The Mound of Sound

Some of us support the Canadian mission to Afghanistan. Some of us oppose it. On both sides, the great majority of us support our troops. This week our MPs are scheduled to have a “debate” on extending the mission to 2011. Our top general, the Big Cod, has already weighed-in on the debate, shamelessly insinuating that subjecting his (and it very much is “his”) mission to political debate could place Canadian soldiers’ lives in jeopardy (which, from Hillier’s mouth to the Talibans’ ears probably ensures it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy – and that jackass impugns our patriotism and support for the troops!).

What is the point of debating this if the arguments are to be framed on deliberately scripted myths and propaganda – half truths and outright lies? For that is exactly what has been dished up to the Canadian public by our political and military leaders. That is what has been fed to you and to me.

From Washington to Brussels to Ottawa the mission to Afghanistan has never been much more than a political football. That’s why, six years down the road, it’s an utter failure. Pursuing our political objectives is what guaranteed failure from the very outset.

Our political agenda treated the creation of a new Afghan government almost as an afterthought. We staged elections that saw our guy, Hamid Karzai, win as president without bothering to notice that the real reins of power were falling into the hands of warlords, thugs and common criminals.

Were we to defeat the Taliban – pretend for the sake of argument that could be possible – what would we leave behind? All that would remain would be a powerful, criminal enterprise under the control of Islamic fundamentalist warlords, our supposed former allies in the “Northern Alliance.” If you take the Taliban out of the equation today that’s what you have left, a feudal, Islamist narco-state under the grinding heel of Sharia law. That’s what we have created, more by omission than act, in today’s Afghanistan.

This week you’ll hear a lot of patriotic jingoism from the floor of the House of Commons, most of it deserving to be shovelled rather than printed because it’ll be heavily laced with pure, manipulative bullshit.

Sarah Chayes is a former National Public Radio reporter who’s been in Afghanistan since the early days after the fall of the Taliban. She handed in her microphone to do development aid work shortly afterward. Today she’s widely regarded as one of the most knowledgeable and reliable sources of just what is going on in Afghanistan and – surprise – it’s not what you’ve been hearing from Rick Hiller or Peter MacKay or that practised dissembler, SHarper, or just about anyone else in Ottawa.

Chayes was interviewed on Bill Moyers Now this week. The entire interview can be watched on the PBS.org website. Here are a few excerpts from her remarks that may help you make sense of what you hear this week when our own MPs debate the mission to Afghanistan:

“SARAH CHAYES: You know, you can drive around the streets of Kandahar. You can drive around the streets of Kabul, and you see some massive buildings. Massive buildings. You see the price of property in Kandahar is probably close to the price of property in New York City.

BILL MOYERS: So who’s living in those buildings? Who’s using those buildings?

SARAH CHAYES: Government officials and drug traffickers. So it’s either the opium money, or it’s the development money. And we’re not following that money trail. The same problem in Iraq. I mean, there’s just millions of dollars that are kind of leaking out of the system.

BILL MOYERS: So, has this become an opium economy?

SARAH CHAYES: Definitely, it’s an opium economy. And it’s totally integrated into the economy. It’s a normal aspect of the economy. And you can feel it. For example, in opium harvesting season, we needed one of our herbs. We needed somebody to — basically wild crafting to harvest herbs up in the hills. We couldn’t get anybody because there were you know, buses at the Helmand, is the province right next door to us where most of the opium is growing. And there would be, you know, from the Helmand bus depot, they would just drive people straight out into the fields. Because, and the price of labor was going up. Normally, labor is unskilled labor is $4 a day. It was $20 to $25 a day in opium harvesting season. It totally absorbs all of the available manpower. Now, the cliché that I don’t subscribe to is that the Taliban are running the opium business.

SARAH CHAYES: Well, we’re paying a billion dollars a year to Pakistan, which is orchestrating the Taliban insurgency. So, it’s actually us-taxpayer money that is paying for the insurgents, who are then killing, at the moment, Canadian troops. Now if I were the government of Germany or France, I’d have a hard time putting my troops in that kind of equation. I would demand from Washington, that Washington require a lot different behavior from Pakistan.

BILL MOYERS: But the money’s supposed to be to stop the Taliban in Afghanistan.

SARAH CHAYES: Has anybody done very strict accounting on where that money is going? I suspect that if you start looking at some of the receipts, you’ll find that there’s money missing.

SARAH CHAYES: yeah. I mean, you know, these are districts that are in the hands of the Taliban. There’s a district I used to go to frequently. We would gather herbs for our essential oil distilling up there. And now there was a deal between the district chief, the government and the Taliban saying, “so long as you don’t kill the police, we’ll let you go wherever you want.” Now what has started to happen, couple of things have happened. One is people are just so disaffected with the government that we put in power.

BILL MOYERS: Ordinary people.

SARAH CHAYES: Ordinary people.

BILL MOYERS: Disaffected?

SARAH CHAYES: Yeah. Their government is shaking them down. I have people telling me, “We get shaking down by the government in the daytime, and shaken down by the Taliban at night. What are we supposed to do?”

BILL MOYERS: This is the Karzai government.

SARAH CHAYES: That’s correct.

BILL MOYERS: This is the government the United States put in power.

SARAH CHAYES: That’s correct. It’s basically a criminal enterprise. And we haven’t really asked it for any accounts in any serious way. And that’s where the average person in Kandahar is totally perplexed. They assume that this degree of corruption, which is everywhere. You hear about it in the police department. It’s not just the police department, it’s in customs. It’s in any adminis–You have– you want to get a driver’s license. You have to fork over money.

BILL MOYERS: So what’s our bind in southern Afghanistan?

