Afghanistan
by Roedy Green ©2000-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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Introduction
The Afghanistan war tends to take a back seat to the Iraq war, even though the
Afghanistan war has gone on even longer. It has an undeserved reputation as a
more noble undertaking because the crass motives for it are not so obvious, and
the victims are fundamentalists Muslims rather than secular Muslims, America’s
whipping boys. Granted the Afghan war is smaller, but the suffering of those
involved in it is just as great. It too has its atrocities, though not quite so
blatant as Abu Ghraib. I feel compelled to write because Canada is involved, and
the majority of Canadians have totally swallowed the pro-war propaganda put out
by the Harper government.
Why Fight?
Just after 9/11, the USA announced that bin Laden did it, and that he was hiding
in Afghanistan. They offered no evidence this was so. They demanded Afghanistan
capture him and hand him over without any sort of hearing or evidence. This
would be illegal since Afghanistan had not yet negotiated an extradition treaty.
The normal procedure for extradition is to negotiate a treaty, then the party
wanting to extradite presents evidence to justify the extradition and a judge
decides if it is sufficient. The USA, in a fit of 9/11 self-righteousness,
demanded these niceties be dispensed with. The Afghans told the Americans to get
stuffed. America invaded on 2001-10-07.
Most North Americans are under the delusion that Afghanistan either attacked the
USA or that they were behind 9/11. Even George Bush says that the 9/11 culprits
were Saudi, not Afghans. The USA, Britain and Canada attacked unprovoked.
This is illegal by the Nuremberg principles, the ones used to hang all the Nazis
at the end of WW II. It also means than anyone who aids or abets the invasion of
Afghanistan is a war criminal. Almost no one acknowledges this. They imagine
that Nuremberg applies only to Nazis.
But oddly the war went and on and on even after it was abundantly clear bin
Laden was not hiding in Afghanistan.
“I don’t know where he is. I have no idea and I really don’t
care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.”
~ George W. Bush
2002-03-13
So even if you believe Bush that bin Laden was the reason for starting the war,
bin Laden obviously had nothing to do with continuing it.
The official justification for the war shifted to such things as:
- To kill the terrorists over there before they kill us over here. Yet no Afghan
has killed any civilian in the USA, Britain or Canada. They kill only in defence
of their homeland. The people killing civilians are the Americans, British and
Canadians, not the reverse. We are the terrorists, not the Afghans!
“Terrorism : killing civilians with the intent of changing their political
affiliation.”
~ Caleb Carr, military historian
- To rescue Afghan women from the domination of their repressive religion. There
are several problems with this argument:
- Just like fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Muslims will fight to the
death for the right to be oppressed by their silly religion.
- The government we back, Hamid Karzai’s, is also a theocracy, though not as
puritanical. They too have a ministry of vice to send men out to beat women
caught without head coverings.
- The amount of spending to better the plight of women has been almost
unmeasurably small. Promoting women’ rights thus can’t be a primary
motive for the war.
“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of
tyrants.”
~ Albert Camus
- To create a western style democracy is Afghanistan. There are two problems with
that claim:
- We have been beating Afghan heads in for
6 years and 7 months
and they are more resistant than ever. What evidence do we have that further
years of brutality will make them give up their attachment to Islam and embrace
western democracy?
- The government we are trying to fob off on them is not a democracy. It is a
puppet government that kowtows to American (i.e. foreign), interests. It is
loose coalition of drug, war lords and Islamic fruitcakes. It is no accident
that key people in the Karzai government are all ex-Unocal employees.
“Currently, the [Afghanistan] pipeline is a go-project thanks to the junta's
[Bush/Cheney's] installation of a Unocal employee (John J. Maresca) as US envoy
to the newly born democracy whose president, Hamid Karzai, is also, according to
Le Monde, a former employee of a Unocal subsidiary. Conspiracy? Coincidence!”
~ Gore Vidal
And don’t forget Zalmai Khalilzad, the envoy is also an ex-Unocal man.
Why Fight? Really
Afghanistan has little oil, so unlike the Iraq war, this war is not directly
about oil. There are three main reason for the war really:
- The war is corporate proxy war on behalf of the Unocal corporation. Unocal
wanted to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. It expected the Taliban
government to give it a free right of way, simply in return for the economic
spin offs. The Taliban balked and wanted a much sweeter deal. Unocal asked their
good friend George Bush to invade so they could have their free pipeline.
