How the US shot itself in the foot in Afghanistan

o get the “big picture” in the failed US policy in Afghanistan, you must go back at least 40 years. After Russian tanks rolled into Kabul during its Soviet invasion in 1979, the American CIA quickly sprung into action cultivating the homegrown mujahideen resistance to push back against the postmodern Bolshevik expansion. They trained the mujahideens and equipped them with shoulder-fired Stinger ground-to-air missiles that blew countless Mig-21s into smithereens over Afghan airspace. American special forces infiltrators, whose existence and operations inside Afghanistan the US government still officially denies, schooled them in the arcane science of dismantling Russian army anti-personnel mines and unexploded Russian air force bombs to repurpose into Improvised Explosive Devices or (IED).

   The irony is so thick, you can cut it with a knife.  The "McGyver" skills that the Taliban used to kill and maim 2,400 American soldiers came from the Americans. They taught these intrepid turbaned guerillas how to snatch and read Russian army maps to predict troop movement and to choose the right spots to plant these lethal IED's. Afghanistan became America's war laboratory for running combat strategy experiments on how to cripple a big military apparatus using only liliputian units seamlessly integrated in rural Afghan villages and moving in total stealth and camouflage.    Why not? America earned the combat knowhow with a collective bloody nose from the North Vietnamese. Afghanistan gave them the best opportunity to see what it feels like to be David against the Russian Goliath in a conventional war in which the US itself is not one of the contending armies. The Russian-Afghan war was one long learning moment. But it wasn't just America the mentor who was learning from these experiments. The mujahideen was paying as much close attention. 

   By all accounts the covert US intervention was a success. Leonid Breznev pulled the Soviet war machine out of Afghanistan. The retreat caused a hairline crack, at first, in the Soviet expansion block. That  crack grew with subsequent military setbacks in Poland, followed by significant political shrinkages in Eastern Europe in the run-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ultimate breakup of the Soviet Union.

  What the present day uninformed taxdollar-miser American doesn't know is that the dirt-cheap cost of this covert intervention policy  throughout the 1980s Afghan war era is ALL the cost the US had to pay to regain world political, economic and military dominance. So they can bellyache all they want now about the trillion-dollar cost of their failed “nation-building” effort finally winding up this month—these shameless cheapos—but in fact the US is ending this engagement totally in the black ink. You have to do the math across-the-board. Say nothing of the fact that US Army seabees mopping up the closure of Bagram air base dismantled, unbolted and crated every last kitchen sink from that former US military base--just like the Americans do everywhere they depart around the world. The real payoff to the US is how it monetized the global peace environment of the last four decades to fuel its post-Cold War economy, enabling it to grow so strong they had to invent business outsourcing to vent some of the excess productivity.

   The US and the Taliban are no strange bedfellows at all.  As recently as days ago only, the CIA director and some top echelon Taliban leaders sat down in a meeting in Kabul outlining the mechanics of the final US military drawdown. Of course they can talk to each other, they've been in cahoots forty years.

   After the collapse of the Soviet empire, the Moscow-sponsored Afghan puppet regime in Kabul foundered too, creating a real opportunity for the US to actually do some “nation-building.” All it had to do was keep pressing with its influence on the Taliban resistance that it helped cultivate. This largely peasant-based resistance was on the doorstep to becoming the new government, the US just had to coax it to make that   government inclusive. Unfortunately, from the perspective of an imperial power looking long-term to preserve proxy control over a regime it had set up, even the US saw an inclusive Afghan government as something that can go many different ways, sentiment-wise in the future. America may be good at exercising democracy at home but is allergic to it abroad. It prefers to prop up authoritarian but loyal and subservient regimes as those in the Philippines, Angola, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Turkey and other postmodern virtual US colonies.

   With the US paying only lip service to inclusiveness, the mujahideen showed even less interest. To say that the Afghan resistance did not subscribe to  inclusiveness on their turn at the helm of government is simply professing the realpolitik adage that oppressed classes know only two positions in life: somebody's knee on their neck or their knee on somebody's neck.  Thus the once nationalistic Afghan resistance eventually rose to become the new Establishment, or the new oppressors  whose brutal ways the US had little choice but to tacitly countenance in another one of those American dogmas: they may have turned out to be sonovabitches but they are our sonovabitches.

