Pashtun – ILANA MERCER

This Is Exactly Who We Are

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 06 May 2011 07:00:00 +0000

The Arab Street erupts in atavistic displays when Americans or Israelis are eliminated. The American Street is not that different. Our adversaries hand out sweets when we die; we pass the beer when one of theirs shuffles off his mortal coil. They dance the Debka (an Arabic traditional dance) and ululate at our misery; we bump and grind lasciviously when they expire ~ilana

This is who we are. Which is why President Barack Obama sounded so phony when he intoned: “That is not who we are. We don’t trot this stuff out as trophies.” The president was alluding to images of Osama bin Laden’s shattered skull. Obama had the fortitude to instruct the elite SEAL Team 6 to shoot Osama on-site, but has, ever since, been feigning daintiness about releasing the images.

According to Al Jazeera, a Pakistani security officer is rumored to have snapped shots of three others who were killed during the raid on bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideout. The pictures were purchased by Reuters and have been published. They show surfaces slick with blood. No weapons are evident.

Tellingly, Barack Obama gave a measure of presidential protection, in 2009, to some of the sadistic and slutty servicemen and women toiling in the porn theaters of Iraq. As Reuters divulged, “at least one picture showed an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.” And who can forget the pornographic pictorials to surface, in 2004, from the Abu Ghraib prison, starring the 800th Military Police Brigade and their Iraqi sex slaves?

The generic GI Joe and GI ho soon surfaced in Afghanistan too. For weeks, “The Kill Team,” a group of American infantrymen serving in Afghanistan, had been baying for blood. As Rolling Stone magazine reported, in March of this year, the “Bravo Company” had been brooding over “the ethics of bagging ‘savages’ and had debated the probability of getting caught,” before they went hunting in “an isolated farming village,” in Kandahar Province. Try as the Pentagon did, the handiwork of the men from the “Bravo Company” has survived for posterity.

Decapitation, desecration, mutilation: Click through this gallery of the grotesque to view these made-in-America, stylized murders.

“The images – more than 150 of which had been obtained by Rolling Stone – portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing innocent civilians is seen as a cause for celebration. ‘Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people,’ one of the soldiers told Army investigators. ‘Everyone would say they’re savages.'” In striving to control and transform alien, Islamic societies, US statecraft goes against its own countrymen’s instincts and interests.

As deracinated and divided as our own society indubitably is; it is still united through the force and manufactured consensus of a highly centralized state. Not so the countries with which we meddle. Kin, clan and the Koran are what unite them. The locals, understandably, hate us for untethering them from what sustains them. And boy, do we hate them back. That too is only natural.

Take the Pashtun people we patronize in rural Afghanistan. They happen to disdain the central government we strive to strengthen. The same antagonism exists between the authoritarian protectorate we’ve established in Pakistan and its people.

In 2003, the US placed a bounty on the heads of Uday and Qusay, sons of Saddam Hussein. When the inevitable tip came in, the occupying force converged on the villa in which the two lived with their families, and shot the place up. The men resisted. The victors arranged a gothic display of the bodies of the vanquished.

That’s who we are, Mr. President.

A few of us still remember Abeer Qasim Hamza. The Iraqi girl had a mop of hair, a delicate face and big black eyes. She was only 14 when she died at the hands of the American soldiers who lusted after her. After careful planning, the servicemen murdered her parents and 5-year-old sister, and took turns with Abeer. When they were through with her, our military men summarily executed her with a shot to the head. Rest in peace Abeer. Her fate and the fate of others like her is a consequence of who we are.

There is reason to believe that many of the students who streamed into the streets of the Capital, and gathered at Ground Zero, in New York, to rejoice over the kill, may not have known who Osama bin Laden was. The average young American, after all, has never read a book, if he can help it. (Did you know that forty seven percent of Detroiters are “functionally illiterate”?)

This too is an aspect of who we are.

“Who is Osama Bin Laden and why should I care?” “Is Osama Bin Laden famous? Am I the only one who doesn’t know who he is?” Such tweets were quite common among American teens, observed the British Daily Mail. By the estimate of “Yahoo! Search Trends,” teens ages 13-17 … made up 66 percent of searches for ‘who is osama bin laden?'” “The figures give a revealing insight into the lack of current affairs and general knowledge among teenagers,” quipped the Daily Mail’s correspondent.

The twits were indeed atwitter:

Tara: I’m probably retarded for asking this, but who is Osama and why is it good that he died? Cory: Who is Osama and why is it important we killed him? Shawn: who is Osama Bin Laden? Is he in the band as well?

Reptilian brains like these took their spring-break behavior to the streets when the news about bin Laden’s demise broke. They too are who we are.Why not own our atavism? There will always be a marginalized, underbelly of genius and ingenuity in America. But for the rest, we have morphed into a militant, mindless people.

