Comments on: Afghanistan: “Big Beasts,” Big Bloodbath

By: Chipher

Chipher — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 01:59:00 +0000

I’ll try to keep this brief, although then it sounds like a tin-foil hat, but long before 9/11, the US sponsored the Northern Mujahideen, and our allies in Pakistan sponsored the Taliban, both then to resist the Soviet occupation, itself in support of a national ‘Marxist’ Afghan coalition which overthrew King Mohammed Zahir. Then followed ten years of civil war between the Mujahideen and Taliban, ignored then by USA, and goaded on by Pakistan, which holds two former Afghan territories, NWT and Baluchistan, granted to it by the British Durand Line, so has a conflicted interest in keeping Afghanistan as their weak sister, and why Afghans loathe Pakistanis, that, and the oppression of the Punjabis.

This was 1989, and soon forgotten in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Well, Taliban won, seized power in Kabul, and in 1998 were guests of Texas Governor George Bush and his oil company friends in Houston, to discuss Soviet geological surveys which revealed that Afghanistan has *world-class* deposits of strategic metals, gold, oil and gas, some deposits the largest in Asia. Bush’s response, under Cheney’s prodding, was to send an assistant Secretary of State to Kabul to tell the Taliban, “either accept our carpet of gold [for the resource concessions], or we will bury you under a carpet of bombs.” Both India and Pakistan were made aware that Bush intended to invade Afghanistan that October.

Then came “9/11″, the Taliban’s refusal to kowtow perhaps, although more and more it appears it was truly an inside job, and “that changed everything”, although it changed nothing. The American invasion came right on schedule, already completely planned logistically, and pushed the Taliban out of power in a circus-circus up at Tora Bora, looking for some Saudi prince to assassinate before he could reveal US complicity.

As George Bush snickered that Osama ‘wasn’t leading any parades’, Dick Cheney at the same moment was in possession of the Soviet geological records, and in contact with World Bank, directing them to prepare Afghan Hydrocarbon and Minerals Laws for resource concessions, and the ink was barely dry on those Western-written “laws” before Cheney then installed Hamid Karzai, Afghan expat living in the US, advisor to UNOCAL and schmoozer around World Bank as an Afghan consultant.

This was June 2002, wreakage of the WTCs still molten and smoking!

Karzai’s was installed as a republican form of government, where the Executive has the power to sign laws without legislative debate, and that’s exactly what he did, calling for a secret ballot of the loya jirga, a national assembly of 1575 elders and warlords who were bribed by the CIA to vote (they say, … it was counted in secret) for Karzai as chief in power, and with that deal secure in place, Cheney ran off towards Iraq.

This was May 2003, the 9/11 Commission beginning their coverup.

Karzai’s first executive act was to sign the World Bank Hydrocarbon and Minerals Laws into place, and build a $1,000M a year corrupt bureaucracy, army and militia in Kabul to hold his powerbase. With the US busy chasing Iraqi oil, and CIA support money drying up fast, especially after Katrina, Karzai had his Ministry of Mining and Heavy Industries [since 'MoM'] tender the Afghan copper concessions and awarded a ~$300B reserve to **China MCC** for a $3B signing bonus and $400M a year in royalties, about 0.8c on the $1 at 2006 value, one of the lowest royalty rates on the planet, ever.

Alarm bells went off at the Pentagon! That was in November, 2007, which, as you recall, is when Cheney started rattling the sabre about the need to ‘surge’ in Afghanistan, since the China MCC concession only gave them four years to get the mining underway, or they would lose the lease. Stir up the hornets, swat a few Taliban, and those China MCC would be running back to Beijing with their tails between its legs.

And that’s exactly what Cheney set in motion before the elections, and exactly what Obama has continued to execute after the charade of US democracy had been played out at the polls. 22,000 hardened US troops are surging into Afghanistan, and Pakistan has mobilizing their forces in the NW Territories at Swat, near the China MCC leasehold. Now SecDef Gates has announced another surge, of another 22,000!

