My family has pretty much always been in support of Western military. My father’s father served in the end of WWII, my mother’s father was in the army. My father was absolutely fascinated with fighter jets, and regularly took me to airshows. I was dead-set on becoming a fighter pilot until age 14, when I discovered I needed glasses. My dream was, in essense, shot down (pun intended).

I was always told by my father and CNN that Israel always has to defend itself against people who just hated them for no reason. When 9/11 happened, I was pretty sure I was still going to join the Air Force. I got my glider pilot’s license the next summer, and my private pilot’s license the summer before 12th grade. I was not uncommon for my father to have a military themed wallpaper on his office desktop background.

This is a tomahawk cruise missile warhead delivery system being launched from a naval vessel. It can deliver over 1,000 lbs of explosive over 2,500 kilometers. I’d see things like this on Extreme Machines and love it. I can just picture the narrator saying something along the lines of “With technology like this, the bad guy doesn’t even have a chance to fire a single bullet.”.

—

Nowaways, my perspective is a little different. I see Israel as a bully, I question our involvement in Afghanistan, supporting a false government, when only about 100 taliban are actually in the country (they’re all in Pakistan now). I can understand if we’re making money off of their drugs, which is what it seems. Funny they don’t tell you that Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, is the brother of a major drug lord. It’s also funny that the Allies only burn southern opium crops, not northern ones.

I see this senseless violence, and greed that is to a level no different than telecommunications companies screwing over the public, or ticketmaster charging you $25 in “convenience fees” per event ticket, and wonder where we’ve gone wrong. We’re all just greedy motherfuckers, it seems.

Now when I look at a photo of a tomahawk cruise missile, I see the real result:

This child was at a distance from the target. I think its safe to guess that whoever was in the blast radius could now only be poured into a vial. This shit happens nearly daily in Iraq. How about if one cruise missile were to hit a rural community in Pennsylvania?  It would be a massive tragedy. Hit a few brown people in the desert? Meh.

Let’s pretend that is a photo of a child in Canada who died at the hands of, say, the Chinese. Would they be winning our hearts & minds, or would we sign up to kill those invaders at any cost?

My point? I do not believe that our tactics are helping us at all in reducing the threat of terrorism.

Let’s talk about Afghanistan. You should easily find it in this map:

Between the 12th and 16th Centuries (1100’s and 1500’s), the Mongols, initially led by Ghengis Kahn, completely invaded, kicked ass and took names. Though they mostly hung out in Ghazni, a central city between Kandahar and Kabul; it was their base of operations for kicking India’s ass. For added timeline context: During most of this time, nobody knew North America existed.

In the early 1500’s, Afghanistan was divided. To the West you had the Persians (now known as Iran), To the north was the Uzbecks, to the East were the Mughals (Persianized/Indianized Mongol descendants. Hell of a gene pool).

In by the year 1700, you had all the occupying armies, but there were still a bunch of Pachtun Tribes (aka invaded Afghanis). Two such tribes were predominant: On one side are the Durranis – most of the settled population, farmers, traders, the professional middle class. On the other are the Ghilzai, traditionally nomadic, fiercely fundamentalist in religion, whose tribal homelands stretch across into Pakistan as far as Kashmir. They hated each other; Afghanistan was in a civil war while they were occupied! Great.

Kandahar was mostly Ghizlai at this time. In 1709, The Afghan people, sick of being occupied by the frickin’ Persian and Mongol armies, say “Fuck this, we have to kick out these Persian invaders from our land.” and decide to kick the Persians out. Led by Mir Wais Hotak (Ghizlai), they did; and took back Kandahar for their own. Hey, it’s a tiny kingdom but it’s a start. The Persians were too rich, fat and lazy to retake Kandahar (literally, actually).

Mir Wais’s son, Mir Mahmud Hotaki, figures his dad was on the right track, and decides to kick more Persian ass…and does he ever. He took their frickin’ capital (Isfahan) within less than 2 years! Mir Mahmud Hotaki, being the sensible man, figures he deserves a go at ruling the people he just invaded. He becomes Shah of Persia. He pretty much abused the shit out of his Persian subjects. He was then murdered by a jealous cousin who wanted power too. Then the Persians said “Fuck this, we have to kick out these Afghan invaders from our land”. They retake Kandahar.