   The US overlooked a critical aspect of  Afghan reemergence from Russian subjugation: the element of Islamic radical fundamentalism that was the real underpinning of the Afghan resistance to Communist Russia's  systematic assault on religion. America ignored it mostly out of ignorance per se. Americans simply don't bother to understand the heathen, comfortably steeped in the dialectics of materialism—which is all the essence of its capitalist culture. So when the new Afghan order began to drift purposefully towards  Shari'ah  law radical extremism, America was caught wondering what kind of Dr. Frankenstein's monster it had created.  

  The  mujahideens morphed into the Taliban, and the Taliban became the Afghan government—at least up to 2001. So now when the US  State Department uses the term Afghan resistance, I'm not really sure I know who they're referring to.   

   In global politics, as in all human affairs, there are no permanent friends or allies, only permanent interests. The Afghan government that Breznev left behind in Kabul --a puppet regime set up by Moscow comprising mostly of Afghan collaborators-- owed no debt to the ragtag guerillas who had driven the Russians away. So, no, the term “inclusive government" meant nothing to them, either. Instead of embracing them as patriots and liberators, they treated the mujahideen as US implants within the Afghan political culture.

  Understand that most or these mujahideens were Afghan peasants who didn’t exactly fit right into the political system. Their awkward efforts to integrate themselves into the government apparatus was ungainly to say the least. They don't know how to run for office or, winning, how to run the office. Over a long period of sporadic civil war, they were systematically marginalized they eventually figured out they would fare better returning to the hills. From there they would practice crude statecraft by controlling isolated enclaves where Shari'ah law would give them a level field they could dominate.

   Discarded by the Americans after they have served their limited purpose of rolling back Russian expansion, the Taliban became free agents in the international geopolitical lobbying space.  What the US did not foresee is that their over-training of the mujahideen created an international school of resistance fighters that found client states all over the most volatile region in the world--the middle east with its genetically-ingrained credo to banish the western infidels from Arab soil, or failing to do that, to bring the fight to the soils of the western homeland. This was how international terrorism was born, and the US has to be pulling its own hair in total frustration at realizing it had a seminal role in its gestation. Ⓒ 2021 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

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Why there won't be any rescue airlifts from Kabul

merican hypocrisy is at its worst display during this frenzied retreat from Afghanistan.

   Scenes at the Kabul international airport showing the practical impossibility of quickly bringing everybody home safe are unwatchable for millions of Americans back in the homeland. But all they can do is bewilderingly trash  a popular president they just installed eight months ago  The Yankee psyche just couldn’t deal with helplessness and impotence, twin realities it is now facing with the incredible resurrection of the Taliban.

   This motley bunch of turbaned Afghan yokels were at one point considered a spent force, a Dark Age purveyor of religious barbarism, vanguarded by a primitive militia that couldn’t possibly bring Uncle Sam to his knees militarily. But that is precisely what the Taliban did. What’s more, they did not even do it Rambo-style but just  using nothing more than overgrown beards, piercing dagger looks from deep-set eyes and a shrill voice shrieking “Allah hu akhbar!” all day.

   The prospect of 15,000 American civilians trapped inside Afghanistan is a nightmare equal to 300 times that faced by Jimmy Carter in 1979. During his watch, just fifty-two US nationals were held for 444 days  by Iranian militants in the captured US Embassy in Teheran. That happened before there was internet and social media. Most of their days in captivity were shrouded in utter obscurity because media couldn’t cover their daily plight.

   Poor Joe Biden—today these 15,000 stranded Americans are streaming live pictures of the mayhem on Facebook and YouTube to every smartphone in the hands of anxious American voters.   The panic and anxiety they are creating is making it an impossible situation for the Whitehouse to handle, public relations-wise.

   Even truth and total candor are not helping the US President in his messaging to his constituents, as well as to his global audience of shell-shocked allies.   He scored practically no points for his self-deprecating “The buck stops with me.”  Even saying “I stand squarely behind my decision to withdraw” sounds like a self-obvious roll call of only who’s got his back in this developing debacle.

