OBAMA'S AFGHAN "SURGE" MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR HYPOCRISY -- The SHADOW: Issue #54

[December 25, 2009] Since President Barack Obama has made his choice in
regard to the war in Afghanistan and has chosen to throw more young American
lives into the abyss to follow up those that have already been lost, it is time for the
alternative press and media to clarify their position on this war.

The Afghanistan situation is not quite as clear-cut an issue for people of conscience
as the Vietnam war because the insurgency per se is not worthy of our support.

While the National Liberation Front of Vietnam, known in America as the Viet Cong,
had a stated program for improving the nutritional and educational levels of their
country and launching economic development programs independent of Western
exploiters, the Taliban is little more than a fascist movement. Their demagogy feeds
on real injustices committed against Muslim people, but the Islamist insurgents
themselves are power-hungry thugs advocating monarchism, religious oppression, and
patriarchal violence within the family. They are, quite simply, scumbags.

That being said, the U.S. Afghan intervention must be opposed. Even if one accepts
Mr. Obama's justifications at face value, this is just one more war to spread "democracy"
which merely spreads more misery among poor people who have enough of that in the
first place, and which in turn spreads anger among Muslim people and gives ammunition
to the violent fundamentalist element, which is only one small faction in a religion with
a billion adherents.

The intervention by the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan was one of those things
that were conceived during the eclipse of reason that marked the weeks and months
after the events of Sept. 11, 2001 and which are rarely subjected to any form of
critical thinking. As happens with an individual as the result of a childhood trauma,
9/11 has left psychological imprints, often described as mental scars, on the thinking
processes of the American populace, causing use to see things that are not there
and believe things that are not true.

First there were the nineteen hijackers, whose faces were projected on our TV
screens hours after the carnage was consummated. Information which the government
had apparently had been gathering for years, but which evidently was of no help in
preventing the 9/11 attacks, suddenly congealed into an ironclad explanation for the
identities of the attackers and their motives. Then, it is revealed that some of these
nineteen Muslim men received training at Islamic fundamentalist camps in
Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, hence the Taliban-9/11 connection and the need for war
against the Taliban.

That is the essence of how we ended up at war in Afghanistan. Faced with a sense of
national helplessness at an act of war committed by a vague and diffuse enemy with
neither a flag nor a defined geographical location, Americans were herded into
accepting a series of assumptions that led, less than one month after the 9/11
incidents, to the U.S. led intervention in Afghanistan which was supposed to give us
a sense of vindication vis a vis the 9/11 villains as well as deprive the terrorists
of their main base of operation.

The revenge consisted in driving the Taliban into retreat, only to spread the
Islamic fundamentalist insurgency into neighboring Pakistan and from there have it
seep back into Afghanistan, with the Taliban reconquering much of its former
territory by the middle of 2009. The very brutality and arbitrariness of the Western
incursion, in which unarmed drones are routinely unleashed to blow up alleged
Taliban retreats along with the homes of the regular people surrounding them, has
been instrumental in stoking up support for the Taliban insurgents. Far from
depriving the bad guys of their base of operations, Bush's fast and dirty surgery
left an abscess in the very heart of Central Asia from which the contagion is
spreading through the bloodstream of the region.

Even were our current President, Mr. Obama, to cleanly lance the Afghanistan/Pakistan
abscess and drain the pus of Taliban violence from the region, he would only find
that the infection did not originate there but from an even more inflamed boil in
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the capital of the modern world's first Islamic fundamentalist
state. The American ruling class has an awe and respect for the wealthy Saudi
barbarians and fanatics who control their energy supply, which is in proportion to
its contempt for the grubby, expendable people of Afghanistan.

While the Afghans and their poor Pakistani cousins are entitled only to death by
"friendly fire," the rich polygamist degenerates who rule Saudi Arabia are buying
weapons of mass destruction, including the latest jet aircraft and missiles, directly
from the U.S. Never mind that the Salafist movement in Islam, a theological current
of though that demands strict adherence to the Sharia with its medieval punishments,
and justifies violence against unbelievers, originated in Saudi Arabia and became the
religion of the royal family and the forbears of Saudi-born Osama bin Laden. It is not
even politically correct to mention that fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers grew up
in Saudi Arabia and were educated according to the violent and ignorant principles
of Salafism, long before they ever visited the much discussed Afghan terror training camps.

Now, eight years later, and with an ostensibly very different kind of national
leadership, we are still acting on the unproven assumptions that became fixed in
everyone's mind during the afternoon of 9/11 after seeing the Twin Towers crumble to
dust.

Never mind that bin Laden is very likely dead, if he actually had anything to do
with the attacks in the first place, which is another big If that took shape in the
hours after the attack.

Never mind that the public has been shown images of several different people
purported to be Osama bin Laden -- there have been skinny Osamas and fat Osamas,
like the Osama who "claimed credit" for the Sept. 11 destruction in a Dec. 13, 2001
video where he chats with Khaled bin Ouda bin Mohammed al-Harbi. The Obama in
the video is a broad-faced, sometimes laughing gentleman who sports several gold
rings on his fingers, an affectation forbidden to pious Muslims.

And, never mind that the U.S. presence in the Middle East is the very thing that
draws the ire of the Muslim world upon the U.S. in the first place, making us a
target and jeopardizing our lives.

Retired Russian General Victor Yermakov, commander of the 40th Soviet Army in its
battle with Afghan Islamic insurgents in the 1980s who were then being supported by
the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, recently gave President Obama
some of the benefit of his experience:

"....you cannot impose democracy by using force. An Afghan has agreed with you
today, at gunpoint, that American democracy is the best thing in the world, just as
he was once saying that the Soviet system was the best.

"But as soon as you turn around, he'll shoot you in the back and immediately forget
what he was just saying.

"I would like to remind you what the first man to unite the Afghan tribes, Czar
Babur, said: 'Afghanistan has not been and never will be conquered, and will never
surrender to anyone.' Afghans are a very freedom-loving and proud people.

"Whether it's Tora Bora or Kandahar we would deploy troops, establish order, place a
popular government there and render our assistance to it. But when we leave that
government or leadership runs away.

"After all who is the leader of a province? If he's not part of the local tribe then
nobody's going to pay attention to him."

When will Americans realize that the Western ideology of spreading democracy by the
sword is as hollow as the former Soviet ideology of spreading communism by the sword
or the Islamic fundamentalist ideology of spreading Islam by the sword? All of these
grand projects have ended up with the ordinary American citizen, or Soviet citizen,
or Islamic believer, rotting away in a forgotten grave. It is better to live for our
own truths than to die for their lies.






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