Afghanistan: Rationality Questions Insanity of War

Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD.

 “We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and it will Help Bankrupt us. One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan's modern history -- to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947…..”           

(Chalmers Johnson.  Dismantling the Empire - America’s Last Best Hope: 8/2010).

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If you ask the American leaders and few of their seasonally hired European bootlickers - what are they doing in Afghanistan other than killing the innocents and bombing the silent historic graveyards?  None of them can offer a rational explanation to justify the decade old warmongering and occupation of that poor and helpless nation. Their terminology of peace and security makes no sense, out of the nonsense. Obama administration is pushing President Hamid Karzai to sign a strategic agreement enabling the US troops to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely after its planned withdrawal in 2014. Ironically, Hamid Karzai lacks legitimacy and constitutional power to do that as his terms of presidency will expire during the summer of 2014. The other day, Ms. Suzan Rice, Obama’s Security chief, reiterated the threat, if Karazi fails to sign the deal, it could undermine the promised US 2 billion or so aid to Afghanistan. Undoubtedly, America is using money to buy time and influence.  Why should America keep its troops in Afghanistan when President Obama wanted to end the Afghan tragedy as he publicly declared since he took office in 2009? Was Obama lying to the American people and to the humanity about ending the bogus war in Afghanistan?  All insane warriors have acted the same way throughout history and Obama is no exception until such people meet their self-geared tragic end and delusional imagined triumph and glory out of the Afghan pains, ruins and sufferings of the innocent people.  America and its European agents of influence could never justify their war and occupation of Afghanistan in any rational context.  The ultimate aim of the Afghan war is to move gradually into Pakistan and destroy its nuclear arsenal which the US and its allies view as a place of harboring terrorism and threat to US global hegemony when seen in the growing Pakistan- China relations. Pakistani paid agents - political-military bootlickers follow the US dictum as they get cash dollars and so called military aid (dry milk, used clothes and obsolete military hardware) to stay afloat. History is living, not a dead entity of human conscience.  Pakistani political culture is on flame because of the American intransigence in neighboring Afghanistan and continued drone attacks on the civilian population.

Hamid Karazi - a former US hired manager of a Oil company in California, will ultimately succumb to US argument and sign the deal if and when the US will deliver millions of dollars cash to him and his supporters.  Kabul is a highly insecure place and nobody can protect Karzai and the American troops from the wrath of God, and the anti-American sentiments amongst the masses of Afghanistan.  America and its paid allied went to Afghanistan as uninvited guests and since 2001, they have failed to gain any logical position of strength to fight the Talaban- the natives of Afghanistan defending their homeland against foreign aggression. Obama is not that stupid to risk his life and security but appears smart and tactful at least on paper and in his protected outlook, fighting and killing people thousands of miles away from his drawing room without any repercussions to the self- his inner soul and human conscience.  Last year, reportedly one US soldier went out at night time to kill 17 innocent children and women in an Afghan remote village. If it had happened in the US as was the Sandyhook, Ohio school massacres in December 2012, American news media would have mentioned their whereabouts and ages for the record.  Strange as it was, the US mainstream news media never bothered to ask the names of the 17 children  and women massacred by its soldier, the children birthdates, about their toys if they had, and how they were massacred while asleep - something the US media is used to portraying in its journalistic cultural context. You cannot blame the US military psyche either because they are doing a job. George Bush ordered them to invade poverty-stricken and already Russian war-torn Afghanistan, and US troops are faithfully carrying out the job of killing innocent people, and this is what Obama calls the invincible armies. Under the NATO, the Western allied nations use media as a weapon to manage innovative battlefield and defeat the perceived enemies in lands far away that the US military minds could not understand - its people, their psychology or cultural identity. One of the biggest hurdles that American strategists face is that they are disconnected and ignorant of the social, moral and civilizational culture of Afghanistan and Iraq, and failed to comprehend its vitality in fighting effectively and successfully. To put a pattern to the context, first it was the US marines photos of pissing on the dead Afghani corps, then unknowingly burning of the Muslim Holy Book Qura’an, and later the added new massacres of the innocent civilians. American commanders in Afghanistan offered apologies as if they were not aware what the Qura’an means to the Afghan people. They assume Afghan people must be dumb and dull but that is not the case, they are well informed and civilized human beings. The American history narrates that Thomas Jefferson, the architect of the American Constitution had three volumes of the Holy Al-Qura’an in his library that he used to devise the legal, moral and ethical stipulations for the American Constitution.  Does it mean that the American populace is not aware of their own history?

The US armed forces are trained and represent the US culture of thinking, sense of freedom and liberty and justice, moral values and political indoctrination, strangely, why should the Commander-in-Chief be ‘saddened’ for these latest atrocities against the people who never harmed nor threatened the US national interests. Does insanity and hypocrisy have another name and meaning?  To invest in favorite perversion, torture, corruption and massacre of the innocent people happening frequently to portray sadistic political governance, and the world can watch the bloody atrocities with deafening silence and inhuman complacency but what kind of glorification would it produce for the future generations to understand the sacred norms of humanity?  Deliberate massacres of the innocents need no explanation or psychological clarification, massacre is massacre. To distort the facts and misinform the public, media outlets bring hourly paid intellectuals and subject experts to discuss the war stigma and psychological imprints on the soldiers leading them to commit massacres. The media exercise shields the actual crimes and creates TV imagery on screen as if it is unreal, no blood - no killing, all unknowingly and “a lone marine”- the Obama explanatory note. The informed and conscientious global community wonders, when rationality would replace the drudgery, hypocrisy of wars and killings of the innocent people?  History will judge the people and leaders by their actions, not by their claims.  Nobody can tell the informed global community, why do 18-25 American war veterans commit suicide daily in abundant corridors and drug addicted dusty hallways of the US public backyards?

