Dispatch from Europe: Americans should wise up and take note. The United States is not the good guy.
There is another way to look at things .
Americans assume we are the good guy, the world's honorable policeman taking care of the poor, badly governed, embattled people of the world. We think our bombs and drone strikes are done for good reasons and that they create peace and stability, while the bombs of others are outrageous acts of cruelty and terror.
Americans assume we are the good guy, the world's honorable policeman taking care of the poor, badly governed, embattled people of the world. We think our bombs and drone strikes are done for good reasons and that they create peace and stability, while the bombs of others are outrageous acts of cruelty and terror.
We know we are exceptional. We are good. We assume we are looked upon by the world with favor, the bright shining light of freedom and justice, a city on the hill, admired. The few people who dislike us (ISIS, Muslim radicals, Latin American yankee-go-home communists) only prove their own vileness by opposing so obvious a benefactor as we are. Our motives are pure. We don't seek cheap oil or rare minerals or cheap tropical crops, not really. Those might be the accidental side benefits of free markets and American business acumen, but our goal is democracy and world peace.
We understand that the American military to be a rescuer. We bring candy bars and cigarettes to the starving people we liberate. They toss flowers at our feet. Young women throw themselves on our troops, in gratitude and secret hope to come to the promised land of America.
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| The US is King Kong |
Barrack Obama understood it was not that simple.
Trump understood Americans believe the story and want to hear it again and again. Trump had the more appealing message.
A college classmate, Carlo Christofori, is an Italian national. He worked with a group set up by the European Parliament, the International Committee for Solidarity with the Afghan Resistance to the Soviet invasion in 1979. His orientation is to support Afghan self determination. That positioned him against the Russians back then--and against the US now.
He likens the US to an uncontrolled King Kong, riding atop a skyscraper. He warns that the US is causing a great international re-alignment that is destructive to the US but necessary for the world. The world's great powers are teaming up against the US. It is happening right now, right under our noses, as Americans look elsewhere, concerned with tweets about low-IQ Mika and low-ratings Joe.
He observes that Europe, Russia, and China understand the threat of a US that carelessly attempts to intervene around the world. The threat is not new. After 9-11 the USA became pro-active, looking for trouble spots, making trouble, carelessly disturbing the status quo in the Middle East and world wide.
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| USA pushes China and Russia together |
Christofori likens American thinking to the attitude of his daughter in young childhood. She was afraid of tiny spiders. He told her not to worry. They are no real danger to her; she is the danger to them.
The election of Donald Trump accelerated the resistance and diplomatic tilt toward a team built around containment of the USA.
Christofori observes that America has become the dangerous adventurer of the world, the country with the means to do great harm and the motives and attitude that enables it: we like having a me-first international bully as president and we think we are the good guys. Cristofori says we are not.
Americans like the idea of an America with swagger. It scares others.
Does it matter what others think? Should we care? Yes.
Great alliances with extraordinary consequences grow over decades, not months. America First-ism combined with American tough talk has consequences later, and now. China, Russia, and Europe are stable, mature governments. North Korea is not. The USA can be wild and unpredictable with the big three confident that they will not over-react. We know that. We wonder why China does not intervene more strongly with North Korea. The answer may be that China and Russia are secretly quite pleased that North Korea is a wild card. North Korea's unpredictability forces the USA to act carefully. If 25 million people in Seoul, South Korea, or better yet 25 million people on America's west coast are at risk. Maybe King Kong will be forced to act with care.
Carlo Christofori Guest Post:
A European view of America's longest war, Afghanistan
Afghanistan, 2017
After 16 years, the Afghanistan war is still going on. Civilians are still being killed by American bombs, earning the United States more hatred. Civilians are still being swept up in dragnets by murderous US-installed warlords and thugs, and routinely tortured in the vilest ways, all with the connivance of the Americans, and on the dollars of the Americans.
Take a look at the documentary "Taxi to the dark side" and the French 1966 film "The battle of Algiers" to understand what is actually going on. Everyone who's swept up in dragnets is tortured. That's the technique for breaking insurgencies. This means that probably several hundred
thousand victims have been tortured in the wars that were started by the US after 9/11, and continue to be tortured on US tax dollars. Talk about Abu Ghraib being "a few bad apples".
