The US is getting the shaft in war making.
Two invasions and two bloody, nasty quagmires.

Rare is the Maureen Dowd column that is more than pancake face powder, or a shoe-horned turn at national politics, and rare still is a piece with insight into the US’ two beleaguered faraway wars.
In her column this morning, Dowd touches upon the deathly maze of Afghanistan and how the US is up against some terrible and experienced fighters.
The money graph:

We invaded two countries, and allied with a third — all renowned as masters at double-dealing.
And, now lured into their mazes, we still don’t have the foggiest idea, shrouded in the fog of wars, how these cultures work.
Before we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, both places were famous for warrior cultures. And, indeed, their insurgents are world class.

Along with the IEDs, the savage car bombs and a wicked, back-stabbing insurgency, is a shitload of cruel corruption, a corruption so deep, the the majority of Afghans would take the Taliban over the supposedly
legitimate government in Kabul.
Indeed, the culture of corruption is a way of life, according to some of those 92,000 documents leaked Sunday by the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks.

Why is the US there?
There have been 1,207 US military deaths in Afghanistan and to fuel the conflict there requires gasoline at $85 a gallon — enough said.
The US needs to do a quick shit out of dodge, eagle pull before the situation gets worse.

Massive toxic leaks into the environment can be horrible, whether it be the Gulf of Mexico or a horrible, incompetent-run war in Afghanistan.
On Sunday, WikiLeaks (my laptop won’t load the group’s website) released a shitload of formerly-classified documents on the  Afghan conflict, and the result ain’t pretty.
From the the New York Times:

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

The documents will most-likely raise a stink, but the war will also most-likely continue.
In Afghanistan (as in Iraq), there is no winning for losing.

Despite the Obama White House blubbering about how the leaks “could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk,” US Sen John Kerry retorted: “However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

And also on Sunday:

Meanwhile, Nato says it is investigating reports that as many as 45 civilians died in an air strike in Helmand province on Friday.
Although an initial Nato investigation found no evidence, a BBC journalist visiting Regey village spoke to several people who said they had witnessed the incident.

Try and cap this sonofabitch…

One really mind-boggling particular nowadays is the continual use of hypocritical-irony; creating a two-faced lie through the clenched-teeth of a smile.

Verbal irony is distinguished from situational irony and dramatic irony in that it is produced intentionally by speakers.
For instance, if a speaker exclaims, “I’m not upset!” but reveals an upset emotional state through their voice while truly trying to claim they’re not upset, it would not be verbal irony by virtue of its verbal manifestation (it would, however, be situational irony).
But if the same speaker said the same words and intended to communicate that they were upset by claiming they were not, the utterance would be verbal irony.
This distinction gets at an important aspect of verbal irony: speakers communicate implied propositions that are intentionally contradictory to the propositions contained in the words themselves.
There are examples of verbal irony that do not rely on saying the opposite of what one means, and there are cases where all the traditional criteria of irony exist and the utterance is not ironic.

We’re living and walking around in an age of horrifying and catastrophic irony.

A terrible case in point: Nimble-minded George Jr. arrogantly blubbered to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001:

Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there.
It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

And the irony of it all:

Americans are asking “Why do they hate us?”
They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

(Illustration found here).

The then-spawned The Global War on Terror coupled with the creation of the huge, bungling Department of Homeland Security reproduced what it supposedly sought to eradicate — an example would best be described in the old reflective-adage of pouring JP4 jet fuel on a small, charcoal brazier in order to smother the fire.

This morning from Al Jazeera English:

Extremists held in a US-run detention centre in Iraq were allowed to teach fellow detainees how to use explosives and become suicide bombers, a former inmate has told Al Jazeera.
Adel Jasim Mohammed, a former detainee of Camp Bucca near Umm Qasr, said that US officials did nothing to stop radicals from indoctrinating young detainees at the camp.
“Extremists had freedom to educate the young detainees. I saw them giving courses using classroom boards on how to use explosives, weapons and how to become suicide bombers,” Mohammed said.
“For the Americans we felt it was normal. They did not stop them [the radicals].”
Adel, who was held for four years without charge at Camp Bucca, said that extremists were allowed to speak freely to fellow inmates.
“In 2005, an extremist was sent to our camp. At first, Sunnis and Shias rejected his teachings. But we were told that he was imposed by the prison authority,” he said.
“He stayed for a week and recruited 25 of the 34 detainees – they became extremists like him.”

