You Think The Afghan War Has Only Been Going On For 20 Years?
You know that old saying, don’t you? If in doubt, say something wrong and stupid as loud as you can, right? And who has the ‘we can’t ever lose a war’ crowd dug up to promote that nonsense today? None other than the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who took Britain into not one but two wars that couldn’t be won.
Remember who was our strongest military ally when we went into Afghanistan in 2001? The same guy who joined us in 2003 for the invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein had all those weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which have yet to be found.
Having been thrown out of office in 2007, partially because 139 of his own Labour Party MP’s were against the invasion, many of whom then lost their seats in the 2005 election anyway, Blair now heads up something called the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, a website that doesn’t yet sell t-shirts and coffee mugs, but that’s because they haven’t made a deal with the company that makes t-shirts and mugs for Donald Trump.
Blair has joined the ‘we need to stay in Afghanistan crowd’ because, according to him, “there were real gains over the past 20 years.” And the only reason that Joe is pulling out the troops is to follow an “imbecilic political slogan about ending the ‘forever wars.’”
Incidentally, later today or perhaps tomorrow, I’m going to look at the ‘we can’t abandon our Afghan allies’ argument of David Petraeus, whose 38-year military career abruptly ended when he was indicted and convicted of giving classified information to the co-author of his biography, with whom he was having an extra-marital affair. Which should, if nothing else, qualify Petraeus for a Fox News gig, assuming he can pass the screen test. More on him soon.
I love how Tony Blair believes that ending an ‘endless war’ is an ‘imbecilic’ policy. Well, maybe there’s some truth to that if the war has only been going on for 20 years. But what if the war has been going on for one decade short of 200 years? That’s not endless?
The Brits first showed up in Afghanistan in 1830. Not 1930. It was 1830. And they showed up because the East India Company, a private, joint-stockholding venture, was basically the government in large parts of India, and perceived that the Russians were going to use their presence in Afghanistan as a wedge to challenge British control of the Raj.
You see, in those bygone days, the foreign policies of countries like Britain, France, Italy and Germany weren’t set by those respective governments. The policies were dictated to those governments by the investors who owned stock in private companies that first went into these ‘uncivilized’ regions to secure the raw products — lumber, cotton, minerals — that were needed for markets and manufacturing back home.
If the so-called ‘indigenous peoples’ in these regions had the audacity, the temerity to question how or why the natural wealth of their region was being looted and shipped somewhere else, the investors would then tell their home government to send in the troops. Or better yet, when the British Parliament held a debate over what to do about the fact that thousands of Hottentot tribal members were starving to death in South Africa because transplanted British farmers had swiped all their land, as one MP put it, “let’s bring milk to the Hottentots.”
Maybe that’s what we need to do in Afghanistan. Bring milk to the Afghans. As I understand it, we have plenty of milk to spare right now because everyone is worried about their cholesterol level, so around here, milk is cheaper than toilet paper or gasoline.
What we are looking at in Afghanistan, and I will be posting more content about this issue on Medium over the next several days (stay tuned) is the legacy of Western colonialism playing out, with much of the political, military and media establishment trying to maintain the fiction that ‘we’ know better than ‘them.’
This attitude has been nurtured, shaped, and sustained because beginning in the 15th Century, a guy named Columbus got off a boat anchored next to an island in the Caribbean and immediately planted a flag and a cross in the sand.
Which is more or less exactly what happened when two British military officers, Alex Barnes, and Henry Pottinger, did a survey of the Indus River which borders on Afghanistan in 1831.
That’s some twenty years.
