Tuesday, October 18, 2005

It’s only a Rumsfeld wasteland

There's nothing in the streets
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Are now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight

-The Who-

Man is naturally a noble creature. All we really need to do is to remove the institutions and leaders who have perverted the natural nobility of Man and something like Utopia or at least, Western style Liberal Democracy will arise almost immediately; right?

There was a time that this was widely believed and it seems that some would still have it true, or at least they would have you think that they think it’s true so that you’ll see their incompetence and aggression and greed as leadership.

Remember the Taliban? Remember the Faith Based people who blew up those ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan? Amir Shah of Associated Press breaks the news that a former regional governor who oversaw the destruction of two massive 1,500-year-old Buddha statues during the Taliban's reign was elected to the Afghan parliament last month, according to results from two provinces now just finalized.

Mawlawi Mohammed Islam Mohammadi, who was the Taliban's governor of Bamiyan province when the fifth-century Buddha statues were blown up with dynamite and artillery in March 2001, was chosen to represent the neighboring province of Samangan. He says it wasn’t his fault.

Although results from only four provinces have yet been finalized, three former warlords still suspected of having ties to armed groups also were declared winners in those areas.  Ahmad Fahim Hakim, deputy director of the state-sponsored Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, says ``Many of the winners are linked to armed groups or drugs. `The number of elected lawmakers who are honest and interested in reform may be tiny compared to the regional strongmen who are only interested in themselves.

Elsewhere, U.S.-led coalition forces killed four police officers after mistaking them for militants during an operation in the southern province of Kandahar,

Yessir, George, all we needed were some elections - nice job Georgie.

We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgment of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song

6 comments:

Intellectual Insurgent said...

The suffering of the Afghani people since 1980 is unimaginable. They must be some of the most resilient people on earth.

Capt. Fogg said...

I think it's going to get worse again. We don't have the troops, we don't have a plan and we will soon loose interest.

RR said...

I am still amazed at how quickly we turned out attention away from Afghanistan. After decades of conflict we actually went in there and removed the Taliban fairly easily.

If we had put half the reconstruction effort into Afghanistan that we are putting into Iraq we might have had a chance at creating a better future for those people... not to mention that it would have sent a strong signal to the Islamic fundamentalists who attacked us on 9/11.

Now, the only signal we're sending is of incompetence... and its costing thousands of lives, not to mention dollars.

RR said...

Your post got me thinking a lot more about Afghanistan.

I posted this blog tonight... check it out:

http://reasonreigns.blogspot.com/2005/10/missed-opportunities-price-of-hubris.html

Intellectual Insurgent said...

The problem with Afghanistan is that it doesn't have oil. Forget all of the Osama Bin Terrorist baloney, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to get a contract for the natural gas pipeline. Once that was done, the neo-cons had bigger, oilier, fish to fry.

Capt. Fogg said...

It seems that the war in Iraq was being planned long before Bush got appointed President. Afghanistan was a half hearted attempt that shows we don't care about stopping Osame and Iraq is, as you say, about oil.