And those five young, naive Americans arrested last week week in Pakistan has created a good scare about homegrown jihad, and the fabled wide, wide world-war on terror has doubled back on itself, feeding off its own entrails, as it were, to make matters far, far worse.
Those lost souls from Virginia were nabbed only after one of the guys’ daddy, Khalid Farooq, called authorities — and after his son and the others were arrested, and just to be on the safe-terror side: Police said they’d also detained Khalid Farooq as a precautionary measure.
One never knows the mystery of jihad.
Read a good view on the mythology of the US-led terror war here.

And this past week, the current US president, Barack Obama, reached far into the cosmic-ironic heavens to pluck a few words to whitewash the total-irony of  being both a Nobel peace-prize winner and a war escalator.

(Illustration found here).

Although Obama claimed he was “most surprised and deeply humbled” by the Nobel prize in October, he popped some hawkish-spin into the peace mix last week in Oslo, Norway:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.
…
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their (Gandhi and King) examples alone.
I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.
For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.
A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies.
Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.
To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

But what about change?
And what about reality vs bullshit?

A situation stated best via a letter to the editor, published Friday in the New York Times: The Nobel Peace Prize only underscores the irony and sadness of President Obama’s Afghanistan policy. On that memorable night a year ago, in Grant Park in Chicago, before an impressed and stunned nation and world, Mr. Obama promised that change would come to America.

Obama, therefore, has produced verbal irony using both the situational and dramatic ironies — Pain is just weakness leaving the body!

From President Obama’s lips to boots on the ground.
Word came Sunday night: Escalation — 35,000 more troops for the Afghan meat-grinder.
And the first batch, 9,000 Marines for Helmand province, will leave as soon as Obama opens his mouth Tuesday at West Point, an event creating a most-strange and ironic circumstance for a snow-job — He will try and somehow explain to US peoples why such a bloody, dumb-ass move makes sense.
(Illustration found here).

A poem from Jean Gerard, age 94: “Defragging Afghanistan”

Take Showkar Kariz for example.
It’s thirty miles northeast of Kandahar
as the crow flies over Mohammed Qasim’s head.
He’s the only remaining inhabitant now.
He looks up into a cloudless sky.

“There’s no Al Quaeda here,” says he.
“I had just dug out a child when
the second strike flew over. That time
they got him!”
He squints in the sun,
rubs his eyes.
“These are war crimes,” he says.
Silence.
Then: “Guess who came by last week,
and for what? Americans,” he says.
He’s tired. His voice shakes. “They
buried a piece of the World Trade Center
here,” he says, “and took a piece
of our mosque back to New York.”
He points
to a small mound beside a ruined wall,
sifts a handful of dust through his fingers.

Bad moon rising, and so forth…

In one of the most outlandish public elections in recent memory, the government of Afghanistan has re-installed itself on a pile of criminal corruption so putrid even an idiot can smell it a mile away.
Despite all the cuddling, a hard-serious fact remains: “Right now 85 percent of the government is corrupt,” said Ahmed Shah Lumar, a businessman in the southern city of Kandahar. He said bribery, extortion and other corrupt practices extend “from the very small person” in government to the very top.

And US GIs — along with troops from all over the world — are getting blown to bits to keep this pile of shit in office.

(Illustration found here).

And Hamid Karzai, supposedly just re-elected to a joyous second term as Afghan president, has apparently learned the trade-craft of bullshit, memory-lapse gall from a master: George Jr.
If you can’t beat ‘em, lie about it, then throw up a pious smoke-and-mirrors, holier-than-thou stream of consciousness.
From Al Jazeera English just this morning:

“Over the last few days some political and diplomatic circles and propaganda agencies of certain foreign countries have intervened in Afghanistan’s internal affairs by issuing instructions concerning the composition of Afghan government organs and political policy of Afghanistan,” the foreign ministry statement said on Saturday.
“Such instructions have violated respect for Afghanistan’s national sovereignty.”

In the past few days just about everybody that’s anybody has trashed Karzai’s government.
In the words of the UK’s Gordon Brown, who is catching bad flak for the Brits dying in the Afghan killing fields, the war there is bad news: “Sadly, the government of Afghanistan had become a byword for corruption,” Mr. Brown said in a speech to defense experts. “And I am not prepared to put the lives of British men and women in harm’s way for a government that does not stand up against corruption.”