   I’m not an apologist for Joe Biden but he’s really getting the short end of the stick here. During the election campaign, Trump-weary liberals touted Joe Biden as the opposite of his predecessor’s buffoonery. His vast political experience and “been-there-done-that” credentials promised relief from the loud, proud, arrogant and ignorant incompetence of Donald Trump.

   That Joe Biden choir has turned their backs on him, practically abandoning him to face the wrath of the voters now that he is having to deal with a political crisis of Donald Trump’s making. What happened to their faith on the guy? How quickly Americans have forgotten that only one Christmas ago, it was Donald Trump who was preparing to host Taliban leaders in Camp David to set up a scheme for a US withdrawal. Trump attempted to do that without informing allies, all he was salivating for was the sensational specter of him announcing that he had put an end to the war in Afghanistan just by his vaunted “art of the deal.” 

   The problem is the deal involved the US vowing to pull out 14,000 “boots on the ground” in exchange for a Taliban commitment not to harbor terrorists—which is a revealing snapshot of the shallowness, if not abject naivete, of Donald Trump. The US jumped into Afghanistan after 9/11 because it suspected that the Afghan government was harboring the Taliban which it labeled as a terrorist organization. Now Donald Trump would ask the terrorist organization not to harbor terrorists? In the scale of world class stupidity, that ranks way up there with asking the goat to tend the cabbage patch.

   Joe Biden’s critics are quick to berate him about channeling Donald Trump’s “America First” nonsense for ignoring intelligence that suggested the fall of Afghanistan could unravel quicker than conventionally estimated. Why did Joe Biden “unilaterally” decide to pull out before obtaining the consensus of its allies?  America, you’re not paying attention. The British left seven years ago, followed in their heels by the French. Joe Biden painfully admits there was no good time to leave, only a best time not to stay. In reality, it would have taken months, if not years, to completely uproot the American footprint from Afghanistan in stress-free repatriation even if the Taliban had not overtaken the capital. The fear is not about the backlash of unilateralism.

   Neither was the fear about the logistical nightmare of evacuation, but the spook scenario about any failure of that effort.  These Americans left behind enemy lines, as it were, would be subject to unthinkable atrocities reminiscent of Somalia, Libya and Iran—supposedly because these are regimes steeped in human rights violations and had not a bone of civility in their bodies. At least, that’s the mainstream media’s characterization of the Taliban, consistent with the primitive Islamic type that inhabits the western consciousness.

   Of course,  this type attribution is never applied by the same media on the crown prince of Saudi Arabia—or upon the whole house of Saud, in fact—no matter if it deals with a perceived enemy by chopping up his body into a hundred parts and scattering them all over parts unknown. True, the Taliban suppresses women’s rights but even much worse do Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan and India. Yet US foreign policy looks the other way on them.

   So all these frantic fulminations in the mouth about leaving no one behind in Kabul is just so much smoke and fury signifying nothing.  It’s bravado taking over reality. I thought it was a pragmatic announcement made by the US State Department that they cannot guarantee they can bring out all US citizens from Afghanistan in time. Ah, but the Yankee body politic would have none of that.  It’s just like that US Olympic men’s basketball “Dream Team” that have been inoculated with the tunnel vision mission never to concede a game. 

   So instead, Joe Biden and his team have to perpetrate the illusion that the US remains in control. They are securing the Kabul international airport, throwing an impregnable perimeter of armor around it, rushing an armada of warships to the nearest coastline with planes and helicopters ready to scramble an airlift rescue mission at a moment’s notice.

   So why don’t they do it already? 

   The answer is subtly obvious, to use an oxymoron.  The US is not in control, the Taliban is. There can be no massive rescue airlift mission because the 15,000 stranded Americans are not in one place. They are scattered every which nook and corner of Kabul and assembling them at the airport will accomplish nothing but concentrate the point of constriction should the Taliban really decide to hold back everybody.  The Taliban militia have taken over the Afghan armed forces, which means they have artillery now. Just a few hundred well-placed shells lobbed at that runway will pockmark it useless for landing or launching aircraft.

