Afghanistan

You may have heard on (what passes for) the news that our government is negotiating with the Afghanistan president, Mr. Karzai to have some U.S. “advisers” stay in Afghanistan after we officially leave.

Although the public thinks that we’ll be finally out of Afghanistan after more than a decade, we’re actually negotiating to leave up to 15,000 U.S. soldiers there to act as “trainers and advisers.” A common quotation is that a definition of insanity according to Albert Einstein is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. That’s something like adding 2 + 2 and hoping to get 4,385.29 as the result.

Our government continues to hope that it can “fix” Afghanistan. It can’t. Our Middle East foreign policy continues to be the worst imaginable, yet our policies don’t change in spite of the disastrous repetitive failed results.

In other words if our soldiers stay with a different name, the war will continue. They won’t be “troops,” they’ll be “advisers.” If you are of a certain age, you’ll remember Vietnam where the initial combat forces were “advisers” as well. They’ll also be working the counter-terrorism problem and will do anything to stop the Taliban taking over again. I doubt it will make much of a difference. If over ten years of war hasn’t stopped them, what will, especially when we indirectly help fund the Taliban weapons and ammunition? See below.

President Karzai will not sign the agreement, that still allows our soldiers to enter Afghan homes, something that he bitterly opposes, and we won’t sign it if our soldiers are subject to Afghan laws.

Iraq refused the same deal, so we left. You can read in the media about the simmering civil war there, and the tens of thousands of ongoing deaths after we left.

Even if he does sign it, his government, and tribal council known as the Loya Jirga must approve the deal. I doubt that they will, so all of the bribe money flowing through President Karzai will be for nothing. Fortunately we can just print it, so giving him tens of millions of dollars in plastic bags, sacks and suitcases doesn’t much concern our government.

I am concerned.

I think that the reason he is delaying the vote until after he leaves, is to extract as much as possible from us and then his successor can be blamed. He learned that technique by watching how Washington does business.

The only benefit that I see after the Taliban takes over again is that they will eradicate the poppy fields as they did when they first assumed power. For some reason that I don’t (publicly) understand is why our government refuses to allows our soldiers to destroy the poppy fields and just pay the farmers the going rate for the poppies.

Poppies are the raw material for manufacturing opium. The Taliban is buying the poppies from the farmers, selling them for a huge profit and then using the money to buy weapons and ammunition to kill our soldiers!

Our government knows this, but looks the other way. Why? President Obama is hoping to delay resolving this (and many others) until he is gone, and some other president takes the blame.

This is a mess that isn’t going away.