This is an excersise on the reason why I need to have structure when I write these things, otherwise they go all over e place.
I have not touched on politics much on this blog, but I am a bit on the opinionated side, so I have views on everything. Today the pull out of Afghanistan is on big in the news. That was a colossal waste of time.
Ten years after 9/11 and two invasions later and the result is a lot of people dead and the U.S.A. in economic trouble back where it started on September 11th, 2001 at 830EST; international bully.
Let me explain. I remember, everyone was in shock that day everywhere in the world. The call center I worked in was shut down for the day out of respect. The next day we were not sure if we should call the States, but we did and everyone we called wanted to talk and connect; they did not swear and hang up the phone once. The world was grieving, because no one had ever concieved of an attack of that nature, or the ones that did never thought it would happen and because the targets affected every country in e world. Over five thousand killed from fifty nations around the world. The US, had political good will from ever country save Afganistan.
The US could have walked away from these attacks and converted the good will into lasting world peace and mutual understanding. Sounds like a bunch of crap right, but it is not really that far fetched.
The US has made a lot of mistakes in its history, too many to recount here. Basically any time the US government made a large foreign policy discision bad things have happened but they have made a few good ones, like entering the two world wars. Good job America. But the Manifest Destiny crap and later the expansion of it to a world stage was really bad for all parties involved.
Manifest Destiny is the idea that it is the destiny of America to control the continent, and later all the Americas. It was seen in its earliest form as the invasion of Canada in 1812-14 and the later invasions of Mexico and attacks on Spanish colonies. There were land purchases, Lousiana, and Alaska. There was the policy of pushing native people out from their historic lands and across the continent. Later years there were the political backing and assassination plots all across the two continents from pre-Castro Cuba, through all the Central American counties, South America, and lastly Grenada and again the invasion of Panama in the nineties. Small wonder that the Canadian Military has a plan for when the US invades again; it will one day.
I digress. So the worst happened and Osama bin Ladden claimed responsibility and the Americans were at war with Afghanistan. Simple. But Afghanistan was really a long ways away and there was nothing there of consequences in Afghanistan and the Taliban were the people that the CIA put in control of the country back twenty years previously and then forgot about them. They made some noise in 2000, they blew up some very large statutes of Budda carved from a mountain, a world heritage site, but nothing else. People knew nothing about Afghanistan, except that most of the country was either mountainous or a desert or both and it was Islamic, like every other country near by.
The coalition landed, because the were a great number of nations that were united behind the US against terrorism, and the Taliban fled and were pushed into the countryside and the long process of wiping them out began. This would have been it if not for two main things. One, America is all about punishment and justice for injured parties and not about reform and rehabilitation. Two, America did not listen to the grievances of the Taliban; they treated it as just a terrorist attack and did not look for any root causes. That last one is a tough one to think about. If we use an analogy on the playground of kids playing on the field, one kid grows a rock at the first kid, out-of-the-blue, and the injured party tells the teacher and the first kid goes to the office and is expelled, or the injured party gets his friends together and shows the kid who through the stone a good time after school ends. Either result, no one asks why the stone was thrown. What were the reasons why the Taliban attacked the US? Certainly throwing rocks is unjustified, and terrorism is really really wrong, but why did they feel that that was the only thing they could do?
Sometimes I think that if we could show world politics as something that happens on the playground at school, more people would understand it and change would occur. It is all about history and money.
In the early nineties the Soviet Union allied itself with a faction in Afghanistan and were in voted to help them take control of the country. Most of the other factions did not like this. One faction was contacted by the CIA. The United States, backed this faction. They supplied arms and money and gave them training. I am not exactly sure what the Americans got from this arrangement, but I have an inkling that it was drugs, which they sold and used to fund the rebels they funded in Nicaragua.
When the Russians beat a hasty retreat from Afghanistan, the country and it's people slipped off the world agenda and seemingly out of history. I assume when they won, the funding slipped away and the stalwart American allies were left to there own devices. The popped up once more during the first Gulf War, on America's side and then disappeared again. The US seemed to forget about them and funded other groups. The reason for the attacks was said to be to punish the country that seems to have all the wealth and flaunted it before the poor. It was about morals, but mostly it was about the gap between the very wealthy and the very poor.
Afghanistan has been a jewel to be placed in the crown of many empires through history. The British tried, the Russians tried and I assume that others tried with varying degrees of success. Since the eighties Afghanistan has been the key to a very lucrative industry, the drug trade, specifically heroine. Opium poppies grow in Afghanistan, the are lightly refined and sold to other countries where it is further refined and later sold to the States as heroine. The farmers receive pennies per kilogram of raw product, but in their poor country, it is enough to make a living. Poppies are a cash crop. They do not grow much of their own food, but grow poppies because they can make more money from it.
When the invasion of Afghanistan occurred, the Taliban was pushed out of the cities and into the countryside. The countryside is where they were most supported. It was up to the West to get the support of the people in the countryside. If the Taliban lost the support of the people, they would not get recruits, they would not get new money from the people and they would have no succor in their home country. The first thing that was done when the cities were secured and the Taliban started to run from the country was the burning of the fields of poppies. By burning the fields, the Americans ensured that the war would be long and bloody.
I know, it is easy to look back on policies of the past and point out how they went wrong and armchair-quarterback say how they should have done it, but I have been saying this for many years after I heard what they did, the aforementioned burning fields of poppies. You just can't go into a country and make a decision that affects the lives of so many people because it is the easy thing to do. Burning fields. If it was determined that growing tobacco was considered harmful to society as a whole, the government would not fire bomb the fields. It was in fact determined that farming tobacco was harmful to society and the farmers were given a choice of something else to farm and they were given subsidies to help make that transition. Tobacco is not any less of a cash crop than poppies are.
The better thing would be to go to the farmers and tell them that if they only grew one quarter to one tenth the poppies that they grew in any year and promised to grow more sustainable crops on the rest of their land. The government would purchase the reduced crop at a price at fair market value for the production of morphine. The farmers would get potentially more money from a reduced crop than they would for a full crop sent to make illegal drugs for the west. The farmers would be on side with the coalition, support for e Taliban would diminish and disappear. As for the people who farm poppies, it is not like they feel that they have a choice. People who farm cash crops are in many ways backed into a corner feeling that they do it to survive.
It is about treating people with respect and like they are human. It is about involving them in the decisions that affect their life. The perceptions of the common person no matter what country they are from, is that the wealthy are making the choices and the common people have nothing to do but accept what they are given. People who are repressed have that Same perception, plus that their oppressors may be oppressed by other people, the wealthy west, lead by the wealthiest and most arrogant, the Americans.
I know that individual Americans are okay people. I know that. I also know that the education system and the media sets up a Us and Them attitude within their nation and the faceless American government, hellbent on getting re-elected, often treats the outside world as if it were not there, but it does, and it is a lot bigger than it.
I did not even touch on Iraq, the war that lost America's world support it gained from being attacked in the first place.
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