Increasingly I feel as if American Foreign policy is like how Fitzgerald described Tom and Daisy Buchanan in Gatsby: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
In reply to a Forever Wars (Spencer Ackerman) post about sanctions as weapons of mass destruction, I wrote the following, which seems apt here as well: "So, if it's a war crime to target civilians with munitions, why is it not a war crime to target civilians with sanctions? I mean, imagine that we were 'at war' with Russia and that the death and destruction caused by the deep freeze in Texas last year was the result not of poor energy infrastructure and regulation but of Russia targeting Texan energy infrastructure. Would Russia be guilty of a war crime? So what's the difference if US sanctions - whether unilateral or multilateral - starve or otherwise destroy the lives of Iranian or Afghan civilians? If a policy is killing civilians, does it really matter if the policy is military or economic?"
Although we are no longer conducting a 'kinetic' war in Afghanistan, I think our withholding that > $9 billion of Afghan assets constitutes, if not a war crime, then surely a crime against humanity.
This would all be interesting if the Taliban hadn't already explicitly declared that the food situation was not their concern. Releasing funds to them will achieve . . . what, exactly?
You obviously missed every WH and Pentagon memo since at least Reagan administration - when US brutalizes millions with sanctions (re: Syria), seizes their property (re: Venezuela), prevent them from conducting business with third parties (re: Iran) that is for the greater good of advancing human rights and democracy. After all, half a million dead kids were worth it, according to Madeleine Albright (and her sociopathic ilk).
It seems the U.S. is not able to make simple tradeoff decisions when it comes to saving lives at the cost of bolstering the Taliban. As if the U.S. has not bolstered other regimes (not so much different than the Taliban) when it meant getting access to natural resources. In a perverse way, American foreign policy and the Washington establishment seem ok with the present course of events rather than acknowledging that the Taliban are in charge in Afghanistan. I don’t think the U.S. alone could address the disaster, but there is no doubt that a lot of suffering could be averted if there was an urgency to mobilize resources and cooperate with the Taliban.
A dispiriting but necessary article. As a companion piece, I recommend George Packer's recent article in The Atlantic, "Betrayal." Increasingly, it looks like our hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan was arguably the worst decision in a chain of bad decisions regarding our involvement in that part of the world.
(1) war has been already lost for at least a decade, 2021 was perfect timing to execute the withdrawal counting on short memory span of US voters, by mid-terms this year won't be top of mind any more.
(2) Biden is a one-term president, so this defeat won't weigh too much on any upcoming Democratic presidential candidate
(3) Unnecessarily bogs down US troops and resources which need to be used in Europe (to annoy Russia) or Asia (to annoy China)
(4) Return on investment was getting low - yes, nice profit can be made by logistic idiocies of flying in toilet paper from Germany on C-17, or sending F-35 to bomb the Taliban, but it is nothing compared to rearming Ukraine (huge country of 40+ million people) from US and NATO old stocks and then replenishing those with expensive new orders.
However the execution was terribly botched, exposing the inability / incompetence of US military to organize an orderly retreat, a set of maneuvers taught at every military academy in the world.
To paraphrase Von Clausewitz: "sanctions are a continuation of war by another means". Often even more devastating to civilian population than the actual war (see Syria). Nothing humanly decent can be expected from vindictive sociopaths occupying US halls of power, how this will end (as soon as the freeze is over) is a million refugees appearing at the EU door, with Erdogan happy to blackmail additional few billion euros from moronic EU politicians (many of which were happy to join NATO's "Afghan mission" earlier).
Choosing between trying to help people and therefore the regime and trying to make the regime untenable while hurting people is always a difficult decision.
Is this where the real genocide is going on? And through US sanctions and Washington sitting on Kabul's foreign reserves. Killing off 1 million children is a start.
