Mark—Peace, yes, please.

Asalaam aleikum. Shalom chaver. Peace, bro!

Mark: “These things do deserve some thought.”

They do indeed. I will.

Didn’t mention it, but the Christian Armageddonists give me nightmares, and the rapture is equivalent, in my mind anyway, to the most outlandish fundamentalist Moslem’s yearning for martyrdom and Paradise. I’ve met some Christian Zionists who believe such things yet smile sunnily and tell me how much they love Israel. In every case I’ve tried to dissuade them by saying if they truly care about Israel then they need to help the peace process and policies toward reconciliation with the Palestinians, who have an equally legitimate claim to historic Palestine. I even suggest concrete ways via MeretzUSA (secular peace, two-state solution party). This holds no interest for any of them and I never hear from them again (which is fine with me). Things are bad enough over there without adding into the equation people actively seeking the end of the world.

Sepharad, I don’t have a favorable opinion of the Taliban, any more than I have a favorable opinion of Christian armageddonists and the rapture nuts. I just don’t think either of them is more deluded and dangerous than the other. Both have little regard for human life and focus on some afterlife. Both are religious zealots. Both are sexist. The only real difference that I can think of is that the Taliban didn’t invade us, we invaded Afghanistan. The other thing that influences my thinking is my knowledge that the only time a majority of Afghans unite, is when they are invaded by foreigners. Once they succeed in ousting the invaders, which they always do, they go back to fighting among themselves. It isn’t a united country. It is composed of many tribes, each with their own customs and language. The women in many tribes did not wear veils.

Sepharad: “Why do you think that a government routinely acting for the interest of the few would be deterred by such a little thing as illegitimacy? I’m trying to get a picture of such a situation in my mind’s eye, and keep seeing a slide into a true oligarchy . But I’ll think some more.”

The oligarchy would not be deterred, but all countries which have any claim to being democratic rather than tyrannical, would find it difficult to continue doing business with the U.S. No more phony claims of exporting democracy. It would be like when the curtain was pulled back in the Wizard of Oz.

There have been many cases of serial killers who were able to lure their victims because they appeared to be ordinary people. If the victims had been able to see them for what they were, they wouldn’t have been as successful. Removing the mask and showing something for what it really is, can make a big difference. It wouldn’t deter the killers, but it definitely helps potential victims avoid them. We are a true oligarchy, but we hide behind a mask of democracy. That makes it easy for the oligarchs to continue in power, continue their wars of aggression, and continue to disregard our lives in favor of profits, as is obvious from the fact that we’re the only developed country without a national health care plan.

I don’t know why the United States sent $43 million to the Taliban just a few months before 9/11 when they were known to be harboring bin Laden, who was on our terrorist list at the time, I don’t know why our government refused the Taliban’s offer to hand him over, I don’t know why our government called off the operation when our troops had him trapped in Afghanistan and let him escape to Pakistan, and I don’t know why Bush said, immediately after 9/11, that capturing bin Laden was his highest priority, and just a few months later said that it wasn’t his priority. But I’ve always felt that such things might have something to do with the fact that the Bush family and the bin Laden family were so close.

These things do deserve some thought.

Mark, What did you see in Afghanistan and Pakistan that gave you a favorable impression of the Taliban? (I originally had a fairly neutral take on them because at one point Mullah Omar offered to talk to our government re handing over bin Laden—don’t know why they would do that other than to forestall bombing everything in sight in Afghanistan—but for some insane reason the government didn’t respond. That made no sense to me; even though I realize some people always get rich off war the chance to get bin Laden should have been too good to pass up. Also read Sebastian Junger’s book after his time spent with Mullah Omar. But stopped being neutral after talking with ex-Afghan residents, now living in the SF Bay Area, especially the women but also the men. These are city people, small merchants, not wealthy. One man set out for Afghanistan to buy more rugs for his store but primarily to bring his wife’s sister back to the States from Kandahar. Unfortunately 9/11 happened and he was unable to enter the country at all, stuck in Egypt for weeks. His wife was so frightened she locked up their SF store and came out in the boonies to stay with us till he returned. She had a lot to say about the Taliban, none of it good.

I’ve read some Afghan history—all horse-based cultures interest me—and also understand the roles of the warlords. Anything you’ve found that would put a different light on the Taliban would interest me—book suggestions?

