The McChrystal debacle dramatizes how military thinking dominates U.S. policy — look at how much of the budget the Pentagon commands — as well as the utter hopelessness of achieving anything but draining defeat from the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. This lesson should have been learned after Vietnam. As Yogi Berra said, it’s “déjà vu all over again.”
When U.S. forces found themselves beset by a growing insurgency in Iraq following their lighting overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the most obvious parallel that came to mind was Vietnam: an occupying army, far from home, besieged by a shadowy foe. But Patrick Cockburn, the Independent’s (UK) ace Middle East reporter, suggested that the escalating chaos was more like the Boer War than the conflict in Southeast Asia.
In recent years, there has been a growing tendency for think tanks and military brass to jointly pursue policy objectives, some of which are opposed by the public or the White House—take, for example, the campaigns to build support for the troop “surges” in both Iraq and Afghanistan. This trend, say critics, raises important questions about the appropriate role of the military in promoting particular policies and whether there is enough transparency and accountability in the work of policy groups. And, just as importantly, will there be a new joint campaign aimed at pressuring the Obama administration to delay troop withdrawal from Afghanistan?
Gorbachev had dubbed Afghanistan “the bleeding wound,” and when the wounded Red Army finally limped home, it was to a country that would soon cease to exist. For the Soviet Union, Afghanistan had literally proven “the graveyard of empires.” If, at the end, its military remained standing, the empire didn’t. (And if you don’t already find this description just a tad eerie, given the present moment in the U.S., you should.)
The mechanization of war has resulted in treating other nations’ citizens as less than equal to citizens of the United States. U.S. military actions kill innocent civilians in a repeated and almost routine manner. However, modern communications are informing people around the world that U.S. policies value other citizens less than its own.
Imagine the Pentagon officials supposedly part of the team that discovered significant mineral wealth in Afghanistan spelunking about in pith helmets with their little rock hammers.
Both Afghan elites and the Taliban have be drooling over the $1 trillion in mineral deposits in Afghanistan.
The future is no longer in plastics, as the businessman in the 1967 film The Graduate insisted. Rather, the future is in China.
Of the many undesirable effects of the ongoing — and increasingly policy-induced — recession in Europe, has received relatively less public attention: the resurgence of racist and xenophobic attitudes. This was already something of a problem, especially in Western Europe in the past decade, when right-wing political forces demanded major restrictions on immigration and sporadic episodes of violence broke out against migrant and Roma groups.
Last year, Lauren Rosenberg was walking across a four-lane highway in Utah when she was hit by a car. Now she’s suing Google for $100,000 in damages because Google Maps told her to take that route.