Quittin' Time in Afghanistan
By Eric Margolis
August 23, 2009 "Toronto Sun" -- An election held under the guns of a
foreign occupation army cannot be called legitimate or democratic.
This week's stage-managed vote in Afghanistan for candidates chosen by
western powers is unlikely to bring either peace or tranquility to this
wretched nation that has suffered 30 years of war.
The Taliban and its nationalist allies rejected the vote as a fraud designed
to validate continued foreign occupation and open the way for western oil
and gas pipelines.
The Taliban, which speaks for many of Afghanistan's majority Pashtun, said
it would only join a national election when U.S. and NATO troops withdraw.
After all the pre-election hoopla and agitprop in Afghanistan, we come out
the same door we went in. The amiable U.S.-installed leader, Hamid Karzai,
may remain in office, powerless.
Yet Washington is demanding its figurehead achieve things he simply cannot
do. Meanwhile, Karzai's regime is engulfed by corruption and drug dealing.
Real power remains with strongmen from the Tajik and Uzbek minorities and
local, drug-dealing tribal warlords who are paid by Washington to pretend to
support Karzai. Behind the Tajiks and Uzbeks stand their patrons, Russia,
India and Iran.
Afghanistan's Pashtun tribes, which make up 55% of the population, are
largely excluded from power. They were the West's closest allies and foot
soldiers ("freedom fighters") during the 1980s war against the Soviets.
The Taliban arose during the chaotic civil war of the early 1990s as a
rural, mostly Pashtun religious movement to stop the wide-scale rape of
women, impose order, and fight the drug-dealing Afghan Communists. The
so-called "terrorist Taliban" received U.S. funding until four months before
9/11. Washington cut off aid after the Taliban made the fatal error of
giving a major pipeline deal to an Argentine rather than U.S. oil firm for
which Hamid Karzai once reportedly worked as a consultant.
Oil pipeline
The current war in Afghanistan is not about democracy, women's rights,
education or nation building. Al-Qaida, the other excuse, barely exists. Its
handful of members long ago decamped to Pakistan. The war really is about
oil pipeline routes and western domination of the energy-rich Caspian Basin.
Afghanistan is a three-legged ethnic stool. Take away the Pashtun leg and
stability is impossible.
There will be neither peace nor stability in Afghanistan until all ethnic
groups are enfranchised. The West must cease backing minority Tajiks and
Uzbeks against majority Pashtun -- who deserve their rightful share of power
and spoils.
The solution to this unnecessary war is not more phoney elections but a
comprehensive peace agreement among ethnic factions that largely restores
the status quo before the 1970 Soviet invasion. That means a weak central
government in Kabul (Karzai is ideal for this job) and a high degree of
autonomy for self-governing Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara regions.
Government should revert to the old "loya jirga" system of tribal sit downs,
where decisions are made by consensus, often after lengthy haggling. That is
the way of the Afghans and of traditional Islamic society.
All foreign soldiers must withdraw. Create a diplomatic "cordon sanitaire"
around Afghanistan's borders, returning it to its traditional role as a
neutral buffer state.
The powers now stirring the Afghan pot -- the U.S., NATO, India, Iran,
Russia, the Communist Central Asian states -- must cease meddling. They have
become part of the Afghan problem. Afghans must be allowed to slowly resolve
their differences the traditional Afghan way, even if it initially means
blood. That's unavoidable.
The only way to end the epidemic of drug trading is to shut border crossings
to Pakistan and the Central Asian states. But those nation's high officials,
corrupted by drug money, will resist.
We can't solve Afghanistan's social or political problems by waging a cruel
and apparently endless war. A senior British general just warned his troops
might have to stay for another 40 years. (He later retracted).
The western powers, Canada included, have added to the bloody mess in
Afghanistan. Time to go home.
© 2009 The Toronto Sun
***
http://www.truthout.org/082209A?n
Republicans, Religion and the Triumph of Unreason
How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?
by: Johann Hari
The Independent UK: 19 August 2009
Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since
Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill
Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have
moved to a mental hospital."
The election of Obama - a black man with an anti-conservative message -
as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's
view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned,
right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.
When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive
landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could
the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big
government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American
right's world-view - to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm
of their own creation - has swollen. Now it is all they can see.
Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one
fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It
started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and - at the same time -
that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people.
Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue
that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a
baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth
certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should
pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.
These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority
of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't
sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that
Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence - here's his
birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in
Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper -
can pierce this conviction.
This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican
Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to
euthanise the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed - with a
straight face - that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.
You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually
happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not
provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required
to provide for themselves - and 50 million people can't afford the
insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly,
because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six
9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the
Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of
being "killers" - and they have successfully managed to put them on the
defensive.
The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because
they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who
benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70
per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that
doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any
life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.
A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health
corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly noticed a clause in the
proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a
doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they
would like care to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want
it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was
only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the
rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced
to agree to death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like
Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his
existence. It was flatly untrue - but the right had their talking-point,
Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were
off.
It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare
has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are
not in favour of killing the elderly - while Republicans get away with
defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was
startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens
there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the
charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But
the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up,
and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.
These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality
that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US
Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would
have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system.
Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be
here without the NHS".
This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy
world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush
years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam
Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they
had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global
warming became unanswerable, they claimed - as one Republican congressman
put it - that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the
world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself
as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind
them.
It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative
philosophy - reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising
caution - could be a useful corrective. But that's not what these so-called
"conservatives" are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical
fantasy that serves as a thin skin covering some raw economic interests and
base prejudices.
For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical
manipulation. One of Bush's former advisers, David Kuo, has said the
President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts" as soon as they
left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican base believe this stuff.
They are being tricked into opposing their own interests through false fears
and invented demons. Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a
healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured - and then complained
he had no health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep.
How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins,
I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good
to have "faith" - which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to
back it up. You don't have "faith" that Australia exists, or that fire
burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or
unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and
most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their
political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.
Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason.
He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate the elite economic interests,
and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has
(shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded
healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to
bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying in public that he "doesn't want
to kill Grandma". Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre
fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them.
This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled.
Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically
defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to
the maddest people or the greediest constituencies. There is no way to
expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be
it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the
civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther
King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."
However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off
into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to
build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan could be -
shrill, baby, shrill.
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