Increasingly I feel as if American Foreign policy is like how Fitzgerald described Tom and Daisy Buchanan in Gatsby: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
In reply to a Forever Wars (Spencer Ackerman) post about sanctions as weapons of mass destruction, I wrote the following, which seems apt here as well: "So, if it's a war crime to target civilians with munitions, why is it not a war crime to target civilians with sanctions? I mean, imagine that we were 'at war' with Russia and that the death and destruction caused by the deep freeze in Texas last year was the result not of poor energy infrastructure and regulation but of Russia targeting Texan energy infrastructure. Would Russia be guilty of a war crime? So what's the difference if US sanctions - whether unilateral or multilateral - starve or otherwise destroy the lives of Iranian or Afghan civilians? If a policy is killing civilians, does it really matter if the policy is military or economic?"
Although we are no longer conducting a 'kinetic' war in Afghanistan, I think our withholding that > $9 billion of Afghan assets constitutes, if not a war crime, then surely a crime against humanity.
This would all be interesting if the Taliban hadn't already explicitly declared that the food situation was not their concern. Releasing funds to them will achieve . . . what, exactly?
You obviously missed every WH and Pentagon memo since at least Reagan administration - when US brutalizes millions with sanctions (re: Syria), seizes their property (re: Venezuela), prevent them from conducting business with third parties (re: Iran) that is for the greater good of advancing human rights and democracy. After all, half a million dead kids were worth it, according to Madeleine Albright (and her sociopathic ilk).
Actually, I am aware of our history of using sanctions, but forced my comment on Afghanistan.
It seems the U.S. is not able to make simple tradeoff decisions when it comes to saving lives at the cost of bolstering the Taliban. As if the U.S. has not bolstered other regimes (not so much different than the Taliban) when it meant getting access to natural resources. In a perverse way, American foreign policy and the Washington establishment seem ok with the present course of events rather than acknowledging that the Taliban are in charge in Afghanistan. I don’t think the U.S. alone could address the disaster, but there is no doubt that a lot of suffering could be averted if there was an urgency to mobilize resources and cooperate with the Taliban.
A dispiriting but necessary article. As a companion piece, I recommend George Packer's recent article in The Atlantic, "Betrayal." Increasingly, it looks like our hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan was arguably the worst decision in a chain of bad decisions regarding our involvement in that part of the world.
It was a very deliberate decision. Main reasons:
(1) war has been already lost for at least a decade, 2021 was perfect timing to execute the withdrawal counting on short memory span of US voters, by mid-terms this year won't be top of mind any more.
(2) Biden is a one-term president, so this defeat won't weigh too much on any upcoming Democratic presidential candidate
(3) Unnecessarily bogs down US troops and resources which need to be used in Europe (to annoy Russia) or Asia (to annoy China)
(4) Return on investment was getting low - yes, nice profit can be made by logistic idiocies of flying in toilet paper from Germany on C-17, or sending F-35 to bomb the Taliban, but it is nothing compared to rearming Ukraine (huge country of 40+ million people) from US and NATO old stocks and then replenishing those with expensive new orders.
However the execution was terribly botched, exposing the inability / incompetence of US military to organize an orderly retreat, a set of maneuvers taught at every military academy in the world.
To paraphrase Von Clausewitz: "sanctions are a continuation of war by another means". Often even more devastating to civilian population than the actual war (see Syria). Nothing humanly decent can be expected from vindictive sociopaths occupying US halls of power, how this will end (as soon as the freeze is over) is a million refugees appearing at the EU door, with Erdogan happy to blackmail additional few billion euros from moronic EU politicians (many of which were happy to join NATO's "Afghan mission" earlier).
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/eu-turkey-deal-five-years-on
Deeply saddened.
Choosing between trying to help people and therefore the regime and trying to make the regime untenable while hurting people is always a difficult decision.
it is hard to tell who is more incompetent, the Taliban or the current resident in the White House.
Is this where the real genocide is going on? And through US sanctions and Washington sitting on Kabul's foreign reserves. Killing off 1 million children is a start.
The United States also holds Iraqi oil revenues hostage to ensure that the government is compliant.