In the biggest non-surprise of the century, Republicans are getting bolder about just dropping the pretense that they give two shits about Afghanistan.
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan guerrilla war can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Taliban and their supporters into the Afghan government.
You heard it—5 years later and the plan is, essentially, just to let the Taliban have it back. Of course, not a word one is being spoken about how BushCo completely fumbled the ball from day one, how the plan to invade Iraq meant that the U.S. half-assed any attempt to actually catch Osama Bin Laden, and how they blew off the most important thing that needed to happen, which was financing a Marshall Plan-esque plan that would actually help the workaday people in Afghanistan get the fundie wackos under control for themselves. I have no idea if there was any good way to invade Afghanistan, but if there was, BushCo didn’t do it. I opposed this invasion from day one, because I knew that BushCo wasn’t physically capable of actually helping anyone, because their instincts are all tyrannical.
Anyway, the funny part of this is watching the wingnuts lose it (well, especially since the rest of it is a existential crisis-causing parade of despair). They bought the line that BushCo gave a shit about putting a halt to “Islamofascism” or whatever the newest term for it is today and this is coming across as a personal betrayal. Massive asshole AllahPundit is putting up pictures of 9/11 victims as if that was an argument about anything at all. Ace of Spades is acting like Bill Frist personally cut his balls off. Like Roxanne said, if you’re touring the right side of the ’sphere, wear a raincoat because heads are exploding everywhere.
The timing is especially fortitutious as conservatives everywhere try to grapple with the fact (again, completely unsurprising to non-wingnuts) that Republicans apparently didn’t give a shit that one of theirs was propositioning teenage boys in the most stereotypical “creepy uncle” way you can imagine. Human Events is calling on Hastert to resign after it was revealed that he participated in the cover-up. I’m almost touched; apparently someone somewhere actually thought that all the blather about “family values” meant something and wasn’t just an empty campaign commercial.
It’s got to suck, though, for conservatives. I mean, we’ve been telling them for years they’re suckers and stooges, falling for a bunch of transparent Republican lies about how they’re going to spread democracy by force while somehow wiping out sex itself, whether it’s evil, non-consensual Foley stuff or just married couples having a little non-procreative fun. To finally realize that you’re a sucker is bad enough, but to realize those liberals were right all along? That’s got to hurt.
20 Responses to “Don’t tell them that the CIA trained Bin Laden”
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Don’t worry, they will find a rationalization. Cognitive dissonance is their specialty.
The question now becomes, will they finally wake up and realize they’ve been had, or are they so deep into it that they’ll grasp for some (any!) tortured explanation of why the GOP is, was, and always has been right about this too. The truth might be too embarassing for them to admit. Let’s watch!
They never wanted to invade Afghanistan in the first place - Blair had to armtwist them into it, as I remember, they were all “Iraq! Saddam! Iraq!” until it became clear that they had to at least put on a fig leaf of trying to get Bin Laden before doing what they’d planned to do all along. They were working on deals with the Taliban over natural gas rights and them doing such a good job keeping the heroin production down beforehand - the GOP never had any problems with their human rights/cultural depradations before. It was all, always a charade. They’re just being honest now.
I had hopes about Afghanistan.
The big thing about it is, they came close to doing it right. They helped native Afghanis take back their own country, and set up an Afghani government from the outset. If you need to change leadership in a nation, that is how you do it.
If we’d put Afghanistan back together well, it could have permanently deprived bin Ladin of a hiding place. It also could have changed people’s attitudes all over the region.
Everyone knew we were going to have to exact vengeance for what happened… but we had a chance to show that we only wanted to harm the guilty, and help the innocent. The Repubs can try to spin that as “they call it a weakness”, and the terrorists might consider it weakness… but the non-terrorists would respect it.
And it’s all the non-terrorists whose gratitude you want to win, because they’re your eyes and ears.
“If we’d put Afghanistan back together well”…
If I remember my history correctly, there’s never been a foreign power that has been able to control Afghanistan. They’re quite scrappy.
“It also could have changed people’s attitudes all over the region.”
