Monday, December 9, 2019

A Fool Lies Here

In a "revelation" that should surprise no one, the Washington Post published a 2014 report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction that makes clear the ridiculous impossibility of what Rudyard Kipling warned us of in 1891.

What is also clear is that the United States learned only one lesson from the loss of the war in Southeast Asia; that if you draft random people and random people's kids to fight idiotic imperial wars in the global hustings you will be made to pay for it politically because the random people will fight to expose your lies and stupidity.

If you let them draft themselves, nobody will give a shit.

So, despite this voluminous mass of evidence that three successive U.S. administrations have been cluelessly, grossly, lying to themselves and the U.S. public and have, somehow, managed to take a grotesquely mismanaged Central Asian failed state and turn it into a worse grotesquely mismanaged Central Asian failed state, not a single one of the people involved will so much as go shy half a slug or miss a meal. No Bushie, no Obamite, no Trumpkin...nobody will pay.

Read the whole thing; the most obvious "lessons learned" were the things that a bunch of us already knew and were howling about back in the Intel Dump days; that, even if there ever had been a hope after choosing to break into the joint, the choice to bolt to Iraq as soon as possible left Afghanistan to go to hell. That the Afghan corruption that was endemic wasn't - and, probably, could never be - addressed. That the idea of trying to set up a central "government" in Kabul was nonsensical, and became a toxic kleptocracy as soon as it could. That...aw, hell, go read it. The whole damn thing was a clusterfuck from the get go and probably always would have been. But it was certainly mismanaged about as badly as possible, too.

And so, just as in Iraq, now all that's left is to spell out in black ink that all the blood and treasure spent in Afghanistan has been utterly wasted, good for nothing but ruin and delusion and merciless hatred.

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: "A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.

There is pleasure in the wet, wet clay
When the artist's hand is potting it.
There is pleasure in the wet, wet lay --
When the poet's pad is blotting it.
There is pleasure in the shine of your picture on the line
At the Royal Acade-my;
But the pleasure felt in these is as chalk to Cheddar cheese
When it comes to a well-made Lie--

To a quite unwreckable Lie,
To a most impeccable Lie!
To a water-right, fire-proof, angle-iron, sunk-hinge, time-lock, steel-faced Lie!
Not a private handsome Lie,
But a pair-and-brougham Lie,
Not a little-place-at-Tooting, but a country-house-with-shooting
And a ring-fence-deer-park Lie.

17 comments:

  1. Wan wird man je verstehen

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AybZIw8BRIM

    Walter Olin

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  2. Small-scale foreign wars serve Presidents domestic needs.

    George W authorized this in a moment of rage and, with his very militarily-bent advisors, couldn't find a way to get out without looking foolish.

    Obama found this godawful conflict useful because it distracted the Republicans from their efforts to crucify him but it is time for this farce to end (it was time to end it almost 2 decades ago!).

    One of the few things about Trump that is actually admirable is his desire to end this farce. Of course, being Trump, I suspect the reason he wants to end the conflict is to increase the number of reporters in DC taking pictures of Trump's face.

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    1. Small-scale foreign wars serve despots domestic needs. Presidents aren't supposed to be despots, so if the nation was truly a republic and not an oligarchy this would be untrue.

      That said, I see no possibility that ANY President could have avoided the initial Afghan incursion; the fury after 9/11 was too great for even the most dovish of Chief Executives to have avoided. Dubya's (and, more particularly, Dick's) real sin was the pivot to Iraq. The SIGAR report makes clear that the problems in Afghanistan largely started when the need to grab a hat forced the Bushies to abandon any sort of attempt to craft a true solution, just dump a crap-ton of cash on the place, and throw the gaddi to the Tajiks and Hazaras of the NA.

      The mess didn't distract the GOP so much as a moment; instead, I'd argue that Obama was caught in the same "weak on terrorism" trap that the Congressional Dems were on the AUMF; he couldn't bail on the place for fear of getting crushed when it fell to the Talibs.

      And Trump doesn't "desire to end" anything. He "desires" to get his ass paid off, and this thing doesn't make him jack shit. He likes taking the oil, so the GIs are still in Syria. He likes his pals the Saudis, so more GIs are now in Saudi (and bankrolling their murderous adventures in Yemen). He likes getting paid, so he's jacking the Japanese and NATO and everyone else who has U.S. facilities for more cash. No, he's fine with GIs getting killed, so long as he turns a buck out of it. The sin, for Littlefingers, is that there's no oil and nothing is going into his fucking wallet. THAT's why he wants to end it.

      And if he does? Fine. Great. Something good done for greedy stupidity is still good.

      But don't bet on it. He's greedy and stupid, and the people who are around him are just as afraid of "losing Afghanistan" as Obama's people were.

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  3. 90 tweets/retweets today. He's much too busy to give a frig about the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Although I suspect he will be forced to leave Iraq soon by the Iraqis and their Iranian compatriots. Once that happens will he finally leave Syria? It would be hard to support the troops from Jordan. And Erdogan is threatening to kick the USAF out of Incirklik.

    His three older kids just had to undergo mandatory training to learn how to avoid defrauding charities. That was part of a deal they made with the New York State AG's Office. What I wanna know is why didn't the Fraudster-in-Chief have to attend also.?

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  4. Yeah, but is anyone really happy that they and us were right about the Graveyard of Empires?

    I saw that come out, sat back, shook my head, and muttered, "imagine that...so...sunk costs, anyone?"

    I don't even know what to say, anymore.

    we had a good run for a few hundred years, but it would seem we're done.

