August 7, 2009

Afghanistan: Why don't we just go home?

What is America's increasingly lethal war in Afghanistan about these days other than Barack Obama trying to to check off the Must Look Tough box on David Axelrod's re-election image strategy list?

I know it's supposed to now be all about Pakistan, but for decades the Pakistanis had a simple solution to Pushtun orneriness: the government just put up a big sign at the border of the northwest frontier territory near the Afghan border saying: "Sorry, but the Government of Pakistan does not guarantee your safety beyond this point. Cheer-i-o!" If Pathans tribal raiders came roaring down out of their mountains into the worthwhile land, they'd be slaughtered on flat ground by the Pakistani Army, and go back to their mountains, so, mostly they didn't. And the government of Pakistan didn't bother trying to control the mountains because A) They're mountains, and B) They're mountains that are are full of Puhktuns ... and why would anybody want to deal with them more than the minimum it takes to make sure they stay away from you?

But ever since Obama came to power, I keep reading (actually, I only glance at the headlines) about the Pakistani Army mounting punitive expeditions into the Swat Valley that sound very much like the one Winston Churchill took part in during the 1890s.

Churchill and friends won most of the battles, but in the very long run they lost the war, for the simple reason that, in the long run, people like Winston Churchill had some place nicer than the Khyber Pass to go home to, while the Pushtuns didn't, and the Pushtuns knew that.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

56 comments:

Anonymous said...

Billionth time - when will you stop using the word "we"? If it were truly a "we", then your article wouldn't need to be written, because "we" wouldn't be there in the first place.

Anonymous said...

Uh oh, fire up the anti-crazy filter for testing99, evilneocon, sillygirl, whiskey, etc. now.

As t99 will no doubt tell us, it's to fight al queda there so we don't have to fight man-hating femtards destroying western civilization here with nuclear suitcases.

Steve Sailer said...

Because some poor bastard American PFC getting show at by some crazy tribesman thinks of you and me and him as "we"?

Dave Drexel said...

Geopolitics is geography and politics.

Changing the _geography_ in this age of LeTorneau machines would be easier than changinging the politics. Announce there's oil under them mountains and taking them down is the only path, and punch some undefendable holes in their ranges.

In a hundred or two huindred years there will be no more Pushtuns.

It's genocide, of course. But as John Wayne said of killing Lee Marvin in "Liberty Valance", I can live with that.

rob said...

911. Tribes With Nukes. Car bomb nuke up. NYC. Ice Road Truckers. Hooded look. Women Beta something Horny.

Protocols of the Learned Elders of SWPL.

Testing99 can take a day off.

Richard Hoste said...

Steve, you're out of your league blah, blah, blah.

blah, blah, blah, Iran, blah, blah, birth control pills

jody said...

probably the same reason that US forces are still in germany, japan, and korea.

Chief Seattle said...

There is the drug trade. Someone's making money off that. A rather lot of money.

Anonymous said...

"There is the drug trade. Someone's making money off that. A rather lot of money."

what, WHAT? non sequitur?

green mamba said...

"Steve, you're out of your league..."

Makes me laugh coz it reminds me of John Goodman talking to Donny (Steve Buscemi) in "The Big Lebowski".

l said...

Afghanistan was originally conceived by Bush as the confidence-builder we needed before taking on Iraq. We'd score an easy victory against the Taliban and the public would be keyed up for more ass kickin'. After the Iraq war started, Afghanistan was put on the back burner.

Obama's shifting the focus again to Afghanistan because he apparently thinks that defeating the Pashtuns once and for all will be easier than establishing some kind of lasting stable order in Iraq. He thinks it's going to be the path of least resistance. Plus it will establish his bona fides as a tough guy.
It helps that liberals by and large support the war in Afghanistan -- because, you know, the Taliban is homophobic and sexist.
Whether Obama can accomplish anything in Afghanistan is iffy at best. If the Taliban were to find some sponsors, like the Mujahadeen had in the '80s, Afghanistan could become 10 times the disaster for the US that it is now.

testing99 said...

That is not the case Steve. Pakistan teeters on the brink, with fighting recently only 50 miles from the Capital.