And as President Obama contemplates troops increases (or not), he should have some sense, he should think about more than the politics — get the US out of Afghanistan.

The trouble: No one will leave.
The UK’s turd-knuckle Brown in the same breath as the above quote said it for all the bullshit political-talking assholes on the planet: “We cannot, must not and will not walk away.”

Oh, but they will, they surely will, but it won’t be pretty — just ask Alex the Great, (Brown should study his own British history) and the Soviets.

Instead of George Jr.’s arrogant rant: “I want justice,” he said after a meeting at the Pentagon, where 188 people were killed last Tuesday when an airliner crashed into the building. “And there’s an old poster out West that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’ “
We should follow Andy Borowitz’s reporting:

In a bold new strategy designed to locate the world’s most wanted man, the United States today dispatched a team of paparazzi to find Osama bin Laden.
“If these people can find George Clooney when he’s vacationing on Lake Como, they can find Osama,” one intelligence insider said.

(Illustration found here).

In the face of Dick Cheney’s insanely-ironic blast last month that President Obama was “dithering” on Afghanistan, dickhead and George Jr. more than dithered in December 2001 in letting Osama and his boys slip out of the east Afghan mountains of  Tora Bora and flee to Pakistan, a move directly connected and a root-cause of the shit-mess now in the Af-Pak region.
Read a good, comprehensive report on the entire Tora Bora muck-up here.

Late to the game: US military/intelligence — pushed by the Bush White House — total dithered in adapting to the new (though very, very ancient) method of “asymmetrical warfare” (although Don Rumsfeld called for a study [pdf] of such tactics and strategy in 2002), which all insurgency/guerrilla groups practice and continue to this very day, and instead relied on a pure power, “shock and awe,” style, something akin to randomly swinging around a large shovel to combat a mosquito in a crowded theater lobby.
Most-likely scenario — the mosquito will vanish amidst the carnage inflicted on all those innocent-bystander theater patrons.

And Osama has been a weird, terror-like guy a long time.
One of his sons, Omar, has penned a ‘Dearest Mommy’-type memoir that paints a picture of a crazy person from the get-go — war against the infidal above all things, even from being a daddy.
From Time magazine’s review of “Growing Up bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World” (St. Martin’s Press):

The younger bin Laden fled Afghanistan only when it become clear that Osama was planning a massive attack on the U.S., but he still couldn’t accept that his father was responsible for 9/11 until months later, when he heard the familiar voice on audiotape claiming credit for the attacks.
“That was the moment to set aside the dream I had indulged, feverishly hoping the world was wrong and it was not my father who brought about that horrible day,” he writes. “This knowledge drives me into the blackest hole.”
…
Still, ever the dutiful Saudi son, Omar couldn’t bring himself to break with his family until the day that his father asked his sons to volunteer for suicide missions.
When Omar protested, Osama replied, “You hold no more a place in my heart than any man or boy in the entire country. This is true for all my sons.” Omar writes, “I finally knew exactly where I stood.
My father hated his enemies more than he loved his sons.”

Another view inside the infamous bin Laden family can be found here, which concluded: One F.B.I. analyst summed up the bureau’s assessment this way: there were “millions” of bin Ladens “running around” and “99.999999 percent of them are of the non-evil variety.”

Osama bin Laden, however (apparently the .01 of the “evil variety”), has become the most-wanted person on the planet and just about everybody on the planet can recognize his mug — and the group he founded, al-Qaeda, is now listed along with Nazis and child rapists as bad, bad bogeymen of history.
Bill Moyers Journal has a good history on Osama and al-Qaeda in campaigns against the West, and especially the US, culminating with those attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
And nowadays, despite all the manpower, firepower, unmanned drones and satellite images, Osama is still at large, causing some to question whether the guy’s still alive (read this), although a lot of horrific shit is still taking place in al-Qaeda’s name.
In Iraq, the group claimed responsibility for the horrific car bombing a couple of weeks ago in Baghdad, which killed 160 people and wounded more than 500, and this despite all kinds of smack-down operations.
This analysis last week from CNN‘s veteran war reporter Michael Ware:

While al Qaeda in Iraq has been gutted from within, principally by Sunni insurgents turning on them and assassinating them over recent years, the network still exists.
Al Qaeda, an organization built with the expectation of loss, has endured and will continue to do so until Iraq’s slated January election and beyond.
…
Al Qaeda in Iraq is not the network it once was, it’s not able to deliver multiple suicide bombings on an almost daily basis.
When I was last in Baghdad nationalist insurgents told me there were but a handful of operational al Qaeda cells in the city.
Nonetheless, they warned five committed al Qaeda members can “wreak havoc.”