At the same time, as Karzai is primped and prompted for the upcoming (re)elections this August 20th, less than 30 days from now, Gustavson Associates, a US-based resource management company, has already tendered and privately short-listed to US:UK mining firms remaining Afghan oil & gas reserves and world-class iron deposits. Never say the Americans don’t hedge their bets, they are backing prime contender to Karzai, Ashraf Ghani, Karzai’s former finance minister, also an Afghan expat, and **former World Bank man himself**.

Regardless of who ‘wins’, either candidate will just sign away Afghan natural resources valued at over $700B, massive oil & gas reserves that would mean 100 years of energy self-sufficiency for Afghans, if they applied the $3B China MCC signing bonus to building a refinery, and it will all be stolen away by the World Bank and IMF for a mere 1% royalty, where US royalties are 12.5%, Alaskan royalties 25%, Canada and EU 33% and so-called ‘leftist’ countries will demand up to 90%.

Even poor Pakistan, Afghanistan’s neighbor, demands in addition to resource royalties the creation of a National Workers Fund to provide for assistance and pensions. But not Afghanistan. Not the World Bank. Although Karzia’s MoM ‘promises’ to conform to Extractive Industries Transparency Inititative (EITI), there is absolutely no requirement to. There is also no environmental clause in the laws, no environmental monitoring, no environmental remediation, no cleanup, no payments to displaced citizens, just a wide open Nigerian Delta brownfield lease!

Tick, tock.

Within 15 years, Afghanistan will become a burnt out hulk, with 5M internally displaced refugees and over 800,000 orphans, with no other resources of value than grapes, pomengranates and chopped down trees for firewood, to trade to Pakistan for $12 a gallon jug gas, at tremendous foreign trade tariff disadvantages, under the tremendous Pakistani corruption of the billionaire playboy Zardari’s government, you remember, widower to the massively corrupt Bhutto mafia?

Within 15 years, Afghanistan will look just like Colombia, a narcostate, that works for Defense too. Narcostates are black money and black ops, even higher war profits than the so-called Second Front in the Global War of Terrorism, which popes and pontiffs called The Great Crusades.

And nobody gives a damn, because our media is bought and sold, and Wall Street is mafia controlled, and WADC is the largest welfare tax dole on the planet, ever, the equivalent of 50% of our wealth drained off for tithes to this or that bureaucracy, to endless war, and constant terror at the loss of our jobs, our health, and our meager SSTF security.

As Sarah Palin shouted, “I’m Fighting for You!” and that’s good enough, and as easily as US:UK steals Afghan’s birthright, is as easy as Russian spies operating in India will uncover your personal financial data left in the open hands of Indian outsource finance and bookkeeping firms!
How doubly ironic, that Micheal Gorbechev warned US that the Right in power would subvert Obama, and turn America into a kleptocracy.

And won’t that be proof that the gods are truly laughing, that America threw a $T dollars of treasure and 5,000 lives in blood for war crimes?

By: Mulga Mumblebrain

Mulga Mumblebrain — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:41:01 +0000