It's not 1890 anymore, in case you didn't notice, and allowing Swat and places like it to fester allows Islamists challenges to the regime, whoever it is, and both a safe haven and the ability to attack.

The Pakistani Army can not slaughter the Islamists charging down from the hills when they don't charge, but rather subvert half the Army and Intelligence service.

Pakistan is very, very corrupt, has a lot of money from Gulf Islamists sloshing around, is both tribal and also in deep contact with the West, causing tribal authority to both over-extend (i.e. Swat Islamist tribal chiefs adjudicating disputes inside the capital) and fracture (under modernity media stress).

Yeah, Pakistan has nukes. What do you prefer to do about it? Ignore them? Pretend the bad nukes will go away. Because of that, we damned well better be involved. For one thing, anyone who just says "run away" and gets followed home by a shipping container nuke in NYC or elsewhere will face massive political and legal retaliation.

Pakistan has more than 100 nukes (and growing). It's governments totter on the face of Islamist subversion with Islamists in the Military, ISI, and Police. It's corrupt and has delivered nothing to it's people. It is a tribal society where tribalism now extends to places it did not (namely the capital) and is itself fracturing, with Islamism the only offered and credible replacement. Pakistan has had elements of it's military and intelligence service stage a provocative terrorist attack on neighboring India which itself is nuclear armed and far bigger.

These are facts, not fantasies, and running away out of fear only encourages men who made their way into power by killing to use WMDs if they can get a hold of them. At a bare minimum, you cede all initiative to tribal elements, many illiterate, and can respond only to the US being nuked.

Make no mistake, if the US gets nuked, to prevent others from doing the same, the response will have to be one of wiping out all Pakistanis, wherever and whenever they can be found. That means killing about 170 million people or so.

I'd say staying in Afghanistan is worth it, if for nothing else being able to influence Pakistan. Unless we want to live with a Bombay style attack followed by a nuclear one. And lose a city or two. If *elements* within Pakistan will attack dangerous neighbor India, they certainly will attack us.

Most of you live in a fantasy, where the nukes just don't exist, and Pakistanis are nice folk who are merely extra-colorful Methodists.

Melykin said...

"...the government of Pakistan didn't bother trying to control the mountains because A) They're mountains, B)..."
------------------------------

Just being mountains doesn't make them intrinsically bad. Mountains in places such as, say, Switzerland, British Columbia, and Colorado are considered to be generally good things with ski resorts, mountain climbing, parks with nice scenery, and so forth.

But I guess all those batsh*t crazy tribes living in the mountains of Pakistan would put off tourists(though some people do try to climb K2). If those folks in the Pakistan mountains played their cards right they could make a bundle opening ski resorts. Maybe they could host the winter Olympics. It would pay a lot better than kidnapping people.

Why are some countries so screwed up? Why can't everyone just get along? *sigh*

Anonymous said...

Why are some countries so screwed up? Why can't everyone just get along? *sigh*

Don't ever leave the house. You'll get chopped to pieces.

Sideways said...

Just being mountains doesn't make them intrinsically bad. Mountains in places such as, say, Switzerland, British Columbia, and Colorado are considered to be generally good things with ski resorts, mountain climbing, parks with nice scenery, and so forth.

But I guess all those batsh*t crazy tribes living in the mountains of Pakistan would put off tourists(t


There's a reason Switzerland hasn't had a war fought on it for hundreds of years. There's a reason the Apennines took much longer to take control of in WWII than the Italian coast.

The fact that it takes both mountains and crazy assholes to make a mountain range a bad place doesn't mean that Steve's wrong. It means that you read far less into what he wrote than was obviously there.

Truth said...

"Really? Does the Mexican PFC think of you as "we" when he gets back to SoCal?"

Gotta agree with this young man Steevie.

"We" is for guys running around in 120 degree desserts with 50 lbs. of gear on trying to dodge AK bullets...Or at least guys who enlisted at one time.

Anonymous said...

I wonder why T99 doesn't enlist in the armed forces. He's so worked up about the Islamists that you'd think he'd want to be over there fighting them himself.

Anonymous said...

Dave Drexel said:
"In a hundred or two huindred years there will be no more Pushtuns."

