Hoffnung for a good 2014 b.

Posted by: cloned_poster | Jan 3 2014 16:50 utc | 4

The world is full of folks getting paid to tell us that water isn’t wet. Our corporate overlords need us to stay in Afghanistan, pick a reason. Such complete horseshit.

Posted by: ben | Jan 3 2014 17:23 utc | 6

A parallel to the O’Hanlon’s Panglossian view of Western power in Afghanistan is the never-ending blame leveled in the Western press against the Syrian government for de-stabilizing the Middle East with its dirty war. The obvious never leads these stories: who is funding all these Salafi groups flying the black flag of Al Qaeda? That’s not allowed. American military planning and prowess are always celebrated, and the obvious is routinely ignored.

Posted by: Mike Maloney | Jan 3 2014 18:41 utc | 8

It’s a waste of time, what’s happening in Afghanistan. The position is lost. The parties will re-engage their politics as though the US had never been there.
I’d be open as to what changes have occurred over time. The Taliban, having lost in 2001, are now back. What else?

Posted by: alexno | Jan 3 2014 21:35 utc | 10

Thank you b about this idiot it can’t be said any better

Posted by: Kooshy | Jan 3 2014 23:35 utc | 12

There’s a delicious symmetry to Michael O’Hanlon and Barry O’Hopey Changey being on the same page.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Jan 4 2014 0:54 utc | 14

#1
You hopelessly conflated the Afghan issue, vilified the Taliban and completely missed b’s point. Read Herold’s “Afghanistan as an Empty (Resource) Space” or Torbay’s “Diminution and Development”, both are available free online and the best authentic view of the issues.
First of all, AQ is a creation of CIA during the First Afghan War, initiated by Zbigniew Brezinski during the same era the US overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran. The Soviet overthrow of Kabul was entirely predictable, as was the CIA gyning up a ‘Northern Alliance’, and ISSI-KSA gyning up a Wahhabist ‘Taliban’ in response.
So to state ‘the Taliban … have been allied with al-Qaeda, and the Saudis’ is a complete inversion of the reality, and doesn’t help the discourse. It’s famous diversion of facts. Taliban are first of all hereditary Afghans, educated in Saudi Wahhabist-funded Pakistani madrassas as cannon fodder in the First Afghan War. They are SWORN ENEMIES of AQ and the Northern Alliance groups.
Taliban were largely routed by the Soviets because of the open unprotected southern Afghan countryside. Post- First Afghan War, Northern Alliance and AQ mercenaries fought over the spoils. Every mile of road had armed bandits demanded tolls, as we experienced on our mission, stopped by bandits with AK47s. NA warlords fought over Kabul. It was the Taliban who overcame both AQ and NA as a populist movement. Anything was better than unchronicled and violently brutal post-war period, similar to what we are seeing today in Iraq.
The Taliban settled Afghan society without imposing a totally alien centralized Federal government. They restored the village strong-men, mullahs, and water-men to authority.
They stopped poppy culture and did what no Western colonist has ever been able to achieve: they rebuilt the Afghan economy and political structure into a sustainable whole.
