Today's Afghanistan Propaganda

Note: I was going to use the Moody's "Go Now" for this post, but then I found this video by Tigertown, and I fell in love with it. Just an unreconstructed hippie at heart, I guess. (Furthermore, "Tigertown" is the current appellation of the section of the coastal California city I lived in when I was just a wee tot... so the name of the band is evocative to me.)


This comes courtesy of the AP -- well, "courtesy of" since the AP tends to lack even human decency much of the time -- but I heard the framing yesterday on NPR:

Apparently Hamid Karzai gave a speech after the blowsy and stupid sounding Leon Panetta left Afghanistan in which he politely suggested that foreign troops should get out of the rural areas of Afghanistan forthwith and return to their bases. According to The Best Available Minds, however:

The demands from the Natives that NATO troops should pull out of villages and return to their bases "represent new setbacks to America's strategy for ending the 10-year-old war."

Besides which, he didn't really mean it.

Note how cleverly worded the assertion is. The demand from the Afghan goverment (such as it is) mirrors and parallels what happened in Iraq as the Imperial Forces were being removed: the troops were withdrawn from daily interaction with the IDs (Iraqi Devils) and confined to their enormous and growing bases, with only occasional joint operations conducted from time to time to ensure the Natives understood who was boss and who was still in charge. But in this case, the demand that the foreign troops get out of rural areas and leave policing them to the Afghan authorities (such as they are) -- which makes perfectly rational sense -- is met with the assertion that doing so will jeopardize the "strategy" for ending the war. Really? The implication being that Karzai is trying to prolong the war. Well, isn't that a turn about?

Furthermore, once again Karzai demanded an end to night raids -- which Panetta, at his blowsiest and stupidest, defended as necessary to "defeat al Qaida."

(Note on Panetta. He really does not seem to be up to this. Maybe he should think about returning to his think tank on the Pacific.)

Teri49 in comments links to an Afghan news source that says that after investigation and interviews with survivors and witnesses, an Afghan parliamentary probe has determined that the killing spree was conducted by two separate squads, totaling as many as twenty American soldiers. No matter how much the military lies about such things and tries to cover up the facts, it will not be possible to keep the true story from coming out eventually. As a rule, most of those who follow these matters know well enough that oppressed peoples (ie: the victims) tend to tell the truth as best they know it, whereas the perpetrators do not.

So. We'll see. But the notion that getting the foreign troops out of the rural areas and ending the night raids will somehow interfere with "ending the war" is laughable. It's as if the military is bound and determined to de-legitimize itself come hell or high water.

There's spin and then there is horseshit.

Is This The End of Empire?

I've said many, many times that the period we're in is not the End of Empire, it is the much closer to the beginning of a Neo-Imperialist Era. It was inevitable given the Neo-Con and Neo-Lib triumph over the Boogey-Man of "Socialism."

Now we're hearing lots and lots of chatter in the system about an accelerated withdrawal from the Afghanistan clusterfuck, thanks in large measure to the Latest Massacre, and there is an almost overwhelming inevitability factor to all the Pull Out Now! yakkity-yak. This is more propaganda, make no mistake. The Busheviks didn't pioneer the tactic, but they certainly made their own, and it worked for them through their whole dismal reign. The Obamanauts are no slouches when it comes to using "inevitability" tactics, either (they did it to Hillary masterfully, for example.)

There is considerable push back on the Pull Out Now! faction, however. Today's Propaganda installment from the WaPo seems to be saying what I suggested in a comment yesterday: since the Natives aren't too restless over this little "accident," it will all blow over, no harm, no foul. The Occupation and Plunder will continue unchanged. Killing and plundering the Natives is all in a day's Imperial Work. Burning of Holy Writ, however, is a capital offense according to Native standards, and in the future, our Warriors will want to watch that shit.

What we are probably witnessing is the outward appearance of an internal squabble between gung-ho Warriors in the Pentagon and Pragmatists in the White House. The Warriors never seem to want to leave the Battle Space (which has metastasized to include Everywhere Around the World) within which to kill and destroy at pleasure. The Warriors seem to have no other mentality at all. On the other hand, the Pragmatists say, 1) it's too costly to keep troops on the ground overseas in large numbers; 2) it's not necessary to do so in order to maintain hegemony; 3) the Warriors fuck up too much to ensure the efficient exploitation of colonial outposts.

