HE ROVING EYE - Mistah McChrystal by Pepe Escobar

[Jefferson23]

June 25, 2010



When it comes to American wars, history has a kinky habit of repeating itself as farce over and over again. So now the Pentagon has been plunged into turmoil because General Stanley McChrystal, former United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander in Afghanistan, was featured unplugged in a Rolling Stone magazine interview.


SNIP* So what's "the mission" in AfPak? For the Obama team it's rather to use Afghanistan as a pawn to expand the already abysmal fissure between the US and Iran, and to throw Shi'ite Iran and Sunni Wahhabi Saudi Arabia at each other's throats.

But for the industrial-military complex it goes way beyond. It's about the new great game in Eurasia. It's about the Pentagon's full "spectrum dominance doctrine", which presupposes setting up strategic Afghan bases to control and survey strategic competitors Russia and China very close to their borders. It's still about the late 1990s all over again; to isolate or crush or bribe the Taliban so the ultimate pipe-dream - the Trans-Afghan Pipeline (TAP) - can be built to carry Turkmen gas to Western markets, and not the rival, anathema IP (Iran-Pakistan) pipeline. In a nutshell, it's about infinite war.

It's easy to forget - as much of US corporate media do - that in the midst of all the "runaway general" hoopla, McChrystal's own COIN (counter-insurgency) strategy in Afghanistan had already been reduced, according to his own neologism, to "Chaos-istan" for quite some time. To apply counter-insurgency en-masse against Pashtun brothers and cousins is a foolish recipe for failure. Washington does not even know who the "enemy" is; Afghans on the other hand see it as a war of Christian foreign invaders against the Pashtun nation.

in full: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LF25Df04.html

[midnight]

1. Infinite war with out Washington knowing who the enemy is.

Time to wrap this up.