If Afghanistan fails, Pakistan could follow: Biden

[gateley]

(Just a reminder that there is life out there, and it could affect us and the rest of the world.)

snip

"Afghanistan's fate and Pakistan's future are joined and America's security is tied to both," Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations. "If Afghanistan fails, Pakistan could follow, because extremists will set their sights on the bigger prize to the east."

Frustration is rising among many ordinary people in Afghanistan over the perceived lack of development and security Western leaders promised before the Taliban were driven from power in 2001.

U.S.-led forces overthrew the Taliban's government after it refused to hand over al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, whom Washington says is the architect of the September 11 attacks on the United States.

The militants have made a comeback in the past two years and violence is at its worst since the Taliban's fall. (snip)

"We have spent on Afghanistan's reconstruction in six years what we spend every three weeks on military operations in Iraq," Biden, a Democrat who withdrew from the presidential race last month, said. (snip)

"It seems time for NATO to realize that they must get fully in the fight. If Afghanistan falls, I am not sure how far behind NATO will be," he said. "If America does more, so will our allies."

snip

more at Reuters.... http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN2537344820080225

[gateley]

1. Kicking myself in more ways than one. I guess nobody gives a fuck. nt

[kayob1]

2. Thanks for posting! n/t

[Muttocracy]

3. I care! Thanks for posting it nt

[wuushew]

4. Google the history of the Council on Foreign Relations

the resulting flame fest is far more interesting than whatever Biden said.

[gateley]

7. Okay - I did, but I must be missing what you're referring to.

Could you enlighten me? Thanks.

[Tashca]

5. NIce report

Very informative article.....nice to hear about the trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I look forward to report from India and Turkey too.
Joe makes some good points about the situation in Afghanistan and it's possible future implications on Pakistan.


Thank you Senator's Biden, Kerry, and Hagle for showing us their are some people in Washington that care and will actually go visit the site's and report back to us.

[unkachuck]

6. I'll give a kick and....

....a quote, 'if Obama fails, PNAC thinking will follow, because extremists will set their sights on the bigger prize, Universal Healthcare, instead of a 100 years of war.'

[ConsAreLiars]

8. Maybe Biden and the rest of those deluded game players

will somehow figure out that the Afghan people don't really like being invaded and murdered. Somehow, I doubt it.

The arrogance behind their assumption that they have the right or, or even more disgusting, the duty, to teach/force those people to become useful pawns in a power game and serve US corporate strategic goals is utterly revolting.

What a piece of slime.

Get the fuck out. Leave them alone. Take that "white man's burden" crap and stuff it back up what it came out of.

[gateley]

9. You should look a little more closely on what Biden feels and his sense of

responsibility to the Afghani people before you condemn him.

You're a lovely person, by the way.

[ConsAreLiars]

14. I simply think that US intervention has already brought far too much suffering to the

people of Afghanistan. Others disagree, I realize. Some are so ignorant of the cultures and people of that region as to think their continued meddling will somehow bring about different results. They have their own culture, and bringing them under corporate control is not something that will do them any good or be welcomed.

[gateley]

15. I wholeheartedly agree with what you say. US intervention has brought much

suffering to many places.

It was the Taliban and Al Q that originally screwed it up for the people of Afghanistan. (Well, the Soviet Union was behind that is as best as I can figure - and then we moved in to exacerbate the situation). But it used to be a country where people could sing and dance. Life was tough, but women weren't afraid of being beaten because their sandals clicked too loudly and there was education beyond memorizing the Koran to fight jihad -- people were literate.

There is a true threat to the people of Afghanistan by the fundamentalists, and so many of these kids are being raised to know nothing other than to hate infidels. They have no choice and they have no voice.

Anyway, OUR very valid concern is that, regardless of who we can point the finger at, the current situation is potentially a threat to many parts and peoples of the world. We do need to take steps to protect ourselves and others whom we have brought into harm's way.

As I type this I'm wondering if I'm coming across as a terra paranoid - but I'm really not.

I don't agree with you on us just getting the fuck out of there - the people of Afghanistan will continue to suffer in my opinion.

Nobody should have to live in such fear.

It's a mess, and we've contributed greatly to it. I fee we have some responsibility to do the right thing FOR them - what they want, not what we want.

Biden is a firm believer in power to the people. He demonstrated this during the Pakistan elections. He didn't have an agenda - he said the Pakistanis have the right to choose their own leader (imagine that), and he's proposed billions to put into education, infrastructure, etc., to help them get back on their feet. I know he feels the same way toward the Afghanis - they know how to fish, as it were, we just need to give them back the nets and lines that we took away.

[ConsAreLiars]

16. Learning more about Afghanistan is not easy, but one important

part of that Very Long history is that before the US intervention it was not dominated by armed fundie fanatics. The Taliban and so on were a creation of the US, when Brzezinski and the CIA, with the cooperation of Saudi Wahabis like you-know-who, decided to use and encourage religious zealotry to provoke Soviet intervention. The book Blowback covers a lot of this.

Your sentiments, a wish to ease their hardships, are something I respect.

But I don't trust empire-builders, regardless of style or persona, to fix the damage they've done. I have a lot more trust in the people of Afghanistan. They can and will and should determine their future, but outsiders who set up their own puppet as Mayor of Kabul and send armed gangs around the country as marauders and enforcers will do nothing to help the healing.