On an elemental emotional level, it's likely that what drove this Massacre -- among so many massacres -- was vengeance, pure, stark, blood soaked revenge. The Natives took it upon their foolish selves to protest the "accidental" burning of the Korans; some of the more uppity of them took it upon themselves to kill a number of American troops and officers in (apparent) retaliation for this "accident." Several dozen of the riotous Afghans were shot during protests, but the troop and officer killings were not avenged -- the way any such action by colonial populations must be. It is the way Empires work and have worked from the first. Imperial Overlords cannot allow the Natives to recognize that they do have considerable power over their captors and exploiters. Any sign of Native threat to Imperial power must be put down swiftly and brutally, and any deadly act of Native resistance must be avenged, with blood and fire. This did not look like the act of a madman gone berserk. It had all the earmarks of a punitive raid.

Back in the day, Imperial forces were generally up front about what was going on, why they were punishing resistance, and the necessity of "Teaching those Wogs a Lesson." It didn't matter a whit if innocents were slaughtered in their beds. Better it should be so. That's how Empire is done. There are so many Natives and so few Imperial forces. The only way to keep the Wogs in their Place is to come down on them with immense cruelty and suffering every time they get out of line. It's the only way. Do it enough, and the Wogs learn their Place and stay in it.

I remember during the earlier years of the Iraq Occupation, horrible things were happening to innocent Iraqis all the time. There were numerous incidents of Iraqis being shot to pieces at checkpoints for not being sufficiently ...something. It was never really clear why all these hundreds of Iraqis were being shot at checkpoints -- except that the troops at the checkpoints were scared of them, and they could shoot them with impunity as long as they said they were "scared." The military justification was that the Wogs needed to learn to follow commands at these checkpoints, and if enough of them were killed for not doing so, they'd get the idea.

Something that happened all too often was that military convoys would charge through traffic jams (which were frequent because of all the checkpoints) by literally crashing into and driving over occupied vehicles caught in the jam, killing and injuring who knows how many people inside the vehicles. Iraqis were horrified at this consistent behavior of their occupiers -- the Turks and the British were never this cruel. Of course, the indifference of the Imperial American Occupiers was routine.

Sometimes when a convoy encountered traffic, they'd just start shooting. They've done it in Afghanistan as well. No doubt thousands of innocents have been killed through these actions.

But that's how Empires work. There is no interest in or concern for the well being of the subject peoples. At all.

In our latest forays, there is hardly any recognition that they are "people" -- they're barely considered to be objects.

Withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan is likely to occur sooner rather than later, simply because it's not worth the aggravation to keep them there. Killing and exploitation can be done by remote control and through surrogates these days.

It will not be a withdrawal like the one from Vietnam. Afghanistan will not be abandoned, any more than Iraq has been abandoned. No, it will be operated as a colonial outpost from the blast-wall-surrounded "diplomatic" facilities in Kabul, much as the British did after they "withdrew" from Afghanistan back in the day, and the killing and exploitation will continue with somewhat less annoyance from and by the Warriors.

Some of the push back on the Pull Out Now! meme is Pentagon Panic. The relevance of a massive Imperial military force is under siege.

We live in interesting times, but it is not the End of Empire.

Today's Propaganda

It took them a while to get the Wurlitzer cranked up, but boy is it going full blast now.

Yikes.

I opened the morning newswipe to see two stories on the front page, the first from the WaPo having to do with the brain injury of the alleged "lone gunman" in the Afghan Massacre Affair, the second (and smaller) from the NYT having to do with the fact that some gibbering Native "person" wants Americans to leave Afghanistan for some reason. Oh, something to do with an American killing his whole family and burning the corpses. Or something. What. Ever.

Very, very far into the second story, this Native "person" is reported to claim (along with a number of Afghan witnesses) that the massacre was conducted by more than one soldier, but of course the Times is quick to follow up with an anonymous diplomatic denial, followed by the statement that what witnesses report as more soldiers involved in the killing and helicopter cover while they went wilding, was actually a helicopter sent to ferry out the five wounded Afghanis. You have to probe a bit in the other story, but the additional soldiers witnesses saw are implied -- not stated -- to have been members of a "search party" dispatched from the base to find the "lone gunman."

Despite the fact that the story of the slaughtered Afghan family and the survivors is truncated and filled with statements from unnamed American officials, the fact that it appeared at all -- and right next to a story about the sad state of veteran's health care, almost as if to excuse the actions of this "lone gunman" is a sort of progress, I guess. Typically, the stories about the victims don't come out until long after sympathy for their attackers and brutalizers is established. In this case, sympathy for the victims and at least one of the attackers is established all but simultaneously. And once again, the upshot is that Americans must leave that failed colonial outpost, the sooner the better, and they had better start concentrating on the serious damage that has been inflicted on soldiers and Americans in general because of that seemingly endless and futile conflict.