- Another reason is simply Afghanistan is a convenient place to hold a back-burner
war. Canada’s Prime Minister Mulroney accepted fists full of cash from the
defence industry at various hotel lunches. Prime Minister Steven Harper, his
protege, is extremely grateful to the copious donations (and possibly illegal
cash) coming in from the defence industry. In return Harper must reward them
with a never-ending war. Bush is in a similar position.
What are the characteristics of a good back-burner war?
- It never ends. You must have a resolutely determined foe who won't surrender and
who never prevails over you either.
- It must be held far from your own shores. There must be no possibility of it
spilling over onto home turf.
- The victims should not be sympathetic. Your citizens should know little about
them so it is easy to vilify the enemy. They should speak a different language,
pray to a different God, and sport a different skin colour. In the war, you will
be raping, torturing, maiming and killing them. We don’t want the average
Joe in your own country giving a damn.
- You must have low casualties. This means you must pick on a country without
sophisticated weapons.
- The war must be stable. You don't want it petering out growing out of control.
- The enemy must be much weaker than you are, so that you are in complete control
of the war. You can ramp it up in times when the home populace are amenable to
more military spending, and you can ramp it down when they start catching on
they are being had or they start to become sympathetic to the enemy due to
atrocities. The victim absolutely must not have weapons of mass
destruction, though of course you can tar him with the accusation he has them as
justification for invasion. He must be so impoverished that he cannot mount even
a token terrorist attack on your homeland.
- It must be easy to leave at any time, without the enemy coming after you in
revenge. Your enemy must be impoverished.
- The enemy has to be believable. You will maintain the fiction that you are
defending yourself against an implacable dangerous foe bent on destroying you,
even though you picked the fight. Of course he wants your head on a plate, but
only because you killed his wife and kids. Other religions appear insane to
Christians, so that attribute alone provides sufficient crazed motivation for
unspeakable acts. You need actual or phony photos of freakish revenge to prove
to your population that the enemy will stop at nothing, e.g. corpse mutilation.
As you can see, Afghanistan fits the bill perfectly for a war designed purely to
funnel money to the “defence” industry. There is nothing defensive
about such a war. It is about a bully ragging a helpless victim as an excuse to
pour money down a black hole.
“No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason
is always economic.”
~ A. J. P. Taylor, (1906-03-25—
1990-09-07), British historian
I worked for many years in the computer industry and saw from both the seller
and buyer point of view the incredible corruption, bribery, blackmail and
threats involved in sales totalling only a million dollars or so. Imagine the
corruption of the Harper government in the planned $11 billion continued
spending on the war until 2011. Recall that Harper’s mentor Mulroney wrote
the book on the art of accepting bribes from arms dealers without getting caught.
- The third reason is the heroin trade. The Taliban are extremely Puritanical, and
without any special technology, completely shut down the opium/heroin trade in
Afghanistan. However, under the American, British and Canadian occupation, opium/heroin
production has exploded. They now produce more than the entire world can consume.
The trade has blossomed to a one trillion (1000 billion) dollar a year business.
Just who is getting all that money? It is not the poppy farmers. It is the
corrupt Karzai government and corrupt American, British and Canadian military
occupiers. Just to give you an idea of just how big a trillion dollars is, you
could use it to bribe every one of 100 senators and 540 congressmen with 1.5
billion dollars each. If the Americans wanted to shut down the trade, they could
do it overnight with all their high tech satellite imagery, helicopters,
herbicides and occupation forces to destroy the easy-to-find poppy fields.
Instead, they foster it. One social cost of this is cheap orange heroin called cheese
flooding elementary schools in North America. 90% of the Karzai economy is based on poppies/opium/heroin.
Why on earth are North Americans dying to prop up the world’s biggest drug dealer?
It has become the main business of
Afghanistan. There is so much money to go around, that even the Liberals voted
to keep the gravy train going, feigning reluctance.
Why Do People Support the Afghanistan War?
Nearly all Americans and a sizeable chunk of Canadians support the Afghanistan
war, despite the fact war means rape, torture, maiming, killing of innocent
people and soldiers, not to mention the huge expense. Why do they support such
mayhem? I see five main pillars supporting the pro-war position in the general
public.
