Afghanistan - Ten Years Of Solid Gold Bullshit

So, Wikileaks dumps a load of documents revealing what we all knew - that we're losing an unwinnable war, using extremely unsavoury and hyperviolent methods in the process. We learn that we little understand the enemy and can, without too much effort, surmise that we have no clear plan for victory.

Further, we get final confirmation that we're rubbing out hundreds of civilians per year, possibly thousands - our governments can't guess how many men, women and children our armed forces are killing and frankly, they show little sign of caring. When questioned, their stock response is that our deranged enemies kill far more than we do. This none-too-sly evasion is generally received as if it were a fair point, rather than a travesty.

Civilian casualties are regretted, but expected. The President of the United States' plan, endorsed by our own government, is to continue doing exactly what we've been doing and to keep our fingers crossed for a favourable outcome.

Let me put that in plain English: we acknowledge that it is impossible to fight this war in Afghanistan without killing large numbers of civilians, but we do not intend to stop fighting and withdraw. Mass casualties are an inseparable and accepted outcome of UK/US military strategy, and we intend to follow that strategy for the forseeable future.

The next time a predator drone strike rubs out a houseful of women and children, we might call it upsetting or unfortunate, but we can't credibly claim that it was unexpected.

And yet, knowing all the above as well as I do... Having the attention spans of pot-smoking fruit flies and possessing a crocodilian talent for keeping their eyes on the prey, various pundits now inform us - apparently in all seriousness - that we should be outraged that this leak may jeopardise civilian lives.

Let's put this bluntly, shall we?

Afghan civilian deaths caused by the ongoing war: 10,000? 15,000? We don't know, we don't care to count and we don't intend to stop any time soon.

Afghan civilian deaths caused by Wikileaks: 0.

Let's recall why NATO forces are in Afghanistan in the first place. In October 2001, following the worst, mass casualty terrorist attacks ever broadcast live on television, the United States declared that it would invade Afghanistan, drive out the dominant militia and capture the 9/11 attackers' leaders.

Half-achieving that goal with relative ease by bribing, arming and providing air support to local warlords and drug barons, an international coalition then plopped thousands of heavily armed soldiers into Kabul and announced that... they would be staying indefinitely!

Ostensibly, this was to facilitate the painting of some schools, the education of some little girls and the transformation of a fractious, narcotics-riddled, tribal war zone into a modern liberal democratic state, amongst other simple, straightforward and laudible goals. And so, the Afghans settled down to the long project of creating the world's most corrupt political and economic system under the watchful gaze of it's most awesome military.

In the interim, ourselves and the Americans saw fit to launch a disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq for reasons that made no sense whatsoever, and then presided impotently over its meltdown into a horrific sectarian civil war.

When some measure of order was finally and bloodily restored, as death squads attached to our allies threatened to entirely exterminate the rebellious population among their countrymen, allowing us to bribe our former enemies to our side, the United States declared this method Good and vowed to export it to Afghanistan, where...

...Almost a decade later, our once-defeated foes were miraculously back and ten times as ferocious as ever, spitting bullets and chopping heads. For our part, we have intentionally and massively expanded the country's war into the territory of its nuclear armed neighbour.

Somehow, this reformed "Taliban" are able to resupply themselves with men and materiel in some of the most rugged terrain on Earth, a region in which a donkey can't fart without being monitored by billions of dollars worth of spy satellites and drones.

They're able to move freely within a population that reputedly hates and fears them and are now stalemating a superpower and its allies in a country that has already defeated and contributed to the downfall of the world's only other superpower within living memory.

I look at this sorry mess and I try to draw some kind of lesson, be it military, moral or political, but find myself constantly returning to the same question...

What the fuck are we doing in Afghanistan?

Whatever, you guys. One thing we all know for sure is that those Wikileaks guys, well Jesus, they sure are irresponsible.

