Afghans Go To Polls : Will The U.S. Now Remain Past 2014? - And WHO Will Pay For It?

"Unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices for territory or for resources.  We do it because it’s right." - Barack Obama,  2011


Today is a big voting day in Afghanistan, and likely will be an even bigger one for the American Military- Industrial National Security State. It means there is a good chance the vote will see pressure for the U.S. to remain long term, possibly even through 2024 - despite the fact we lack the money to do that. Hell, we have more pressing problems here at home with a collapsing infrastructure as well as middle class. We can't be the world's cop forever!

What we know is that eight candidates are competing in the race. The problem is that the five minor candidates’ separate  shares of the total  vote will make it even more difficult for any one candidate to reach the 50 percent threshold that would allow an outright victory. In this case, a runoff vote is unlikely to take place until the end of May at the earliest. The leading candidates going into the vote were Ashraf Ghani, 64, a technocrat and former official in Mr. Karzai’s government; Abdullah Abdullah, 53, a former foreign minister who was the second biggest vote-getter against Mr. Karzai in the 2009 election; and Zalmay Rassoul, 70, another former foreign minister.

All three of these guys are said to be in favor of approving a long term American troop presence. Up in the air is how long an American force will remain in Afghanistan after 2014. Hamid Karzai’s refusal to sign a long-term security deal to allow that presence through 2024 was a major point of tension between the American and Afghan governments.  Why, baffles the mind of the objective and rational observer, given the continued costs to Americans in blood and treasure.  Hell, we've already been there over 12 years and have little or nothing to show for it other than a lot of pissed off people - at home and over there. (Many of the latter pissed and outraged at drone strikes that took out family members and for which they were offered a few head of sheep and a thousand bucks as  reparation.)

I mean, in the normal world of logic and rationality and given our dwindling resources and stupendous debt - with domestic needs already stretched beyond limits - we ought to have taken Karzai's 'out'  and left, lock, stock and barrel. But oh no, we have to continue the pretense of Pax Americana and being the cop of the world. But, of course, why would a national security state that killed the President who inveighed most against Pax Americana (in 1963)  pay any attention to it now? They wouldn't because they removed the sole obstacle to its future implementation, via the document NSC-68.

As in the case of Vietnam, which ought to have had its plug pulled much earlier (thereby saving thousands more lives), we ought to be pulling the plug on this Afghan fiasco and THIS year!  We can't do the Afghans' nation building for them.  It's now their job. We invested in their security forces as much as we can and as it is that trillion dollars pissed away over there has set us back in sundry ways. Hell, to me it'd be more crucial to use the projected money we might spend there on lowering the interest on college students' debt.

But make no mistake that Amerikkan  Neocons and the military-industrial state want a presence there if for no other reason to bleed down our domestic resources even further - thereby widening the nation's economic inequality and hastening the end of the American Middle class. The longer the U.S.  presence, the more money pumped into the pockets of defense contractors for more stupid weapons, including setting up a "combat air brigade" at a cost of $1 billion here in Colorado Springs. (And ranchers here are already in an uproar that the Army wants to claim over 200,000 acres for "drone maneuvers", for cripes' sakes!)

Yes, it may take six months or even longer for the Afghan issue to be settled, following today's election, but make no mistake the end result will be an unwise extension of our presence, of at least 10,000 troops - maybe more. Obama has made it clear this is what he wants-  for reasons I cannot begin to fathom- other than that the neocons have burrowed into his head. In effect, making 10,000 (or more)  targets for the Taliban as well as laying the potential for more incidents to piss off the Afghans and surrounding nations, likely leading to more terrorist blowback.

Which, of course, the national security state welcomes as more justification to keep its expansive surveillance system going. They ought to be more concerned with the additional thousands of returned troops likely to go mentally  'haywire' and ending up with tragedies such as we beheld at Fort Hood 2 days ago.

See also: 'Afghan Elections for Another Fake Regime' - by Eric Margolis

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-margolis/55206/afghan-elections-for-another-fake-regime

Excerpt:

Afghanistan’s national election held this week is a sham. A group of candidates, handpicked by the US, will pretend to compete in an election whose outcome has already been determined – by Washington. The candidates include US -groomed politicians, and drug-dealing warlords from the Tajik and Uzbek north. Chief among them, Rashid Dostam, a major war criminal and principal CIA ally who ordered the massacre of over 2,000 Taliban prisoners.

Such is the rotten foundation on which Washington is hoping to build a compliant Afghan “democracy” that will continue to offer bases to US troops and warplanes. Afghanistan’s majority, the Pashtun tribes, have little voice in the election charade.

The Conspiracy to Assassinate Martin Luther King Jr.