I don’t understand this logic, it’s also used in regards to Iraq. Let’s use an analogy here; suppose Castro got out of his sickbed and sucessfully used his army to invade the U.S. and successfully occupy it (okay really out of the question but just work with me here). Do you honestly think Canada and Western Europe would go “Ohhhh I see” and instantly turn communist? No they wouldn’t. Not because Democracy is superior to Communism (another argument for another thread), it’s because you can’t get people to embrace an ideology when you’re pointing a gun at their head and their country’s infastructure is in ruins from your bombs. All you can do is hope to occupy that country for as long as you can until either the people rise up against you (as the Soviets learned in Afghanistan) or a bigger guy stomps on you and tells you to get the hell out (As Hitler found out). Afghanistan did get a little better for a little while on the surface yet it had no effect on Pakistan, whose government structure is not much better than the Taliban. The theory just doesn’t work.
And for all of the fantasizing about mid-east democracy we sure weren’t thrilled when Hamas and Hezbollah participated in elections and got in the government were we? Come to think of it as rigged as it was good ol’ Sadaam was a democratically elected leader. Now Frist wants the Taliban in government and ya know why? Because this administration cooperated FULLY with the Taliban before 9/11. We could’nt have cared less if they were mowing down women and harboring terrorists that weren’t a priority at the time. The bottom line is we don’t want true democracy in these countries, we want puppet governments who will do our bidding.
For the record, the CIA didn’t train Osama bin Laden.
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/08/15/bergen.answers/index.html
Be nice if there were some kind of way that these poor people, thoroughly betrayed by the Repukes, could be brought home to Democrats. (Or failing that, if populists from the left and right could get together and create a real opposition party.) This is what Dean was talking about when he said the Southreners with rebel-flag stickers on their pickup trucks (with the shotgun racks inside) should be voting Dem — and was roundly thrashed for it by most of the left. But after years — generations — of such propaganda on all sides, I don’t think that’s likely for at least another generation. The purists on both sides will ensure that doesn’t happen. Pity, though. Because if I’m right in that, it means that the real powers that be — the corporatocracy and the tiny sliver of the population that own most of it — will have succeeded in their divide-and-conquer strategy, and we all lose.
ANd now - this…
British troops in secret truce with the Taliban
BRITISH troops battling the Taliban are to withdraw from one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan after agreeing a secret deal with the local people. […]
It has now been agreed the troops will quietly pull out of Musa Qala in return for the Taliban doing the same. The compound is one of four district government offices in the Helmand province that are being guarded by British troops.
Question: if you were the Taliban, would you feel any legal, religious or moral obligation to keep your word once the Brits were dust? Any obligation at all? Anyone? Beuller? Bueller?
Prediction: spoken in a plummy British accent “We had no idea the Taliban were going to renege on their side of the bargain. Not a clue!”
I posted the following over at Ace of Spades. I figure it will last all of 10 seconds before it is deleted so I might as well post it over here too. And no I don’t visit Ace regularly. The most wingnuttery I can take is checking out what racist, misogynistic cartoons are in the toons thread over at Freeperland.
Yah, even Alexander the Great only quieted them down by some spectacular mountain assaults, & even then wound up marrying one of the warlords’ daughters.Still, flooding Afghanistan with even half the cash that’s been devoted to the Iraqi war would have shut them up for a while (if only because anyone opening their mouth would inhale a blizzard of dollar bills).
Well, W has a couple of daughters who haven’t done much for the war effort so far. And I think Mullah Mohammed Omar’s still single… hey, this is coming together rather nicely. Just like the end of “Henry V”.
On a more serious note, no one’s talking about controlling Afghanistan any more than the Marshall Plan meant that the US was controlling western Europe. Just reconstruction aid.
Afghanistan shows that the real chicken that came home to roost is the unintended effects of the hard-on people once had about what used to be called “communist adventurism.” Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t think the mujahideen would have held out that well against the Red Army without all the American lolly and weaponry. There’s only so much money to be had from hash and opium. Instead, the entire American mainstream, including liberals, squeaked at Moscow’s basically above-board intervention against people whom anyone with half a brain could see were intent on making the Iranian takeover look like a Unitarian conference. Even my right-wing father now wishes Carter and Reagan would have just shut up and let Moscow do what needed to be done.
