Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee points out Afghanistan war is of Obama's choosing, and this is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in. Steele also calls the recent resignation of Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal comical and makes fun of Obama for deciding to increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Steele asks that if Obama is such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? Because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed.
Basil Venitis points out Afghan president Hamid Karzai bites the hand that feeds him, doing his best to irritate the Western countries which keep him in power. Wily Karzai shows his independence, in order to survive the post-NATO era. Karzai is a drug addict, and his brother, Ahmad Wali, is the leading drug lord of Afghanistan, the greatest opium producer in the world. 95% of the opiates originate in Afghanistan!
Civilians are helpless and indecisive, caught between NATO forces and the insurgents, and thus unreliable. They might help you in the morning, then help your enemy in the evening. In fact forces are worried about protecting locals from them too, because there's so much collateral damage. When you do anything that harms the locals, you just have a huge chance of alienating the population. Soldiers trap Taliban fighters in residential compounds, then allow them to send out the women and children, only to discover the fighters had slipped in burqas and walked out as well.
You have to be able to distinguish between the armed enemy and the unarmed enemy, the population that supports the enemy and the population that doesn't support the enemy. The soldiers who don't know how to distinguish friend from enemy wind up multiplying the enemy. The NATO forces are the invader, the outsider, that's not going to change, and you add to this problem with your own record of human-rights violations. Soldiers cannot convince the locals they can protect them from the insurgents, after all, if the soldiers look like they are not sure they can protect themselves. The locals just ask the soldiers why are there in the first place, and the soldiers blank out!
Basil Venitis points out Uncle Sam and Fourth Reich(EU) now spend two trillion euros every year on the military, homeland security, and intelligence. There are 5,000 active terrorists in the world. This works out to spending 400 million euros per terrorist per year. Fear of terrorism drives growth in government and has led to involvement in multiple little wars and some bigger ones as well as subsequent exercises in nation building, all of which have been unconstitutional, and none of which have turned out well.
The global war on terror, now referred to as overseas contingency operations, is without end and without limits, and has made the West hated and feared in most of the world. It has even made Americans and Fourthreichians potential targets of their own government without any recourse to the protections afforded by the American Constitution or the Lisbon Treaty. The exploitation of fear of terrorism by kleptocrats has led to wars that did not have to be fought. Fear has been the key to the door for expansion of government, and kleptocrats have seized the opportunity. It has also eroded the liberties that have defined our Graecoroman culture.
The war on terror has been used to justify trillions of dollars in spending, hundreds of thousands of new government positions, and thousands of new government contracts. At the same time, the war on terror has produced very little in terms of new technology or enhanced security, has vastly increased the degree of national centralization, and has created many new permanent trees and branches in the gnarled world of kleptocracy. Furthermore, it has led to conditions and changes antivenitists hope for, massive growth in spending, new permanent and centralized government institutions, and worst of all, an incredibly stupid militarization of the pursuit of terror.
Chinese general Sun Tzu understood that understatement and deception is necessary in war. He asserted to be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate.
Instead, American approach has been to almost randomly identify countries and governments and very publicly, go after them. The only mystery of our military and foreign policy is in the minds of the American people, who do not understand why the war isn't won yet, and why the enemy seems to be expanding, getting smarter, and hating us more.
Sun Tzu pointed out that if ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril. He was right about that, but in fact you wouldn't know it from the obscene confidence and outright idiocy put out by the Pentagon, and eagerly embraced by two presidents, one a conservative, the other, an antivenitist. We, as venitists, ought to care about getting back to a kind of venitist normal, not creating a stupid normal of unconstitutional government, unsupportable debt, and endless war. We should want victory in the War on Terror but understand that victory must include a return to small government venitism. Sun Tzu asserted that he who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.
Von Clausewitz, a famous German strategist, knew that the first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish the kind of war on which they are embarking. But instead, we are still debating the question of "What is this war on terror?" More and more we are asking, why isn't it working, and when will it end. Instead of Sun Tzu and Von Clausewitz our strategy has been more theatrics than tactics, and running on a script written by those who stand to benefit from more government, and more government spending, than those Americans who are venitists and who in their hearts, do value the Constitution.
The war on terror is simply not succeeding. In many of our overseas battlefields, we are creating and growing new terrorists, and smarter terrorists. We are increasingly exposing our own weaknesses in terms of occupation and counterinsurgency, and even as we institutionally learn from our mistakes, it is always too slow, always after the fact.
We seem to be supporting a vague policy of global nation building. We keep hoping that putting another one of our crooked guys in charge of a country will work, and we keep hoping that military and economic blackmail can keep the locals in line. That's just idiotic.
It may be that our military policy is not designed to reduce terror at all, but is instead simply designed to evolve hand-in-hand with the war on terror, in order to maximize the opportunity for growth of American intelligence and security institutions. Permanent institutional growth.
Many predictions about the next decade have been made recently. One thing not predicted for 2010 is a reduction of American forces, or fewer American interferences and entanglements overseas. No one is predicting the ending of America's illegal wars, or even the ending of a front in just one of the illegal wars.
The nearly decade-long experiment in government growth called the war on terror has been a cruel joke that history will rightfully blame on the Republican Party. It's not working can all see that. But only venitists are truly in a position to offer a reasonable alternative. And that alternative is to energize venitism in our defensive strategy and foreign affairs, and to rediscover the sound advice of Sun Tzu, Von Clausewitz, and more than ever, the American founding fathers.
Military violence is a tool of limited utility. American threats can frighten weaker countries, encouraging them to seek nuclear deterrents. Willful diplomatic isolation is counterproductive. Inserting ourselves as the balancer-of-first-resort in every region of the world is a costly and unnecessary strategy that discards America's natural strategic advantages and plays to our weaknesses. The sooner these lessons are digested by the U.S. foreign policy elite, the better.
Basil Venitis asserts that now is the time to stop in Afghanistan and get out as soon as possible. De Gaulle mused that genius sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. Genius is not required to recognize that in Afghanistan, when means now. The emotion that people are feeling is deep disappointment over the Afghanistan policy of Barack Obama and the US Congress, which now registers as a surprising 90 percent disapproval rate. Doubt will turn into dissent; it will manifest in congressional districts. Amerikleptocrats will find it hard to ignore their base, as it will be very threatening to their electoral success.
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