   There’s only one way for Joe Biden—indeed, for the United States of America—to proceed, and that is to recognize the Taliban government and invite it to the dinner table of international diplomatic legation. Demonizing it and calling it a brutal regime—even if accurate—doesn’t alter the situation on the ground.

   Afghan women will return to oppression, to be sure. The only way that can change is for Afghan mothers to start raising their Afghan boys to respect Afghan girls. Change will evolve over many generations and cannot be accomplished by schooling a nation in western core values overnight.

   I don’t know who even came up with that phrase “nation-building” as the central organizing principle of US foreign intervention. But it failed in Vietnam as miserably as in Afghanistan. But if you listen to the hawks in mainstream US media today, they sound exactly like their peers in the post-Vietnam war era.  Fast forward forty-six years and look at Vietnam now. The best thing that ever happened to Captain America and Vietnam Rose was disentangling from their hypocritical copulation. They should have done it much sooner, and that is the long and short of Joe Biden’s argument today for early withdrawal. Funny but the only people who don’t seem to get it are the hypocrites who voted for him.

   Philosopher George Santayana couldn’t be more right: “Those who refuse to learn their lessons from the errors of history are doomed to repeat them.” © 2021 Joel R. Dizon

 NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

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No, Joe Biden didn't fumble

he decision to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan was an easy one. The US had no other choice. Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, ancient and modern. World superpowers, including the once-awesome Soviet Union, have tried unsuccessfully to subdue this desert land and failed miserably.

   Chaotic scenes at the Kabul international airport are not only reminiscent of the fall of Saigon in 1975, it is emblematic of the similarity of missions between those two wars.  In an epic pointless battle fought over Hill No. 937, a highly-fortified ridge in Central Vietnam near its western border with Laos,  American soldiers bled and died in repeated efforts just to set foot on its summit. They would fight Vietcong guerillas fiercely in the morning, secure the hill by noontime, only to head down back to the base of the mountain in the afternoon. 

   Memorialized in a 1987 movie “Hamburger Hill” it popularized the cynical explanation for taking a worthless piece of combat real estate—“because it’s there.”   It’s the same nonchalant justification alpine climbers give when asked why they climb a tall mountain—“because it’s there.” But summiting Mount Everest, for example, is a celebration of the triumph by the indomitable human spirit. In contrast, making it to the top of Hamburger Hill bristling with 200 pounds of ammo was just an exercise of getting rid of all that weight. It had no sense, no meaning, no redeeming purpose whatsoever—just like the whole of the Vietnam war itself.  It was a war to slake the thirst of the Joe McCarthy’s in the US Congress who imagined a “communist” getting ready to knock on American doors any time soon, back in the day.  Otherwise, controlling south Vietnam meant less than nothing in the geopolitics of the era. If America was just looking for “communists” to spook themselves silly, Cuba’s Fidel Castro was just a hundred miles south of Florida.

   Afghanistan is the same worthless wasteland, maybe even worse. It didn’t have rich oil deposits beneath its treeless sandy flats, no mineral mines in its inhospitable mountain ranges, it had practically zero agriculture. The only livestock it had were camels that had zero chance of landing in the world’s gourmet plates.

   All that Afghanistan was is a chopping board of American foreign policy. Three presidents before Joe Biden—two Republicans and a Democrat—had only looked to Afghanistan for demonstrating “political will” in staying the course of “keeping the flame of democracy” burning fervently worldwide. For the giant military industrial complex, it was a war to guarantee arms sales for years to come. And for the trigger-happy war junkies among US generals, it was a grownup’s sandbox for playing “winning the hearts and minds” of a primitive Islamic society.