For what it’s worth, I don’t think we’ve been involved in any necessary or just war between or after the Revolutionary War and WWII. (Think the Civil War could have been avoided; all the good it accomplished would have come to pass in another five or so years, as technology was rapidly making agrarian-based slavery obsolete just as moving from the mercantile economy to an industrial economy had ended slavery in the North. Railroads, banks and Northern textile mills were the big winners. Equality of people was never the issue. Cruel hoax that only perpetuated the sickness of racism.)

Why do you think that a government routinely acting for the interest of the few would be deterred by such a little thing as illegitimacy? I’m trying to get a picture of such a situation in my mind’s eye, and keep seeing a slide into a true oligarchy . But I’ll think some more.

Sorry about your computer, Sepharad.

Sepharad: “I think that if we boycotted elections, everyone in the existing government would take it as a huge mandate (“See? The people are so happy they don’t want us to change a thing.”)and only ramp up their ill-fated policies.”

It doesn’t matter what they’d say. If people don’t vote, they lack the consent of the governed and have no further legitimacy.

Sepharad: “Quite a dilemma we’re in. Re nuking, I don’t think our government would nuke an American city because someone would lose too much money.”

Larry Silverstein made huge profits when his World Trade Center buildings were demolished on 9/11. Developers made huge profits after faulty Army Corps of Engineers levees allowed hurricane Katrina to destroy New Orleans. In most major U.S. cities it is quite common for landlords to hire arsonists to burn down buildings they no longer find profitable, so that they can collect the insurance and sell the land or put up more expensive buildings. If the wealthy elite that owns and runs this country decides to nuke a U.S. city, they would make sure that they profited from it. As usual, only U.S. citizens would die. And wars are so profitable that there have been many false flag operations committed by governments so that they could blame others and have a fraudulent basis to start wars.

Sepharad: “I DO think that if the Taliban were to gain possession of Pakistan’s nukes they would nuke anyone they felt like nuking because their yearnings are for Paradise, not real life.”

If I hadn’t lived in Afghanistan for almost five years, near the Pakistan border, and visited Pakistan several times, I might think that the Taliban was as dangerous and deluded as our Christian armageddonists and the rapture crowd. But they’re not.

Sepharad: “If you think the Islamists care about Moslem lives, look at what the Sunni and Shi’ia are doing to each other even as we are pulling out troops.”

That’s strange, because they were living peacefully together before we invaded, embargoed, and then invaded and occupied their country. Is it possible that we caused the problems? If you think that Americans care about Moslem lives, think back to when Madeleine Albright said, that killing a half million Iraqi kids was worth it. And if you think that our government cares about American lives, go back and watch the pictures of New Orleans after Katrina again.

Sepharad: “And elsewhere the Janjaweed have no problem killing other Moslems.”

Only when multinational corporations and foreign governments supply them with weapons and pay them to do so, so that we can get coltan for our cell phones, uranium for weapons (we already have enough uranium and other nuclear weapons stockpiled to blow up at least a thousand planets the size of earth, but our government keeps handing out contracts to produce more), and other minerals.

Sepharad: “We have to keep thinking, however.”

Of course. And a little research might help also.

Mark E. Smith, Today, just received another charger that replaced the old one’s default, stranding me without a computer and the nearest Internet cafe 70 miles away.

I think that if we boycotted elections, everyone in the existing government would take it as a huge mandate (“See? The people are so happy they don’t want us to change a thing.”)and only ramp up their ill-fated policies.

Quite a dilemma we’re in. Re nuking, I don’t think our government would nuke an American city because someone would lose too much money. I DO think that if the Taliban were to gain possession of Pakistan’s nukes they would nuke anyone they felt like nuking because their yearnings are for Paradise, not real life. If you think the Islamists care about Moslem lives, look at what the Sunni and Shi’ia are doing to each other even as we are pulling out troops. And elsewhere the Janjaweed have no problem killing other Moslems. We have to keep thinking, however.

Fell, I just finished reading Saramargo’s books, “Blindness” and “Seeing.”

“Seeing,” does not finish the story. If some Portuguese, like some Americans, have guns, the people would likely not remain passive in the face of what was done.