Yes, yes, I know the Neoliberal corporate media narrative is that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.was slain in Memphis by a scruffy drifter and lone loser named James Earl Ray. This is exactly what they want you to believe, since god forbid anyone venture out of the vanilla PR matrix - to reveal King's legacy has been airbrushed away to remove the fact he was a revolutionary in the sights of the national security state.....and yes, good ol' LBJ.

As salon.com's Joan Walsh observes in her piece ('The Radical MLK We Need Today')  this morning

"King crossed some Democrats and labor leaders when he turned against the Vietnam War in 1967, after his unparalleled Riverside Church speech. He knew the war was not only wrong, but was making Johnson’s alleged “War on Poverty” fiscally impossible. Meanwhile a growing black power movement mocked King’s commitment to nonviolence and integration. Even some close allies in the civil rights movement blanched when he joined Marion Wright Edelman and other organizers to start a Poor People’s Campaign later that year – a movement of black, white, Latino, American Indian and Asian people mired in poverty, to fight the war and get the help they deserved. They were to march on Washington and set up a camp there in April 1968, the month King was assassinated."


Though she doesn't venture into the plot to kill Martin, we in the deep politics community are aware that once he came out aggressively against the Vietnam War his days were essentially numbered.  We know from more than a year earlier LBJ had Hoover monitor Rev. King's comings and goings - who he spoke to, who he affiliated with. We also know - despite the Neolib media wanting to cover it up- LBJ had already gotten away with the crime of the century in the JFK assassination, using the bogus Warren Commission as a Potemkin investigation to cover his crime.

In his Nov. 23rd 'UP' program, Steve Kornacki briefly brought LBJ's impending criminal investigations to attention for the first time on national television, though I wonder how many actually watched it. Kornacki's assorted clips showed  LBJ was on the verge of being exposed in a massive LIFE magazine piece (and Senate investigation) for his role in the Bobby Baker scandal - including influence peddling to net millions of dollars- with the money trail to be published. Hence HE stood to gain the most, at just the right instant of time, with JFK killed.  Instantly he became the great "successor" as opposed to damaged criminal, and dropped from JFK's '64 ticket.


Those who wish to examine the document basis in more detail are advised to get hold of Philip Nelson's, 'LBJ - The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination' which make a profoundly credible case for Johnson's involvement - again noting Kennedy's removal cleared the way for Johnson to  accede to the Presidency and escape a long prison sentence.  The Warren Commission was his vehicle for clearing any culpability - using his pal Hoover as the "cleanup man". (E.g. ensuring that no controverting evidence -i.e.  to that painting Oswald as the lone nut assassin- found its way before the Commissioners.)

The point is that if LBJ got away with one major crime, he'd have been emboldened to do it again, especially when King's anti-Vietnam speeches were tarnishing his legacy to promote civil rights.

William F. Pepper, author of Orders to Kill, in a speech he gave on Feb. 4, 2003,  noted that what incepted his investigation into the King killing was an article  by journalist Steve Tompkins in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.  It dealt with the infiltration of the civil rights movement and black leaders by U.S. military intelligence.

The article showed that what transpired in the 50s, and 60s was a continuation of what had seized the American security state zeitgeist since the Russian Revolution. That is, that blacks were regarded as the prime candidates for being recruited as communists because they had the most motivation for revolution against the imperious white -controlling state.  Hoover suspected Rev. King was in this category as well, and used that to justify hounding him.

 

Pepper noted that "one paragraph" in particular caught his eye. It noted that on the day of Rev. King's  assassination there was in place a Special Forces Alpha 184 team, and no one understood at the time why this 6-man  sniper unit was present in Memphis. Pepper then approached Tompkins, observing this introduced a whole other dimension to the case - which was now not nearly as closed as the media would have had us believe.

 

Pepper's breakthrough (and what led to his book) arrived on learning that a film existed of the King assassination. It was in the hands of Army psyops (psychological operations) officers who had been in Memphis that day to take photographs of everything, everyone in the vicinity of the Lorraine Motel.  One of the officers, as Pepper noted - in his speech and in the book - just happened to spin his camera around on hearing the shot, toward the bushes in front of the motel.  The film held the clues Pepper needed and rather than do an injustice to the findings, I think blog readers need to get hold of the entire book, or at least avail themselves of this abbreviated account of Pepper's findings from the speech he gave:

 

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFP020403.pdf

 

In the preceding, Pepper observes that:

 

"Martin King was killed because he had become intolerable.  It was not just that he opposed the war and was going to the bottom line of a number of the major corporations of the United States, those forces that essentially rule the world at this point in time - the transnational entities. But more importantly, I think the reason is because he was going to bring a mass of people to Washington in the spring of '68 and that was very troubling.