The theory of rule by psychopaths is yet further re-inforced, I believe, by the behaviour of the mainstream media. As Chomsky and Herman and many others noted, and any reader not totally bereft of all intelligence must have understood for decades, the media act as propaganda systems. Indeed, as Chomsky said in Manufacturing Consent, the unanimity of acceptable opinion would have impressed Stalin.
Here in Australia we have three main sources of media propaganda. The Murdoch sewer is uniformly, hysterical and often diabolically (meant literally) extreme Right. Murdoch’s flagshit ‘The Australian’ which has the monstrous gall to call itself ‘The Heart of the Nation’ (I have long seen it, rather, as ‘The Fundament’-The Arse-hole of the Nation, in that its product is best consigned to the cess-pit) has moved so far to the Right that it seems self-parodying. It is home to a number of Judaic extreme Rightwingers, the Likudnick tendency being central to Rightwing agitation in this country, as throughout the West. Therefore ‘The Australian’ is, in my opinion, an absolutely ferocious centre of anti-Arab, anti-Islam and anti-Palestinian hatred, posing as journalism, opinion, or in the letters pages, where really vile hatemongering by Likudniks is regularly published. Similar sullage traducing Jews would not, of course, be even contemplated for a second. ‘The Australian’ also specialises in anthropogenic climate change denialism, which it pursues with Rightwing ideological ferocity, while, with truly stupefying hypocrisy, posting little vanity adverts claiming ‘News Ltd will be ‘carbon free’ by 20and some date’. Interestingly, illustrating the intellectual milieu that News Ltd inhabits (The Australian is upmarket compared to Murdoch’s other rags)the 100% biased coverage of climate change, where the vast body of scientific experts that support climate change is totally unrepresented, and every loony denialist gets a regular bully pulpit, is often praised by the brain-dead denialist foot-soldiers as ‘the only balanced debate’ available in the country. It reminds one of that other Murdoch sewer, FoxNews, with its ‘fair and balanced’ coverage that would have put Big Brother to shame.
The other mainstream media empire, Fairfax, is, I would say, slightly less Rightwing, and as a result is regularly parodied by the zealots at ‘The Fundament’ as, amongst other alleged crimes, being involved in ‘agenda journalism’. Coming from a rag whose every breath is employed in pushing an extreme Rightwing agenda in every field of human activity, this is, I think it is plain, a hypocrisy of truly immense proportions, but the even more horrible possibility is that these creatures actually believe this stuff, that their thought processes and spiritual nature are so deranged that they are actually convinced of it.
Fairfax may be slightly less Right, but it is just as pro-Israel. It was long known to journalists in the days when Fairfax was run by the Fairfax family, particularly Sir Warwick Fairfax, that criticism of Israel in any manner was career-ending behaviour. For a few years, after the Fairfaxes lost control, ‘The Age’, the Melbourne newspaper in the chain, erred on the side of a certain sympathy for the Palestinians. This resulted in an hysterical hurricane of denunciation, calumny and invective from the local Zionists, with the usual slimy slur of ‘anti-Semitism’ being mobilised, as usual, to shut up any comment but total adulation and gobsmacked admiration for the Holy State.
The third force in Australian mainstream media is the ABC, the national broadcaster. It once presented a range of views, from the Right, to the Left, with the ideological extremes left out. No longer. It marched steadily to the Right, under the Hawke/Keating regime, then was frogmarched to the extreme Right under the Howard regime.Howard, as he did with every Government organ, stacked the ABC Board with extreme Right ideologues. The entryism of certain groups became more and more obvious. Opinion almost identical with that of ‘News Ltd’ is presented on topics from Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, Venezuela to the causes of the curent financial implosion. Coverage of climate change is still balanced (despite the denialists representing about 1% or less of scientific opinion)although even here the Right tendency is growing in influence.
One particularly cogent example, at least in my opinion, of what has happened at the ABC, was the ‘Religion Report’. Now thankfully defunct, this half-hourly weekly program emanated from the still extant Religious Affairs Department. Its head is Rachaeal Kohn, a proud and unapologetic Zionist and, I would say, a pro-Israel zealot. This program for years produced a steady output of anti-Islamic sludge, and groveling sycophancy to Israel and Judaism. Any anti-Moslem agitator imported by one local Zionist organ or other was guaranteed a run on the Religion Report, with kid-gloves treatment. Anti-Moslem propaganda from the likes of MEMRI or CAMERA featured prominently-you know the stuff. The evil Hamas brainwashing their poor children etc. The ‘Eurabia’ garbage of Bat Yo’er was peddled, at the same time that it was, with stunning synchronicity, being pushed on FoxNews.
After one piece that propagandised the Israeli claim to all of Jerusalem, the presenter, forgetting discipline I suppose, commented on all the ‘smiling Israeli faces’ he could see in the control room. Naturally no-one would think, for an instant, how it came to pass that the faces in a control-room of the Australian national broadcaster came to be Israeli, or if that might be detrimental to even-handed and balanced treatment. Of course that gives the game away. Even-handed treatment of Israel is, by definition, ‘anti-Semitism’. Anything less than total obeisance to Israel, any stand that implies, even at the margins, that Israel may have acted in any manner less than completely morally is ‘anti-Semitism’. Hence all the rubbish about a leap in anti-Semitic incidents. When you define ‘anti-Semitism’ as broadly as to encompass any criticism of Israel or any Jew, anywhere, for any action, whatsoever, you get all the ‘anti-Semitism’ you desire.
We need not even consider why the proliferation of Likudnik Jews in the media, not to mention their goy collaborators, elicits no comment, not even an admission of its existence. One can hardly imagine the reaction if this entryism had been performed by Moslems or Palestinians.The basic question must surely be, why has the media become so debased, so wicked in ceaselessly pushing violence and cruelty as the solution to every problem. Why are certain groups, the Palestinians, the Shia of Lebanon, any Moslems who resist Western state terror etc, demonised and traduced, preparatory to the murder of millions of their people. Why do media insects insist on using the fraudulent Iraqi Body Count figures for the civilian death-toll in Iraq, rather than the real figures.It’s like speaking of the 500,000 Jews killed by the Nazis. Imagine the outrage! What sort of debauched facsimile of a human being uses such a figure knowing the truth, or shuts their mind to the truth, for reasons of career advantage or out of sheer moral cowardice. I think these must be ponerology’s ‘characterpaths’, those manipulated by the psychopaths of Rightwing power into behaving despicably, and who go along out of sheer self-interest. The media in the West is simply a microcosm of the diseased and morally evil state of our societies as a whole, and perform a vital but diabolical service in deepening and extending that moral and spiritual death.