As for the United States, I have long been expecting that our government will nuke a U.S. city and blame it on terrorists, in hopes of getting everyone to submit to its tyranny. I think that’s why our government has constantly been trying to accuse every potential enemy of having nukes when they obviously don’t. The countries that DO have nukes would never nuke the U.S. because of the massive retaliation they would receive in return, and would certainly never nuke just one city, knowing that their entire country would be nuked to cinders if they did.

This would merely be a continuation of Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine, and is to be expected. But a people who didn’t vote would already be aware of the tyranny of their government and there’s a chance they wouldn’t be taken in as easily.

Because it cannot represent them or act in their interests, a tyrannical government can only unite people through fear, often through false flag operations blamed on a foreign enemy. Once people lose their fear, there is nothing else to fear.

Thank you, Fell. I just checked the online catalog and my library has Saramago’s book, so I placed a reserve hold on it and should have it within a few days. My local government, by the way, which always has money for sports stadiums, is trying to cut funding to libraries. Obviously, the less able people are to educate themselves, and the more they’re distracted, the better off government is.

That’s the big question, Sepharad.

Last night I watched a documentary film called “The Fourth World War.”

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-fourth-world-war/

It seems to be the same all over, the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Italy, France, Argentina, South Africa, Korea—millions of people march, the police beat them up, and the governments ignore them.

The solution I advocate is an election boycott. It is the only nonviolent way I ever heard of to successfully discredit a government. The only way for a government to claim legitimacy, is to show that it has the consent of the governed by holding elections. If people don’t vote, the government will fall.

But before that can happen, Americans have to learn about our tradition of direct, participatory democracy, which still survives in some New England states where the citizenry, in Town Hall Meetings, votes directly on budgets and laws rather than delegating their power to unaccountable representatives to make their decisions for them.

There was more than 90% public opposition to the bailouts, which means that if we had been able to vote directly, we could have saved all that money and used it for education, health care, or whatever we really need. As long as we distrust ourselves and place our trust in officials we can’t hold accountable, we’ll continue to get swindled.

I couldn’t understand when the only two candidates with any chance of winning the Presidency were both pro-war, people bothered to vote. Whoever one, continuing war was the inevitable outcome of the election and most Americans oppose war. So why do we vote for what we oppose? Because the powers that be don’t give us any other choices? That’s not a good reason. If the only choices a car dealer gives you are lemons, you postpone buying a car until you find one that is roadworthy, you don’t just say, well, that’s the only choices they gave me so I have to pick one.

We have to educate people to understand that the only reason our government can do things we don’t want it to do is because we keep delegating our power to it by voting. No matter how evil the opposition candidate, how emotional the hot-button issues on the ballot, we have to refrain from voting until we can vote directly on issues of importance instead of delegating our power to the rich.

Election boycotts have worked in other countries so there’s no reason they couldn’t work here. If those who oppose the bailouts refused to vote until we could vote directly on bailouts and those who oppose war refused to vote until we could vote directly on foreign policy, we’d have a real democracy. And with a majority of Americans opposed to what our government is doing on both issues, we’d do a much better job of self-governance than they’ve been doing in governing us.

That’s the only solution I know of, Sepharad. Some people say that if you don’t vote, you can’t complain, but complaining doesn’t seem to do any good. Some say it is our only voice in government, but it really isn’t a voice when we allow decisions to be made by people we can’t hold accountable. Some say that many died for our right to vote, but that’s not what they died for. A vote that isn’t counted, is miscounted, or only counts towards letting people we can’t hold accountable make our decisions for us, isn’t the voice in government that people died for. Only when we stop voting in sham elections and insist on real elections, will we have a democracy where the supreme power over government is vested in the people. That’s our heritage and our right, but we have to stand up for our rights and not settle for anything less.

Mark, you (and Buglioso and Lasar) have convinced me.
Now what do we do?

Rita Lasar, whose brother Abraham Zelmanowitz died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, visited Afghanistan and says it more eloquently that I can:

Dear President Obama: Get Us out of Afghanistan

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/04

Unfortunately, appearances can be deceiving. President Obama seems to be much more intelligent than Bush, however he just called for an $83.4 billion “war supplemental spending bill like the ones he sometimes opposed when he was senator and George W. Bush was president.”

Obama to seek $83.4 billion for Iraq, Afghan wars

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gTwALhA-6u9xoToe67OlHgdxXsfQD97F4O380

So Obama may seem smarter, but he’s acting dumber than Bush, continuing the very Bush policies he used to oppose (or pretend to oppose), not only with regard to Afghanistan and Iraq, but also with regard to the bailouts, torture, illegal wiretapping, the Patriot Act, and much more. He’s not “Bush-lite,” he’s Bush-heavier, but with many calls for public input—which he then ignores.