Somebody posted on another site that this was "the My Lai Moment" of the Afghanistan campaign. What may not be realized is that Americans didn't know about My Lai in (almost) real time. The American public didn't find out about the massacre (which happened in March of 1968) until November of 1969. While My Lai was a monstrous atrocity, the Indochinese War went on as if it hadn't happened. The initial reports that were released in 1968 were simply lies -- something about all these Viet Cong getting killed in a fierce firefight. The lies from the generals and the officers in Vietnam were so constant the press called their daily briefings "The Five O'Clock Follies." Colin Powell was assigned to make sure the official story was cleansed of any question about who got killed at My Lai and how.

By the time Americans found out about My Lai toward the end of 1969, the ground war was winding down, troops were being withdrawn and "Vietnamization" was fully in play. The air war continued, of course, and intensified, but for all intents and purposes, the US was preparing to leave.

Also, ultimately, 26 soldiers faced criminal charges in the case of My Lai, though only Lt. Calley was convicted. He served three and a half years under house arrest. His defense? "Just following orders."

It looks like only the one brain damaged soldier will face charges, and if he has an even half way decent counsel, he won't even go to trial.

I could be wrong, but something tells me a deal is in the works with the Taliban to put and end to this thing once and for all, and reparations are being assembled as we speak.

The story of the soldier was accompanied in my paper by the picture of Leon Panetta looking blowsy and stupid.

Enough.

September 11 and The Narrative

I'm in a motel room in Kingman, AZ. That morning 10 years ago, I was in a hotel room in Seattle, WA. Travel has been a consistent part of my life for most of my life, so it doesn't seem strange at all that I would be away from home when Something Happens.

What's strange, as I watch the coverage of the 10th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on MSNBC, is the persistence of The Narrative. Narrative is not just Myth, it is the Whole Story now. There is nothing but The Narrative. And even more than The Narrative is the insistence that "everything changed" that day ten years ago, while everything is being done today to demonstrate continuity. Bush and Obama and Clinton have all been out and about, and the commentary is as if Bush is still in office, the pivot around which all else revolves.

"Everything changed" on that day ten years ago. They talk about "resets" -- that the events of September 11, 2001, "reset" America's relations with itself, and "reset" the American relations with the rest of the world. That's true enough. For a brief moment, the trivialities and obsessions of the past -- particularly the media's summer obsessions with sharks and missing white women -- were set aside while the shock of the attacks was endlessly chewed over...

Of course we know that sharks and missing white women would return to the summer schedule soon enough. The shame of the Chandra Levy/Gary Condit media obsession -- and the eventual denouement that hardly anyone remembers -- should have put the likes of Nancy Grace out of business forever, but if anything, the events following that summer of 2001 have only reinforced the warped and twisted freakishness of Grace and her fantasies of persecution and prosecution. The major mass media has gotten far worse, in other words, and worse in ways that make it less and less likely that the public will ever again be an active participant in government.

That's the worst part of the change that has taken place since the attacks of 9/11/2001. Our Government -- well, what used to be Our Government -- has retreated behind ever more secure barricades. In many cases, it is no longer accessible or even knowable to the American People. The participation of the American People in their government is now distinctly unwelcome -- except in the form of pre-packaged/pre-processed "movements" like the TeaBaggers, who simply scream or threaten mindlessly whatever they are told to.

You would think that the correct approach to attacks like these would be to make public participation in governance even more of necessity, but it has become a near impossibility at the Federal level, and it is becoming progressively more difficult at every other level of government.

Nothing seems to penetrate the barricades any more. It's as if nothing will be allowed to ever again.

It's as if the government used the attacks as an excuse to finalize its divorce from The People -- a divorce tendered with the lawless intervention of the Supreme Court into the election of 2000.

Even the most autocratic and totalitarian governments of the Bad Old Days were seemingly more accessible, in many cases more directly accessible (as in the case of Versailles under the Ancien Regime), than Our Government today. So something fundamental about the relationship between government and the people has changed.

Not "everything" has changed, but that has changed.

Another change related to the barricading of government away from the People is the capture of government by the financial sector. Many of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks were of course financiers; that's a big part of what went on in the World Trade Center, and what those people in those towers did for a living was a big part of what spurred the attacks. We can't pretend that's not so. We can't pretend they all were "innocent." They weren't.

They were exploiters and destroyers by trade. And the transfer of the Treasury to them began almost immediately after the attacks, such that now, nothing can be done without their approval and consent, and more and ever more of the wealth of nations -- all nations -- must be relentlessly poured into their maw. Is it atonement? I don't know. But we -- the People -- have no say in what more they will demand and extract from us and our progeny. Masters of the Universe, indeed.

I've had some conflicted feelings about the Memorial waterfalls at the WTC site.

Intellectually, it makes perfect sense. Emotionally, it's... tough. The memorial represents constant falling. Never-ending. Every minute of every day. "Never forget". What will it mean to those who didn't witness the events being memorialized?

Will they remember: Coups are easy. Revolution is hard.