I met several Taliban on our mission in Kandahar. They are clear-eyed patriots, businessmen, and holy warriors against the Western-Neo-Liberal-Colonialism-of-All-Human-Life-Down-the-Meat-Grinder-of-a-Global-Mafia-Corporatocracy. Everyone here knows what I’m referring to. If not, watch “Argentina’s Economic Collapse (Memoria Del Saqueo 2004)” on YouTube, for a preview of America 2016.
That’s what I meant when I responded to brian about jihadists. Taliban have been demonized and conflated with the monstrous number of mercenaries that State-CIA-IL-KSA have created. Neither the Taliban, nor the Afghan People, had ANYTHING WHATSOEVER to do with Sep11, and they have EVERY INTERNATIONAL RIGHT to throw off their occupiers.
If not for Ken Lay – Enron’s catastrophically failed India power plant project, where they desperately needed a TAPI pipeline through Afghanistan, a pipeline that the Taliban then refused to sell out their country for silver shekels for, we would still be DOING BUSINESS WITH THE TALIBAN TODAY instead of making resource war on the Afghan State.
It’s an illegal colonial war, face it. And Karzai was and is a US puppet, bought and paid for, especially by Hillary-Milliband after his 2009 reselection, bribed with $5B stolen from US Humanitarian Aid fund, bribed for AF resources, which are world-class. To his credit, Karzai took the bribes, he took the Chinese bribes, he took the Indian bribes, then awarded ALL THE RESOURCES to China and India. America got NOTHING. Ha,ha. Who wants to be the last US soldier to die defending the foreign lease holds of Chindians. Cripes!
And now it’s ‘over’, the headlines bray, although Karzai never signed the ‘Get Out of Jail’ document, and DoD never followed through with their plan to peremptorily ‘pull out’.
The AF 2014 elections are up for grabs at this point, with more than a dozen candidates. A cynically sardonic point of view would be that PNAC co-founder slash State-CIA enabled Afghan-American dual-citizen Zalmay Khalilzhad will ascend the throne, then Afghanistan as a State will collapse into another 3W neo-colonial American resource extraction asset.
I can tell you through my AF contacts everyone in their ‘intelligentsia’ has already fled the country, and there will be no serious opposition to Khalilzhad, who nominated himself, if you can imagine the full effrontery to the Afghan People, and especially the Taliban, that an End of History US-citizen PNAC hegemonist self-selects as their King. Just .. wow.
So if you were a betting person, your best bet is that the Third Afghan War will be one of deepest deceit, a Colombian-style US hegemony, the Final Solution to eliminate any and all strong-men, mullahs, water-men, local or district authority figures, then simply crush the still smoldering rebellion with ANA-ANP killing and looting as Khalilzhad directs, while US predators circle overhead like vultures over the Corpse of the Damned, as the Globalist drag-shovels strip-mine ‘The Garden of Central Asia’ into a moonscape.
Don’t ever denigrate Taliban. They have more sack in their little fingernail than any of us will ever have, as we roll over for WADC-NOVAs $15 TRILLION PERPETUAL INTEREST-ONLY DEBT FOREVER Slow Motion Apocalypse, while letting our wives become strippers and pole-dancers and crack whores, and our daughters disappear by the 10,000s every year, without a trace or care, in this every-man-for-himself ‘Last Great Hope’ Gog-Magog.
Now get to work, bitch.