Yes indeed.

From Al Jazeera English:

The reality is that, whilst direct al-Qaeda actions have been seriously restricted, the organisation has franchised from Somalia to Indonesia and North Africa.
In Afghanistan, it directs or collaborates in Taliban attacks.
Al-Qaeda is mercurial and, like a virus, mutates and adapts.

Also at the link is an most-excellent video on the subject.

In Afghanistan, the US appears to have driven out the group, as top dog Gen. Stan McNasty (oops,sorry) McChrystal told reporters in September: “I do not see indications of a large al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan now.”
So why does the US then continue its presence there?

Matthew Hoh has been in the news lately — he’s the US State Department official who resigned in September in protest over the Afghan war strategy — and this week he was on CNN to discuss the issue, which also included some words about al-Qaeda.

Crooks and Liars had this partial transcript:

ZAKARIA: Do you think  –  the top military brass have all endorsed General McChrystal’s report and request. Do you think that down on the ground there is a very different feeling?
HOH: Oh, yes. Yes, there is. I think on the ground  –  and the perspective is that, what is the strategic value of what we’re doing here. Why are we doing this? What are we getting out of it?
It’s not going to defeat al Qaeda. It’s not going to — if you take our two goals as being the defeat of al Qaeda, and then, because of its nuclear weapons and because of the relationship with India, the stabilization of the government in Islamabad, 60,000 troops taking 50, 60 dead a month in this country, and how many wounded and killing how many Afghans, as well, it doesn’t accomplish either of those goals.
ZAKARIA: Why doesn’t it defeat al Qaeda?
HOH: My belief is that, after 2001, al Qaeda evolved. They became, as I like to say, an ideological cloud. It exists on the Internet. They don’t need a safe haven in Afghanistan. They’ve got safe havens in five, six, seven other countries.

In this respect, should the US invade and occupy those “five, six, seven other countries” where Osama’s boys have been operating?
One would hope the obvious is apparent — the fight in Afghanistan, no matter how long and cruel, will not yield Osama bin Laden or any of his boys: Asked whether he would give up bin Laden, Mullah Omar explained in a September 21, 2001, interview with the Voice of America that “We cannot do that. If we did, it means we are not Muslims . . . that Islam is finished. If we were afraid of attack, we could have surrendered him the last time we were threatened and attacked. So America can hit us again.”

The moral: When trying to kill a mosquito, much less anything as vaporous and crazy as an ideological cloud, don’t use a big shovel in a small, crowded room.

One wonders what is bubbling up in George Jr.’s brain fluids and what makes the guy so blind he can’t see the huge, out-stretched, multi-layered hand about to slap his freakin’ face.
Either he’s so dumb to be believed, or he just don’t give a fat-rat’s ass.
Most-likely a strange, biological combination of both.

On Saturday, the former president (I write that with a heavy heart) told a leadership conference in New Delhi, India, the war in Afghanistan should be escalated beyond the boiling point as apparently the conflict is the linchpin for the freedom of the planet.

The boy hasn’t lost his touch for irony and unmitigated gall.

(Illustration found here).

Via Agence France-Presse:

“If the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and their extremist allies were allowed to take over Afghanistan again, they would have a safe haven and the Afghan people, particularly the Afghan women, would face a return to a brutal tyranny.”
“This region and the world would face serious threats,” he added.

The former buck-stops-here Big Decider guy steered clear of offering direct advice to President Obama, who is currently figuring out what to with George Jr.’s Afghan debacle — more troops and how many — but that didn’t plug his face-hole, however:

“…the work is hard and I hope we don’t abandon the people of Afghanistan.”

The asshole has a memory lapse — George Jr. abandoned the country in December 2001 when he started prep work on the Iraq invasion — and even after it became apparent the Taliban was re-emerging years later, denied a troop increase (due to the Iraqi front going to shit in a wire basket).
And he punked the Indians with the continuing line that extremists want to destroy us simply because they just plain loath our way of life.

