When you criticize someone for using a shabby, cultish product to cure cancer, you are not being objectively pro-cancer. Similarly, if you criticize the shabby cultish foreign policy that got the U.S. into Afghanistan, you are not being objectively pro-Taliban.
“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads
Wednesday, August 18, 2021
sloppy imperialism 2: what it means to be objectively anti-taliban
The end of sloppy imperialism? The Afghanistan experience
For thirty some years, I have had my ears filled with Americans - mostly white guys who of course never fought there - saying that we were winning goddamit in Vietnam. That we lost must be due to some evil stab in the back. These peeps evidently think that the 388,000 tons of Napalm dropped on Vietnam was just not enough - another spoonful of sugar and we woulda won!
A similar crackbrained meme has sprung up, inevitably, about the 20 year Afghanistan war. Another thousand soldiers, brave Americans, put on the mountain passes and presto chango, the wonderful democratic government of Afghanistan, our ally (or ventriloquist dummy) who we respect so much, but did exclude from our negotiations with the Taliban, would have shown the world that it could eliminate illiteracy in another measly half a century, or maybe seventy five years.
I've grown old, I've grown old/I shall keep the cuffs of my trousers rolled, or something like that. And so it goes - nothing is more dangerous than educating an American in international relations at some Ivy League school and plunking him or her into a think tank. It poses a danger to peoples everywhere
As we watch the gnashing of teeth among the elite who, twenty years ago, cheered on the invasion and asked no questions.
Monday, August 16, 2021
America - if we pretend it is so, it must be so!
America's idiocracy rolls on. This NYT sub is a great expression of the lack of reality that has seized this country, from the anti-vaxxer Trump won contingent to the Trump was Putin's puppet we must support our freedom lovin' pals, like Saudi Arabia contingent.
Sunday, August 15, 2021
Look back in Anger - Afganistan November 25, 2001 to August 15, 2020
Ah, how it all comes
back!
Long before “fake news”
was a cry to rally the yahoos at presidential candidate rallies, it was a quite
m.o. of the media during the Bush golden years. My blog, limited inc, which
goes back twenty years, contains a treasure of fools gold culled from the asinine,
warmongering, fakin’ and lyin’ press – mostly in the realm of print. I am not
and never have been a listener to news on the radio or a viewer of news on tv.
Eccentrically, I consider tv one of the worst platforms for news, and radio is,
to me, best when playing music, second best when doing drama or standup or some
funky shit, and bottomlessly bad doing news. Of course, I’ve heard that in its
time, Pacifica radio was primo, but that’s hearsay.
NPR, though, I did
hear enough of in the Bush golden years to realize that it viewed its job as
transforming hysterical America ueber alles-ism into dulcet toned America ueber
alles-ism.
So much of news is in
the non-reporting. What were the headlines on November 24, 2001? For the NYT,
it was a curious headline: Pakistan again said to evacuate allies of Taliban. The story, by Dexter Filkins, begins with a
graf that tells us that Pakistani airplanes are evacuating Pakistani soldiers
who fought with the Taliban. Not exactly a warshaking scenario, right? What Filkins
didn’t say, and what was not headlined and burned into the American psyche,
with all its peppy get up ‘n kill them Taliban, is that the evacuation was not
just of Pakistani soldiers.
Here's a long quote
from an intelligent assessment of what happened in Kunduz:
“The request was made
by Musharraf [Pakistan’s president] to Bush, but Cheney took charg- a token of
who was handling Mussharraf at the time. The approval was not shared with
anyone at State… until well after the event. Musharraf said Pakistan need to
save its dignity and its valued people. Two planes were involved, which made
several sorties a night over several nights. They took off from air bases in
Chitral and Gilgit in Pakistan’s northern areas, and landed in Kunduz, where
the evacuees were waiting on the tartmac. Certainly hundreds and perhaps as
many as one thousand people escaped. Hundreds of ISI officers, Taliban
commandos and foot soldiers belonging to the IMU (Islamic movement of
Uzbeckistan) and Al Qaeda personnel boarded the planes. What was sold as a minor
extraction turned into a major air bridge.” - from 102 Days of War by Yaniv Barzilai
Well, the selling went
down all right, signed by Dexter Filkins and the NYT. The voices that told us
that Afghanistan’s Taliban was not down for the count, as its central commanders
were saved, weren’t just mocked – the news didn’t give enough information to make
mocking possible. Still, some got it. Ted Rall, writing in the Village Voice in
December, 1981, under the headline “How we lost Afghanistan” already got it right
by doing basic research. But the mainstream press had its story. And, as America
is always just,naturally it attracts the best and brightest as its allies.
