Our enemy as a child, playing marbles in the Rawalpindi, Pakistan dust.
Go here or here to see what the means looks like.
So, the ends must surely be a garden of Hollywood joy. Surely there will, soon, be a Big Mac w cheese in every Af-Pak cooking pot and a Pam Anderson poster by every Af-Pak brat’s bed. Surely?
Because the means are heartrending, just terribly sad.
Which is why the media (and Obama) don’t show them to you.
And why the media glorifies the occupying army. Direct enforcers of U.S. rule are a weak link in the immorality, and the media supplies a massive, unanswered barrage of psychological uplift to help our killers get through their nightmares (while they serve).
(Double dare ya, Fox News: show the not so nice things American heroes and our allies sometimes do to Af-Pak children.)
But it’s also the seeming pointlessness of the cruelty.
So, let’s look at the ends. Who knows, maybe they counterbalance the horror.
I don’t know what the ends are, but here are three best guesses:
- Direct profits for corporations that fund our broken democracy’s political campaigns. (Is it cuz I’m in Chicago? That sounds real likely.)
- Our corporations effectively owning their natural resources. (Yeah, probly.)
- Providing a big why for our military-industrial complex. (Yup, I think so.)
X. Democracy and development for Af-Pak? (LMFAO! Bullshit by operatives for chumps.)
Amerika wages wars of occupation to benefit the U.S.
Take it to da bank.
This (1.3 million refugees have fled Pakistan’s border areas because of the war the U.S. demanded) has nothing to do with Af-Pak needs:
Elderly woman flees fighting in Swat Valley, Pakistan
Though bribery of elites is always part of the deal.
Bet on it.
P.S. – To be well informed about the greater Middle East you have to read regularly at least one publication that hasn’t thrown in with one major side or another in the Great Game. (Of course, you need to know there is a Great Game being played, which the WaPost, NYTimes and so on don’t want chumps to know.) The publication that daily puts itself at the intersection between the two or three major players is Asia Times, atimes.com (a distant second place to Le Monde Diplomatique). Their latest excellent piece, for example, is Afghanistan defies the US battle plan. Their star reporter/analyst is Pepe Escobar, always worth reading (his latest, Pipelineistan goes Af-Pak). Atimes is not a `radical’ or `anti-capitalist’ rag (if that’s yer taste, wsws.org is an informative place to go); in fact, Escobar was an Obama Hoper for a reasonable period of time, till the new President made his imperial policies clear. Here’s what Escobar said May 1 about the `Taliban gonna take over Pakistan!’ propaganda push by the U.S., which demanded and got Pakistan’s military to devastate the impoverished civilian population of its border area near Afghanistan:
Apocalypse Now. Run for cover. The turbans are coming. This is the state of Pakistan today, according to the current hysteria disseminated by the Barack Obama administration and United States corporate media – from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to The New York Times. Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said on the record that Pakistani Talibanistan is a threat to the security of Britain.
But unlike St Petersburg in 1917 or Tehran in late 1978, Islamabad won’t fall tomorrow to a turban revolution.
Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At least 55% of Pakistan’s 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There’s no evidence they are about to embrace Talibanistan; they are essentially Shi’ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis – faithful followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari’s centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People’s Party. Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces – amounting to 85% of Pakistan’s population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class – are an infinitesimal minority.
The Pakistan-based Taliban – subdivided in roughly three major groups, amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles – are concentrated in the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab.
To believe this rag-tag band could rout the well-equipped, very professional 550,000-strong Pakistani army, the sixth-largest military in the world, which has already met the Indian colossus in battle, is a ludicrous proposition. . . .
Please learn not to believe the corporate media when they push ludicrous propositions. Even when it’s a ludicrous proposition President Obama wants you to buy. You must avoid such `news’ and use alternative and more reliable sources if you don’t wanna end up just another chump.
