Tuesday, October 27, 2009

American involvement in Afghanistan

Amer is too lazy to write, so I will share what he told me yesterday in Afghanistan. He is right: he said that the situation in Afghanistan is quite an embarrassment to US intervention anywhere, if you think about it. Here was the Taliban: a most medieval, obscurantist most backward and traditional government on earth (despised by all), and was overthrown by the US. And the fact that the Taliban is making a comeback is a testimony to the lousy regime that the US set up there, and to the atrocities that have been committed in Afghanistan by occupation troops and by their allies (who accounted for the war crimes of US, ally Abdur-Rashid Dustum: his murder of hundreds, some say thousands, of prisoners?) made that backward and archaic movement of the Taliban attractive? What can you say about such an American intervention? And as I was reading the various American options in Afghanistan in the Economist (the best magazine there is--at least the only one that I don't feel that it insults my intelligence although the editor should really cut back on the word "reckon" in articles: it is driving me crazy), I was thinking about the arrogance of power. To think that an addition of 10,000 or 30,000 troops will change the reality on the ground to such a point that the occupation become attractive is just amazing. I realized that I woke up chatty today.