In Afghanistan, all elections since the US conquest have been massively rigged. Packs of voting cards are bought and sold by the hundreds. I remember reading at the time that there were 18 million voting cards being traded, in a country with 12 million voters. This has been exhaustively documented, but only for the September, 2009, presidential "election". The Pentagon got wise after that media flop. They no longer let journalists run around election polls, not even in Kabul.
That's right, the Pentagon has been managing not only the war itself, but the news about it as well. The public has been quietly manipulated and bamboozled by secret Pentagon media services who feed news to the media. We all know that the Vietnam war was lost in the hearts and minds of the American public. That's the lesson the Pentagon has drawn.
The way out of Afghanistan is relatively easy. Most commentators admit that the war is going like shit, but opine that it's better than letting the Kabul regime go to hell, and have the Taliban back in power.
In fact, the Kabul regime is rotten to the core, and would better be jettisoned as soon as possible. It was created with the warlords that helped destroy the Taliban in 2001. They are all bloody profiteers who should be mostly put on trial for war crimes.
The regime, as I mentioned, is based on the 2001 warlords, plus a ridiculous US puppet as president, US-Afghan citizen Ashraf Ghani, whose power derives from having the gift of large American resources. He's just a puppet and has no Afghan political base. The country is run by the Americans through the warlords, who in 2001 took over the security services, army, police, everything.
There is a major ethnic side to the war, in that the country's largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, have been oppressed since 2001, when some ethnic minorities (the "warlords") took over with US support. The Pashtuns are not going to tolerate being under the thumb of the Tajiks. And the Taliban have become the only vehicle that is available to the Pashtuns to protest and fight against this oppression. Resisting the oppression that the Pashtun tribes have been placed under is a matter of honor for them. They'd rather drop dead than submit.
It's sufficient to take a look at a map of the insurgency to see that it is practically the same as an ethnic map of Pashtun areas.
As long as the US is willing to get rid of the warlords (which should not be difficult, as they have grown fat with 16 years of gorging) the Pashtuns should be given the option of returning to the country's traditional system, i.e. a tribal monarchy, under someone from the former royal family, who should be presented for approval to the representatives of the people convened in a Loya Jirga or national assembly.
At the same time, the US should withdraw most of its troops, and Nato should withdraw all of them.
Real power should be placed in the hands of the head of state selected by the Jirga. The model for the operation should be the successful agreement negotiated by the Brits to install Abdur Rahman Khan as Amir of Afghanistan, in 1880.
Carlo Cristofori
CARLO CRISTOFORI was Secretary of the International Committee for Solidarity with the Afghan Resistance, set up by members of the European Parliament following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In that capacity, he worked closely with a number of Afghan resistance organizations, becoming personally familiar with many Afghan political figures. He has analyzed Afghan politics for thirty years.
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| Christofori |
After 16 years, the Afghanistan war is still going on. Civilians are still being killed by American bombs, earning the United States more hatred. Civilians are still being swept up in dragnets by murderous US-installed warlords and thugs, and routinely tortured in the vilest ways, all with the connivance of the Americans, and on the dollars of the Americans.
Take a look at the documentary "Taxi to the dark side" and the French 1966 film "The battle of Algiers" to understand what is actually going on. Everyone who's swept up in dragnets is tortured. That's the technique for breaking insurgencies. This means that probably several hundred
thousand victims have been tortured in the wars that were started by the US after 9/11, and continue to be tortured on US tax dollars. Talk about Abu Ghraib being "a few bad apples".
In Afghanistan, all elections since the US conquest have been massively rigged. Packs of voting cards are bought and sold by the hundreds. I remember reading at the time that there were 18 million voting cards being traded, in a country with 12 million voters. This has been exhaustively documented, but only for the September, 2009, presidential "election". The Pentagon got wise after that media flop. They no longer let journalists run around election polls, not even in Kabul.
That's right, the Pentagon has been managing not only the war itself, but the news about it as well. The public has been quietly manipulated and bamboozled by secret Pentagon media services who feed news to the media. We all know that the Vietnam war was lost in the hearts and minds of the American public. That's the lesson the Pentagon has drawn.