Bush said both the United States and India were “involved in an ideological struggle against extremists who murder the innocent to advance a dark vision of extremism and control.”
“They attack political, financial and diplomatic targets because they hate our way of life and they hate our vision for freedom and human rights and human dignity and prosperity and peace,” Bush told the conference.

This is also the same George Jr. who waxed poetic nearly two years ago  about the sweet-fiction of war: “I must say, I’m a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks.”

For what, you lying, freakin’ freak!

End of the week and bad war-related shit.

Beyond the US domestic horror of Joe Lieberman, military exercises in the Middle East are becoming way-more frightening than any paranormal or blair-witch fantasy could envision, creating a deep hole-drain in anything that remains of a moral fiber in the facade of a so-called American Ideal.

The righteous, or “just war,” is a lie perpetrated since day one — no such thing as a good murder, despite all the literary and artistic rhetoric babbled-out by political people and pundits pointing at the dire need to make the planet collateral damage.

In March 2003, at the time of the Iraq invasion, I was an editor/writer at a twice-weekly in Central California and responsible for the lay-out (and content) of several pages, including ones for religious activities, church services, specials and the like — after interviewing some local preachers/lay people on the religious/moral grounds for the war, I came away with the distinct impression that anyone with any sense of ethics would know the Iraqi endeavor was near-pure bad and appeared to signal a significant schism in history.
Of course, not that many people truly and fully understood back then (I didn’t) the true terror of George Jr.’s White House — the near fabrications, the outright ‘Curveball‘ lies, the twisted-torture of the US Constitution — and only some gut instinct told me these assholes were so-full of shit.
However, what I really didn’t comprehend was US-home-grown war criminals on a grand scale spawning two horrifying endless wars in faraway places as part-and-parcel of a long, freakin’-ass long war on terror — a worldwide and timeless conflict created by the US that feeds off itself.

And history is indeed now rampant, one would have to be a total dumb ass not to realize 9/11 and its after-effects of Afghanistan and Iraq made the world a much-more strange and violent place.
Even a pastor within George Jr.’s own supposed Christian denomination, Methodist, told me the Iraqi invasion did not fall under the premise of  the “just war” doctrine  — in fact some Texas Methodists crafted a petition/letter of complaint against George Jr. (“a member of Park Hill United Methodist Church (UMC) in Dallas, Texas”) and his boss, Dick Cheney (“local membership unknown”) for being “undeniably guilty of at least four chargeable offenses…crime, immorality, disobedience to the Order and Discipline of The UMC, and dissemination of doctrine contrary to the established standards of doctrine of The UMC. For these offenses, we the undersigned call for an immediate and public act of repentance by the respondents. If the respondents do not reply with sincere and public repentance for their crimes, we demand that their membership in the United Methodist Church be revoked until such time that they sincerely and publicly repent.”
Hahaha…gotcha! Hell first will freeze way-over.

Meanwhile, back up to speed: Bad wars getting way-badly worse, especially in the nefarious Af-Pak zone of insanity.
Wednesday morning, Taliban gunman staged an explosive pre-dawn raid on a guest house in Kabul, shooting-to-death six UN workers and a couple of Afghan security people — the scene was anti-pretty.
According to the New York Times:

The police said one of the victims, a woman, had been shot in the head, and another burned to death.
A cellphone video taken by a security official and seen by a reporter showed just the head and torso of a third victim, apparently cut in half when one of the attackers detonated his suicide vest.

And to add JP4 to an already-roaring fire, the Times has also reported the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, has been on the payroll of the US CIA the past eight years — since the October 2001 invasion.
WTF!
Key long-range quote from the brothers Karzai story:

“If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves,” said Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan.

No shit sherlock!
And says it all for Gen. Stan McNasty (oops, sorry, I always do that) McChrystal’s big, bright idea of a counterinsurgency program — the so-called ‘population-centric strategy’ — to turn the tide of an already-lost operation, to give the US a victory in that endless war on terror.
The good general is all mouth and no brains — even with all the NATO troops (about a 100,000) and the vaporous-like Afghan forces (from 50,000 upwards to 200,000, but mostly not many at all according to some experts) against the suspected 25,000 (tops) Taliban, a 12-to-one ratio in favor of NATO, there is still no sign of any kind of tide turning.
And what’s worse, dumb-simple bombs are beating the shit out of the most-powerful military in all of history — IEDs killed eight US GIs on Tuesday in several incidents in south Afghanistan.
From Wired‘s Danger Room blog on these “dumb-down” devices:

We’ve become accustomed to the idea that a weapon’s potency grows with its sophistication: “Smart” munitions are more effective than dumb ones; supersonic jets can shoot down slower planes.
But Afghanistan and its IEDs are proving the exception to that rule.