SARAH CHAYES: I think there are two binds. One is our relationship with Pakistan, which is a contradictory one. And the other is our unwillingness to hold Afghan public officials to any standard of decency in government. We keep hearing in the west, about the democratically-elected Afghan government. And, oh, no, we can’t get in there and interfere with any of these people, because they’re the government of a sovereign country. Well, you could have fooled the Afghans. The Afghans– the only person who’s really elected, who has any power, is president Karzai. But every other government official that Afghans interact with on a daily basis, they didn’t elect. And they don’t have any recourse. They’ve got no way of lodging a complaint against this person. Or nobody who can put any leverage on them. And that’s the other bind. We’re only fooling ourselves when we talk about this democratically-elected Afghan government.

…SARAH CHAYES: Correct. And we made an alliance with these thugs than we then placed into positions of power. So it’s sort of like a–it’s like a western movie. You know, you’ve got a posse. You’re going go out after the outlaws, so you gather together a posse and it’s usually a posse of criminals, right? But in a western movie, you don’t then put the posse on the city council. You know.
BILL MOYERS: So who is the sheriff?

SARAH CHAYES: We’re the sheriff.

BILL MOYERS: We are?

SARAH CHAYES: In this particular metaphor, we’re the sheriff, right? We’re going go out after the outlaw, Osama bin Laden. We gather this posse of Afghan criminals to gallop off with us. And then we put them in positions of the governor. We make them into the governor, the mayor, the, you know. And we don’t ask them anything about how they’re governing. We don’t demand– all we say is, we have to support the Afghan government. We have to support the Afghan government. And so we’ve fed them money, we’ve fed them arms, and then we say to the people, “okay, you’re supposed to hold your government accountable.” they’re looking at these thugs with the whole power of the entire world, is what it looks like to them, behind them. And the Afghan people say, “you want us to hold them accountable?” So this, I think, is really the root of the problem.

Sarah Chayes went on to say that some Afghans believe the US supports the Taliban because they know Washington supports Pakistan and, to them, Pakistan is the Taliban.

So, by propping up the Afghan government, we’re bailing furiously with one hand while we are busy boring holes in the hull with the other. Now that sounds like something worth continuing, doesn’t it?

It is only because we’re pursuing our political agendas – civilian and military – that we can demand that this counterproductive and contradictory failure continue. This isn’t about Afghanistan and the future of the Afghan people. If it was, we wouldn’t be acting the way we have been and the way we intend to continue acting.

Go “fullscreen” with this one.

Enjoy and have a great weekend

Surfers know you have to catch a wave before it breaks. Yet American legislators are now tossing around policies to surf out of the subprime mortgage collapse long after the wave has broken.

Banks in the US are howling and, when that happens, Congress responds. Unfortunately the current economic minefield isn’t as neat and tidy as the Savings & Loan collapse of the early ’90s. This time no one’s really sure just how bad the problem is, much less what might work. From the New York Times:

“Not since the Depression has a larger share of Americans owed more on their homes than they are worth. With the collapse of the housing boom, nearly 8.8 million homeowners, or 10.3 percent of the total, are underwater. That is more than double the percentage just a year ago, according to a new estimate of the damage by Moody’s Economy.com.

The housing slumps of the mid-1970s and late 1980s were confined to the coasts. The current bust, while leaving some cities relatively unscathed, has cut a far wider path and it comes just when home debt is at its highest level since World War II.

In Washington, it will be difficult to engineer a bailout similar to the one for savings and loan companies in the early 1990s, because Democrats and Republicans alike cringe at the very word bailout and fear a backlash by people who never became overextended.

But with millions of homeowners already underwater and the prospect that millions more may face the same situation, Democrats and Republicans alike are scrambling for ideas to keep people from simply walking away from their homes and to help those struggling to pay their bills.

John M. Reich, director of the Office of Thrift Supervision, the agency that regulates savings and loan companies [has a] plan, still in rough form, that would create a voluntary system under which mortgage lenders would reduce debt and monthly payments to reflect the diminished sales value of a home.

It would take the remainder of the mortgage as a “negative amortization certificate,” a lien that the investor could recoup if the house were later sold for its original mortgage value or higher.”

The collapse in housing prices is having a variety of negative effects. One is mobility. An underwater homeowner is tied to his unsaleable property and that makes it very hard to move to secure better employment.

Then there is the phenomenon of people unwilling to sell at a loss in a steadily declining market. Rather than cut their losses, they hope against hope and hang on while the market declines and their losses soar. I know from my experience in my former bankrutpcy practice how common and powerful that emotional inertia can be.

The worst part, however, may be a matter of timing. This is 2008 and it’s turning out to be the biggest election year America has faced in decades. Eventually the presidential nominees from both parties will have to lock horns on this issue and you can bet it’ll be their political fortunes, not the plight of imprudent homeowners, that will shape their policies.

Last week Russian president Vlad Putin angrily accused the US of using the supposed need to destroy a disabled satellite as a ploy to mask what was really an attempt to test its anti-missile defence system. No, not us, claimed Washington, we’d never do that.

So they fired a Standard missile at the errant satellite and, bingo, a hit. And then, bursting with pride, they couldn’t wait to herald a great success for their missile defence system.

“I think the question over whether this capability works has been settled,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, quoted by AFP news agency.

“The question is what kind of threat, how large a threat, how sophisticated a threat [the US faces].”

The US approach was one of “complete transparency”, he said.

“We provided a lot of information… before it took place,” he said, adding: “We are prepared to share whatever appropriately we can.”

Yeah, sure you will, Bob. Meanwhile, Vlad, looks like you were right. That should give you renewed impetus to develop that new generation of Russian missiles and warheads. Great, rachet up the arms race.