’t simply been “going on” for 13 years. The U.S. began the conflict by attacking the Taliban government. The U.S. chose this enemy! The U.S. made this enemy appear by its own aggression. Carney makes the false statement that the U.S. doesn’t choose its enemies when it goes to war. That makes it sound as if the Taliban attacked the U.S.! What trash he speaks. The U.S. attacked the Taliban.
Can a country like ours actually be run with such lies routinely being told to us by the highest levels of government? Can it survive such lies? Do the liars come to believe their own lies? I think they do, and this is one thing that makes their policies so crazy. What happens is that the lies erode the capacity of those in power and of all Americans to think straight and understand what’s actually going on. They obscure truth and corrupt the capacity to understand or know truth.
America’s leaders cannot make up truth as they go along. They think they can, but the truth will not go away. Tell the Taliban who are still fighting that they attacked America! They know that they didn’t. They’ll keep fighting. The U.S. will have to face that reality, and it will have to spend more in facing it. The truth will obtrude on the liars in power in an uncomfortable way. The liars will do nothing but confuse themselves.
Washington doesn’t listen to uncomfortable truths if it can help it. It listens to a ring of think tanks and scholars who are part of a closed circle, all of whom are on the same irrational page, that is, the page of empire, as opposed to what a person without their ambitions, personal gravy trains, interests and pretensions sees happening.
12:23 pm on November 22, 2014