Couple dumb with bad terrain and you’ve got the mixing of a hell-hole.
Due to the asinine US military set-up in a rugged, jagged, mountainous Afghanistan, placing outposts way out in country, nearly-non-accessible except by air — by helicopter.
As insurgents plant sometimes up to 100 IEDs a day, and although the military is throwing a lot of money and time to figure how to better detect booby-traps (the Danger Room post above goes into some detail on that aspect), the only way to move troops and supplies is by whirlybird.
A good look at this dangerous situation — three choppers went down on Monday (two collided) killing 14 Americans — can be found at a Popular Mechanics piece from last April, which proclaimed: “Afghanistan is hell on helicopters: Temperature swings can ruin seals and gaskets; towering mountains with low air density sap power from spinning rotor blades and engines; dusty deserts gum up hydraulics; and enemy combatants pepper the machines with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire.”
A terrible place to be right now.

And right now, President Obama is deciding what to do with Afghanistan — in reality he’s weighting how much of an troop escalation should be allowed — as McNasty (oops) McChrystal wants at least 40,000 additional US troops, and up to 80,000 to do the job right, but now it seems the tortured nitwit general will end up getting far less fodder for his foolish fancies.
Obama, according to reports, will attempt a less ambitious plan in which 10 population centers and the Helmand River Valley in the south will see an increase in troops, a “compromise” it’s been called instead of trying to beat the Taliban out of the bushes all across the country — supposedly about 16,000 new GIs.
Much to Obama’s extreme-near-future misfortune, the only real course for the US in Afghanistan is withdrawal, a concept the White House has said is not even an option, which in turn creates a self-defeating, no-way-out strategy into a box canyon without exit signs or doorways — expect horror stories from there soon.
(Obama will have to curtail activities like his heartfelt photo op this morning at Dover AFB as the bodies of US peoples killed overseas were returned home — there will be way-too many of them).

One new twist in the ugly Afghan saga is Matthew Hoh, the first publicly-known U.S. official to resign in protest over the Afghan war.

“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel.
“I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”

Much has been made of Hoh’s resignation, which paints not a good picture of the US/Afghan scenario and a lot of commentators, politicians and other sorts have lofted Hoh way up high as a banner for getting the US out of the country.
He was on PBS’ News Hour this evening, saying “I don’t believe al-Qaeda is coming back…” in addressing the fear the terror group would return and set up camp if the US pulled out, and a troop increase would only “fuel the insurgency” — good talk, though nothing really new, for the US getting the shit gone (I didn’t take notes).
One former Afghan legislator called Hoh “A Great American Patriot”.
Glenn Greenwald gets in on the act with a post found here.
Even Garrison Keillor came out of the smooth-voiced woods in honor of Hoh, ending an opinion piece in The New York Times: Time to move on. Tell the others. It’s a brand-new day. Let us start making our way on out of Afghanistan, Mr. President.
What’s been missed is the moral slaughter involved in these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was criminal and immoral from the get-go.

One quote from Hoh in the original Post story has not been much touched upon in which he discussed his time in Iraq and there were no qualms about killing, death and destruction there:

“There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed,” he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
“I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys.”

Nothing immoral and bad about Iraq — a complete criminal enterprise.

No one seems to feel anything about the Iraqi invasion being a war crime, immoral and really, really bad.
I didn’t catch that deeper, much-more scarier vein of verbiage in that last quote of Hoh’s until I read Chris Floyd’s most-excellent post on the subject.
Floyd always looks at stuff at a more truthful, less hampered way (he’s one of my daily reads — or when he posts, which is just about daily) and his take on Hoh begins first with an examination of an interview with Jane Mayer, which appeared in the New Yorker online, and concerned the use of unmanned drones and its effect on Pakistan.
Meyer replies that although about 10 top bad al-Qaeda guys have been killed, a shitload of ordinary folks have been slaughtered to get them.
Floyd counters:

What is astonishing about this is that the interview doesn’t end there, in a roar of outrage from Mayer and her interviewer: “They’ve killed hundreds of civilians!”
Hundreds of Pakistani civilians, men, women and children with no involvement whatsoever in war or terrorism; just ordinary people living their lives as best they can — just like your neighbor, just like your mother, just like you…or just like the people killed on September 11, whose deaths are used as an eternal justification for war and bloodshed on a global scale by the American state.
But these drone-murdered Pakistanis — these human beings, these fathers and mothers, these grandparents, these toddlers, these brothers and sisters — their lives are just statistics to be coldly weighed in the calibrations of imperial policy.
The “bad news” about their deaths is not that they were murdered, not that these utterly defenseless men, women and children were blown to shreds without warning, without the slightest chance of escape, by flying robots controlled by unseen hands a world away; no, the “bad news” is that these that these killing might possibly hamper America’s “counterinsurgency program”…

And Floyd’s take on Hoh:

Hoh doesn’t like the war crime in Afghanistan because it doesn’t seem to be working out too well — not because it’s wrong.
Mayer doesn’t like the CIA Predator program of targeted assassination and massive “collateral damage” because it’s too unregulated, too opaque, and we need to find ways to make it work better — more like the Pentagon program of targeted assassination and massive “collateral damage.”

Floyd pulls insight from another most-excellent writer, Arthur Silber, who blogs at Once Upon a Time… and although he can really become involved in his subject matter, he also cuts to the bone of reality.
In his post regarding Hoh and the US, Silber nails the bottom line:

The critical facts are few in number, and remarkably easy to understand: Iraq never threatened the U.S. in any serious manner.
Our leaders knew Iraq did not threaten us.
Despite what should have been the only fact that mattered, the U.S. invaded and occupied, and still occupies, a nation that never threatened us and had never attacked us.
Under the applicable principles of international law and the Nuremberg Principles, the U.S. thus committed a monstrous, unforgivable series of war crimes.
Those who support and continue the occupation of Iraq are war criminals — not because I say so, but because the same principles that the U.S. applies to every other nation, but never to the U.S. itself, necessitate that judgment and no other.
While it may be true that some “dudes” threatened Hoh’s life and the lives of those with whom he served, Hoh could never have been threatened in that manner but for the fact that he was in Iraq as part of a criminal war of aggression.
In other words, he had no right to be in Iraq in the first place.
And if he had not been, he would never have been in a position to “whack[] a bunch of guys.”

Highly recommend both Floyd and Silber — both more intelligently-eloquent than I.

UPDATE/ADD-ON BELOW

Yes, the Edwin Starr song paraphrased is the counterinsurgency of fighting dumb-shit wars.
Last month on PBS‘ “Frontline,” an interview with Andrew Bacevich, a retired US Army colonel and a level head in this era of military idiots.
He’s also a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, a Vietnam veteran and the author of the 2008 book “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.”
The US military’s fog-horning a counterinsurgency program in Afghanistan is baffling:

I am baffled by the fad of counterinsurgency, and I’m especially baffled by the extent to which the American officer corps has embraced this fad.
Now, I say that from the point of view of somebody who comes from a generation when counterinsurgency was anathema to the United States military.
In the era after Vietnam, the officer corps believed with something close to unanimity that long, protracted campaigns were very much at odds not only with the well-being of the military as an institution, but frankly at odds with the interests of the country.
Post-Vietnam, the officer corps was committed to the proposition that wars should be infrequent, that they should be fought only for the most vital interests, and that they should be fought in a way that would produce a quick and decisive outcome.
What we have today in my judgment is just the inverse of that.
War has become a permanent condition.
I mean, we’ve been at war now for eight years, and for all practical purposes, nobody can say with any accuracy when war will likely come to an end.
In my judgment — I know people that would disagree with this — we are now engaged in wars where we do not have vital interests at stake.
And … we’ve now abandoned the notion that we can win wars quickly or cheaply.
Our approach to war is one in which we now accept the notion that war is an open-ended proposition and that if someday out there some outcome is reached, it’s likely to be an ambiguous outcome that really doesn’t resemble in any sense the traditional definition of military victory. …

And this shit is generational?

