INVOLVING CHINA

Afghanistan, like for example Laos, should be entitled to its insignificance and anonymity.

Throughout history it seems to be been a pawn in the great game of great power rivalries. Nothing seems to change, yet within a blink of twenty or thirty years everything can change – consider the potential role of China in the Vietnam War and the current Afghan-Pakistan war.

Recent history in Afghanistan, perhaps prior to the American Invasion, was a history of a long and destructive civil war, that was resolved in part by the Taliban Government. Given time they, as happened in Britain for example, might have been able to work their way through religious barbarity. We forget the positive legacy of those died for their conscience, and it is doubtless the case that their contribution to a tolerant and democratic society was greater by orders of magnitude, although impolite to mention, than the many who died fruitlessly in service to the many wars of conquest, or attempted conquest.

Modernization, much like civilizations in general, present ready made solutions, and therefore perhaps the impatience to impose them on others. In the process, diversity is constrained, if not denied. The mindless automaton working for the fruits of his or her labor to be realized when they are seventy or eighty was not even an observation made of industrial society. The myth pervades and overwhelmes the reality. So much for a scientific culture. We do not worship science, we worship technology, and every problem is a nail, especially war, to that hammer. So too the impatient with the arts of peace to which ignorance is strength, but doubtless the Inner Party understands the principle at the deepest level.

We live in history, but we are impatient with the working through of historical process, since we are privileged by knowing the best and only outcomes, which since they are true for us must be true for everybody else. Anonymity becomes a state to be fixed. Afghanistan, independent of its location and history can be transformed, even if in the process, like Iraq, it must be smashed and trashed indifferent to the suffering the policy causes for its people. Somehow the grand plans never seems to quite work out, and in truth had we bothered the same could be said for the noble invader societies. How ironic, beyond ridicule and laughter, can it be that the one society that spends more on “defence” than any society on earth is quivering in fear at the tribal machinations in the remoteness of the Central Asia?

The current state of Afghanistan is not just evidence of impatience but of geo-strategic cunning. The pieces on the chessboard can be moved with acumen, if not consistency. There is only the current high purpose underwritten by noble morality (that squares the circle of mass murder). Anyone can be conscripted, indulged and induced to support the cause, even as those that are allies today, were enemies such a short time ago. This process is not limited to the conflicted tribal system of Afghanistan and Pakistan, both nation states abstractions of the imperial cartographers. The Mudjahadeen, including some holy war warriors from Suadi Arabia and Egypt, were once the good guys armed with shoulder carrying rockets to fight the Soviet helicopters. CNN has an account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four and Part Five).

It is not enough for those who dream great dreams and exercise imagination in the cause of victory to widen the war to Pakistan. The problem of two million refugees may not be easily solved, and who cares about them anyway. Not, apparently the barrackers in Pakistan press supporting the actions of their government. Pakistan is an easy mark.

So what of the China, the banker to the imperialist endeavours? Juan Cole notes:

The LAT reports that the Obama administration is pressing China to provide more training and equipment to the Pakistani army in its fight against the Taliban. China has a doctrine of “harmonious development” that discourages foreign adventurism, so it isn’t Beijing’s first instinct. It recently declined to send troops to fight in Afghanistan alongside NATO. But Pakistan is near to China’s Xinjiang Province, which is traditionally Muslim, and which has seen some separatist violence, and Beijing fears the spread to its realm of Talibanism.

So you see anybody can be an ally on the path to final victory, even as other chessboard warriors who have you believe that China is in the longer term an existential threat. At least this way, you never run out of enemies, or address the requirements for global peace so as to confront the fundamental and real existential threat of global warming.

Such a thought, perhaps truth and justice, may be relevant to the human condition now as always.

ELSEWHERE

Cindy Sheehan, mother of Casey, born on Memorial Day 1979, is one American not taken in by the hype of the “they died defending our freedom”. Rather, she observes the obscene number of people who “have been slaughtered for the US Profit Driven Military Empire”. Still to be prophetic does not pay with some punters.

Meanwhile, in emulation of their fathers of the Vietnam generation, the Winter Soldiers, via Democracy Now, report their harrowing tales of invasion before the Progressive Caucus of Congress. War is destructive of humanity. Brutalization causes extreme suffering for the perpetrators. They are supposed to “stuck it in”. Meanwhile, certain decorous persons ponce around the place indifferent to those for whom they might have some responsibility. The Sunshine Patriots and the toothsome Obama are all ears, although to the president’s credit, he has promised to better address veteran issues, not least one hopes “post traumatic shock syndrome”.

Carlo Cristofori, at Counter Punch, notes how from the beginning the political calculation was made to install a puppet government in Kabul – such a novelty. Equally he observes that the war is an attempt to crush the Pashtuns, or at least their tribal structures and tribal leaders who have been brutalized by long years of war. He assumes, perhaps incorrectly, there is a contradiction involved, not recognizing the combination of egotism, arrogance and “overwhelming military” reformulated as counter insurgency with its mantra of death, decapitation and dispossession. In that successful outcome, Obama and his generals would become American heroes for the ages.

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