Afghanistan is a complex subject indeed – even to people like me, born and bred in the locale. It is a medieval patchwork of tribal “nations”, but nothing like those of the the Native Americans. Afghans are dangerous, haughty and contemptuous of others’ cultures and outlooks, unlike the Amerinds who are far more docile, friendly and philosophical from what I know about them. Afghans are basically bellicose and medieval, and would like to remain that way – but of course together with the conveniences of cars, aircraft, electricity, and watches etc. that characterise modern amenities - like their Gulf Arab sheikh “brethren”. But these goods they have to obtain from others since they don’t have the necessary mode of production, science, culture or labour division to produce them. In short, they unreasonably want to have their cake and eat it too. Now people may discredit Americans with lots of flaws – be that as it may, but the crafty and cunning Afghans can outsmart them 10:1. To be criminal minded and paranoid are normal Afghan behavioural characteristics – enabling them to survive in the harshness of their badlands, and also deal with the chronic tribal instabilities and conspiracies in which they indulge always. But paranoia and criminality are considered pathologies by any normal human beings, and rightly so. To be able to cope with, and deal with Afghans and their psyche, you have to be a bit old-fashioned and medieval yourself – something which North Americans definitely aren't.
The Afghan communists (or rather pseudo-communists) who staged a coup in 1978 and tried to reform their own society, were beset with the same characteristics. No doubt they tried to effect massive land reform and female emancipation and education programmes – ordering women to unveil and wear European skirts and trousers, but the traditional jealousies and conspiratorial tendencies also afflicted them, and thus they cooked their own goose. They made such a mess that the Soviets had to step in physically to save them and their revolution, and also prevent this primitive former tribal kingdom’s destabilisation from reaching their vulnerable Central Asian “underbelly” which is an extension of the same cultural milieu. No doubt, the Afghan communist instability was exacerbated by the Carter Administration, in particular by Zbignew Brzezinski who stirred the pot by discreetly abetting one communist faction and egging on its leader’s hungry ambitions, so as to entice the Russians into intervening - and thus into a trap. Then when the USSR finally did intervene, it was the infamous Kermit Roosevelt’s idea to cook up an Islamic Jihadi resistance so as to “give the Russians their own Vietnam”. The Americans cockily thought that this scheme was clever and that they would conveniently use Afghanistan like a Kleenex tissue for this purpose and then chuck it away – but this Kleenex proved to be laced with an invisible deadly poison.
Now, before the Soviet intervention of 1980 (actually: 12/27/1979), poppy cultivation on a mass scale was unknown even in Afghanistan. That is, the Afghans were too primitive to realise its marketability, and had thus far no opportunity to do so. Of course opium had been used there for centuries by addicts and as a medicinal cure for pain – but heroin, and its value on the modern Western street – were unknown. This was inspite of the fact that during the 1960s Afghanistan was a major “Hippie” destination, but the Hippies mostly smoked “Pot”, which grows there wild in the fields and by the wayside – and has been a traditional Afghan pastime since time immemorial just as tea and bagels are elsewhere. But as the CIA began its Jihad in the 1980s, mysterious Americans suddenly appeared in the area who instructed the impoverished locals in poppy farming, and then in setting up laboratories to refine it into heroin – for free. This was in the Pakistani Tribal Belt, known by its acronym FATA – the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The FATA is ethnically Afghan – and together with Pakistan’s NWFP (North West Frontier Province), was a part of Afghanistan that the British had managed to capture and add to their Indian Empire territory, before that and adjacent parts of it became Pakistan a hundred years later. (This was just like Hispanic Texas, which was taken by the US from Mexico – and at the same time, in 1847). Thus the FATA adjoined Afghanistan, and was a safe haven where the poppy produce from war torn Afghanistan could be refined into heroin and shipped onwards securely in the Pakistani army’s logistical department’s trucks, the Pakistani government being involved in heroin smuggling at all levels. The FATA is also an autonomous, wild violent area consisting of seven tribal reservations called “tribal agencies”, where regular Pakistani laws don’t apply, and tribal custom is the law. Many have compared it to the American “Wild West” of the 19th Century. The FATA tribes also grow their own opium poppy, and at one time its production rivalled that of Afghanistan’s. But that was in the 1980s. The FATA and its people was also used by the US, UK and their Saudi and Pakistani surrogates as the staging area for their Jihad – which is why Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are nowadays to be found based there – and are effectively its rulers too. The primitive FATA tribes, which live in Neolithic style adobe fort dwellings in harsh dry mountain villages, still make a living by robbing, kidnapping and the petty smuggling of contraband goods (contract killing, auto theft, counterfeiting, forgery and gun running are also among their “trades”). But heroin made them into billionaires overnight. Now some of the richest business magnates of Pakistan, and in Dubai, are from among them – having laundered their drug money. They may own Cadillacs and BMWs, but a lot of them still don’t know how to wipe themselves, or even blow their noses properly! You are advised to read Pepe Escobar’s priceless book “Globalistan”. Mentioning the inveterate Pepe Escobar, I will also second what “Orwellian UK” on the FTW blog message board has said about the Asia Times Online (ATOL) being a reliable source of information about these issues. I would say that it is not only reliable, but among the best. Escobar’s columns appear regularly in it.