There is growing trend of “Big Thinking” in American politics that often overwhelms the powerful nation to drain out its abilities to see the mirror for a critical self-analysis and reconstruction of policy and strategic behavior in a situation of primary crisis management conflict resolution.  Throughout its two centuries of evolving history, the US government has been continuously engaged in more than 220 wars.

Robert Pape, Professor, University of Chicago's, and author of the Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, 2005, points out the alarmingly failing record of the US Empire in war engagements:

"America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today's world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony."

Late Chalmers Johnson (Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope: 8/2010) one of America’s well known contemporary intellectuals warned the US political leaders:

“We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and it will Help Bankrupt us. One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan's modern history -- to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947…..”

Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, points out Chalmers Johnson, that the last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union's, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.

Do the American politicians and military strategists THINK like the common folks who love peace, freedom and liberty?  Professor P.L Thomas (Furman University, South Carolina) speaks out loud and clear (“Obama's Failed Hope and Change: "Forget the Politicians. They are Irrelevant.”  Speak Out: 9/04/2013):

Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice! You have owners! They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear….They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.

What is the cure to raging indifference and cruelty to the interests of the people of the United States and for that matter to the whole of the mankind?  Looking at the Nature of Things, the universe encompasses many challenging opposites - time, space, sun, moon, gravitational rotation of the earth, fire, water, air, sand, floods, earthquakes, tsunami, disasters, explosions, wars, destructions, bombing and all that can be imagined to destroy the mankind and endanger the continued movement of the splendid, inspiring and harmonious Universe. How it is that Man - a creation of God cannot co-exist with fellow Man?  Is Man by nature a blood thirsty creature?  Perhaps, the invisible forces of culture and environment and societal indoctrinations frame and shape that mindset.

To change the world, it is incumbent upon the intellectuals, academics, visionaries, poets, philosophers and thinking hub of the informed global community to perceive and articulate new and creative ideas, new political imagination for the 21^st century organizations to be functional for the people, by the people and accountable to the supremacy of the people’s will. Thus facilitating opportunities for dialogue and reason to deal with issues of national and global conflicts, competing economic and political discords, freedom, justice, human rights, and to invent new terminologies of diplomacy, peacemaking and co-existence between Man, the Humanity and the encompassed Universe. Peace and global security are not the properties or the exclusive domains of any superpowers, UNO or the Security Council or corporate entity. The global mankind enjoins rational optimism to see the ideas and ideals of peace and human security as it’s own collectively, not possession of the few.

One major factor encouraging the global superpowers to go freely and unchallenged out of their own hemisphere to far fetched lands and commit massacres and destroy human habitats, is the obvious corrupt system of global peace and security operated by the UNO. It is nothing more than a debating club overwhelmed by the few – the five obsolete global powers at the UN Security Council to claim legitimacy to rule the nations of the world. The UNO is in a desperate need of change and reformation,. If not perhaps a new initiative is to be taken by global thinkers to plan and evolve anew International Institution of systematic credibility and legitimacy by the people, of the people and for the people. The abstract notion of European State has lost its relevance and meanings.

Time and encompassing opportunities warrant New Thinking, New Leaders and New Visions for change and the future-making. But change and creativity and new visions will not emerge out of the obsolete, redundant and failed authoritarianism of the few insane and egoistic leaders. None have the understanding of neither peace nor respect for human life and co-existence in a God-given splendid and living Universe. To challenge the deafening silence of the US and Europeans for global peace and security, the humanity must find ways and means to look beyond the obvious and troublesome horizons dominated by the few warlords and continued to be plagued with massacres, barbarity against human culture and civilizations, destruction of the habitats and natural environment as if there were no rational being and people of Reason populating the God-created beautiful Universe. The informed and mature global community looks towards those thinkers, educated and honest proactive leaders enriched with coherent unity of moral, spiritual, intellectual and physical visions and abilities to be instrumental to rescue it from the planned encroachment of the few global warlords. 

To sign a strategic deal with America at this juncture of the allied clear military defeat in Afghanistan, it will be a major error of judgment and irresponsible behavior on the part of the Karzai government. He will be out of office shortly and has no authority from the masses to comfort America for its aggression and to maintain continued occupation. The Kabul Jirga (people’s gathering) was a hired and hurriedly arranged set-up for the Western media outlets and Obama administration to claim some element of legitimacy in its policy adventure. Rationality wants answer and clear commitments to phase-out the insanity of the treacherous war and create a culture of normalcy to phase-in a legitimate government of the people of Afghanistan including those of the Talaban and support its functional stability.  The American- led occupation has articulated frightening trends in crimes, moral and social decadence and ultimate collapse of the Afghan people and culture. Its direct and dire impacts on the emerging chaos and disorder are visible in neighboring Pakistan. Unless America in collaboration with another Pakistani-rival nation plans to occupy Pakistan, there is no logical discourse for the US to keep its Rapid Deployment Forces in Afghanistan. If George Bush – the indicted criminal for the Iraq war, was to be questioned, Ben Laden is already killed and there is no obvious political reason to stay in Afghanistan and get its own troops to kill innocent people and be killed.   Aggressors never help to develop nation, they go-in there to destroy the people.

William Boardman (Is “America a country at war with an Illusion.” Information Clearing House: 8/19/2013), offers a rational insight into American psyche of continued warmongering:

 “We are waging war on terrorism even as we embody terrorism. No wonder we seem sometimes to be at war with ourselves, and have been for most of the 21st century….. No American under 12 Has Lived in a Country at Peace…whatever the U.S. government knows, or thinks it knows, is not widely shared with most of its citizens….. The American Enemies List Is Decided Anonymously and Secretly.”