It was last fall that the magazine exchange thing happened. Joe had a bunch of old Playboy magazines from the late 80's and early 90's, brand new, still in their plastic mailing bags. Someone had given him a subscription and he never read them. Gave them to me. Kind of interesting....the movies they panned that turned into big hits, the Sports predictions that they got right, the ones that were wrong. Electronic gadgets that were going to set the World ON FIRE....stuff like that. I passed them on to Dave...and in return he gave me a bunch of old National Geogrphics from the late 70;s and mid 80's. Those were very interesting. I gave some to the Ex and she gave me a bunch of old gardening magazines that I gave to Brian....that he ended up taking to an old folks home....it was fun, it a low key way....everything was old enough to be just slightly quaint.
Do the History yourself. It would not help anyone for me to do it. It was 1985 when the article was written. It talks of how the Soviets arrived; at that time they had already been fighting Afghan tribes, political factions, guerrillas from Pakistan. It tells of refugees living away from their homeland areas. It talks of how America had, at that time, already channeled over $325mm in weapons to groups fighting the Russians.
....and now some of those same weapons are used to kill Americans.
....but we still do not GET IT....there is no winning in Afghanistan. Politicians and Pundits will tell you it is now America's longest WAR.....but the poeple their, just like the Vietnamese, have been fighting for Centuries. The British failed there in the mid-Nineteenth Century...they could not succeed. Alexander the Great could not conquer them in 325 BC....and no invaders in between could. It is easy for the press to call those fighting American forces, "Insurgents", which takes away who they really are...Pushtans,Tajiks, Badakshis,Nuristanis,Uzbeks, Hazara, Turkomens, Baluch....and it is there land. I do not understand insurgent. It is a made up word. Refugee is not. Many of the native people of Afghanistan now live in Pakistan. Refugees.
Obama has set a timetable to Withdraw from Afghanistan. 2014. Millions yet to spend. Some Republicans are against a timetable. Said it will let the 'other' side prepare. For what... I am not sure. Maybe to build homes and plant crops. To have lives. To have families. We did not win. We never could have won.
But we could have educated our children without calling our teachers 'Greedy' for asking for decent wages.
We could have created a decent economic structure for our country that did not rely on building weapons, rockets and missiles.
We could have fed our poor, healed our sick, housed our homeless.
But those are just weasely, greedy takers that have no place in American plans.
We still have insurgents to kill. Perhaps we need more American Insurgents.
There is more saber rattling amongst the smug and rich.....send guns and bullets to Syria, Egypt, Libya. Made me think of an old song.....from a different war....one that cost a lot.
Yupperz..... the times they aren't changing. I do not want to see another girl with far away eyes.
5 comments:
For the longest time I've imagined the Russians just chuckling when they learned we were headed into Afghanistan. It was obviously not going to go as we hoped. It didn't go as they hoped. Irony abounds.
As The Kids used to say, Word.
Sherry.... the Political and Economic drain of the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan was a key element to the demise of the USSR....gees, our Politician just don't get it.
Randal....Word is correct. and Word is a four letter word.
"there is no winning in Afghanistan...The British failed there in the mid-Nineteenth Century...they could not succeed. Alexander the Great could not conquer them in 325 BC....and no invaders in between could."
Now what kind of defeatist attitude is that? Of course we can conquer Afghanistan if we put our minds to it. We can triple the defense budget and start sending hundreds of thousands more ground troops into that primitive country. "Shock and Awe" we'll call it. And we'll give lucrative contracts to Bechtel, Halliburton and Blackwater, since those fine companies know how to git 'er done.
And we can easily afford to do this, especially if we quit giving government handouts to them whiny 47-percenters.
The whole war in Afghanistan has been a tragic waste, just like the war in Iraq. With billions of dollars lost and countless people dead or disabled, what do we have to show for it?
The people who died could still be alive today if not for this mistake. The billions blown in Iraq and Afghanistan could have been put to much more constructive use. But the military industrial complex doesn't care about any of that.
Post a Comment