Winning Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan

The Story of the Good Ship, "Relentless"

This catchy phrase has lubricated the relentless appropriation of million after million, billion after billion of our tax dollars as a sort of "icing on the cake" in the constant redefinition of our involvement in Afghanistan.  

Oh yes, NATO has been dutifully -- and relentlessly -- training the locals in the fleeting hope that they might, one day, support the government we have installed so carefully once we are gone.  

Oh yes, 15 cents of every dollar we have relentlessly allocated for infrastructure has "hit the dirt" before even this last little bit was stolen.  

Oh yes, the poor, bomb blasted wreck of a country has been relentlessly exploited for the extraction of the relentless stream of half-baked "talking points."

Now, the Americans are as tired of this rolling disaster as the Afghans are.  But wait, how could all those Afghans be "tired" of our relentless, high priced effort to, uh, modernize their country and establish democracy there?

From DEMOCRACY NOW: ( source link )

Poll: 92% of Young Afghan Men Don’t Know About 9/11 Attacks

In other news from Afghanistan, a new public opinion poll of young Afghan men in Kandahar and Helmand provinces has been released by the International Council on Security and Development. The poll founded that 92 percent of young men in those regions knew nothing about the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States; 40 percent think NATO forces are there "to destroy Islam" or Afghanistan itself; 61 percent believe that Afghan national security forces will not be able to cope without international support; and 56 percent suspect that Afghan policemen are helping the Taliban.

Surely, after 9/11 they can understand our motivation.  Right?  And, since they understand our motivation, they should be able to understand our relentless execution of "everything necessary" to, well, oh whatever...

A MeanMesa "Quickie" - Are There Taliban Casualties?

MeanMesa, enjoying the perspective available only to those of us with enough decades behind us to remember the outrageous "body counts" our Defense Department was constantly "trotting out" almost daily during the Viet Nam War, notices the rather sinister and possibly well designed reluctance of the corporate media seems to exhibit on the same subject as they report evens from Afghanistan.  The trick worked well enough back in the '70's -- that is, until the American "news consumer" began to realize that the "enemy" there had almost lost more troops than they had people in their entire population.

This isn't to say that US forces fighting in that war didn't wreak mortal havoc on the "insurgents" from the North -- ooops, they lived there.  Oh well, during those heady times, the cynical pall of another American "victory" was far more important than the presentation of any actual facts about what was happening.

Domestic politics was everything.  Facts took a distant second.

However, those pesky "media designers" running the alphabet outfits' "news shows" (and, of course, the fair and balanced Faux "News" and Fear Carnival) have now learned a new trick.  See, they remain a little gun shy about just how soiled their credibility became during Viet Nam.

It's simply too hard to sell the latest heart attack and depression pills when no one takes the little dab of heavily biased information presented between the commercials seriously.

So now, as we watch the coverage of what is happening in Helmund and Kandahar, we focus exclusively on only our own casualties.  The few and sketchy reports about totals of enemy dead seem to only be added as "icing on the cake" when civilians have been accidentally killed.  Uh, American, it seems, just aren't that comfortable with the realities which inevitably emerge when there are thousands of soldiers and marines hammering away on the competition.

Those would be the realities of war fare and combat.

Don't kid yourselves.  Your signature is on the death certificate of every one of those Taliban corpses just as much as it is on the death certificates of the Americans coming home in body bags.

Oh gosh.  Is MeanMesa exaggerating again?

Sample a few corporate media "news" reports on the conduct of the conflict, and form your own opinion.