Wednesday, December 29, 2021

I Wish It Wasn't Thus But We MUST Learn The Lessons Of The Worse Than Futile Twenty-Years-War

I READ FORMER BRIT PRIME MINISTER Gordon Brown article in The Guardian decrying the humanitarian catastrophe that Afghanistan under Taliban and continuing war-lord rule is and have no idea of how he thinks "the West" could possibly do anything to improve things that twenty years of Western propped up governance of the country, costing trillions of dollars - much of it stolen - couldn't do.   

As I was reading it and its condemnation-exhortation of "the West" for not preventing what may be a catastrophe outside of our control AS, INDEED, MOST OF AFGHANISTAN WAS NOT IN "OUR" CONTROL FOR MOST OF THE PERIOD OF PROPPING UP THE ALLEGED CENTRAL GOVERNMENT,  I kept wondering, why is Gordon Brown not haranguing the Saudi and other oil rich oligarchies of the Middle-East to provide the 4.5 billion dollars he's calling on the West to pledge, not to mention the unmentioned prospect of re-involving westerners in a country so many of them and our Afghani allies had to be emergency rescued from and some of those eligible trapped by the deadline Trump set for American withdrawal.

I deplore the humanitarian catastrophe that Taliban rule and the consequences of that, largely foreign financed religio-gangster regime have brought  BUT IT IS CLEAR FROM THE TWO DECADE LONG EXPERIMENT OF TRYING TO REFORM AFGHANISTAN IN THE WAY BROWN WANTS, THE WAY HIS GOVERNMENT WANTED WHEN IT WAS PART OF THE COALITION FIGHTING TO SUPPORT A  GOVERNMENT LARGELY OF CROOKS AND LIARS THAT IT CAN'T BE DONE.  

We have no power to do what has to be done, if there was evidence that we would have even partial success instead of the kind of futile debacle that the Bush II, Obama, Trump Twenty-Year War that Biden finished was.  We have no power to change Afghanistan to rescue it from itself or what it is under the combined force of internal warlord gangsters, foreign financed religio-fascist-gansters, the power plays of surrounding countries and billionaire gangster money from the oil cleptocracies.  

We have got to get used to the fact that a terrible, violent, ruinously expensive twenty-year experiment has shown us the fate of those being destroyed by that reality IN THAT PLACE  is not in our hands.  We have no responsibility for what happens there, now, those who drove our efforts into disastrous ruin have that responsibility, they and their backers among the gangsters of the middle east and the Afghanistan region.  That they will almost certainly not take their responsibility seriously and will suffer no consequences is beyond our control.   I think, ironically, the one person in the West who will suffer the most from it is the one man who was brave enough who, when Trump along with his cronies in the region set an arbitrary end of America's presence in Afghanistan had the courage to face what that would bring, President Biden.   He will pay the price because the media-political-economic-academic establishment have seldom seen a futile and violent and dangerous incursion into an impossible war in an economically backward (non-)country that they didn't want the United States to commit to.

If Gordon Brown, ex-PM wants to make something of it, he should be lecturing those who have some real influence within Afghanistan.  Outside attempts from the West have never done much but make things worse at worst, merely revert to the status quo ante, at best. 

We should concentrate on getting any remaining American allies trapped in that hell hole out, we have a real moral commitment to those who trusted us from the time of Bush II, Obama and Trump.  The same ones who President Biden's political and media enemies are libeling and slandering so to hurt President Biden politically.  The others, we can cry for and plead for but we really can't help them.  If they want to blame someone they should blame the Saudis and others who created the Taliban and the Pakistani and Iranian power players and their own internal gangster-warlords and the culture that sustains that hell hole situation.  We have guilt there as a result of our war there but what's always been wrong with the place isn't something we are guilty of.

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