November 29, 2010
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While the counterfeit cleric was giving away the farm, another mullah said that the U.S. “wants to throw dust into the eyes of the people by spreading the rumors of negotiation.” This other mullah is named Omar, and he is the Taliban’s head despite (or because of) nine years of American efforts to hunt him down. Only one mullah was telling the truth: either Omar or Uncle Sam’s own Akhtar. My money is on Omar, who, after all, is winning the war and has little reason to negotiate with the foreigners who are desperate to get out of his country before they lose thousands more of their young people, bankrupt their treasuries, and sow more discord in the House of Islam than the Crusaders did in the 12th century.
If General Petraeus was not lying when he told the world the Taliban was at the bargaining table, he must have imagined that what he said was true. If the Pentagon and CIA’s top military and intelligence brains cannot differentiate one mullah from another, how reliable is the information they use to commit remote-control murder with Predator drones? If dubious sources supplied information for the death lists, what was to stop them from fingering their own enemies for dispatch to the heavenly kingdom? Why not accuse America’s allies in remote tribal regions of being Taliban or Al-Qaeda? It certainly happened during America’s Phoenix Program of mass assassination to purge Vietnamese society of its anti-American elements. It also happened to the Germans in occupied Europe, when opportunistic “informants” gave away business and marital rivals as Jews and members of the Resistance. There was so much “informing” going on in some countries, the Germans could not keep up. How many more Afghan informants are fakes? And how many innocents have they enabled U.S. drones to kill?
No revelation”whether Wikileaks” thousands of documents or American policymakers” idiotic credulity in dealing with a fake sheikh”has shaken the White House’s determination to prolong this illegal, vicious, expensive, and counterproductive crusade. With the U.S. having outlasted the Soviet Union’s nine year, seven-week Afghan sojourn only last Saturday, what more will it take to end it?