   At least, at the end of World War II, the American G.I. was a celebrated hero in many European countries, whose governments to this day still keep well-groomed American cemeteries for fallen US soldiers who had liberated them from Nazi Germany.  America’s global chivalry—some say fool’s pride—fueled the Marshall Plan to rebuild wartorn Europe and get their economy back on its feet. To be sure, benevolence was part of it, but more importantly the so-called “peace dividend” guaranteed that the European consumer society would become America’s biggest postwar market for decades. At the same time, a firm grip on its NATO allies gave the US a high ground overview of the entire continent. American foreign policy called this the anti-Soviet trip wire, very critical in sandbagging Soviet expansionism during the Cold War. In so many ways you could not count, US military presence in Europe was a no-brainer presumption.

   Uncle Sam liberated most of Northern Africa, too. But you don’t see the US wasting any breath holding on that equally worthless piece of territory. In Asia, China—yes, the pre-Mao Zedong variant—South Korea and the Philippines are three countries that still bear fond memories of “Victory Joe.”  But these countries don’t have to be occupied, their societies embraced Hollywood and the internet they are joined at the hip with western culture and psyche.

   But what has America got to do with the Afghan mujahideen? Nothing. That’s why the Afghan war is the quintessential puzzle wrapped in a mystery surrounded by an enigma. Agfhanistan is not even communist—in fact, godless Marxism is the opposite extreme of medieval Islamic puritanism. The US doesn’t have to worry about Afghanistan embracing China—they’re not even interested, there’s nothing in Afghanistan China can grab and sell.  America doesn’t have to fear any religious or cultural invasion from Afghanistan, either. Anglo-Saxon Islamophobia is thriving so well on its own in America, the only thing Afghans can sell Americans is a kashmir sweater.

   Observers think Joe Biden is making a huge mistake by coming out publicly and owning up the decision to pull out of Afghanistan. I give him more credit and savvy than that—he didn’t even give Donald Trump a split-second chance to say, “hey, I thought of that first!”   In fairness, he did.

   Joe Biden knows his countrymen too well. Americans are puritans in public, perverts in private. Their opinion makers will hone their word-bending skills criticizing him in the open, but muttering inwardly, “By golly, Joe, it’s a wonderful thing you’ve done for all of us!” 

   Now even South Korea is sitting on the edge of its seat. Having seen what happens when a regime sponsor pulls out, they will capitulate to every US demand from hereon—including underwriting the enormous cost of its own defense, which American taxpayers have been footing the bill for much too long.

   And don’t even get me started on Israel. © 2021 Joel R. Dizon

 NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

 

The Antivaxer's Quandary

 

o you are an anti-vaxer. Here’s what you need to know.

   Vaccines work. If you don't think they do, then there's no reason to oppose vaccines. You'd be just as fulfilled by the self-destructive pleasure of not getting them.   You oppose them because they work, they cause something to the persons who do get them. You oppose vaccines not because you don’t believe it works, but because others believe it does. And that is what you don't like. Persons who get the vaccines declare their faith on medical science, and that offends you. When authorities make vaccines widely available to the public, you view that as an attack on personal liberty. Therefore you see government as the enemy and not the deadly virus that's actually killing people. This is fundamentally what is wrong with the antivax movement. It takes up a minority sentiment and uses it as an advocacy to defeat the greater good, wrapping it with arguments premised on ignorance.

   Of course in a democracy like ours, everyone is free to ingest any poison he wants. More than that, it is politically incorrect to prevent someone from exercising his personal liberty even by doing something harmful to himself.

   But what antivaxers do not quite understand is that by depriving themselves of proven medical protection, they are lowering the level of protection for everyone else. And while they have the right to choose death as a possible consequence of their mistaken belief, they don't have a right to superimpose that choice on the rest of us.  Put in another way, you can kill yourself but you may not take me along with you.

   You see, it is not possible to win the war against COVID19 partially. If we don’t exterminate the virus completely, the remnants of the species can develop a tolerance to any vaccine we have created and come off stronger, more virulent and deadlier than their ancestors that we have only managed to marginalize--but not eliminate-- when we did not vaccinate everyone.

   This leaves us no choice but to vaccinate everyone, including antivaxers against their will. Isn't that a  violation of their freedom? Yes, it is.

