[THS] What I Learned in Afghanistan - About the United States

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25398.htm

What I Learned in Afghanistan - About the United States

By Dana Visalli

May 07,2010 "Lew Rockwell" -- I was surprised on my recent trip to Afghanistan that
I learned so much
about the United States. I was in Afghanistan for two weeks in
March of this year, meeting with a large number of Afghans working in humanitarian
endeavors – the principal of a girls’ school, the director of a school for street children,
the Afghan Human Rights Commission, a group working on environmental issues.
The one thing that all of these groups that we met with had in common was, they
were penniless. They all survived on rather tenuous donations made by philanthropic
foundations in Europe.

I had read that the United States had spent $300 billion dollars in Afghanistan since
the invasion and occupation of that country ten years ago, so I naturally became
curious where this tremendous quantity of money and resources had gone. Many
Americans had said to me that we were in Afghanistan "to help Afghan women," and
yet we were told by the director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission, and we
read in the recent UN report titled "Silence is Violence," that the situation for women
there was growing more violent and oppressive each year. So I decide to do some
research.

95% of the $300 billion that the U.S. has spent on its Afghanistan operation since we
invaded the country in 2001 has gone to our military operations there. Several
reports indicate that it costs one million dollars to keep one American soldier in that
country for one year. We will soon have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, which will
cost a neat $100 billion a year.

US soldiers in Afghanistan spend almost all of their time on one of our 300 bases in
that country, so there is nothing they can do to help the Afghan people, whose
physical infrastructure has been destroyed by the "30-year war" there, and who are
themselves mostly jobless in a society in which there is almost no economy and no
work.

Some effort is made to see that the remaining 5% of the $300 billion spent to date in
Afghanistan does help Afghan society, but there is so much corruption and general
lawlessness that the endeavor is largely futile. We were told by a female member of
the Afghan parliament of one symbolic incident in which a container of medical
equipment that was purchased in the US with US government funds for a clinic in
Ghawr province, west of Kabul. It was shipped from the US, but by the time it arrived
in Ghawr it was just an empty shell; all the equipment had been pilfered along the
way.

Violence against women is increasing in Afghanistan at the present time, not
decreasing. The Director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission told us of a recent
case in which a ten-year-old girl was picked up by an Afghan Army commander in his
military vehicle, taken to the nearby base and raped. He brought her back to her
home semiconscious and bleeding, after conveying to her that if she told what had
happened he would kill her entire family. The human rights commissioner ended the
tale by saying to us the he could tell us "a thousand stories like this." There has been
a rapid rise in the number of self-immolations – women burning themselves to death
– in Afghanistan in the past three years, to escape the violence that pervades many
women’s lives – under the nine-year US occupation.

Armed conflict and insecurity, along with criminality and lawlessness, are on the rise
in Afghanistan. In this respect, the country mirrors experience elsewhere which
indicates a near universal co-relation between heightened conflict, insecurity, and
violence against women.

Once one understands that the US military presence in Afghanistan is not actually
helping the Afghan people, the question of the effectiveness or goodwill of other
major US military interventions in recent history arises. In Vietnam, for example, the
country had been a colony of France for the 80 years prior to WW II, at which point
the Japanese invaded and took over. When the Japanese surrendered, the
Vietnamese declared their independence, on September 2, 1945. In their preamble
they directly quoted the US Declaration of Independence ("All men are created
equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among
these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness
.").

The United States responded first by supporting the French in their efforts to
recapture their lost colony, and when that failed, the US dropped 10 million tons of
bombs on Vietnam – more than were dropped in all of World War II – sprayed 29
million gallons of the carcinogenic defoliant Agent Orange on the country, and
dropped 400,000 tons of napalm, killing a total 3.4 million people. This is an
appreciable level of savagery, and it would be reasonable to ask why the United
States responded in this way to the Vietnamese simply declaring their inalienable
rights.

There was a sideshow to the Vietnam war, and that is that the United States
conducted massive bombing campaigns against Vietnam’s two western neighbors,
Laos and Cambodia. From 1964 to 1973, the US dropped more than two million tons
of ordnance over Laos in a operation consisting of 580,000 bombing missions – equal
to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. This
unprecedented, secret bombing campaign was conducted without authorization from
the US Congress and without the knowledge of the American people.

The ten-year bombing exercise killed an estimated 1 million Laotians. Despite
questions surrounding the legality of the bombings and the large toll of innocent lives
that were taken, the US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs at the time, Alexis
Johnson, stated, "The Laos operation is something of which we can be proud as
Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for
our money there . . . is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective."

One Laotian female refugee recalled the years of bombing in this way: "Our lives
became like those of animals desperately trying to escape their hunters . . . Human
beings, whose parents brought them into the world and carefully raised them with
overflowing love despite so many difficulties, these human beings would die from a
single blast as explosions burst, lying still without moving again at all. And who then
thinks of the blood, flesh, sweat and strength of their parents, and who will have
charity and pity for them? In reality, whatever happens, it is only the innocent who
suffer."