 

The military knew that once he started out bringing the wretched of America to camp out in the shadow of the Washington Memorial - and go every day to see their Senators and Congressmen - to try to get social program monies put back that were taken out because of the war- and they got rebuffed again and again they'd become increasingly angry. It was the assessment of the Army that he would lose control of that group."

 

Pepper goes on to indicate that had the event spiraled out of control there would not have been enough troops available to quell the violent (they suspected) results. Hence, taking out King removed the threat of instability.

 

My additional take is that LBJ wanted King's voice silenced once and for all. He'd gotten too much attention on the Vietnam issue, and it undermined LBJ's "great legacy" - having already taken control of all of Kennedy's ideas and programs and pushed them through. Let's also bear in mind the Army itself would have done nothing without the go ahead from the "commander- in-chief".
 

 Joan Walsh in her piece on MLK today writes:

 Harry Belafonte likewise thinks much of American political culture “is guilty of dealing with Dr. King’s life and story in grievously superficial ways. What gave us all strength to do what we did was his radical thinking.” Acknowledging that King’s turn against the war and toward cross-racial, anti-poverty organizing was “controversial” among his closest colleagues, Belafonte notes:

 “It was controversial, but controversy wasn’t something he shunned; controversy became the system through which disagreement and debate could be heard. He was comfortable with that. He welcomed it. That aspect of his history is never really discussed."

And he added:

“The vested interests don’t want us speaking of Dr. King in radical terms. The great tragedy and irony of it all is that the public hungers for voices that are driven more by these moral concerns.”

As I've noted before, the warp and woof of the corporate media has been to soft soap our history and even our heroes, like JFK, MLK, and RFK. They want us to believe they were all simply offed by isolated lone nuts, but the deep politics of each case says otherwise: that all were victims of the national security state and its allies.  History only makes sense when treated not as a succession of facts to be memorized, but as an analysis of countervailing forces set in opposition to each other for attainment of power and/or resources. The conspiracy zeitgeist only becomes manifest and apparent in this context - and not allowing oneself to become a victim of what Curtis White has called "the Middle Mind".  This is a molded - by PR - entity, averse to scrutinizing any event below the superficial media-market tropes and sound bites. It is terrified of what it may learn, say about the 60s' assassinations, and therefore sticks to the safe, conforming path offered by the media - never diverging too far beyond the lines.

Martin Luther King's voice, like Kennedy's before him, inveighed against the military  -security state's infrastructure and its alignment with corporate power - seeking to instead disburse social capital  to the average citizen. Until we understand that, and get our heads on the right side of history, we will remain victims and not victors - in the ongoing fight to be a truly free people - as opposed to hostages of a Potemkin Democracy - which is really a Corporatocracy.

You're WRONG Again, Mr. Prez!

On left blogs, sites such as smirkingchimp.com and firedoglake, one of the worst epithets you can use on a member is "Obamabot". This term captures a blind, unthinking follower of Obama prepared to accept every single decision he makes and find no faults - lest the other side might use them against him. In truth, most of such spineless "citizens" (and I use that term loosely) don't grasp that the presidency is not a personality cult no matter who's in office. And if you're not prepared to hold YOUR President's feet to the fire on specific issues then you have no right to do so for any other. The same applies to Mr. Obama.

Though yes, I voted for him twice, I've made it abundantly clear I am no "Obamabot"! I am prepared to call him out when I believe he's veering wrong, as he did yesterday in front of the press asserting "Mr. Snowden is no patriot!" YES, he is, Mr. President!  Snowden's a hero and patriot if for no other reason than to get you to admit changes are needed at the NSA such as those you proposed yesterday! If you held faithfully to the actual constitutional principles you once taught, especially on the fourth amendment, you'd have  acknowledged that. (You'd also never have approved the National Defense Authorization Act last year or the extension of the Patriot Act sections (e.g.. 206) that flout the original 1978 FISA law curbing mass NSA surveillance.) However, I don't necessarily hold this against you for reasons I gave before, i.e. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/one-blog-every-citizen-needs-to-see.html

showing that Obama doesn't  necessarily hold total freedom on every decision, especially applied to so-called "national security" issues. In those he'd probably been read his "marching orders" as soon as he entered office. Then the shadow government that really runs this country let him know in no uncertain terms what they expected of him and when - then likely pointing to a freeze frame in the famous Zapruder film from November, 1963.

But that doesn't mean I need to agree with what he proffers, even if he's acting under some kind of external duress. It's still wrong, as wrong as other decisions he's likely made when  given wider latitude. Often, I have had to point this out to the other side, including one local numb nut who claimed (before the last general election, in a letter to the Colorado Springs Independent)  that I was an "Obama zombie". (Essentially meaning the same thing as Obamabot but in this case more living dead than not living at all and simply a cyborg.)