It is more likely that in a hundred or two hundred years there will be no more Americans. One of the Anons nailed it when he said:

"Really? Does the Mexican PFC think of you as we when he gets back to SoCal? Does the Scots-Irish soldier from Alabama think of the Persians across the hill from you in the Valley as we? Does he think of the Chinese in Monterey Park as we? Does the black dude over there think of the Hindus up in Fremont as we or the Syrian Jews in old NY, NY as we? Does he think of you as we?"

They do not, and this will only get worse as the country turns into a bunch of mutually hostile competing groups. Eventually there will be tribal warfare right here in the former U.S. America will become more like Afghanistan than Afghanistan will become like America.

LBK

Anonymous said...

T99, you just don't understand Afghanistan. It isn't Iraq or even Saudi Arabia. The war there isn't so much about Islam as it is about the Pushtuns not liking the governments of either Afghanistan or Pakistan. Why should they? Both were imposed on them by outsiders, as was the border which runs right thru their homeland. They support the Taliban because its the only force fighting the corrupt governments they don't like. If you were a Pushtun you'd want your own country, too, and you'd probably be a Talib.

The way to settle things is to re-draw the borders, creating a new
country of Pushtunstan from parts of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The remaining pieces of Afghanistan could be given to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, because most of the people there are Uzbeks or Tajiks.

Thus, each ethnic group would have its own ethno-state, eliminating much of the motivation for war. But such a solution would violate the multi-culti ideology of our rulers, who will not allow it to happen. And our rulers sure as hell don't want white Americans to get any ideas about
ethno-states.

LBK

Anonymous said...

Protocols of the Learned Elders of SWPL

Rob gets it.

~Svigor

Anonymous said...

Afghanistan was originally conceived by Bush as the confidence-builder we needed before taking on Iraq.

More than that, it was the old salesman's trick of getting them to say yes to something they want, so they'll say yes to something they don't later on.

You know, Afghanistan was harboring AQ so it made sense to kick the crap out of them, Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with the WTC attacks so it made no sense to even bring up the subject...

~Svigor

Anonymous said...

I'm the guy that wrote the first Anonymous comment, and the subsequent Anonymous reply to Steve's response about "we". I'm also the guy who wrote, on another post, about what the half-Jew, half-Russian told me on the flight from Tel Aviv regarding the videotaping of the rape of captured Russian soldiers by mujhadeen forces.

I've been to this region, not as a soldier, but as a traveler. When my sometimes ally, sometimes rival Truth writes on another post that about 25% of the white males he saw at some junior high last year seemed gay, or at least effeminate (a percentage I accept) I have to compare it to the Pathans I spent time with in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. The "gayness" that began to be talked about in that mujhadeen rape thread isn't the same as that manifested by some character dancing on the table at Rage in West Hollywood, but more along the lines of Theban Greeks, per historical descriptions. These guys struck me very much as men, and I mean men like you rarely see here in the Kwa anymore. The Pashtunwali was there for all to experience - they were polite to strangers, in an old world way that most of the washed out Davos-man whites could learn from, if they had the capacity for dignity anymore. They were also hard, though, and lame as it might sound, you could see it in their eyes. I'd only ever seen that calm, killer-like look in a few other peoples - the Lebs in Lebanon, the Mongols who'd seeped into Tibet, and some of the Boers in S. Africa. These dudes aren't the batshit crazy type you like to make them out to be. All this bluster about how nutty they are is just more ridiculous white hubris, akin to some National Geographic article in 1954. These are men, residing in their historic homeland, wanting to live their lives as they see fit, and fighting the multi-ethnic incursion of a grasping empire. They don't write articles about what's happening to them - they build weapons and they fight those who are doing it.

Anonymous said...

"Uh oh, fire up the anti-crazy filter for testing99, evilneocon, sillygirl, whiskey, etc. now."

For those who don't know, testing99 IS whiskey.

airtommy said...

.

Solving the poverty problem in Afghanistan

.

Anonymous said...

"They do not, and this will only get worse as the country turns into a bunch of mutually hostile competing groups. Eventually there will be tribal warfare right here in the former U.S. America will become more like Afghanistan than Afghanistan will become like America.