In order to fund their bailouts, their wars, their stimulus, their health coverage plans, and all the rest, the Democratic Congress and the Democratic President have cut funding to the States, which in turn have been forced to cut Supplemental Security Income benefits to the elderly and disabled already living below the poverty line, and to cut funds for public transportation and other social services. Eventually, I believe, these Democratic Party millionaire and billionaires will kill us as callously as their kill our military troops and kill innocent poor people all over the world, just to make profits for the millionaire and billionaire corporate and military-industrial cronies and big campaign donors.

When Obama and McCain were both in the Senate and both running for President in ‘08, I compared their voting records and found that they seemed to differ only on non-budgetary issues, where Obama’s vote tended to be more progressive. When it came to budgetary issues, their voting records were virtually identical—take from the poor and give to the rich.

There’s a new interview with Vince Bugliosi by Michael Collins:

Murder Trumps Torture Says Bugliosi

http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/murder-trumps-torture-says-bugliosi/

I had predicted long before the election that Obama wouldn’t investigate or prosecute Bush for war crimes that Obama was committed to continuing. Nor can Congress hold anyone accountable for war crimes in which they are complicit. Wars of aggression based on lies are war crimes—crimes against humanity. That’s what we’re doing in Afghanistan, and it isn’t just a crime—crimes against humanity are the worst crimes that there are.

People who commit crimes against humanity are either very stupid or not themselves human and therefore unable to identify with other humans. Obama is definitely human and quite capable of identifying with other humans, so there’s only one possibility left—despite being educated, well-spoken, and clever, he’s a fool. He thinks money is worth more than human lives. To paraphrase the old Cree Prophecy, after the last innocent Afghan child is bombed, after the last big campaign donor goes bankrupt, and after the dollar collapses, he’s going to learn that he can’t eat money.

Not to worry—Michelle has a vegetable garden. The First Lady knows what is coming and is prepared.

Sepharad, there were “relatively few people who meant to harm us” BEFORE we invaded.

Think of it this way, suppose that you were mildly or even subconsciously prejudiced and you didn’t particularly like Asians, but you rarely saw any Asians and you were much too busy with your life to travel to Asia to learn more about them. Then an Asian criminal gang invaded your home, killed your family, destroyed your business, and told you that they were looking for somebody else and it was just collateral damage. Wouldn’t you want them out of your home? Wouldn’t you do anything in your power to get them out of your home? Isn’t it likely that you would then mean Asians, at least this particularly violent gang of Asians, harm?

It was stupid to invade a country that had done nothing to us and where even those few people who didn’t like us, hadn’t done anything to us. Once we invaded, killed a lot of innocent people, and destroyed a lot of homes and businesses, the resentment against us grew.

As it happens, Afghanistan has historically been prone to defend itself against foreign invaders. The Afghan people don’t like foreign invaders and have never yet failed to defeat foreign invaders. Had we not become foreign invaders, there would not have been any problem. Now, the longer we remain and the more damage we do, the more enemies we make. This is fine with the military industrial complex, but it places an enormous financial burden on this country when we can least afford it, and for every Afghan defender that we invaders kill, a hundred more join their ranks in anger. Do the math—how stupid can anyone be if they can’t see that the longer we stay in a situation where we cannot win, the more expensive and dangerous it becomes?

There’s a reason that we cannot win. We are Americans, not Afghans. Afghans have a right to defend their land against foreign invaders and have done so for centuries. Should we manage to kill off every single Afghan citizen, we would then have to call the country America East, as without the Afghans it could no longer be called Afghanistan. If we do not kill off every single one of them, they will resist to the last man, woman, and child, as they resisted the British, the Russians, and every other foreign invader.

Let’s go back to that gang invading your home and killing your family. Suppose you managed to escape and call the police who arrived with a SWAT team. How would you feel if the police said, “Sorry, we can’t do anything about that violent gang who invaded your home because they are already there and they can’t just leave, so we have to let them stay there?”

Do you think that if you had the possibility of defending your home and your family from foreign invaders, you might do so? A lot of people would, or at least would die trying rather than just let a violent gang invade their home and kill their family.