“Basically above-board intervention”? Er, Douglas, I hold no brief for the Taliban, but you are talking through your hat. The Soviets actually shot the President of Afghanistan because they suspected he was shifting from being pro-Soviet to being pro-Pakistan/China. They and their Afghan allies then fought an extremely brutal scorched-earth campaign against the Afghan rebels. The UN voted 104-18 for the Soviets to withdraw in 1980.
It was “basically above board” like the invasion of Cambodia. And, in as much as it helped ruin the Soviet Union, helping the Afghans was a good thing- the world’s a hell of a lot more peaceful with the USSR gone, and Central Europe is a much happier place. Your right-wing father is a fool.
I have to give the rightwingers cited in the article some credit - they’re being consistent. As soon as I heard Frist’s remarks, I thought, “Damn, if that were a Democrat saying it, the right wing would be going into so many Ragegasms(tm Tbogg) there’d be a run on tissue paper.”
Are the Right’s Big Media Mouthpieces picking up on this, too?
Umm… Grumpy, i know the truth hurts man…
, former leader of the British House of Commons and Foreign Secretary from 1997-2001, wrote in The Guardian on Friday, July 8, 2005,
Osama bin Laden
Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally “the database”, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.[18]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden
For a cynical but perceptive look at why our Afghan strategy barely had a chance in the first place, please check out the War Nerd:
http://www.exile.ru/2006-September-22/war_nerd.html
Some of you are probably going to be offended by what he has to say, but I think he hits the nail on the head. We’ve gone charging into the Middle East thinking if we just bump off a couple of top guys, we can transform the whole region into one big church picnic. There’s been no awareness of the actual history, culture or any of the other million subtleties (and not-so-subtleties) of the region. I think Bush and many of his supporters had this conception of Afghanistan as one of those alien planets in Star Trek where everybody shares the same language, culture, climate and wardrobe.
The Nerd lays it on the line:
“So once we’d taken Afghanistan we had this leftover problem, which was that nearly half the population consisted of these lunatics who had no stake in “peace,” didn’t want “peace,” and thought “peace” was a lot of newfangled nonsense only fit for heterosexuals, foreigners, and assorted sissies. Especially because “peace” came to their town on tanks and APCs driven by their old enemies the Tajiks and Uzbeks.
“…I get tired of having to say it, but: not everybody thinks like we think. Not everybody wants what we want. The Pushtun want (a) somebody to kill; (b) women kept in their place, somewhere between a the clay oven and the livestock; (c) nobody reminding them that there are other ways to live.”
Mikes Blog Round up…
Crooks and Liars
This Thursday is " The World Can’t Wait" (to end the Bush Regime) Day. Find a protest rally in your area and go.
Last Left before Hooterville : This AA member is not buying Foley’s "but I’m in rehab"…
Since I’ve occassionally trolled Frist’s VOLPAC blog, I somehow ended up on his mailing list. While the emails are immediately sent to the Spam folder, I did check out the one on this. According to Frist’s non-denial denial, he didn’t say that we should work with the Taliban itself, but rather with “moderate Islamists potentially sympathetic to the Taliban”.
Of course, overlooking the absurdity of the statement and the weakness of the “correction,” there would not be a single Republican blog that would have let Bill Frist (D) get away with this. He would be the smoke screen they spread across Fox News to divert people from Foley (D-FL).
Plus, of course, there’s no better way to win hearts and minds than to refer publically to people you hope to make allies as “Islamists”.
“A Saudi Arabian millionaire, Bin Laden became a militant Islamic leader in the war to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan. He was one of the many religious fundamentalist extremists recruited, armed, and financed by the CIA and their allies in Pakistani intelligence to cause maximal harm to the Russians — quite possibly delaying their withdrawal, many analysts suspect — though whether he personally happened to have direct contact with the CIA is unclear, and not particularly important. Not surprisingly, the CIA preferred the most fanatic and cruel fighters they could mobilize. The end result was to ‘destroy a moderate regime and create a fanatical one, from groups recklessly financed by the Americans’ (_London Times_ correspondent Simon Jenkins, also a specialist on the region).” read more at link to find out more
http://www.zmag.org/chomb92.htm
You just have not been paying attention. Mark Foley was really a Democratic Congressman according to Fox News. If reality doesn’t fit your beliefs then alter reality, not what you believe.