Taliban spokesmen Zabiullah Mujahedd told the BBC recently that his side is winning the war in Afghanistan. And no one can refute his claim.
Either side can claim victory because there’s no way to “win.”
The so-called war is a senseless series of sorties in which men and women are dying for no other reason than the fact that they happen to be fighting each other.
Opposing groups roam about, running into each other and killing each other, with no apparent effect on the political structure. Afghan politics is much the same as it has always been. Drug runners and war lords run the place regardless of what “government” is currently in Kabul.
As for the “counterinsurgency” that they talk about in Washington, that’s a joke.
Billions of U.S. dollars that were dispatched to Kabul to build a “democracy” are being shipped out to private accounts in Dubai.
Here’s an excerpt from a recent Wall Street Journal article:
KABUL -More than $3 billion in cash has been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years, a sum so large that U.S. investigators believe top Afghan officials and their associates are sending billions of diverted U.S. aid and logistics dollars and drug money to financial safe havens abroad.
The cash—packed into suitcases, piled onto pallets and loaded into airplanes—is declared and legal to move. But U.S. and Afghan officials say they are targeting the flows in major anticorruption and drug trafficking investigations because of their size relative to Afghanistan’s small economy and the murkiness of their origins.
Officials believe some of the cash, if not most, is siphoned from Western aid projects and U.S., European and NATO contracts to provide security, supplies and reconstruction work for coalition forces in Afghanistan. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization spent about $14 billion here last year alone. Profits reaped from the opium trade are also a part of the money flow, as is cash earned by the Taliban from drugs and extortion, officials say….
Most of the cash loads are taken on one of the eight flights a day from Kabul to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Wealthy Afghans have long parked their money in Dubai.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his confederates must be rolling on the floor laughing.
Trying to conquer Afghanistan is like trying to conquer the Sahara Desert There’s no country there to conquer; it’s just a place on the map. And it’s a horrible place which can no more support civilized life than some desolate planet in outer space (see photo above). The indigenous people who subsist among its crags and canyons are like army ants; they live to fight, and dying is no big deal for them.
“Taliban” is just a name for whatever gang of thugs happens to control the Pashtun tribe, the ethnic group to which most Afghans belong – including Karzai and the bulk of his “army.”
Fighting the Taliban is like fighting crime. You can kill as many criminals as your ammunition supply allows; as long as the conditions that breed crime persist, more criminals will emerge. And the conditions that breed violence in Afghanistan have prevailed for centuries with no reasonable expectation of change.
And Al Qaida? Al Qaida’s leaders left Afghanistan long ago. I’m sure they’re plotting to blow up some place in America as you read this, but I don’t know where the plotting is going on at the moment. Possibly in Pakistan – but just as possibly in Berlin or London or New York.Or all of the above.
The last place they would be is Afghanistan.
Meanwhile back in the US, millions are jobless and there’s no money to extend unemployment benefits. Yet Congress continues to fund the phantom “war.” Here’s a Reuter’s report I just read:
The House of Representatives approved funds on Thursday to pay for President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan troop increase but also voted to signal growing unhappiness with the war among his fellow Democrats.
The House’s Democratic leaders, who had procrastinated for weeks over the bill, did not act in time to get the $33 billion to the troops by July 4 as the Pentagon had requested.
An amendment demanding an exit timetable from Afghanistan failed, but got 162 votes, the biggest anti-war vote in the House on Afghanistan to date. All but nine of the supporters were Democrats, and included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
House leaders added billions of dollars in non-military spending before passing the war funds, so the measure must now return to the Senate. It passed the troop funds and its own set of disaster relief add-ons in May.
Do you find this as insane as I do?