We had no business invading Afghanistan, we have no business staying in Afghanistan, and only the very least intelligent people would think that the fact that the military-industrial complex is making trillions of dollars war profiteering, is a reason to stay there. Putting your grandchildren in debt for an unwinnable war of aggression based on lies just to make some billionaire arms dealers wealthier is stupid. It might be a smart move for a politician who got campaign donations from defense contractors, but it sure isn’t a bright idea for the citizens paying to send our own troops to die for no reason other than corporate greed.

Folktruther, I don’t think my comment “supports the dangerous unwinnable Afghan-Pak war.” I don’t yet trust Obama that much. IF there were a way to extract the relatively few people who mean to harm us or our allies (Euros, Israel, India, Pak & Afghan supporters if there still are any) without sending in hundreds of soldiers, then fine. If not, no way.

Mark Smith—the problem is that the American people do not recognize the outrageous deceit with which American policy is implemented.  The problem is not ignorence so much as denial.  The refusal to accept tht the American power structure could systmatically lie to the American people strategically.

As you say, they have killed the Amerian people in the 9/11 false flag operation.  And they have done so not only to implement American imperialism, but Zionist imperialism as well.  Note Sepharad’s argument for the dangerous, unwinable Af-Pak war, motivated by Zionism not American power interests.

American policy has largely been hijacked by Zionist neoliberal interests, deceit being essential to conceal it.  And for Obama to promote it, since the only presidents who failed to win a second term, Carter and Bush 1, attempted to rein in Israel.

I just started reading Ward Churchill’s 1988 book, Agents of Repression, and happened across a relevant quote from Howard Zinn about the Truman Doctrine and 1947:

“The United States was trying, in the postwar decade, to create a national consensus—excluding the radicals, who could not support a foreign policy aimed at suppressing revolution—of conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, around the policies of the cold war and anti-Communism. Such a coalition could best be created by a liberal Democratic President, whose aggressive policy abroad would be supported by conservatives…if the anti-Communist mood became strong enough, liberals could support repressive moves at home which in ordinary times would be seen as violating the tradition of liberal tolerance.”

That’s our Obama. Yes, the Republicans are now pretending to oppose their own agenda, but they’ll keep funding it, as will the Democrats, because the military-industrial complex wouldn’t support them otherwise. Obama can do stuff that Bush could never have gotten away with. This is history repeating, only it seems to get more repressive every time.

Maybe there are people in Afghanistan and Pakistan who would like to attack us, but so far they never have. And attacking us was the farthest thing from their minds before we invaded. As for the Saudis who were accused of hijacking the 9/11 planes, they were Saudis, not Afghans or Pakistanis. Yes, a few months before 9/11 the Taliban was known by us to harboring Osama bin Laden who was on our terrorist list, but that was when the Bush administration sent them over forty million dollars. But they couldn’t have planted the explosives which a group of respected scientists proved had been planted in the World Trade Towers (their paper was recently published in a reputable peer-reviewed scientific journal) or forced Dick Cheney to order our air defenses to go off on wild goose chases or to stand down.

9/11 was a false flag operation, of the sort described in the Northwoods Plan to gain public support for a war, and there were no WMDs in Iraq. It was all lies, we had no business invading either country, and both wars are dumb. Not to those who have made trillions in war profiteering, but to those whose granchildren will be paying for it or whose children died for lies.

The Patriot Act was prepared long before 9/11, and pushed through before anyone had a chance to read it. It was all planned—not by foreign terrorists but by the domestic terrorists in our government. We are the terrorists. And most people know it but don’t know what to do about it. The rest are in denial and would rather kill every innocent man, woman, and child in the world than admit that they’re wrong.

Islam is indeed patriarchal, but not more so than evangelical fundamentalist Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, or similar brands of sexism and intolerance. There are no good guys, but there are lots of bad guys, and as our military and private military contractors often brag, we’re the baddest.
Actually, there are some good guys, but they don’t wage wars of aggression because they’re not stupid.