In 2001, this column wrote of putting “precision pac men—special-ops soldiers”—to good use in capturing the man who confessed to 9/11. Instead, America sent lumbering, standing armies after bin Laden. In its clodhopper’s traipse around the world, our military has caused the deaths and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, squandered trillions of our debased dollars, destroyed at least two countries, and crippled the American economy. Had the “Pac Men Of The Universe” undertaken and achieved a precision operation after 9/11—it would be worth celebrating. But not now.

Conga lines of jubilant Americans must, by sad necessity, give way to welfare lines. If recent news reports are to be believed, one in seven Americans stands in-line for food stamps from the government. That is now the alpha and omega of American life.

The post This Is Exactly Who We Are appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Afghanistan: A War Obama Can Call His Own

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Holding out hope for that elusive humble foreign policy is proving futile. Barack Obama had promised originally to exit Iraq within 16 months of taking office. Now he is wobbling about that war, and has indicated he might “refine” his policy. Or, rather, renege on his campaign commitments.

Obama’s liberal acolytes—and some libertarians still hankering after that humble foreign policy—will soon discover that the troops he withdraws from Iraq will not be heading home; 9000 soldiers will be packed off to Afghanistan to join the 36,000 American fighting in that theater.

You see, Obama wants to maintain a meaty presence in Afghanistan. He may even be conjuring up new monsters and new missions. This is because Obama needs a “good” war. Electability in fin de siècle America hinges on projecting strength around the world—an American leader has to aspire to protect borders and people not his own. In other words, Obama needs a war he can call his own.

In Afghanistan, Obama has found such a war.

By promising to broaden the scope of operations in Afghanistan, Obama has found a “good” war to make him look the part. By staking out Afghanistan as his preferred theater of war—and pledging an uptick in operations against the Taliban—Obama achieves two things: He can cleave to the Iraq policy that excited his base. While winding down one war, he can ratchet up another, thereby demonstrating his commander-in-chief credentials.

The polls tell Obama that Americans want out of Iraq. And more Americans want to leave immediately than want to stay to “stabilize” the situation. Americans have learned this much from Iraq: Democracy has not sprung Athena-like from her father’s head. Surge, smurge; this form of government will not take hold in Iraq, not in our lifetime. And no matter how long we linger. Although they are hardly enthusiastic about the prospects of an interminable conflict there, voters are more ambivalent about Afghanistan.

If a presidential hopeful needed to buttress his commander in chief bona fides, as Obama apparently does, Afghanistan would be the place to do it. The initial mission in Afghanistan was, after all, a just one. Going after al-Qaida in Afghanistan at the time was the right thing to do and was a legitimate act of retaliation and defense accommodated within Just War teachings. Al-Qaida was responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans. The Taliban succored al-Qaida and its leader bin Laden. The President had told the hosting Taliban to surrender bin Laden and his gang. The Taliban refused. America invaded. So far so good.

But that initial mission mutated miraculously, and now we are doing in Afghanistan what we’re doing in Iraq: nation building. Nations building is Democrat for spreading democracy. Spreading democracy is Republican for nation building. These interchangeable concepts stand for an open-ended military presence with all the pitfalls that attach to Iraq.

Americans are currently training the Afghan army. As in Iraq, it’ll take years if not decades before the training wheels can be removed. The men of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions have made magnificent progress in pushing the Taliban back. But the gains are short-lived. The Taliban invariably regroup. Their stake in that country is simply greater than ours. Always will be. Then there are the costs and the casualties. When Special Forces target the Taliban, they frequently infringe on tribal territory instead. Civilians die. Tribal elders are enraged, and rightly so.

Nation building in that country also entails policing a corruption-riddled police force. Afghani officers of the law are “uniformed thieves.” They run the opium trade by which the impoverished Afghani farmers survive. Somewhere on the food chain sit the drug traffickers. We mediate between them and other crime bosses, or war lords, as they are known. When we supply impoverished farmers with basic supplies, the Taliban first fleece these long-suffering folks and then punish them for collaborating with the Americans. By swooping down to save the locals from the Taliban we cripple them with kindness and deepen their dependency.

Another of the contradictions of occupation: The Pashtun population we patronize happens to disdain the central government we hope to strengthen. So it goes: We help local groups we believe to be patriotic, at the same time, end up establishing an authoritarian protectorate. Pakistan anyone?

So, as Obama sets forth strategically to ingratiate the conflict in Afghanistan on his constituents—all in order to flaunt his fitness for the office—remember: This war too must end.

*Screen pic courtesy here.

The post Afghanistan: A War Obama Can Call His Own appeared first on ILANA MERCER.