A friend sent this along, reportedly a flowchart posted on MSNBC from a consulting group that works on the American effort in Afghanistan. My head tells me it’s a hoax. My heart is filled with fear that it’s not.
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There’s no tenable reason to stay in Afghanistan. With what Obama’s plan for Afghanistan
will cost, we could pay for Obamacare. Literally.
Instead, we will get the worst of both worlds.
That’s called leadership, USA style.
Congress screams out loud about the costs of healthcare but funds this imperialist warmongering without a whimper.
You only told half the story citizen, you get the worst of both worlds but the few get filthy rich. The big money gets it all, you get nothing. The machine gets to grind, and people both foreign and domestic get ground to powder, and there is only one way out of it, but few want to listen –
SOME ARE CELEBRATING
In other words, when it comes to something like this YOUR money is no object for the few who will benefit. They will spend a dollar of YOUR money to make a dime.
Almost 1 million Afghanis are refugees living in Iran. A young Afghani I spoke with at a restaurant in Mashad, which is near Harat in Afghanistan, told me that he had been in Iran for over six years. Iran supports Afghani refugees through ‘grade school’ and ‘high school,’ but does not afford them the same access to college education as an Iranian. Further, obtaining a job in Iran, when the unemployment rate for natives hovers around 20% (thanks in part to US / Israeli sanctions), is nearly impossible for an Afghani. This young man worked as a waiter and told me he attempts to strike up conversations with as many Westerners as possible, so that he could practice speaking English in order to more readily make his way out of Iran.
He told me that returning to Afghanistan was not an option — he would be killed. Our tour guide told me that the young Afghani’s statements were “scripted for the tourist trade.”
Maybe so, maybe not; it is truly the case that Iran is providing safe harbor for about a million Afghanis and perhaps as many as 3 million Iraqis.
If US/Israel impose even stricter sanctions on Iran, as Howard Berman is leading over 350 Congresspersons to do, does anyone rationally think that the situation in Afghan will improve?
Truncate that question — when the Israel lobby is involved, does anyone in the US Congress rationally think?
Pingback: Now do you feel better about our plans in Afghanistan? | Afghanistan Today
I’m pretty sure it ain’t a hoax. The truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.
If you haven’t seen it, ZeFrank’s brief video analysis of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires is terrific:
http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,45950304001_1931954,00.html
I heard one talking head on television say that we could pay the 40% of unemployed Afghanis $4 billion a year to rebuild their own country. But instead, because of the neocon zionist influence we will spend well over $400 billion to destroy people and things and destabilize the country further … but israel gets more destabilization in the region and the politically-c0nnected defense contractors get billion$ more in profits. What an ugly mess.
What in the hell does Israel have to do w/ Afghanistan?
Pipelinistan. Look it up. Pepe Escobar is on top of it.
A principal grievance that al Qaeda uses to appeal to fellow Muslims is Israel’s occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The people there know how to connect the dots, even if people here haven’t learned how to. The US occupation of Afghanistan and our drone attacks against Pakistanis do not distract them from the fact that US taxpayer dollars are the bankroll Israel needs to kill off the Palestinians.
Phil,
This first surfaced on the Rachel Maddow Show. She claimed it as an exclusive. The producers got it from our people in Afghanistan.
From a review of, With Zeal and With Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775-1783
“The author demonstrates that British failure in the war was not due to their tactics, but rather their inability to win the fight for ‘hearts and minds,’ in part due to the very effective political and social controls established by the Patriot movement. In short, the American Revolution was one in which the better army was capable of winning numerous ‘hollow victories,’ which yielded no strategic or political benefits.”
The US clearly has a better army than its enemy in Afghanistan, even if you exclude the negligible effort of Karzai’s forces.
After 8 years there has been a failure to capture the hearts and minds, if that was ever the goal. Obama has changed the mission and now recognizes US occupying forces are there for us alone and not for any foolish promises made in the past to the people of Afghanistan.
Sending 30,000 more soldiers pours gasoline on the ever growing funeral pyre of Afghanistanis and Americans. This failed effort will become all the more bloody for both sides made evident in the growing desperation of those Americans sent to fight. Because Obama, the generals, the Senators, and the Congressmen can’t afford to lose face, there must be sacrifice.
This looks really confusing to me, and when I try to zoom in it expands to way larger than the size of my monitor. Can someone give me a little summary of what this is and what is problematic about it?
I think what’s problematic about it, chiefly, is that it is physically impossible to give a little summary about it.
robin, I think you already nailed it: “confusing,” “expands,” “way larger than,” etc. At this point in the decline of all its former manufacturing might, and amidst increasingly skeptical international creditors, the U.S. economy desperately needs a war, any war, and it’s the Pentagon’s and corporate media’s charge to define a coherent objective and refined methodology for the unseemly chaos and barbaric slaughter. Enter that lovely chart, or “hairball” as Phil has appropriately titled the mouseover. It is a fucking joke, and the American taxpayer and Afghan peasant are the butt of it. Print it out, wipe your ass with it, and send it in with your taxes next April 15th.
LOL. Thank you.
It takes complex logic, circuitous rationale and sophistry to justify oppression and mass murder by such an advanced civilization over an undeveloped one.