The way out of Afghanistan is relatively easy. Most commentators admit that the war is going like shit, but opine that it's better than letting the Kabul regime go to hell, and have the Taliban back in power.
 |
| Creating chaos, not peace |
In fact, the Kabul regime is rotten to the core, and would better be jettisoned as soon as possible. It was created with the warlords that helped destroy the Taliban in 2001. They are all bloody profiteers who should be mostly put on trial for war crimes.
The regime, as I mentioned, is based on the 2001 warlords, plus a ridiculous US puppet as president, US-Afghan citizen Ashraf Ghani, whose power derives from having the gift of large American resources. He's just a puppet and has no Afghan political base. The country is run by the Americans through the warlords, who in 2001 took over the security services, army, police, everything.
There is a major ethnic side to the war, in that the country's largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, have been oppressed since 2001, when some ethnic minorities (the "warlords") took over with US support. The Pashtuns are not going to tolerate being under the thumb of the Tajiks. And the Taliban have become the only vehicle that is available to the Pashtuns to protest and fight against this oppression. Resisting the oppression that the Pashtun tribes have been placed under is a matter of honor for them. They'd rather drop dead than submit.
It's sufficient to take a look at a map of the insurgency to see that it is practically the same as an ethnic map of Pashtun areas.
As long as the US is willing to get rid of the warlords (which should not be difficult, as they have grown fat with 16 years of gorging) the Pashtuns should be given the option of returning to the country's traditional system, i.e. a tribal monarchy, under someone from the former royal family, who should be presented for approval to the representatives of the people convened in a Loya Jirga or national assembly.
At the same time, the US should withdraw most of its troops, and Nato should withdraw all of them.
Real power should be placed in the hands of the head of state selected by the Jirga. The model for the operation should be the successful agreement negotiated by the Brits to install Abdur Rahman Khan as Amir of Afghanistan, in 1880.
Carlo Cristofori
CARLO CRISTOFORI was Secretary of the International Committee for Solidarity with the Afghan Resistance, set up by members of the European Parliament following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In that capacity, he worked closely with a number of Afghan resistance organizations, becoming personally familiar with many Afghan political figures. He has analyzed Afghan politics for thirty years.
1 comment:
"No Offense to Carlo, But..."
With all due respect to Carlo Christofori, I'm sure if the war was as hopeless, barbaric and corrupting as he says, then our mainstream media would not have let us stay there as long as they have. The media must have a good reason for giving Bush, Obama and Trump a pass on this war. Certainly, the media would not miss the opportunity to bash Trump-- of all people-- if the war was really all that wrong. Even the cynics would admit this, and resist the cheap shot at saying it's because the media war on Trump uses up so much web space and air time that's there's not any left to attack him for keeping us in Afghanistan. If our media is not upset about the war, nor relentlessly trashing Trump for being there, how wrong could it be?
Let's take a breath and get some perspective before going overboard. We have only been at war in Afghanistan for 15 years (ok, and 8 months), and we probably need to stay a little longer so we can leave with dignity and the legacy of a peace-loving new democracy. Although virtually all of our NATO allies have long since left (probably because they don't have enough money after meeting their NATO commitments as honorably as they have), we aren't just a NATO member, right? We are the USA. NATO joined the war in 2003, and as we all know, NATO keeps its commitments unless there's a very good reason, and the savage barrage of French and British media on NATO members certainly is a good reason.
Anyway, the USA cannot cut-n'run like the USSR did after only nine years, and barely 15,000 of their troops killed. Plus, 15,000 dead is not as bad as it sounds since Russia was able to kill over a million Taliban and civilians in that decade. We almost never kill civilians, despite what Carlo says (again, all due respect to Carlo). And we don't torture people or allow our proxies to do so, give me a break!
Lastly (and as a Vietnam combat vet now living in Vietnam), I don't mean to impugn Carlo, but I can't help but believe that if we just stay, say 4 years and 4 months more (to make it an even two decades for us), that WE WILL WIN. We could then be proud of what we've accomplished. Lest we forget, we won the wars in Vietnam and Iraq with sheer persistence. We can do the same, exactly the same, in Afghanistan.
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