In Cambodia, the United States was concerned that the North Vietnamese might
have established a military base in the country. In response, The US dropped three
million tons of ordnance in 230,000 sorties on 113,000 sites between 1964 and 1975.
10% of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having
"unknown" targets and another 8000 sites having no target listed at all. About a
million Cambodians were killed (there was no one counting), and the destruction to
society wrought by the indiscriminate, long-term destruction is widely thought to
have given rise to the Khmer Rouge, who proceeded, in their hatred for all things
Western, to kill another 2 million people.

Four days after Vietnam declared its independence on September 2, 1945, "Southern
Korea" also declared independence (on September 6), with a primary goal of
reuniting the country – which had been split into north and south by the United
States only seven months before. Two days later, on September 8, 1945, the US
military arrived with the first of 72,000 troops, dissolved the newly formed South
Korean government, and flew in their own chosen leader, Syngman Rhee, who had
spent the previous 40 years in Washington D.C. There was considerable opposition to
the US control of the country, so much that 250,000 and 500,000 people were killed
between 1945 and 1950 resisting the American occupation, before the actual Korean
War even started.

The Korean War, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, was an
asymmetrical war, in which the highly industrialized and mechanized US pulverized
the comparatively primitive North Korean nation. One third of the population of North
Korea was killed in the war, a total of three million people (along with one million
Chinese and 58,000 Americans). Every city, every sizable town, every factory, every
bridge, every road in North Korea was destroyed. General Curtis LeMay remarked at
one point that the US had "turned every city into rubble," and now was returning to
"turn the rubble into dust." A British reporter described one of the thousands of
obliterated villages as "a low, wide mound of violet ashes." General William Dean,
who was captured after the battle of Taejon in July 1950 and taken to the North,
later said that most of the towns and villages he saw were just "rubble or snowy open
spaces."

More napalm was dropped on Korea than on Vietnam, 600,000 tons compared to
400,000 tons in Vietnam. One report notes that, "By late August, 1950, B-29
formations were dropping 800 tons a day on the North. Much of it was pure napalm.
Vietnam veteran Brian Wilson asks in this regard, "What it is like to pulverize ancient
cultures into small pebbles, and not feel anything?"

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein came to power through a U.S.-CIA engineered coup in
1966 that overthrew the socialist government and installed Saddam’s Baath Party.
Later conflict with Saddam let to the first and second Gulf Wars, and to thirteen years
of severe U.S.-imposed economic sanctions on Iraq between the two wars, which
taken together completely obliterated the Iraqi economy. An estimated one million
people were killed in the two Gulf wars, and the United Nations estimates that the
economic sanctions, in combination with the destruction of the social and economic
infrastructure in the First Gulf War, killed another million Iraqis. Today both the
economy and the political structure of Iraq are in ruins.

This trail of blood, tears and death smeared across the pages of recent history is the
reason that Martin Luther King said in his famous Vietnam Speech that the United
States is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." Vietnam veteran Mike
Hastie expanded the observation when he said in April of this year (2010) that, "The
United States Government is a nonstop killing machine. The worst experience I had
in Vietnam was experiencing the absolute truth of Martin Luther King's statement.
America is in absolute psychiatric denial of its genocidal maniacal nature."

A further issue is that "war destroys the earth." Not only does, as President Dwight D.
Eisenhower said in 1960, "Every rocket fired signify a theft from those who hunger
and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed," but every rocket that is
fired reduces the life-sustaining capacity of the biosphere. In an ultimate sense it
could be argued that those who wage war and those who pay for and support war,
in reality bear some hidden hatred for life and some hidden desire to put and end to
it.

What are our options? The short answer is, grow up. Grow up into the inherent
depth of your own existence. After all, you are a "child of the universe, no less than
the trees and stars, you have a right be here." There is no viable, universally
inscribed law that compels you to do as you are told to do by the multitude of
dysfunctional and destructive authority figures that would demand your compliance,
if you acquiesce.

"If we led our lives according to the ways intended by nature," wrote French author
La Boétie in his book The Politics of Obedience," we should be intuitively obedient to
our parents; later we should adopt reason as our guide and become slaves to
nobody." La Boétie wrote this in the year 1552, but people today remain slaves to
external authority. "Our problem," said historian Howard Zinn, "is not civil
disobedience; our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the
world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to
war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that
people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and
stupidity, and war, and cruelty."

Do you want to spend your life paying for the death of people (executed by the US
military) that you would probably have loved if you have met them? Do you want to
spend your life paying for the arsenal of hydrogen bombs that could very well destroy
most of the life on the planet? If not, if you want another kind of life, then as author
James Howard Kunstler often suggests, ‘You will have to make other arrangements."
You will have to arrange to live according to your own deepest ethical standards,
rather than living in fear of the nefarious authority figures that currently demand
your obedience and threaten to punish you if you do not obey their demands on your
one precious chance at life.

"We must know how the first ruler came by his authority." ~ John Locke

"How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I
answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." ~ Henry David
Thoreau

Dana Visalli [dana at methownet.com] is an ecologist, botanist and organic farmer
living in Twisp, Washington.

Copyright © 2010 Dana Visalli