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    1. I don't think anyone outside the Karzai family is happy. I can't speak for anyone else, but my main emotion is a barely containable rage; this makes me so furious at all the people involved in making this clusterfuck happen that, in the words of Gaius Caligula, it makes me wish they all had one neck so I could hack through it.

      And I think it's way premature to write off the U.S. I think the bright promise of the Civil Rights Era is done, yes; we're going back to a pretty awful place, a New Gilded Age, in which the Trumpkins - that slice of the "conservative" minority that adores the Tangerine Colossus - are going to do their damnedest to undo everything that changed in this country between 1932 and 1980.

      But the raw economic and military power of this country is still vast. A U.S. that is becoming a white ethno-oligarchy will still have enormous power to do harm all over the globe, as well as the political energy to DO that harm. We're already seeing it in the Middle East, where the reflexive response to ANYthing is to throw high explosive at it. Expand that to the rest of the globe and you've got a hell of a mess for the rest of the 21st Century.

      Today's British election is just depressing. Here's a similar polity that just handed the hammer to it's oligarchic class enemies and laid it's own head on the anvil. I grimly await the howls when the Tories come for the NHS; what the fuck did you think they were going to do, dumbass? They've hated all the post-WW2 social programs since...well, since post-WW2. You've now given them the absolute right to fuck you over and taken away your ability to do anything about it.

      And so with this. Where is it now? Check your news feed - is anyone...ANYone...still talking about it? Christ, having in their hands proof that between them DoD and DoS pissed away a trillion dollars in Afghanistan, Congress just handed them a massive budget that included every military wet dream possible.

      So we may be "done" as an actual popular republic. But "done" as a global military power?

      Not hardly.

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  5. Well, guys, have a nice holiday season and good New Year (Guten Rutsch!). I'll be away with family for most of the rest of the year.
    My own blog posts for this year are written scheduled and I can tell that on 28th I will break with the statistically biggest part of my readership. Most American readers will hate it (and me) beyond description.

    It's going to be a Fascism check list and all boxes are checked.

    The past two decades have been 'mixed' at best. The 90's were fantastic for the Wet. I understand that lots of global human development indices have developed extremely well since the 90's, but subjectively the period between the 21 Aug 1992 and 11 Sept 2001 was the Golden Age of the Western World. We had overcome the Cold War and especially the risk of thermonuclear war, mankind met the ozone layer challenge, culture was fun instead of dark and we built the WWW.
    I wish I could go back. Now I feel old.

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    1. I saw that most of the commentors on your cult piece either didn't get it or wanted to quibble about details. It's kind of grim the way humans are kind of hardwired to ignore or deny the boulder that's going to flatten them. Damn but we're stupid that way...

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    2. If anything you're letting us off easy. How - in the face of all the evidence from the extirpation of the Wampanoag to the Banana Wars - the goddamn U.S. public continues to see our country as the Arsenal of Democracy I have no fucking idea, but the bottom line is that we've had repeated opportunities to live up to the aspirations of the foundational documents of our nation and failed.

      Sure, the guy who wrote that "all men are created equal" was raping his slave. But we could have redeemed his words and, time after time, we've chosen not to. While my country is not uniquely evil...it's NOT uniquely good, either, and we seem to have trouble dealing with and accepting that, and doing what We should be doing to try to make reality line up with what we claim.

      Goddamn, I feel older than dirt. And sad. And tired. Here we are, re-fighting the battles against the racist idiot fucks we thought we'd won back in 1972. And we're losing.

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  6. Sven -

    Hope your Yule Season is bright. And may the New Year brings you health and a wee bit of wealth. Celebrate but stay away from the Glühwein.

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    1. LOL, Glühwein is harmless.
      We do this
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuerzangenbowle
      and not with 54%, but 80%.

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    2. That is what I meant by Gluhwein. Or worse. The stuff I drank in Heidelberg was spiked with rotgut. What is the German equivalent of American moonshine?

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    3. As far as I can tell, Schnaps and most drinks that end with -brand (such as Obstbrand).

      Glühwein is really near-harmless. It's simply heated red wine with extra spices.

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  7. Charlie Pierce takes this mess and runs with it: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a30247045/afghanistan-papers-vietnam-lies/

    And he cuts to the chase that takes this from farce to tragedy:

    "And, of course, the most damning thing about these revelations is that they vanished from the media almost immediately, lost in the din of the barely organized crazy that this administration has brought to Washington. This was a monumental scoop, the result of dogged work by the entire news operation of the Washington Post, and most people know far more about Giuliani’s insane overseas ramblings than know anything about the archived failure and waste present here.

    “We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich,” James Dobbins, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as a special envoy to Afghanistan under Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. “We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”

    Everything is awful."

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  8. Your cult article was very good, Sven, I look forward to the tyranny article. Most of the US citizens who live in my area (which shall remain nameless) see the tyranny. The question is how to deal with it:
    1. Submit quietly and wait it out (not really a viable strategy in my opinion but my father favors it)
    2. Leave (just hitting people's radar screens now, I've been considering it for 20+ years). Problem currently is that the leaders of too many English-speaking countries are trying to make Trump look like a stable moderate genius.
    3. Fight (also not a viable strategy yet, not enough consensus on what needs to be done)

    The next decade is going to be VERY interesting (as in lets watch the car we're riding in crash...)

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  9. My sons were in Honduras last month. As tourists, but stayed with people who live there. What was telling was that the locals talked about Americans in the same way as they talk about the weather: "it'll be fine unless the Yankees come / a hurricane lands". I.e. something that exists and that they have to deal with, but have absolutely no control over.

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