Stuck in Fear Gear in Afghanistan, Hemorrhaging Blood and Billions of Dollars

STEPHEN PIZZO FOR BUZZFLASH

The Bush/Cheney bunch used fear so effectively to get us to do the wrong things that we are now afraid to do the right thing. The right thing, of course, would be to admit that Afghanistan will never be anything but Afghanistan. And the Afghan people will never be anything more, or less, than Afghans.  And, above all else, “being Afghan” means, above all else, fidelity to tribe -- and there are a lot of tribes:

Forty percent of Afghans are Pashtun, 11.4 of whom are of the Durrani tribal group and 13.8 percent of the Ghilzai group. Tajiks make up the second largest ethnic group with 25.3 percent of the population, followed by Hazaras, 18 percent; Uzbeks, 6.3 percent; Turkmen, 2.5 percent; Qizilbash, 1.0; 6.9 percent other.

Oh, and BTW, the 40% who are Pashtun -- the tribe of the Taliban. They always have, and always will, control the largest hunk of Afghan soil:

"Things are so bad that Robert Blackwill, who was on George W.’s national security team, wrote in Politico that the Obama administration should just admit failure and turn over the Pashtun South to the Taliban since it will inevitably control it anyway. He said that the administration doesn’t appreciate the extent to which this is a Pashtun nationalist uprising."

Nevertheless Congress voted yesterday to spend another $59 billion we don’t have to keep on keeping on in Afghanistan. The administration and Pentagon claim they are seeing a light at the end of that tunnel. I suspect that light is just another bonfire of imperialist vanity, just latest in a long string of European hubris and stupidity to burn in that sandbox from hell.

But all that fear mongering out of the last administration seems to have Congress and a big hunk of the American public stuck in fear-gear and thus unable to get the machinery in reverse. We seem determined to finish this train wreck no matter what. Why? Because, “we gotta fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”