LBK"

Nah, Hollywood will step up the racial intermarriage propaganda campaign. After our kids are all intermarried, then they will all be "we". If women were weak minded enough to fall for the misery of feminism and sexual liberation/single motherhood, they will be fools enough to think racial intermarriage is the way to go as soon as it is promoted in images in all the textbooks from mandatory preK through graduate school.

Anonymous said...

Amazing how the Imperialist always make the same freakin arguments. I can remember Vietnam Hawks telling us we had to fight 'em in Hue - or we'd be fighting them in Long Beach. And 50,000 died in Korea - and for what?

Remember when Khadaffi was going to conquer the world? And what about the Chinese - one minute we're begging them for money the next minute the "NeoCons" are telling us we need to look out 'cause they're going to conquer the world.

Idiocy.

We could withdraw from Afghanistan tomorrow and be the better for it. We don't need to occupy the country to stop people from flying 747 into US Buildings.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

I wonder why T99 doesn't enlist in the armed forces. He's so worked up about the Islamists that you'd think he'd want to be over there fighting them himself."

In order to prevent America being attacked, as in "The Sum of All Fears", with ICVMs (Inter-Continental Vending Machines), T99 is willing to pay any price and incur any sacrifice.........as long as it is no sacrifice by him.

Truth said...

"I'm the guy that wrote the first Anonymous comment, and the subsequent Anonymous reply to Steve's response about "we". I'm also the guy who wrote, on another post, about what the half-Jew,..."

Very interesting post my friend, and I agree about the last part on rebels fighting an invading force. I think it was Susan Sontag who got into a huge issue for saying "cowardice is not setting ambushes, it is dropping bombs from 7,000 feet.

In any event, to you realize that you could have saved the first paragraph of your post by just picking a name?

headache said...

Thanks Steve that was very nicely explained. I can only agree with u. Looks like the Russians who sneered at the US invasion of Afg. are going to turn out right in the long run. As far as I can recall they also managed to invade the place in about an afternoon, but after about 10 years had enough and split. In addition they were facing Stinger missiles and other nasty weapons which the Taliban don't have much left of.

stari_momak said...

I wonder why T99 doesn't enlist in the armed forces.

Maybe he can be like Rahm and enlist in the IDF -- oh, I'm sorry , a 'civilian adjunct' of the IDF.

stari_momak said...

Anonymous superlong poster,
Nothing in Steve's post, or anything in the comments as near as I can see, says these folks are 'nutty'. Rather, they have there culture, adapted for their environment, and which sometimes impinges on other cultures (flatlanders). The assumption is that they are quite rational in their raiding, that the Pakistani's are quite rational in repelling them in the flatlands, and also in leaving them alone the mountains. What does seem to be irrational is our actions.

Anonymous said...

Pakistan teeters on the brink, with fighting recently only 50 miles from the Capital.


I'd say that's coz the US forced Pakistan to start fighting the tribes, and now they are pushing back. Had the US not meddled in Pak. this would not have happened. The US cannot even control Afg. but starts meddling in Pak. which had a cease-fire between the tribes and the central gov., like Steve sez.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, Pakistan has nukes. What do you prefer to do about it? Ignore them? Pretend the bad nukes will go away.


how the f. are the nukes going to get to NYC?? strapped on the hips of a model?

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Nothing in Steve's post, or anything in the comments as near as I can see, says these folks are 'nutty'."

It's not just confined to this post, but is found in others, and in replies in those post's comments section, etc...(e.g. "some crazy tribesman").

Truth, the four seconds it took me to type that paragraph you mention are worth it in order to continue using various names and thus foster the illusion that Steve has many followers, rather than the seventeen of us who actually comment here. For instance, I seem to be replying to "stari_momak", but I actually am stari momak.

Anonymous said...

It seems to me that America is forgetting strategies that have served it well since the War between the States. It should fight with adversaries that a) are more or less of it's own size but properly softened up by others (Germany in both World Wars), or b) targets that are so weak that a 'glorious' victory is all but a certainty (Panama, Grenada). I don't think Afghanistan really fits in any of these categories.

Melykin said...