As for your fear of the people of Afghanistan, how have they ever threatened anyone outside their borders? Never, in any way, has there ever been any reason us to fear them, at least before the invasion. Every day that the US tries to enslave/help/manipulate them is one more day in which there is a slight increase in the odds that some will become to see it as a simple manor of honor to seek justice of the two-eyes-for-an-eye sort.

[Swede]

10. May you live in interesting times.

As the saying goes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times

[daleo]

11. If Viet Nam goes communist, Thailand will be next

Then Japan and Australia, then the commies will be at the gates.

[gateley]

12. Yeah, well there is that.

But I do see a difference this time - the jihadists are a big more of a threat that the communists.

[daleo]

20. The communists had thousands of ICBMs loaded with 20 megaton H-bombs

I think the "jihadist" threat is rather overblown in comparison.

[Indenturedebtor]

17. But we have always been at war with Asia

Or is it the Middle East? Or Terrists? Or Libruls?

Ok good point. But we do have an obligation to rebuild Afghanistan. Not with our contractors but theirs. Build up their economy by building schools, hospitals, and roads, and they'll tell the Taliban to piss off themselves. But to do that we do need to protect our troops there.

Not nearly the shitstorm that is Iraq. I think Obama has it right that we should pull out of Iraq and fulfill our debt to the Afghani people.

[eridani]

13. More of an air war against civilians? Let's hope not.

Biden is talking as if we were doing social work with JDAMs and cluster bombs in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, with imperial domination, helping people is strictly secondary to the domination thing. You can tell when that's the agenda because dominators always look for local elite cats paws to carry out their agenda of domination, which usually fails because the locals always have their own agendas as well. For that reason, the dominators are constantly switching sides. Look for that--it's how you can tell what's actually going on.

Our first intervention was recruiting radical Islamists from all over the world to fight against the Soviets starting that year, with the deliberate intention (according to Brzezinski) of drawing the Soviets into a Vietnam-like quagmire. We paid American universities to develop pro-jihadi textbooks. Of the native reactionaries, we gave most of our $5 billion or so financial aid to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who made his bones in the 70s thowing acid in the faces of female university students. (Yes, as late as 1975, female students in Kabul occasionally wore miniskirts.) The CIA knew all about his prior history, and they were happy to watch him burn down girls' schools. Now we have a price on his head.

After the Soviets left, warlord factions destroyed a lot of Kabul and killed around 40,000 of its citizens. We fully supported the Pakistani ISI in their sponsorship of the Taliban, which the warlord-weary population of Afghanistan thought might suppress lawlessness. Imperial agent Zalmay Khalilzad (currently our ambassador to Iraq) even wrote a WaPo editorial in 1997 explaining how the Taliban were agents of stability and not nearly as bad as those Shi'ite fundies in Iran. Now we don't like them for supporting bin Laden.

AFter 9-11 we ignored constant pleas from indigenous anti-Taliban forces to not engage in massive bombing of civilians in support of the (formerly Soviet-allied, so we switched sides again) Northern Alliance warlords. After our allies kicked the Taliban out of major population centers, we refused to let the Loya Jirga of 2002 install their choice of ruler, the former king (favored mainly because he had pissed off the fewest number of people). They also wanted nothing to do with the warlords we insisted on installing, but we installed them anyway.

Our current campaign there consists of supporting warlords who are not much different from the Taliban with extensive bombing of civilians.

Why in fecking hell anybody believes that more of the same can possibly do Afghanistan any good is beyond me.

[TheLastMohican]

18. Biden is full of crap

I don't care about NATO.
What is it, an official war racketeering organisation?
NATO was supposed to fight the Warsaw Pact, since there is no Warsaw Pact any longer, why keep the NATO?
It was dubbed a "defensive alliance", isn't it odd that a "defensive alliance" of "North-Atlantic Treaty" is making wars in Afghanistan?
Besides, our european allies seem to be burdened with that NATO-thing and unwilling to put cannon fodder and money where their mouth is.

[Disturbed]

19. The Afghanistan Failure By MIKE WHITNEY

Afghanistan is a tragic example of American foreign policy run amok. The promises of liberation and reconstruction have only generated more suffering and death." Operation Enduring Freedom" was nothing more than a marketing ploy designed to project American military power into the region and secure long-coveted pipeline routes. It has created a situation that is more unstable than before. A recent report from Kim Sengupta confirms this; "The UK Independent has learned that an all-party group of MPs from the Foreign Affairs Committee has returned from a visit to the country shocked and alarmed by what they witnessed. They warn that urgent action must be taken to save Afghanistan from plunging further into chaos because of Western neglect."

This is the reality of the Afghanistan campaign; a nation teetering towards anarchy because it fit nicely into the global designs of a handful of fanatics in Washington. It is a reality that has been scrupulously omitted from the establishment press because it doesn't exemplify the virtue of American warmongering. A faithful rendering of the facts of the Afghanistan war would convince the American people that it was a cruel and cynical misadventure that never should have taken place. Nearly, three years after the end of major hostilities, the country is still more fractured and unsettled than ever. Large swaths of the country are engaged in an unreported war and the drug trade is fueling even greater instability. The Taliban have been replaced by the equally misogynist warlords who rule with an iron fist and have a similar disregard for basic human rights.

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney06022004.html

[jillan]

21. Thank you gateley for posting this.

People around here just don't get it, get how important this is.

I hope these people that are berating Biden go see Charlie Wilson's War and
see what happens when we screw things up.