Don't Be Too Proud Of This Technological Terror You've Constructed

You know, if I was

- A gigantic, fantastically rich corporation that deals in megabillion weapons systems and I was facing a future in which

- Wars are likely to be fought with glorified model planes that cost sweeties to produce, then I too would

- Perform high-profile demonstrations of a new ultra-expensive anti-model plane laser gun, in the hope that governments would then fork over megabillions.

Of course, bullets and rockets will also shoot down glorified model planes that can be made for sweeties. So could other glorified model planes that can be made for sweeties, but then, the GMPTCBMFS don't cost megabillions to produce, and that could be bad for business.

Still, laser guns! Woo, queue up here for zap, bang, pow!

Tu Quoque, Buddy

"If BP is found to have gained access to Libyan oil reserves by using a mass murderer as a bargaining chip then, make no mistake, any money it makes off of that oil is blood money", - US senator Bob Menendez, on BP's relationship with the British and Libyan governments.

Oh dear. Not that I enjoy raising the No, you smell argument to an artform, but really - if I were a member of a legislative body that regularly voted through trillion dollar defence budgets and was sitting on two wars, plus sundry bombing campaigns in several countries with which my nation was not at war...

Well, I'd still feel free to bash BP, but I'd be a little slower to deploy phrases like "Blood money", I think, especially if I was standing next to Chuck "Strangle the Palestinians!" Schumer when I said it. Given the prostitutional relationship that exists between US politicians and military tech/crowd control sweethearts like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, to name but two, the phrase rings a little hollow.

At brass tacks, it'd hardly be a huge, earth-shaking WTF??! moment to discover that BP and the last government had cooked up some Libyan skullduggery between them. It'd be a barnstorming, five-alarm head-exploder if a journalist followed some senator's little foot-stampy moral outburst by raising America's mega-billion, economy-propping, international death colossus as a negative.

I hate to be all Hey, if we're talking about this oil company's nefarious activities let's, like, you know, Iraq, man but really. If a gaggle of US senators want to drag hundreds of dead civilians into their bitchy, Gulf of Mexico gusher pissfight with BP, I feel somebody needs to go for the seven-year old's favourite argument - you started it, guys. If we're talking splattered civilians and blood money, I'd say there's a hell of a lot of Tu Quoque, buddy to be thrown around.

Bokonanism

You have to admire Paul Berman for publishing a piece called "What You Can't Say About Islamism" in... the op-ed pages of America's top-selling newspaper by circulation. (Full text available here, due to the WSJ's paywall).

Berman's list of the things he isn't allowed to say but does is merely a retread of the points he couldn't make in his latest book but did, which is itself merely a very lengthy retread of the things he wasn't allowed to say but did in his previous, gigantic article, being...

1) I can't tell you, because I'm not allowed to describe the things Berman says in the WSJ, in his book, in his articles or in person to many, many people.

No, I'm screwing with you. Actually, the words on the page blur and jumble before the human eye as the reader fights to comprehend the unsaid arguments that can't be printed, spoken or transmitted because You Can't Print, Speak or Transmit Them.

I'm kidding. I do only mild violence to his argument if I shorterise it to because the Mufti of Jerusalem met with the Nazis in the forties and because some minor academics voiced mild criticisms of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a huge number of academics have lost their damn minds and become bastards.

Fear not though, for Berman is unafraid to question his certainties...

"But am I right? I glance with pleasure at some harsh reviews, convinced that here, in the worst of them, is my best confirmation..."

Similarly I imagine that, while casting an eye over rancid reviews for The Phantom Menace, George Lucas felt a swell of fierce pride at his genius creation and depiction of Jar Jar Binks.

All of which makes no sense at all, unless you realise that Berman is clearly a devotee of some form of ultra-belligerent Bokononism - Kurt Vonnegut's fictional religion, which held that the path to true happiness lay in the conscious adoption pleasing but blatantly untrue beliefs, or Foma.

Beset upon all sides by wrang-wrangs (Indecent academics), Berman and his karass (Followers) are thus able to follow their wampeter (Raision d'etre) into whatever pool-pah (shitstorm) it may lead them, even if that's a paid opportunity to plug Berman's book.