Anonymous wrote:
"These are men, residing in their historic homeland, wanting to live their lives as they see fit, and fighting the multi-ethnic incursion of a grasping empire. They don't write articles about what's happening to them - they build weapons and they fight those who are doing it."
---------------------------------

They are not writing articles because most of them are probably illiterate. Their society is being kept in a brutal, stone-age-like state by some force or another...maybe genetics, maybe fundamentalist Islam, maybe they are all addicted to opium..I don't know. In any case, it is not a stretch to describe their behaviour as "crazy".

Anonymous said...

--For instance, I seem to be replying to "stari_momak", but I actually am stari momak.--


Might as well come clean myself...I'm Anonymous.

AmericanGoy said...

"And 50,000 died in Korea - and for what?"

So that millions of South Koreans do not live under an insane madman as their leader.

Evil Sandmich said...

Unless we want to live with a Bombay style attack followed by a nuclear one. And lose a city or two.

No I definitely wouldn't want...hmm...which cities? ;-)

kudzu bob said...

>Pashtuns build weapons? Tell me all about this phenomenon, please.<

In the time it took you to write that, you simply could have googled "Pashtun" and "gunsmiths."

Anonymous said...

In the time it took you to write that, you simply could have googled "Pashtun" and "gunsmiths."


testy beter take that up in his threatlist for NYC. i mean what's gonna happen when all these gun-totin Pashtuns converge on NYC? where are the young Obama babes gonna run to? socal? testy would love that!

Mr. Anon said...

"AmericanGoy said...

"And 50,000 died in Korea - and for what?"

So that millions of South Koreans do not live under an insane madman as their leader."

Sounds like a good deal for the Koreans.

What did we get out of it?

I mean, besides Margaret Cho?

Anonymous said...

"Pashtuns build weapons? Tell me all about this phenomenon, please."

I wrote a magazine article years ago about Dara Adam Khel, and the global distribution of the various weapons produced there. Kudzu Bob's correct. Instead of having to be told about things, like my six-year-old or a fat housewife in Florida, you could, if genuinely curious, look them up.

As for the "fags" aspect, say what you will, bro. I see a lot of tough guy posturing on these boards that would fall apart with a few economic changes.

Melykin displays typical white arrogance and an absolute inability to adequately observe the realities of the land he himself lives in. Pashtun society is simply a pre-industrial society, lacking in some things Westerners find necessary now, but free of many of the ills that were ushered in with industrialization. It is not a "stone-age" society. Buzzwords like that are used by neo-cons and feminists alike in their bid to bomb, subjugate, and "free" indigenous peoples of the world from the societies they would prefer.

"In any case, it is not a stretch to describe their behaviour as 'crazy'."

Not to you. To me, the champions of the culture of the Kwa and their rah-rahing Euro-equivalents are crazy. Acting like men and choosing to live seems sane. Guess it's all subjective.

Anonymous said...

"you simply could have googled 'Pashtun' and 'gunsmiths.'"

Try Googling "Pashtun" and "nuclear scientist." They're gonna git us!

Anonymous said...

Whenever I read an elaborate domino-theory chain of geopolitical reasoning such as testing99's, I'm reminded of what Mencken wrote:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety), by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."


America has suffered somewhat for never having understood that the main motives for wars are economic, not bullshit ideologies or emotional appeals to abstractions. There is a super-colossally profitable machine in the USA and beyond dedicated to manufacturing foreign hoblgoblins, so that the taxpayer will go on feeding armaments manufacturers and civilian contractors with orders for ever more expensive kit to meet our self-imposed commitments in three quarters of the world's countries-- some of which are per capita richer than their guardians.

America expends half the world's money for "defense". Now that the USSR has packed up, Europe is pacifist and the Chinese and Japanese only want to own the US, not conquer it, the "Islamonazi terror" is the best hobgoblin the machine can come up with. Not a very terrifying one, since it has not landed a punch on this country for eight years, but still....

Incidentally, Mencken's warning was echoed 50 years ago: not by some leftist cynic but by a Republican president who had commanded our armies in the biggest real war we ever fought. It takes a chickenhawk paranoid to work out how leaving the Pashtuns to their own country will result in nukes falling on Seattle.