As far as the present situation is concerned, the Americans and the West will wish that they had never committed the fallacious mischief of stirring the Afghan cauldron, and coating themselves in its potent evil stew. They have got themselves into a sticky mess from which extrication will be very painful and hard – because even if they do decide to “slash the Gordian Knot” somehow, their reputation is already sullied at having caused the problem in the first place, and they will be blamed for the subsequent corrective measures even, and by their own people also: those who cause problems are not the ones to administer the justice to heal them in the end: they need bringing to justice themselves. They are likely to cut a sorry figure in the Afghan theatre, and the US forces commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal, as well as the British commander there have both predicted that unless a new strategy is prepared, their defeat there could be as early as next year. But I fail to see what new magic any player can conjure up now. And in the coming Peak Oil scenario, that defeat could even be sorrier than any ever imaginable.
The so-called allies in Afghanistan could come up with some very quick and efficient solutions to the Afghan opium problem, but isn’t it strange that it has flourished as never before under their occupation and policing? But that might not be so strange if one reads what Michael C Ruppert has said in his seminal book “Crossing the Rubicon” about how the vast sea of drug money is the life of Wall Street – and thus of Western capitalism, and how drugs serve to “cull” a substantial amount of the population so that they can be “junked” and treated as such. Many high figures in Afghanistan’s tottering US puppet government are drug lords, including President Karzai’s brother. That is as open a secret as ever. But the abetment and cultivation of a drug economy has its own destabilisation dynamic – so even if they persist in keeping it going for the sake of Wall Street and The City of London, they will at the same time be sowing not only poppy, but the seeds of other unimaginable social disasters and political malaises to come.
It is not only the situation in Afghanistan which is worsening for the US – in neighbouring Pakistan, so important in the US regional strategy, the government debauchery and corruption have reached an all time high. Perhaps its rulers know that their rusted leaking ship is sinking, and they want to make as much hay as they can while the sun still shines. For the first time, albeit too late in the day, the US has realised that its Pakistani hirelings are too corrupt to be entrusted with the aid they give them. This aid has always been Pakistan’s life support, but for the good part of the past six decades, the ruling elites have embezzled it to enrich themselves. Now, the US insists that any of the aid it gives in future ($4 billion having been earmarked this year alone), will not be given directly to Pakistani functionaries, but to US personnel, NGOs, employees and other “stake holders” to be based here. The breakdown in Pakistan’s law and order and state-society fabric is now so pronounced that there is the risk of Taliban/extremist takeovers in several areas once thought to be secure – and the US is slowly and discreetly moving in “contractors” such as Blackwater and DynCorp to take direct control of the situation by supervising the dysfunctional Pakistani bureaucratic and government services and security forces, and therefore effectively run the country right there themselves. The operatives of these two companies as well as a few US Marines (in “civvies”) are seen frequently all over the place. They are now buying up land for bases, and the lone five star Intercontinental Hotel (later known as the “Pearl Continental”) in the key Pakistani provincial city of Peshawar on the Afghan border has been bought by the US, ostensibly to house its expanded “consular operations” in that city... moreover the new US embassy in Islamabad is touted to be the largest ever yet to be built anywhere – with 400 acres of prime urban land having been sold dirt cheap by the Pakistanis to the US for the purpose. It is not going to be an embassy, but a mini-Pentagon for this region. It looks like the US is rapidly and quietly taking up position and digging in to tackle the inevitable breakdown now at hand in Pakistani society.