I then provided (in a reply letter, published later)  all the examples of Obama decisions with which I energetically diverged, including:

- Ramping up in Afghanistan when our own country is falling apart from lack of attention to its infrastructure.

-  Not fighting to make the stimulus package much larger. In hindsight a package of nearly $1.3 trillion was needed - and much less laden with tax cuts- to jump start aggregate demand and job growth.

- Turning the decision of a public option part of Obamacare over to a Senate committee composed of Dem conservos like Max Baucus (and three Reeps), instead of fighting for it himself. 

- Creating a "deficit commission" with the likes of Alan Simpson ("Social security is like a cow with 310 million tits") and Neoliberal Ernest Bowles. This gave the Reeps an inside track to use Social Security and Medicare as budget cut wedges, for example in confrontations to do with raising the debt ceiling and later budget deals.

- In that debt ceiling  showdown with the Reeps, capitulating to them using the device of a "sequester" when every rational and insightful person knew they would rather send the nation down the sewer (via sequester cuts of $1.2 trillion)  than make a deal. He ought to have used Sec. 4 of the 14th amendment to raise the debt ceiling on his own, but this would have triggered a bigger confrontation and Obama is known for his dislike of such. See e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/07/time-for-talk-is-over-mr-president.html

Therein I noted:

"Obama's last best choice is to enact the debt ceiling increase on his own, and tell the Reeps to screw themselves. He can do this under the provision of the Constitution (Amendment XIV, Section 4), which stipulates:

The validity of the Public Debt of the United States, authorized by law, includes debts incurred for payment of pensions ....and shall not be questioned.

It is clear to me that if the Republican Congress refuses to act to raise the debt ceiling (and thereby honor the validity of paying the Public Debt) then President Obama can and MUST issue an Executive Order to override a putatively derelict Congress and invoke Article 4 of Amendment XIV to raise the debt ceiling himself"

I stood by that then, and do so again, since another debt ceiling brouhaha looms at the end of September. And let's get clear one more thing: this raising of the debt ceiling is NOT to garner more federal money via added debt but to pay debts already outstanding! Not to do so will be to risk our credit rating. So, again, Obama must not let the nation be held hostage and to blackmail by the Reepo Teabag crew.

Other Obama initiatives or decisions with which I have disagreed, sometimes extremely vigorously:

- His proposal on the whitehouse.gov site to use a chained CPI to cut Social Security when that would directly impact the longest living elderly who will need S.S. the most.

- His more recent plan to "means test" Medicare by raising premiums for moderate income seniors.

- His ill-advised "missile defense" system in Europe which every Russianologist or student of Russian history knew would antagonize the great Bear in a big way - and has been almost single-handedly responsible for souring U.S. -Russian relations, never mind Snowden. (Though here, again, his choice may well not have been his but the unseen secret government, see Kathryn Olmstead's 'Challenging the Secret Government', University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

- His giving the go ahead to set the Stuxnet and Flame computer worms loose on Iran, thereby creating a cyber-weapon that can backfire and be re-engineered to be used against us by enemies. (Here again, the decision may well not have been his own, but that still doesn't mean I have to agree with it.)

- His endorsement of natural gas and shale oil fracking which is wholesale destroying the environment of this country, and not adding one single benefit to containing CO2 emissions and global warming.

Robert Heinberg, in his new book, Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Endangers Our Future , is blunt in asserting that in terms of weighing environmental protection  vs. economic growth fracking is a "false choice and a losing strategy".  The problem is that as precious, finite  environmental resources (e.g. water)  are destroyed our long term costs will spike, even as natural gas-shale supplies plummet from demand. (Heinberg shows how Peak oil applies to these fossil fuels as well as to high EROEI light crude oil.)

My wife, of course, is discomfited by all of this because- while not an Obamabot - she doesn't like seeing any negatives expressed against the first African-American President. But she is also prepared to mildly express discomfiture at a number of his decisions (e.g. Social Security and Medicare cuts) though not as vehemently as me.  Also, as I told her, the job of a real citizen is not merely to blindly follow a leader but to call him out on his decisions and when he falls down. No leader is perfect, and it's the citizen's job to recognize that. Just as I sent a letter to Mr. Obama praising him back in 2009 for rescuing this nation from a depression, I have criticized him for other decisions I believed went amiss.

I also believe it is possible to criticize him without resorting to the sort of vile invective and racial epithets (s well as odious depictions) seen on some hard right blogs and sites which shall go unnamed lest these reprobates get swelled heads.

What I'd like to see, truly, is far fewer occasions where I'd feel the need to call Mr. Obama out and criticize him. That could easily happen if he only governed the same way he campaigned last year, alas.