Anonymous said...

"Try Googling "Pashtun" and "nuclear scientist." They're gonna git us!"

Wow, how far this spins from my original point. Pashtuns make weapons in order to fight invaders. Some of the weapons are smuggled out to Chechnya, Bosnia, Ingushetia, etc...but all I meant was that they produce firearms and small scale bombs for dealing with invaders. I'm not Testy, with the speedboats and the suitcases and the 24 episodes on Tivo and all that. I'm talking about defense on the scale at which they're capable. Which seems capable enough, for the time being.

Truth said...

"America has suffered somewhat for never having understood that the main motives for wars are economic, not bullshit ideologies or emotional appeals to abstractions. There is a super-colossally profitable machine in the USA and beyond dedicated to manufacturing foreign hoblgoblins..."

This is absolutely correct!

Kudos to you whichever anonymous you are, friend or foe.

And to the rest of you, just keep "fighting them over there, so you won't have to do it over here!" (From your laptop of course.)

airtommy said...

America has suffered somewhat for never having understood that the main motives for wars are economic, not bullshit ideologies or emotional appeals to abstractions.

It doesn't help that so many on the anti-war left spout the preposterous mantra "Religion has caused every war".

Anonymous said...

America has suffered somewhat for never having understood that the main motives for wars are economic

I guess that's one way of saying America has never actually suffered from war.

Seeing your continent smashed once or twice will cure that.

~Svigor

kudzu bob said...

>I guess that's one way of saying America has never actually suffered from war.<

Gore Vidal tells the story of how, after having written the brilliant novel, "Lincoln," Norman Podhoretz approached him and expressed puzzlement at Vidal's choice of subject matter, confessing that to him (Podhoretz) the Civil War was as distant and irrelevant as the Wars of the Roses.

I guess the Neocons aren't the only ones who suffer from that particular blind spot.

Anonymous said...

"confessing that to him (Podhoretz) the Civil War was as distant and irrelevant as the Wars of the Roses."


Mmmm, now why would that be? Maybe for the same reason why Podhoretz's extended family living in Europe, Australia or Russia also does not give a shit for local history. Only the narrative dealing with a particular piece of realestate carries any weight.

Anonymous said...

I guess the Neocons aren't the only ones who suffer from that particular blind spot.

I'm a southerner; the south suffered from that war, not America.

Even if you don't buy that, enormous differences between the World Wars and the American War Between the States.

~Svigor

kudzu bob said...

>I'm a southerner; the south suffered from that war, not America.<

This unreconstructed capital-S Southerner doesn't understand your statement that the South suffered from the War, not America. Both sides were comprised of Americans, and both experienced terrible losses in the War--especially the soldiers and civilians of the Confederacy, of course.

>Even if you don't buy that, enormous differences between the World Wars and the American War Between the States.<

You underestimate the sheer bloodiness of The War for Southern Independence. Three percent of all Americans ended up on the casualty rolls, an appallingly high proportion of the population. The organized slaughter that took place across those five Aprils can reasonably be thought of as a large-scale dress rehearsal for the total wars that followed.

Anonymous said...

You underestimate the sheer bloodiness of The War for Southern Independence. Three percent of all Americans ended up on the casualty rolls, an appallingly high proportion of the population. The organized slaughter that took place across those five Aprils can reasonably be thought of as a large-scale dress rehearsal for the total wars that followed.

No doubt it was by far the bloodiest war in American history. Makes Vietnam look like a stroll in the garden. But, the devastation wrought on the land itself was negligible outside the south.

But you do have a point about casualties. I was going to respond that you should separate your percentage into north and south, but then I remembered that the north had a lot more casualties than the south. Still, higher population too, so it would be interesting to see them broken out.

~Svigor

l said...

Raimondo's take:

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/08/13/why-are-we-in-afghanistan/

neil craig said...

The purpose of the Afghan occupation & it is a fair one, is to find & kill bin Laden. Only problem is that I am pretty sure he has been dead for years.

While the CIA say "his" tapes have been genuine a Swiss firm who do voice recognition software say they definitely aren't. It depends whether you trust a foreign corporation or America's first line of defence in the inteligence war?