   However, we must understand that belonging to society is totally about losing your freedom. Every individual surrenders liberty for himself in exchange for a code of behavior binding on everyone. That way we don’t have to clobber each other for dominance of good intention.  If we didn't have laws for everyone, then we would have to  contend with the tyranny of the strongest one among us. That's how it was in the state of nature, where the most powerful individual dominated everyone else unwilling or unable to challenge him. But even the strongest one is not safe for he can be murdered in his sleep, to be replaced by the next bolder one, and by the one who comes after him.  It’s an oxymoron that the attainment of the ultimate good intention can only be pursued with the worst violence.  No one can be safe unless everyone is rendered harmless, that is, until everyone is stripped of his power to prevail over another.  Ultimately nobody wins until everybody is willing to lose.

   That is the essence of the Social Contract which is at the very heart and  foundation of modern society.  We all agreed to surrender our rights in favor of a centralized regulation of our lives by an indefeasible sole central powerholder called the State.

   Therefore, when the State acting through the government has legitimately and validly determined what is good for the greater number, opposing its mandate is insurrection and sedition, plain and simple. It’s a futile repudiation of an irrepudiatable covenant—the Social Contract.

   Vaccination works for the greater number and therefor can be imposed on the totality of society, through the irresistible coercion of the State. It is what it is. Being irreversibly integrated in society, you don’t have a choice but to go with the flow.

   Unless you can figure out a way of  resigning from the human race.Ⓒ 2021 Joel R. Dizon

 NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

Vaccines work. Get over it fast.

 

accines work.

   It’s not a matter of opinion. It’s an objective scientific fact. A virus cannot be destroyed except by eliminating its ability to reproduce. You cannot kill a virus because it is not a whole living organism. Unlike bacteria, a virus doesn’t eat, you cannot starve it to death.  It doesn’t reproduce sexually so there’s no way to make it infertile. It does not have intelligence so there’s no way to influence its behavior.

   So the only way to stop it from multiplying is to disrupt the biochemical mechanism by which it copies itself. Our immune system does this by directly dismantling the cluster of proteins that make up a virus. This is conventional one-one-one combat on a subcellular level. Unfortunately, the immune system is limited by the  resources of the finite individual cells that make our bodies. On the other hand,  sky is the limit in the growth and reproduction  of viruses.  In a population competition, our disease-fighting antibodies get overwhelmed if it’s a purely numbers game.

  Enter modern genetics technology. The idea sounds unbelievably simple. You don’t have to destroy the whole virus—just its DNA—that pesky double helix of organized molecules that carry the blueprint of future copies of the same protein.  Scientists have discovered a way of adding new sequences to that chain that effectively tells the protein it has become stable enough to remain inert permanently—ergo, to stop reproducing until it’s simply metabolized away.  In other words, the viruses’ DNA is deprogrammed not unlike the way software hackers introduce “patches” of new programming code in a computer software   to disrupt and change the way a computer program executes.

   It’s all done in virtual laboratories where the battleground is the software simulator. This is why it took scientists no more than a year to produce a testable vaccine. They were not playing around with the virus itself, trying to coax it into benevolent mutation in a petri dish and counting on the virus to cooperate.  They were just mapping its genome sequence to find the right spot to paste that patch of new destructive genetic code.

   Scientists have been doing this for years. Genetically modified organisms have been around for decades, especially as food for human consumption. From featherless chicken that need no dressing and go straight from farm to freezer, tank-grown  fish that reach maturity in less than 45 days and chicken eggs that scramble and go over easy but would never hatch into chicks. There are seedless varieties now of almost any fruit you could think of—orange, watermelon, strawberry, cucumber--you name it.

   The public uproar over GMO’s has all but vanished, not necessarily due to the death of outrage, but more because of unwitting public acceptance  fueled by consumption. The bread you ate this morning for breakfast was baked with flour from wheatfields that were no longer pollinated by bees, and you couldn’t care less.

   If your objection to vaccines is because of the genetic engineering component involved in its production, then you’re placing your sentimental empathy for organic vegetables,  natural poultry and livestock on the same pedestal as some unexplainable  concern for the health and well-being  of deadly viruses.

   And that is just plain absurd.Ⓒ 2021 Joel R, Dizon