By: bozh

bozh — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:36:50 +0000

it is a myth that we have a democratic governance anywhere. However, we can have better or much better governance than presently in switzerland, sweeden, finland.
but as long the education and media reports are controled by plutos, we will not see any improvment in governance nor management of it.
parents need to give their chldren a civic education as well.
tnx

By: mary

mary — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:27:31 +0000

Craig Murray, the highly principled Independent candidate in the Norwich North by-election, who spoke out against this illegal war in Afghanistan came sixth today and the Conservative won. The status quo continues with the three party rota system following the resignation of the former Labour MP in the expenses scandal.

Craig Murray resigned as British Ambassador to Uzbekistan (an adjacent state to Afghanistan) having exposed Blair’s complicity in the CIA torture being carried out there. He gave evidence to a parliamentary human rights committee earlier this year, half of whose members are incidentally members of their party’s Friends of Israel lobby groups.

The BBC completely airbrushed Craig from their coverage and he met with other obstacles such as pre-booked local authority school halls suddenly becoming unavailable.

As my brother David said today – Westminster party trio straight jacket = more wars, more fascism here and abroad = the ‘war on Islam’ for decades = the last breath for a free Palestine on its land. The lumpen have made the sign of the cross, or at least 45 % of them have. They will be the lumpen of the lumpen. Their spirit hardly exists and their vision stops at the leylandii hedge. They profess concern for the weeping child abroad but their interest is self interest. The British are, as always and in the majority, treacherous and cruel.

Stand quietly as the hearses go by and speak of pro patria. Do not ask about the unseen ambulances with those 18 yr olds reduced to kit form and brainless.

WAKE UP YOU BLOODY BRITONS. YOU PRETEND TO BE CHRISTIANS. YOU SPEAK OF ELECTORAL CAMPAIGNS. CANNOT YOU SEE TRUTH AND WORTH, AND THEN GET OFF YOUR FAT A***S AND HELP THOSE WHO MIGHT RAISE US FROM SLOW DEATH – OF BOTH BODY AND SPIRIT.