Ignorance
Most supporters are under the delusion Afghanistan or Iraq perpetrated 9/11. Not
even Bush claims that. They also imagine these countries both wish to attack and
have the means to attack the USA, Britain and Canada and convert everyone to
Islam. They fail to notice the average income in Afghanistan is under
a month. They have no means to attack.To defend our freedom
On the face of it, this is ludicrous. The only tool the Afghans have to kill
Canadians is to plant roadside bombs. They have no true weapons. They have no
means to attack Canada. This idea is sold frequently at military funerals. It is
terrible that a young life was snuffed out for no useful purpose. So we tell a
beautiful lie, that he sacrificed his life to protect his country and its
freedoms. He did nothing of the kind. He died trying to impose a fake democracy,
a puppet government on someone else. He was interfering with someone else’s
freedom, not protecting his own.Bigotry
Hatred of people from the middle east, Arabs and Muslims goes back to the middle
ages. The war is an excuse to act on that hatred.Paranoia
People are terrified of terrorists. Bush constantly refers to the Taliban as
terrorists, even though they have not committed any acts of terrorism against
the USA, Britain or Canada. Even in war time, the Taliban have not managed to
kill a single civilian in the USA, Britain or Canada, even now when they have
strong revenge motivation to do so. They just want the Americans off their backs.
Why would they risk renewing hostilities with attacks against the USA after the
war ended? Did Viet Nam attack the American homeland after the withdrawal? Of
course not.Sadism
The main motive of soldiers is sadism. They enjoy hurting innocent people with
no chance of reprisal. They are bullies, morally on the same plane as Mafia hit
men. I further explore the moral bankruptcy of the average soldier in my essay Don't
Marry A Soldier. Most Canadians consider someone like Darcy Tedford 
who went to Afghanistan to kill people and ended up getting killed, as heroes.
To me there is no question. They are war criminals who received poetic justice.
Canada attacked Afghanistan unprovoked. Such aggressive war is illegal. The
Nuremberg penalty for participating in an aggressive war is hanging. There is no
exception, even for clean cut Canadians. The Nazis at the end of WW II tried to
excuse themselves by saying they were ordered to commit their atrocities, or
that their superiors lied to them. We decided then these excuses did not wash.
They don't wash now. Canadian soldiers are even more personally responsible than
Nazi soldiers because they volunteered to kill people in Afghanistan. Nobody
coerced them to. They chose to kill because they wanted to kill. Even if you
excuse or laud the soldiers for their war crimes, war is a waste of young life,
Canadian and Afghan. Were there no war, these young Canadians would have done
many productive and pleasant things.
How You Know Stephen Harper is Lying
When Prime Minister Stephen Harper tells you Canada is fighting the Afghan war
to give the gift of democracy to the Afghans and to protect Canada from
terrorists, how do you know he is lying, not just mistaken — lying?
- A war fought to give democracy to strangers is an extraordinary act of altruism.
Not only does it cost billions of dollars, it requires the sacrifice of hundreds
of lives. If Mr. Harper were this altruistic to impoverished Muslims on the
other side of the world, you should see other signs of his largesse, but you don't.
Instead he reneged on Canada's commitment to foreign aid, a tiny sacrifice in
comparison. Mr. Harper has shown not a scintilla of compassion even to homeless
people in his own city. Members of his bigot-tolerant party routinely express
revulsion for anyone who is not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. There is no way
the Conservatives would give such an enormous gift to “sand niggers”.
- The Afghans have made it abundantly clear they don't want this “gift”.
They are even more indoctrinated than Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their Islamic
religion requires them to live under a theocracy. They don't have a
tradition of separation of church and state. To them, a secular democracy is
anti-Islamic and hence evil. Besides, what we are forcing on them is a democracy
is name only. It is actually a puppet dictatorship controlled by Washington. The
Karzai government is as obnoxious to the Afghans as the Vichy Nazi puppet
government was to occupied France during WW II. This is not to say the Taliban
are wonderful, just that Karzai is no better. We have no more business forcing a
regime change in Afghanistan than Afghanistan has in attempting to overthrow the
government of Canada. It is up to the Afghans to choose a government they
can live with. We are behaving in an obscenely paternalistic way to think we
know better what’s good for them and have the right to impose our view on
them.