It’s probably generational in that perhaps young people — and this is not necessarily a bad thing — have bigger dreams, have bigger ambitions. Older people tend to perhaps be more given to pessimism or cynicism.
I mean, I would like to call it realism, but others might view it differently.
I hesitate to say that older people have a better understanding of the human consequences of unrealistic and naive projects, because I know that these younger fellows like Nagl and [CNAS fellow Andrew] Exum have lost friends.
But at the same time, I puzzle over why their personal losses don’t cause them to question the implications for the policy proposals that they support.
We’ve lost over 5,000 American soldiers over the past eight years between Iraq and Afghanistan.
We think Iraq is now finally winding down.
At the same time, we ratchet up Afghanistan.
So if we do indeed have a full-court-press application of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, certainly at least several hundred more American soldiers are going to die.
And I think it’s very, very important to be absolutely certain that no alternative exists that would enable us to achieve our interests in Afghanistan without all those soldiers being killed.
And I think the people who insist that it has to be done through counterinsurgency have not seriously examined all the alternatives.

Is President Obama boxed in with regards to an Afghan escalation?

I think so. … I don’t think the president has to worry too much about being criticized from the right.
I mean, he’s going to be criticized from the right on, if not on the war in Afghanistan, on any number of other issues.
By staying the course in Afghanistan, he’s not going to get more Republican votes for health care or anything like that.
But if the president alienates the core of his support, plunging more deeply into this war when many on the left or people like myself, … wary of an overly militarized foreign policy, then I think he could find the enormous public support that he had during much of the first year of his term in office collapsing pretty quickly. …
There are many glib comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam.
And maybe we’re beyond making glib comparisons. But I do think that’s one of the areas where the Vietnam comparison still has merit.
The Vietnam War destroyed the Johnson presidency, and it destroyed the Johnson domestic reform agenda. And to the extent that Obama’s war becomes this costly, open-ended proposition with no end in sight, then one possible consequence that he has to consider is that his own very ambitious and important domestic reform agenda could be placed in jeopardy. …

And is this Obama’s war?

I think so.
And the question is whether or not [it is] going to be Obama’s war in the same sense that Iraq became Bush’s war, that Vietnam became Johnson’s war; that it’s going to be the one issue that consumes his presidency; the one thing that, … for the rest of his time in office, reporters [are] going to be asking: “When is it going end? When will light become visible at the end of the tunnel? How many more soldiers are going to have to die? How many more hundreds of billions of dollars are going to be spent?”
That’s what I fear he is inviting if he allows himself to be sold this counterinsurgency program.
But the president is a smart guy, and the president, I believe, is a very shrewd man in the best sense of the word.
And so I retain at least a smidgen of hope that he will understand the trap that he’s being led into here and therefore avoid it.

Read the entire interview here.

And to highlight the coup-like seriousness of the problem, yesterday NATO indeed boxed Obama.
From the UK’s Independent via antiwar.com:

Nato defence ministers signalled their backing for the Afghan strategy put forward by the American commander General Stanley McChrystal yesterday in an implicit rejection of the alternative plan proposed by US Vice-President Joe Biden.
The general had made an unscheduled appearance at the meeting of ministers in Bratislava, Slovakia, to give a presentation behind closed doors. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary general, said: “What we did today was to discuss General McChrystal’s overall assessment, his overall approach, and I have noted a broad support from all ministers of this overall counter-insurgency approach.”

Real-bad moon rising — an insurgent War, What is it good for?

Update/Add-On:
Just discovered this evening — a way-little noted story of Seymour Hersh’s speech at Duke University 10 days ago, in which he said the US military, along with working hard in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Somalia, etc., are also “in a war against the White House — and they feel they have [President] Obama boxed in…They think he’s weak and the wrong color. Yes, there’s racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it’s true and we all know it.”
According to the Herald-Sun in Durham, North Carolina, Hersh also had this to say (h/t HuffPost):

“A lot of people in the Pentagon would like to see him get into trouble,” he said. By leaking information that the commanding officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the war would be lost without an additional 40,000 American troops, top brass have put Obama in a no-win situation, Hersh contended.
“If he gives them the extra troops they’re asking for, he loses politically,” Hersh said. “And if he doesn’t give them the troops, he also loses politically.”
The journalist criticized the president for “letting the military do that,” and suggested the only way out was for Obama to stand up to them.
“He’s either going to let the Pentagon run him or he has to run the Pentagon,” Hersh said. If he doesn’t, “this stuff is going to be the ruin of his presidency.”

If anywhere near reality, and Hersh has been so-many times around the military block, he’s got a shitload of DOD sources — what a US-constitutional catastrophe.