Wake Up
10 December 2009 12:11 am by kris
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/12/09/pakistan.arrests/index.html
As Imohtep says, when are we going to wake up. Does anyone remember after 9/11 Osama Bin Laden saying that Al Qaeda is going to bring us down from the inside of this country?
I am so tired of political correctness. I have listened all night to many news broadcasts about this. It’s absolutely frightening if you think about 11 different events in the last 3 months.
My suspicion is that I will be absolutely hammered for this, but I don’t give a crap anymore. Our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq is causing us to be more vulnerable.
Out of Afghanistan now. Out of Iraq now. Take care of this country and stop the pandering to everyone that wants to see our country taken down.
This post was submitted by kris.
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As it is completely impossible to stop a nutcase, kris, what would be your plan? I mean seriously, if I decided to blow up my local chamber of congress, I guarantee you, you could not stop me.
I agree we need to use less ‘total attack’ and more ‘precision extraction’ – but we’re not going to stop the single extremist – especially one that is suicidal.
There’s been more than one SciFi story regarding the ‘testing’ of children to see if such tendencies are there (definitely ‘politically incorrect’ *L*). Is that what you’re thinking? I’m interested in your plan.
War is actually Peace Obama tells us from Oslo. So where is bush’s Nobel Peace Prize? After all it was he who initiated the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. It is true that Peacemaker Obama has frozen bush’s Iraq war in place by choosing to keep 120,000 troops in that country. Obama the Peacemaker has escalted the war in Afghanistan beyond the point of absurdity. Obama the Peacemaker has expanded his ’secret’ war in Pakistan so that it now rivals, in size, Nixon’s secret war in Cambodia. Finally, Obama the Peacemaker is working as hard as he can to trigger a military confrontation with Iran. Obama a Peacemaker? Big Brother would be proud. Remember it was he who said that ‘up’ meant ‘down’ and ‘black’ meant ‘white’ and that ‘a permanent state of war’ was , in reality, ‘a permanent sate of Peace’. What a joke Obama is. Peace
Curious, I’m not following the reference to 11 in 3 months, or the political correctness angle.
Cut and run is the same old Liberal song and dance. I’m not trying to be harsh, but your post is definitely from the liberal perspective. What kind of tune would you be singing if you were being forced to where a burqa? I have a lot more thoughts on this, but no time to type them… maybe later.
that is “wear a burqa”…
Kris,
These five young men going off the reservation has next to nothing to do with our foreign policy. It has next to nothing to do with Jihad or political Islam. It perhaps has something to do with the Psycho-Social make up of the men involved.
A generation ago these men may have become punk rockers, a generation before that they might have joined an Ashram. Today they went off on a half-baked idea to become holy warriors.
Politically speaking there is no there there. This is much more likely the story of some young men who were allowed to drift; tossed into the deep end of the pool and then left to their own devices. These gentlemen could have just as easily become Christian Cultists as Mujaheddin.
Kris, there are much better reasons to oppose the current AfPack strategy of the Administration. We are after all blundering around the “Graveyard of Empires” with no clear vision of what the hell we are doing there. What is the end game, what are the metrics, how the hell are we getting out of the big hole that Bush helped to expand?
Taylor is correct in one respect; Afghanistan is a humanitarian crisis of the first order. Thirty years of constant warfare has reduced the land to epic mess. There is no civil society, there is only a hobbesian struggle that pits the cities against the vast rural heartland. In this twilight struggle, the weakest,the women and children, have been the most abused.
Where bleeding heart liberals depart from muscular diplomacy types is in the solution. Lefties like me are dubious of the claim that the United States can impose its will on this situation. We doubt that further military action is a solution to a land that has seen far too much military action as it is. We sincerely doubt that the rabid misogynists of the mujaheddin can be made to play nice with there women folk by the gentle application of a bayonet to the backside.
We lefties look at the tools at our disposal and are incredulous. We look at the operatically corrupt Karzi government and its warlord base and scoff ” we are going to fix Afghanistan with this lot?!” I have listened to and share Taylor’s concern for the plight of Afghan Women but personally I can not see how we manage to fix the failed nacro-criminal state that is Afghanistan by using the very people who benefit from the land’s abject state.
From this one lefty’s perspective the attempt to work from a top-down strategy, that is from a government-to-government strategy is a non-starter. There is no central government in Afghanistan, never has been. The only solution from this perspective is the long and painful process of building up from the bottom. If the concern is the plight of women then focus there like a laser. Stop throwing money at corrupt elites and channel that money into the hands of local women via micro loans. Women then gain power and respect via the most direct manner, the family purse strings.
This is not pie-in-the-sky romanticism or woolly minded thinking it is actually a lot more pragmatic an approach than what is on offer from supposed hard-bitten “realists.” It is an approach that accepts Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as gospel. Right now 90% of Afghanistan is at the very bottom of the pyramid, struggling just to live another day. Self realization is going to have to wait, democracy is going to have to wait, grand Geo-strategic goals are going to have to wait. The real question is how our policy secures the very basics for the people of Afghanistan: food, water, shelter, security. If we don’t solve those issues we are just waisting lives and treasure.
Note – the Muslim parents of these young men called for help in fear of what they may be intending and the FBI was ultimately called in for assistance.
They called for help djjl because they were missing and they had no idea what happened to them.
SPINCITY -
Thanks for the very thoughtful comment. Well said. My fear as there is example after example in the last couple of months that home grown terrorism has become a reality. I believe the SOS referenced as much yesterday when asked about these five young men. I strongly believe our presence in Afghanistan presents even more fodder for the extremists in the Muslim faith. We can agree to disagree about that but only the future will tell us who is right.