- If Canada were truly worried about terrorists, Harper would have taken serious
measures to seal its borders and keep terrorists out. It hasn’t because it
is not really worried.
You might wonder why Harper would lie to promote such as obvious evil as
unnecessary war. There are four reasons:
- Harper’s mentor is Brian Mulroney, a man most famous for accepting
hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash from a corrupt arms dealer Karlheinz
Schreiber, and likely many others. Presumably, Mulroney taught Harper his dirty
tricks for raising money for personal expenses and for the Conservative party.
- Harper likes to play general. It makes him feel manly, perhaps to compensate
with his soft pudgy cheeks and flabby tummy. The Times Colonist captured this
vanity and his queer infatuation with George Bush when it printed a cartoon of
Harper pretending to drive a tank actually driven by George W. Bush, saying “Vroom,
Vroom”.
- Not all Conservatives are bigots, but most of Canada's bigots support the
Conservative party. Harper represents their interests. The brown-skinned, non-Christian
Afghans are the perfect scapegoat for bigot bile.
- Harper is a control freak and sadist. He gets sexual satisfaction contemplating
what his soldiers are doing to the people of Afghanistan.
Rex Murphy
Rex Murphy is a hawkish Conservative commentator on the CBC. He doggedly
supports the Afghan war. He calls it a “mission”, a word with
connotations of religious fervour. He has the Rudyard Kipling arrogant attitude
that wise folk like him know better than Afghans what sort of government they
should want. He has a sacred duty to bring them western enlightenment and free
them from their backward Islamic religion. He is thus fired by much the same
motives as the crusading knights in the middle ages. He believes the war is a
stern medicine that will result in a democracy, much like Canada’s. He
figures the Afghans should be willing to endure the pain of war for this great
prize. In his view, the end justifies the means.
He makes the error of all end-justifies-the-means fanatics. There is no
guarantee the end will ever materialise! The war has dragged on and on for 6 years and 7 months, and there is there is still no
sign the Afghans are closer to anything remotely resembling a western democracy.
All this pain and suffering imposed by Canada on the Afghans was for nought. I
think Mr. Murphy is his heart knows this, but pride won’t let him admit
that Canada commited a war crime and that we Canadians had no business meddling
in Afghanistan’ internal affairs in the first place.
The very fact that the impoverished, unarmed people of Afghanistan have
successfully resisted an invasion of three major world powers, including the USA
the largest, richest and best-equipped military on the planet, and the Karzai
coalition of drug lords and war lords for 6 years indicates the majority of Afghans don’t
appreciate being invaded. If they are to be saddled with a tyrant, better a
local Islamic tyrant than one who takes orders from Washington.
Murphy seems to think it would be cowardly to stop the war in Afghanistan. This
makes no sense. If we were truly in danger from Afghanistan, we would not have
the option of stopping the war. Withdrawal is not surrender. There is nothing
noble about attacking a third world nation unprovoked and beating it to a pulp.
Stopping such an attack is no more cowardly than a street gang deciding to end
their attack on an old lady. Three of the richest western nations with the
latest high tech armaments, unprovoked, attacking a tiny unarmed third world
country, is cowardly. Ending the attack is not cowardice, but rather an
awakening of conscience.
Freedom of religion is the most difficult of the UN charter of freedoms to grant
others. You have to be willing to allow others to make fools of themselves and
to act against their own best interests.
Take Action
who went to Afghanistan to kill people and ended up getting killed, as heroes.
To me there is no question. They are war criminals who received poetic justice.
Canada attacked Afghanistan unprovoked. Such aggressive war is illegal. The
Nuremberg penalty for participating in an aggressive war is hanging. There is no
exception, even for clean cut Canadians. The Nazis at the end of WW II tried to
excuse themselves by saying they were ordered to commit their atrocities, or
that their superiors lied to them. We decided then these excuses did not wash.
They don't wash now. Canadian soldiers are even more personally responsible than
Nazi soldiers because they volunteered to kill people in Afghanistan. Nobody
coerced them to. They chose to kill because they wanted to kill. Even if you
excuse or laud the soldiers for their war crimes, war is a waste of young life,
Canadian and Afghan. Were there no war, these young Canadians would have done
many productive and pleasant things.
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