During
his stay at the White House, George W. Bush accomplished what Adolph Hitler
could only dream about doing - bringing the American economy to a standstill.
My friend Bob just told me that there are now actual tent cities forming
up outside of Sacramento, CA,
and that the people there call them “Bushvilles”.
If you could pick through
the ruins of the American economy, one of the main artifacts you would
find would be the pork barrels left over from the invasion of Afghanistan.
It’s gonna be interesting to see what Obama is going to do with the Afghanistan
disaster he has inherited from Bush, Cheney and a Republican Congress
full of Dittoheads.
Obama is now sending
17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan - but
will that strategy work? Here’s my opinion on the subject: It’s all going
to depend on how those troops are used.
When the Marines in
Anbar province in Iraq finally stopped shooting everything in sight
and went to work helping the locals to rebuild Anbar’s infrastructure,
economy, healthcare and educational systems instead, the results were
immediate and obvious. This policy worked.
Yesterday on TV, the
video footage that accompanied a news segment on our withdrawal from Iraq
showed U.S.
soldiers firing away at miscreants. That’s bad reporting. The TV station
must have just sent some page down to get this out-of-date footage from
their storage vaults. They shoulda’ shown the
current reality instead, wherein the U.S. military’s main task right now
is to help get Iraq’s schools, hospitals, power lines, agricultural programs
and water systems back on line after Bush and his Dittoheads wantonly
destroyed them.
And that’s what should
be going on in Afghanistan right now as well. In fact, that’s
what should have been going on in Afghanistan
(and Iraq)
all along. When I was in Kabul
a while ago, I talked with both Afghans and Americans - and they all agreed
with me on this point. “We offered the Bush administration a series of
workable plans and ideas for community-building in Afghanistan and they told us no,” said one US-AID
worker, speaking off the record. “The Bush people told us flat-out that
they wanted the American money supply in Afghanistan to go for weapons and roads only.”
Why only weapons and roads? Because that’s where the pork for all Bush’s
friends comes from.
One Afghan I talked
with told me that, “The U.S. used to pay me to perform my job as a road-repair
specialist - and I did it well. But then the U.S.
policy switched around 2005 and they started hiring American contractors
only to do my type of job. But then the contractor turns around and hires
ME to do the exact same job - only he pays me half of what I was getting
before and pockets the rest for himself.”
Another Afghan told
me that he was forced to grow opium poppies because “the Americans support
the warlords and the warlords want us to grow poppies - and so we grow
them. We would rather grow other crops if we had protection from the warlords
and markets to sell them in. But we don’t.” Where’s the pork in disarming
the warlords and growing tomatoes instead? There isn’t any.
Many Afghans I spoke
with are hungry for education for their children. Education is highly
respected in Afghanistan. But there has been very little money
channeled toward schools in Afghanistan
for the same reason there has been very little money channeled toward
schools in America.
Where’s the pork in paying teachers decent salaries? There is none.
“We hate the Taliban,”
said another Afghan I met, “but we have no choice but to do what they
say or to chose them. The Americans are not offering us any alternative
except for military solutions. If we were stronger economically, people
would willingly turn the Taliban away. As it is now, however, we cannot
afford to do that.”
So. Bush had his “Springtime
for Afghanistan” - and now it’s Obama’s turn. How
can Obama succeed where Bush failed? It is my opinion that perhaps Afghanistan can still be turned around - by the
same methods that helped stabilize Iraq. Sure Iraq is a different story
because of the oil money the Iraqi government has to work with, but the
principal is the same. Fewer guns, more butter.
By putting the emphasis
on community-building in Afghanistan and with an eye on stabilizing the
country and then getting the hell out rather than continuing to stage
an endless string of pointless shoot-em-ups, America might just stand a chance of defeating
the Taliban.
Anyway, these are my
recommendations and I would hope that Obama might consider following them.
As things stand now, it might not be such a hot idea to send even more
foreign troops into a country where its citizens truly resent foreign
occupation. But. If you ARE going to send in the troops, you owe it to
the Afghan population, the troops themselves and the American people to
maximize their effectiveness.
And if the President
doesn’t know how to begin to establish successful community-building mechanisms
in Afghanistan, I happen
to know a few Marine lieutenant-colonels, some State Department agricultural
experts and a couple of Marine battalions in Iraq who do. I have seen them in action and these
men and women do a good job. So. Mr. President. Please let me know if
you want me to send you their names and e-mail addresses so that you can
punch them into your BlackBerry.
BlackCommentator.com
Columnist Jane Stillwater is a freelance writer, civil rights and peace
activist from Berkeley, California. She is also the author of Bring Your Own Flak Jacket: Helpful Tips for Touring Today’s Middle
East. Click here
to contact Ms. Stillwater. |