THE LUNATIC'S ASYLUM
Apropos of the recent news of an American soldier allegedly murdering 16 Afghans, I say this:
Give that sick motherfucker a chestful of medals, and turn him into the next Patton.
If you're going to have a War on Terrorism at all, it should, one thinks, behoove you to be out killing the people who will, eventually, be performing said acts of Terorrism. After all, every Afghan is just one missed shipment of Islamically-approved, American-taxpayer-provided, dog-food-grade canned goods away from joining the Taliban, anyway.
The (predictable) fake outrage that has been ginned up in recent weeks by both this incident and the accidental (allegedly) burning of Korans is based upon a simple premise,which because of it's very simplicity American leadership -- both political and military -- have missed completely. When it comes to killing Afghans in any number whatsoever, it seems the Taliban and other Afghans would prefer that we leave such things to them.
After all, you never heard of a protests in Kandahar when a Taliban raid leaves a string of dead goatherds and well-raped rams behind, do you? President Hamid Karzai doesn't get all snippy when Afghan drug lords and their Taliban allies send the mentally ill into crowded marketplaces with remote-controlled explosive belts strapped around their waists, does he? No one in Afghanistan seems to give a shit when their this-close-to-Huns brethren machine gun and mortar a schoolhouse full of little girls, right? When was the last time you can remember a Pashtun getting bent out of shape because his armed-to-the-teeth 6-year old son went to slug it out with the Tajiks in a pointless "retaliation for stealing our most sexually-attractive donkeys" raid and didn't come back?
Quite frankly, I could give a tinker's turd for what any Afghan has to say on the subject of killing; they have a long history of a bloody, brutal, and casual relationship with the act of murder, both against the armed and the helpless. It's embedded in their culture so deeply as to make them wholly irredeemable, and hypocritical when they complain about it.
Then again, all Islamic cultures have this same casual attitude towards killing; it's one of the ways in which Islam managed to establish itself, making the great leap from the military/religious code of the demented desert nomad to the excuse to commit every crime it's possible to imagine in the name of God.
The only time Arabs, Palestinians, Afghans, Persians, et. al. get truly concerned about violence is when it's done to them by The Other...especially when The Other possesses the power to totally annihilate them in a way which makes retaliation impossible. In the meantime, they have absolutely no qualms whatsoever about inflicting violence against anyone their sick religious beliefs can manage to turn into an enemy, and usually by surprise or subterfuge, or in the case of Iran, through a myriad of proxies.
I've said it before here, and I shall say it again, mostly because the people in charge of this Public-Relations-Campaign-With-Guns-Disguised-as-a-War still don't get it:
These people don't want freedom, democracy, and free trade. For a start, they don't know what these things are, or what they are good for, and so long as what passes for a thought process in that part of the world is dominated first and foremost by matters of RELIGION, they will never learn. There is no history whatsoever in the Islamic lands of anything we might term as the necessary institutions for the successful implementation of constitutional ,democratic republicanism.
There is no history of free markets. There is no history of religious pluralism since the Islamic Wave first left the Arabian deserts. There is no such thing, and never has been, as an unfettered cultural, scientific or political point of view that wasn't mixed up in the dialectic of the Iron-fisted Supreme Ruler, the dictates of God, and the tangled system by which each props the other up.
Pakistan is NOT our ally, and never has been. It's overriding goal has always been to use American Aid to substitute for a native economy, and to use American arms to counter the threat they feel from India and other Middle Eastern dictatorships. The creation of Pakistan, in the final analysis, was the single greatest failure of British foreign policy in a history which also includes the Munich Peace Pledge and the Treaty of Versailles.
All your typical Afghan, Iranian, Pakistani, Syrian, Palestinian or Saudi wants is to be left alone to beat his wives, rape his livestock, and use his AK to bully as many of his neighbors as possible for his own personal comfort and benefit -- not to mention claim credit for killing as many Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and other Infidels as he decently can without having another barbarian in dirty laundry call him out on it. As far as these people are concerned, Might-makes-Right, and it's only fair when they're the ones in command of all the Might.
It is unfortunately too late to change strategy in our War on Terror; having, from the beginning, been committed to a stupid policy of first sending the troops to make headlines, and then following that up with outright bribery and bullshit, multi-lateral, nation-building, the War has lost whatever momentum it might have once acquired had the grand strategy adhered to the KISS Principle (Keep it Simple, Stupid). In the case of a War against Terrorism and it's proponents, this should have entailed what used to be called "Total War", because it is only through an abject demonstration that their mindset and culture are innately inferior to ours that we can even begin to bring them around to thinking that it might be better to join us rather than fight us.
The only way to make that point unmistakably clear to them was, at the outset, dedicate our military effort to a program of inflicting inhuman suffering upon our enemies, and then when they begged for mercy, kicking them in the teeth once more for good measure. But then again, it's not as if Afghans have teeth, is it?
Of course now, a decade later, embracing the policy of Total War and Scorched Earth would be largely seen as a bigger failure than the so-called "Make-Nice" approach; after all, American politicians and soldiers have spent a decade telling you that what seems obvious to the man in the street is not quite that simple, and requires complicated political maneuvering that keeps the State Department and Pentagon paper-pushers busy and pours billions into the coffers of defense contractors, but which doesn't do jack about defeating the culture that breeds terrorists.
And then some douchebag like a Barack Obama or a Leon Pannetta apologizes to Afghans for doing something which our soldiers should have been doing from Day One -- killing the enemy, fighting terrorism with terrorism -- and does so to a collection of near-cannibal-tribes with flags we keep pretending are civilized -but-misguided nations. Quite frankly, who gives a fuck what the Afgans, not to mention the Germans and French think about what America has done in the Middle East? It might be politically too late to kill everything that moves in that rocky little shitpile, but it would do far more good in preventing future 9/11's than all the U.S. Aid, well-digging. and American-taxpayer-paid-wired-for-Wi-Fi hookah bars ever could.
Posted by Matthew at 11:46 AM