Posted by: Chip Nihk | Jan 4 2014 1:35 utc | 16

“One wonders why the above media feel that they still have to promote the nonsense of such a hopelessly delusional idiot?”
They wouldn’t want to showcase a merely averagely delusional idiot, lest they find themselves hopelessly outclassed.

Posted by: guest77 | Jan 4 2014 3:24 utc | 18

Sounds like O’Hanlon’s high on Afghan (h)opium.

Posted by: saddiq | Jan 4 2014 5:34 utc | 20

floggings begin on the dc mall at noon.
1st in line is bernardo the levy followed by cubicle warrior o’hanlon then wolfowitz the spitter.
the line is long and the worthies will bleed.
not to worry about the grass enviros. the mall pool will catch the blood to be recycled into bovine and porcine food stuff.

Posted by: joe anon 1 | Jan 4 2014 19:12 utc | 22

@23
But who is the US?
I see very little evidence that this asylum is professionally staffed at the upper levels. Washington is full of factions fighting each other. Sure, everyone in the ruling class wants to rule the world, but there is nothing approaching unanimity as to how this can be done.
Since the Soviet Union was destroyed, the USA has been totally unable to adjust to a new role. Hegemony ought to have been close to automatic, but, instead of just cashing in on its “victory’ the US went nuts.
One problem was the MIC, which simply refused to allow itself to be reduced in size and influence. That isn’t surprising but it is surprising that among the leadership of the US nobody was able to put forward the case to scale back the ruinous “Defense” spending, buy goodwill internationally when it was cheap and obtainable and reassure the world that all those bases were not designed to dominate but really were for defending them against Communism.
Instead the wars were simply cranked up so that today, for no perceptible reason, the US is sponsoring wars (civil wars, AQ style jihads, pirate raids, as in Congo, coups, regime changes etc) in dozens of countries. Wherever peace breaks out the Empire or its catspaws step in. Anyone can make a list-there are wars everywhere, and everywhere else armed men, bombers and drones are lurking in the wings waiting for the tiniest excuse.
This is why, quite evidently, US influence in the world is shrinking rapidly. And the hegemony project becoming less and less realistic.
So long as the Soviet Union was there, the US had to act with the restraint of self discipline. If it didn’t, if it lost sight of its real position, as it did in Indo-China and Africa (where Cuba beat the shit out of its best auxiliaries) it came a cropper.
Without any rival all focus was lost. The US still had immense power but, for the first time since MAD had come in, now it had no excuse for not using it. It had a clear field for its military and the result was that it was shown to be a paper tiger, with the paper being watermarked and cut up into $100 bills, by the skid load, shrink wrapped and sequentially numbered.
The US won wars but only because the enemy excused itself to fight another day. And the wars it won brought it nothing but debt and the blood debt of hatred and revenge postponed.
But nobody was allowed to say so: as the triumphs piled up- the Grenadan leaders killed, the Panamanian President jailed, the Sandinistas driven onto the opposition benches, for a few years, Saddam humbled then toppled, Ghaddafi, Milosevic etc etc murdered or otherwise killed- the media went wild about the Greatest Military Machine Ever, the Ever Victorious American Army, the irresistible force wielded by the greatest strategists in history, the Caesar-Bonapartes from West Point. Men like Petraeus and McChrystal.
But where was the hegemony?
Part of the problem was that it was so inevitable that US power would dominate forever that everyone in Washington wanted to use it for their own purposes. Most notably the zionists felt that it should be used to get them the Jordan Valley and anything else that looked tasty. The euro-fascists wanted to use it to expand NATO to the very borders of Russia, to complete the Cold War project of encircling the country with missile sites, bases and a renewed Gladio force armed to the teeth. Others wanted to use the power to surround China with bases in Afghanistan, for example, and The Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Australia and even Vietnam. Then there were the “Africa is a pushover” mob.
There were and are dozens of pet projects: Somalia, looting the Congo (for Uganda and Rwanda), Yemen (for the Saudis), splitting the Sudan (for Israel and George Clooney) Colombia, Honduras, Venezuela. Perhaps Cuba. Bolivia certainly and Paraguay.
Everyone gets a wish and all wishes come true: you want war in Mexico, using gangsters armed by the DEA and trained at Fort Bragg? Sure, be Washington’s guest. Have a ball! Who cares what the Mexicans think?
You want to push Honduran campesinos aside for Palm Oil plantations? Sounds like a plan. If you need drones call us and we’ll see what we can do.
You’ve got a band leader who used to be a fan of Papa Doc who wants to introduce fascism to Haiti? Why not. Nothing simpler than to instruct the Election Commission to count him in. And when you need tear gas give us a call.
Smash Hezbollah? Why not? we’re with you 100%.
Smash Hamas? If you want to, by all means do. And sell tickets if you like: here are the bombs.
The US might be ready to destroy the world to achieve hegemony, but it is incapable of it.
It can destroy the world, maybe, but hegemony isn’t in the cards any longer.
It’s the old story: given enough rope it hangs itself. Given the freedom to do just about anything it tries to do everything, all at once.
In the end the world will have to go one step further than telling opinion pollsters that it feels the US is the biggest threat to world peace, and do something about it. Money is no longer enough: as a matter of fact the money is no longer looking as solid as it once was, it may just be paper backed by a forked tongue.
The idea that elites everywhere are ready to sell out to the US no longer applies, because the US can no longer be trusted to deliver, because, and this is the bottom line, the US ruling class no longer inspires confidence. Washington is run by election obsessed losers who offer bribes so readily only because they are all, themselves, bought, paid for and, yet, always available to a higher bidder.
Hegemony sounds nice but Hedge Funds pay better. And they offer good jobs when a guy gets tired of politics and just wants to chill with a billion in the bank.

Posted by: bevin | Jan 4 2014 22:57 utc | 24