I don’t think that is correct kris:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/12/10/deradicalizers/index.html
The young men’s families went to the offices of Council on American Islamic Relations in Washington on the morning of December 1, shortly after discovering their sons were missing. They’d also discovered a disturbing video posted by one of them.
The council contacted a Muslim community organization involved in deradicalization efforts, the director of that organization said. Given the sensitivity of the case, the organization has asked not to be identified. The executive director of the council, Nihad Awad, confirmed the role of the organization to CNN.
The deradicalizer said he contacted the FBI and, together with the council, worked closely with U.S. authorities to locate the men. FBI agents interviewed family members of the missing men in northern Virginia and young Muslims living in the area, he said. The Muslim community in northern Virginia was very cooperative, he said, and “the FBI was careful not to strong-arm the community
Lot of home grown terrorists abound =
Timothy McVeigh
Scott Roeder
Paul Hill
Michael F Griffin
Eric Robert Rudolph
Terry Nichols
Elohim City crew
Richard Wayne Snell
David Koresh
and on and on – they just don’t all have funny sounding names to the American ear
Thanks djjl
For once I agree with you. Our home grown terrorists are much more likely to hail from the radical right than from the Muslim community.
If you discount the Army doc who blew a gasket the real connection is not Islam Kris, it is Pakistani ethnicity. Please note the people who are really getting hammered here Kris, it is Pakistani civilians and Pathan civilians. There is more and less than meets the eye. Islam then only becomes a proximate cause, a mcguffin, the real distress is caused by seeing one’s ethnic brethren being needlessly and casually slaughtered.
There in lies the rub Kris. This is where you and I find concordance. Maybe at one time Afghanistan was the “good war” but that time is long past. That good war was lost at the caves of Tora Bora. It was lost when our feckless leader and his NeoCon enablers went on a fool’s errand in Iraq.
We’ve been too long in Afghanistan and we have killed far too many innocent by-standers. We have overstayed our welcome and are now looked upon as just another band of foreign interlopers. Hearts and minds are hard to win in this situation and easy to loose. You can build a thousand schools but it only takes one blown-up wedding party to erase all that hard work.
Our ramp up in Afghanistan guarantees that more wedding parties are going to be vaporized by predator drones, it guarantees that more innocent civilians are going to die in the crossfire. The relatives of the maimed and the dead are not going to have warm feelings for the U.S.A. , that much is certain. They may not become jihadies but they are certainly not going to lend any meaningful support to our efforts at nation-building.
We have seen this math before large number of indifferent to hostile civilians plus a corrupt, incompetent elite equals a foreign policy disaster for the U.S. Adding 30,000 troops into the calculation will not change the results in any serious way IMHO.
Islamic radicalism is merely a symptom of a larger systemic disease. In the stans it is a reflection of the massive failures of the local governments to provide the very basics : food, shelter, security. Political Islam thrives because good governance does not. People only reach for radical solutions when the term ” the legitimate government” becomes an oxymoron.
It is not the vaporizing of innocent that is core issue Kris, it is the U.S. governments support of the detached, corrupt, venal, and lazy local elites. We are stuck in mode of thinking that a leader may be a S.O.B. but he is our S.O.B. I will grant you that the killing of innocents is so much salt on the wound of the suffering ordinary peoples of AfPak. Still the anti-U.S. impetus come from our constant big-footing of small nation-states to conform to our Geo-political notions. It comes from our support of corrupt local elites to further the economic goals of trans-national corporations. It comes from a rejection of our insistence on free-market absolutism, an absolutism that is undermining tradition and pauperizing people both economically and culturally. Political Islam is a way that the ordinary people of many nations try to reclaim control over their destinies. More importantly it is a way for ambitious people to gain political power after they have been frozen out by the ruling elites. Political Islam is the sledgehammer that is used to break through the high walls of exclusion. It is a way to break into the charmed circle of power.
As such Political Islam will continue to draw adherents to its fold, it will remain a force for as long as local governments are dysfunctional, corrupt, and rigidly exclusive. The odd killing of civilians by U.S. firepower will definitely help the process along but the main engine of Political Islam’s progress will always come from the failures of local government, from the corruption and incompetentce of local elites who bend to Washington’s priorities instead of the needs of the local citizens.
Thanks spincitysd
It just goes to show – it’s not always one side or the other.
But, I don’t think the anti-US impetus comes from big-footing for Geo-political outcomes – I think it comes from big-footing for capitalist greed at the expense of whoever can be tramped for the benefit of big business.
“Big-footing for Geo-political outcomes” is exactly what the “capitalist greed” is all about. Without a secure world, these capitalists tell us, we could not safely trade between nations. They say that our navies “must” make the sea lanes safe and our armies the land routes (our pipelines, if you’d like) secure. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get all of that over priced oil and cheap crap from China, that we used to manufacture in the USA before NAFTA, to our shores to buy. By funding this massive military that is stationed all over the world we have, in essence, formed a circular firing squad and are shooting each other in the head. Just so the capitalists can secure their profits. Peace
djjl, AMEN!!!
But, but, theyz all good UUUUberchristians you talkin bout!?
What’s next…profiling all CHRISTIAN MALES?!
The ignorance and short sightedness of the profiling crowd is nearly equaled by the constant buzz of the imhopless gnat signing it’s one note symphony.