This would certainly explain Berman's stated belief that, following the invasion of Iraq, it was everyone's duty to then begin fervently rooting for peace and democracy, with the inevitable result of (cough, cough, mumble) defeat of terrorism and magical ponies, or something.

The only problem is that Foma are meant to be harmless, and Berman's schtick... Well, sometimes pool-pah exceeds the power of humans to comment, as Bokonon would say.

Works a Smart Person Can Avoid, If He Doesn't Fancy Studying English Lit. Properly

I like to think of myself as being pretty well-read, but I have never read -

Wuthering Heights; A Tale Of Two Cities; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Middlemarch; Jude The Obscure; Sense And Sensibility; The Iliad; Moby Dick; War And Peace; The Brothers Karamazov; Far From The Madding Crowd; The Turn of the Screw; Sid Arthur; Pilgrim's Progress; Clarissa; Tom Jones; Tristram Shandy; Ulysses; The Odyssey; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; The Tin Drum; On The Road; Lucky Jim; Lady Chatterley's Lover; The Rainbow; Daniel Deronda; Madame Bovary; The Scarlet Letter; Jane Eyre; Emma; David Copperfield; Vanity Fair; Paradise Lost; Rashomon; Great Expectations; Little Women; Oliver Twist; The Count of Monte Cristo; Doctor Zhivago; Ethan Frome; Ivanhoe; Anna Karenina; Bleak House; The Divine Comedy; Great Expectations; Les Miserables; Mill On The Floss; Moby Dick; Northanger Abbey; Pygmalion; The Turn of the Screw; Silas Marner; A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court; The Three Musketeers; The Old Man and the Sea etcetera...

Note to Googling students: You can only get through an academic course with this level of ignorance if you are a collossal bullshitter of superhuman proportions, like I am. Achieving anything with my level of ovine ignorance requires an amazing talent for inventing vast amounts of utter bullshit on the spot.

A Proposition

In light of the following absolute facts and educated assumptions...

- That the coalition of western powers have now had ground troops in Afghanistan for almost a decade, taking hundreds of casualties both killed and wounded, and yet our enemies appear to be stronger than ever;

- That we still appear to be labouring under the pretence that we are fighting "The Taliban", rather than a motley crew of regular Taliban militiamen, Pakistani jihadists and a vastly greater number of ordinary Pashtun tribesmen;

- That even now, our continued presence is entirely based upon the false notion that our forces are not fighting Pashtun tribesmen, but are in fact fighting the first successful yet unsupported insurgency in modern history;

- That the size of yer actual "Al Qaeda" forces in-theatre is possibly as small as 100;

- That the United States military has spent years bombing not one, but two countries in the area with which it isn't officially at war;

- That we have no idea whatsoever how many civilians our armed forces have killed, but that we do know it's probably a whacking great number;

- That the government of Afghanistan, which our leaders hope will provide security and stability, is actually the second most corrupt on Earth;

- That the net result of our highly violent attempts to destroy our foes has been to turn vast tracts of Afghanistan and Pakistan into no-go areas filled with an exponentially larger number of hardened and highly-skilled anti-western combat veterans than were in situ before deployment;

- And that our goals in Afghanistan have now been reduced from "total victory followed by stable democracy" to "denying our enemies control of that country indefinitely, followed by ignominious withdrawal at an unspecified future date",

...That it would've been wiser and more useful in military and diplomatic terms; more humane, productive and billions of pounds less expensive if the US and Britain had responded to 9/11 by...

- Crashing two planeloads of US marines into the centre of a randomly-chosen Afghan city at 700 mph, or

- Executing 300 randomly-chosen British squaddies by firing squad, or

- Not responding at all.

Discuss.

A Double Standard

So it's all cheeky and hilarious when the ladies are going on about their "Rampant Rabbits" with their seven speeds and authentic thrusting action, and what have you. It's all glasses of wine and giggles then, but if you so much as mention your inflatable woman, they'll call you a pervert and a creepy little twerp.

It's no wonder the country's going down the pan, if you ask me.