NATO's Afghan fuck-up
"How many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they are forever banned
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind
The answer is blowing in the wind"
etc.
-Bob Dylan, 1963
How else to describe it? It's a complete disaster. Ten years of military involvement by the most powerful military alliance on the planet in one of the most war-torn and poverty stricken countries on the planet has produced - in the unbeatable words of Michael Herr - "noise, waste, and pain" - that has cost billions of dollars and produced millions of traumatized, wounded, and dead. And it's only getting worse.
How to say this? The Emperor has no clothes. It looked bad at the start in 2001, and has looked worse as time has gone on. The ICRC reports are studiously neutral but do not shrink from the obvious conclusion that Afghanistan is a toxic swamp of corruption, violence, bigotry, poverty, and evil, much of which has been produced by NATO (the ICRC didn't say this - I'm saying it) in its delusional pursuit of an Afghan representative democracy the like of which it is doing its best to undermine in its own democracies that provide the NATO military alliance an almost completely unsupervised licence to act out its fantasies at public expense and national criminal responsibility.
It doesn't get worse than this, except Vietnam and Iraq, possibly now Libya.
