More Reading Around the Web

This was an anti-war comment on a blog that I was just reading. It was written by a man named John Chuckman:

Afghanistan is not a "tragic failure." Rather, it was a fool's errand from the very start. People defending this insanity have been imposing concepts - concepts like women's rights - on a place which, in general, has no more grasp of them than they do quantum mechanics. Afghanistan never has been any thing but a collection of tribes. It is not a country in the sense that we understand. It has no meaningful central government, no bureaucracy, and few roads. Yes, it is a colored patch on our maps, but even its borders are vague, the main border with Pakistan simply being a line drawn by a British official about a century ago. For the people living on each side of that border, the so-called Durand Line, it is meaningless. They are tribal people, the same tribe living on both sides of that line. Afghanistan is nothing but a collection of tribes, many of them living impoverished, hardscrabble lives in an environment of barren mountains and deserts. They are hard people with ancient, unpleasant customs and attitudes, owing to their harsh circumstances which is precisely why the idea of defeating them is, and always has been, ridiculous. A place like this only makes progress through steady economic growth, and you don�t get that from guns and bombs, America�s idea of a human-rights mission. America invaded to kill people, not to help anyone, and Britain has been sadly dragged along for the ride. The world is so much more complicated than this view. It is not a place entirely to our liking. Ancient, anti-progressive customs and attitudes come with the territory of poverty and economic backwardness, much as malaria or high infant mortality. Go try enforcing anti-homophobia in Jamaica or rural Africa. Go try teaching women's rights in rural India or South America. In any of these places, you could be killed just for your words. No thoughtful, well-informed person supported that invasion. The Taleban were never a "terrorist" organization before the U.S. invasion. It was a backward religious governing party in a backward, religious land. Yes, they were unpleasant and nasty, but absolutely no different to fundamentalist groups all over the world, everyone from the murderous ultra-orthodox settlers in Israel to the villages in India where women are burnt alive or the societies in South America where women are treated as animals. It is not our duty, and it is not even within our capacity, to correct all the outdated evils in the world. No one � repeat, no one - went to Afghanistan over social ills like the treatment of women. This has been a piece of American propaganda from the start - the best propaganda always being based on truth - to gain support from its soccer moms for an invasion. The notion spread like a virus in the press. If the U.S. really wanted to help people like the 14th-century Afghans, it would have spent even a tenth of what they've spent on destruction on economic development there. We are in Afghanistan out of "owing one to the Pentagon." Full stop. America went there for vengeance. Full stop. If you think America's destructive crusade has been positive consider just two facts. The Afghans hate the current national government, even after years of American propping up. And consider the mass graves just discovered. These are Taleban fighters from the early days, thousands of them suffocated by the truck-full and buried quickly in the desert by the warlords the U.S. has put in charge of the provinces - all done while American soldiers watched while picking their noses.