Barack Obama’s intensification of the occupation of Afghanistan is nothing less than a full commitment to one side in the civil war raging there. What he calls a threat of a Taliban takeover is actually a Pashtun resistance to the U.S. occupation and the corrupt Karzai government it backs. Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s spin cannot change those facts.
Obama’s story isn’t even coherent. Al-Qaeda is in Pakistan, he says, not Afghanistan. (Obama’s speech said nothing about the continuing “secret” drone assault that the U.S. military is conducting there.) Yet he insists that we must see Afghanistan through because that’s where the 9/11 attacks were planned. Well, not actually. You can just as easily say they were planned in Germany and Florida. Why are those terrorist sanctuaries not feeling the wrath of the U.S. military?
Obama vows to defeat al-Qaeda, but what does that mean in the case of a highly decentralized “organization” under whose banner anyone anywhere may claim to be operating? How do you defeat an idea?
Obama promises that U.S. forces will begin leaving in July 2011–maybe, depending on conditions on the ground.
Our only hope is that opposition will keep growing–where is that antiwar movement anyway?–and that the looming 2012 presidential election will prompt Obama to get out.
But in the meantime, Afghan people, expect more U.S.-sponsored violence, more maimed and dead babies and children, compliments of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t regard someone as my enemy merely because he refuses to recognize the legitimacy of Karzai’s gang.