By 1747, Ahmed Shah Durrani kills the Persian ruler of Kandahar and becomes ruler.

The Durranis rule until, oh…about 1979. But don’t worry, the Ghizlai were still around, and still fecking hated the Durranis. The ruling Durranis had to move the capital from Ghizlai populated Kandahar to Kabul a couple of hundred years before. The Durranis were never shy to ask for help in calming down the Ghizlai. Either the Tajiks from the North, or later the British, were happy to help. The Brits, had every interest of protecting its crown jewel, India, from the Ghizlai.

In 1979, The Russians decide they want a piece of Afghanistan. They try to get the Ghizlai to help them overthrow the Durranis. Thing was, The Ghizlai hated the Russians’ socialist and secular agenda so much, they were easily influenced by the USA to attack the Russians. America gave tons of money, guns and training to a Ghizlai guy from Saudi Arabia (They’re everywhere) named Osama Bin Laden so he could fight the Russians (and the Durranis too, the USA didn’t really care, as long as the Russians lost). Heh—It worked.

The Ghizlai, now using God Mode + Infinite ammo cheats, take over Afghanistan, and impose a strict Islamic Sharia law. America leaves under the rule of what is now knows as Taleban, thanking them for their help.

In 2001, The Taleban attack the US. Americans give God Mode+Infinite ammo cheats to Hamid Karzai, a Durrani drug lord.

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I’ll leave final thoughts to Christopher Booker

As so often before, the Ghilzai have seen their country hijacked by a Durrani regime, supported by a largely Tajik army and by hated outsiders from the West. One reason why we find it so hard to win “hearts and minds” in Helmand is that we are up against a sullenly resentful population, fired by a timeless hatred and able to call on unlimited support, in men and materiel, from their Ghilzai brothers across the border in Pakistan.

Only in towns such as Sanguin and Garmsir are there islands of Durrani, willing to support the Durrani government in distant Kabul. No sooner have our forces “secured” a village from the Taleban, than their fighters re-emerge from the surrounding countryside to reclaim it for the Ghilzai cause. Without recognising this, and that what the Ghilzai really want is an independent “Pashtunistan” stretching across the border, we shall never properly understand why, like so many foreigners who have become embroiled in Afghanistan before, we have stumbled into a war we can never hope to win.

For various reasons I’m starting to really disagree with our involvement in Afghanistan. It is less the fact that we’re interfering with another country’s internal affairs by siding and bribing criminals and drug dealers, as much as the allied attitude toward citizens at home. When I see our media calling the Afghan election a success, when entire sections of the country do not cast any ballots under threat of violence, I call bull.

And then you read a report like this, saying that the Pentagon profiles US journalists, and selectively “chooses” which stories get through. It seems they were rated on how many negative, neutral or positive stories they wrote.

Of course, the release of this report caused an absolute shitstorm. The Pentagon and since assured the public that this profiling was not used to select stories. I guess they were just working on a massive chart for the office pool.

Matthew Good is on a roll: Bam, bam and bam.

What the Hell happened to reporting on events in Iran? What’s going on there? Why the fuck are we STILL talking about Michael Jackson? What’s happening in China? Riots? How about Pakistan’s Swat region? Israelis taking over Palestinian fishing boats?

Fucksakes the world pisses me off sometimes.

Over 60 years ago, Mikhail Kalashnikov, a Russian peasant and inventor, would set into production the final model of the weapon he wanted to make to exact revenge on Nazi invaders. The Avtomatni Kalashnikova model-1947 would eventually be the mainstay weapon of drug traffickers, rebel groups and whole armies even to this day.

From the Wired article:

American soldiers in Vietnam, toting M16s prone to jamming, gained a grudging respect for the AK-47, too, when they began encountering them in large numbers.

[...]