Thus, when Musharraf retired as Pakistan’s president in 2008, he was given a
tongue washing by the NYT:
“A commando at heart, and a man of often
impetuous decisions, Pervez Musharraf ended Pakistan’s support of the Taliban
leadership in Afghanistan after 9/11 and pledged to help the United States,
becoming one of Washington’s most crucial allies in the campaign against
terrorism.”
This is fake news with a bullet, my
friends. Even the NYT knows it, so in one of those “walks with a schizo” that
tells you that the editors at the paper are nervous about leaving reality for
neverneverland entirely, they quote journalist Ahmed Rashid, whose words are modified
to the format. Best not shock the Americans entirely:
“Musharraf
continued to provide cover to the Taliban, but still managed to convince the
Americans for many years that it was not a double game,” said Ahmed Rashid, a
Pakistani expert on the Taliban and the author of “Descent into Chaos,” a book
that details the relationship between Mr. Musharraf and Washington. “It was a
remarkable feat of balancing on the tightrope.”
Definitely that.
And a remarkable feat of ensuring that the leadership of the Taliban escape
unharmed and have the territory and supplies to go back. But that the U.S. is
that pig ignorant, that Bush was a disaster on every level, that the slimy
administration lied and lied with the help of the shiny centrist press – well,
that is not a story anybody wants to headline, surely.
Ah, the memories!
Rarely do you catch the NYT and the pseudo-liberal media in real lies, since they
hedge the falsification. Thus, fake news instead of lying liars news. But
sometimes they have to admit to lies in the interest of empire. From my blog, I
reach back to the interesting case of Robert Levinson, which occurred at the end
of the Golden Bush years. Levinson “disappeared” in Iran in 2007. The NYT was
on the case, and for seven years kept up the heat: Iran had captured an innocent
American businessman! And like all evil Islamicists, they put him in a dungeon.
A businessman who made a border crossing mistake!
Well, after seven
years the AP reported that Levinson was no businessman, but was a CIA agent. It
was rather obvious that he was one: his family was in fact suing the CIA in
court. So the public editor of the NYT, which was back when they had one, went into
the case and found that the NYT had not had the wool pulled over their eyes. In
fact, they’d always known the man they labelled an innocent American businessman
was a CIA agent. But they held back the info not because they are in the
service of the American establishment’s foreign policy – no, the answer will
bring tears to your eyes, its so romantic and sweet. As explained by the editor at the time, Jill
Abramson:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/public-editor/a-missing-spy-and-the-right-to-know.html?ref=thepubliceditor&_r=0,
Holding a story entirely is
“a very rare thing,” she said. “The more usual situation is to withhold a level
of detail, and those decisions are excruciating.”
“In this case, Ms.
Abramson said, the reason for holding back the story was not because of a
government request about national security, but in deference to Mr. Levinson’s
family. “What caused us to hold the story was their profound worry that he
would be killed.”
Of course, that profound
worry didn’t prevent them from outing dear old dad themselves. At the same
time, Levinson’s disappearance, as Abramson might have known, was being used as
yet another reason to attack Iran. But come hell or high water, the NYT, which
would never ever ever ever ever hold back information because the government
told them to – after all, the whole point is to inculcate a set of responses so
the government doesn’t have to do that – but only for sweet reasons of family
love.
Ah, the memories. And the
forgetting – the long forgetting I’ve tried to do of America in the 2000-2010
period. Alas, what you forget can kill you – or others. In droves.
Jack Shafer, immortal moron, and our last twenty years
I have a long memory for stupid media. Luckily, in the 2000-2003 period, it was all gathered together in one place: Slate! Today, let us celebrate Jack Shafer. Frankly, Shafer is an idiot and a valient member of the uncancelable media club. He goes from place to place within the DC circuit, always wrong, always smug, always promoted.
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