During his campaign, I think Obama said he wasn’t against all wars, just dumb ones. So, if one presumes he’s neither a fool nor a liar, he believes that his proposed actions in Afghanistan/Pakistan are smart ways to preempt/prevent yet another big long dumb slog of a war as intelligently and overall unprovocatively as possible. I don’t question that there are dangerous people in Afghanistan/Pakistan who will attack us, their own people who oppose them, our allies, and anyone else who threatens their extremist caliphate agenda, which is just as abhorrent as Western colonial adventurism. But there aren’t that many such people so the problem is how to i.d. and extract them without killing hundreds of bystanders in the process. Also, the larger the number of foreign soldiers there are traipsing around the countryside the angrier and more involved those “bystanders” will become, meaning more risk of death on both sides. For now, we can do nothing but hope that Obama is getting good intelligence from experts in the field, and that he’ll be diplomatically agile enough to not alienate the entire Moslem world as well as the Europeans who already have worries regarding their own dissatisfied large Moslem minorities don’t want any more headaches.

Obama seems like the most popular man on earth because he is popular with the media. Most folks that I know are bitterly disappointed by his leadership on the war and the economy. The comparison to Johnson is an apt one—and Johnson was a one term president…

The purpose of escalating the AF-pak war is to help Obama win the next presidential election.  The original reason for the war, the oil pipeline from the ‘Stans to the Arabian sea, has long been a lost cause.  So the only reason that the US has to ‘win’ this war is to avoid losing it.

The US is the leader of Nato, which have troops in Afghanistan.  If the US pursued withdrawal, it would diminish to the point of destroying its leadership of Nato, with unpleasant policy effects.  Obama would then be attacked by the Gops for having ‘lost’ not only Afghanistan and Pakistan, but Nato as well.

If he can keep the war going and contained until after the next election, he can then withdraw, with exactly the same results as above, but now it doesn’t matter, electorally, to the Obama regime. 
So Obama is trading blood for votes, and keeping the war going until he is re-elected.

This is ezactly the same reason that Johnson escalated the Vientam war, to avoid losing it.  And it may work out exactly the same way.

I remember this Afghan guy from Bajaur province who used to post to what billed itself as a “tough progressive” website, begging America to help them fight the “terrorists.” Before that website banned me permanently, I tried to explain to him that we ARE the terrorists, but he didn’t listen.

The site raised enough money to get him, but if I recall correctly, not his wife and family, from Afghanistan to “safety” in Pakistan.

So now that we have a “tough progressive” President, over a million people in Bajaur province have had to flee the bombings by U.S. drone aircraft. Entire villages in Bajaur province, primarily in Pakistan near the Afghan border, most likely where the poor guy fled to “safety,” have been flattened.

http://www.dictatorshipwatch.com/2009/04/05/one-million-flee-attacks-by-us-drones-pakistan-army.html

I tried to warn him. Tough means unyielding, severe, and harsh. Progressive means moving forward, advancing, as in escalating wars of aggression. And Terrorists “R” Us, us being spelled, U.S.

Thanks for laying out the “good war” argument Wilberforce, so tell us…why aren’t you there?

By your argument we should be revving up the war machine to attack Mexico and rid that nation of its drug cartels.  We probably should have bombed Germany, where many of the (supposed) 9/11 attackers were before coming here.  We definitely should have invaded Saudi Arabia.

The far left will always be against war, but this isn’t a matter of the far left.  This is about commonsense, which says, “Never start a war you cannot win.”

Considering the wreckage the U.S. has strewn about the world, particularly among the littler and browner folks, I’m amazed that anyone anywhere outside North America can see an American without wanting to kill him.  730 military bases in 130 countries?  We outRome Rome.

I still don’t understand why the heck we are in Afghanistan.  I mean, Iraq I kinda-sorta understood, at least in an evil, James Bond villan, Pinky and the Brain ‘tonight we conquer the world’, weird sort of way where killing hundreds of thousands of people to take over the oil and dominate the world sorta makes sense.  Being slightly more moral than the average James Bond villan, I don’t agree with what we’ve done to Iraq.  But at least it had some sort of twisted logic to it.

But Afghanistan?  Huh?  Why the heck are we fighting for Afghanistan?  Will controlling the economic power of Afghanistan be the way the American economy pulls its way out of depression?

If its just Al-Qaida, keep a few spy planes flying around the area, and lob a few million dollar missiles at them if they start to set up camps again.  Or send in a bunch of special forces trained murderers to go take them out.  But, we don’t need to conquer and rule the freakin country to keep them from attacking us.

And its not like conquering and ruling Afghanistan was ever a realistic option to start with.  Read the history of the last 200 years.