Kalashnikov, now 89, has expressed regret that his AK-47 has become the weapon of choice in the terrorist world, but he suffers no pangs of guilt. “If someone asks me how I can sleep at night knowing that my arms have killed millions of people, I respond that I have no problem sleeping,” he said. “My conscience is clean. I constructed arms to defend my country.”

There are an estimated 100 million Kalashnikovs in circulation, and at the equivalent of $25 apiece overseas, it’s no wonder it’s so widely used, given it’s proven reliability.

I’ve been looking at a lot of videos from both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts in the past weeks. It’s stirred many emotions, including hate, sadness, fear and anger. I can only imagine how much these emotions would be amplified if I was an Israeli or a Palestinian myself. Hamas is an absolutely atrocious group, as is the Israeli response in the last incursion. I’m just glad I’m trying to see it from both sides.

I’d like to link a few videos. A warning, some scenes are pretty graphic, but I feel it important to see.

• Here’s how Hamas reacts to a wedding, when their own people are dancing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1M4eH9Kk7I
• Or on the other side of the coin, Israelis shooting into Gaza: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0aEo59c7zU
• Israel’s use of White phosphorus in Gaza: http://www.hrw.org/en/features/rain-fire-white-phosphorus-gaza

Watch these and see how either side can be condemned or justified. Notice the common theme of religion being used to legitimize actions. For fuck’s sake, this is sick. I can definitely understand why everyone hates the other so much.

This is just one conflict in one era. Can you imagine how much suffering has occurred elsewhere in the world? Unknown wars? Past conflicts? I bet you that if we were all forced to watch graphic videos of conflicts in Africa, for instance, we’d be much more inclined to pay attention. I could quote mine for hours, but I’ll settle for a bit off of this essay by George Orwell :

[...]
Here is another memory from Germany. A few hours after Stuttgart was captured by the French army, a Belgian journalist and myself entered the town, which was still in some disorder. The Belgian had been broadcasting throughout the war for the European Service of the BBC, and, like nearly all Frenchmen or Belgians, he had a very much tougher attitude towards ‘the Boche’ than an Englishman or an American would have. All the main bridges into town had been blown up, and we had to enter by a small footbridge which the Germans had evidently made efforts to defend. A dead German soldier was lying supine at the foot of the steps. His face was a waxy yellow. On his breast someone had laid a bunch of the lilac which was blooming everywhere.

The Belgian averted his face as we went past. When we were well over the bridge he confided to me that this was the first time he had seen a dead man. I suppose he was thirty five years old, and for four years he had been doing war propaganda over the radio. For several days after this, his attitude was quite different from what it had been earlier. He looked with disgust at the bomb-wrecked town and the humiliation the Germans were undergoing, and even on one occasion intervened to prevent a particularly bad bit of looting. When he left, he gave the residue of the coffee we had brought with us to the Germans on whom we were billeted. A week earlier he would probably have been scandalized at the idea of giving coffee to a ‘Boche’. But his feelings, he told me, had undergone a change at the sight of ce pauvre mort beside the bridge: it had suddenly brought home to him the meaning of war. And yet, if we had happened to enter the town by another route, he might have been spared the experience of seeing one corpse out of the—perhaps—twenty million that the war has produced.

Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers have been sporting custom t-shirts that have raised a few eyebrows, such as this one from a sniper unit. Depicted is a pregnant Palestinian woman in the crosshairs with the caption “1 Shot, Two Kills” :

(Link to www.haaretz.com)

I can just hear it now : “Oh the fuckin’ civy hippie got offended! I wonder if he even knows the shit I go through for his freedom!” or something of the sort. Look, I’m not offended that they are wearing those shirts; anyone who knows me personally is probably aware of my very crude sense of humor. What does offend me is that I have the impression that many IDF soldiers (and officers) actually think like this. Factor in the use of white phosphorous and now Canada can call itself a supporter of genocide by attrition.

Related articles

US military spending visualized, via The Economist:

(click on the image to follow the link)

Although to be fair, if the graph were to be of the % of national GDP, it wouldn’t be so drastic.