Monday, February 27, 2012

Beyond Sad

Carney P.E. and special-ed teacher Major Robert Marchanti, 48, was killed in Afghanistan. Why, why, why are we still there? Why did we not leave the day after they shot Osama?
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9 comments:

ppatin said...

Sadly our current involvement in Afghanistan is a perfect example of the cliche about throwing good money (and lives) after bad. Maybe if we'd managed to find someone less loathsome than Hamid Karzai to run the place there'd be a chance of things turning out better.

Mon Feb 27, 10:49:00 AM EST
Anonymous said...

We are currently in Afghanistan because the international Heroin trade is a multi-billion dollar business, and Afghanistan controls 80% of the opium and heroin supply.

That's a LOT of money for the Banksters to launder, and for DOD contractors like Halliburton and Dyncorp to pass up on shipping and handling fees...

Mon Feb 27, 05:50:00 PM EST
ppatin said...

*yawn*

More crazy conspiracy theories.

Tue Feb 28, 07:03:00 AM EST
Cham said...

The US, Russia or any other country can go into Afghanistan and straighten it out all they want, in a couple of years it will revert to its original self. It has problem that will never be solved: too little food for too many people, religious zealotry, women viewed as personal property, impossible geography, no infrastructure and an ideal poppy growing climate.

It's a lost cause, it will always be a lost cause. The best thing we could do for Afghanistan is for the US to offer a relaxed immigration policy for any sane person who want to leave, and then get out of it.

Tue Feb 28, 08:40:00 AM EST
Dave said...

Fighting in that region of the world has been going on almost continuously for over two thousand years. To think that the United States, or any other world power, for that matter, is capable of doing anything more than slowing the fighting for a brief period of time is foolish.

Claims that the US is there for humanitarian purposes are laughable. There are regions in Africa that make the Middle East look like a playground. We aren't spending billions of dollars for a military presence there because the only resource of value there is diamonds, which amounts to chump change in comparison to the profits in the oil industry.

Make no mistake about it -- everyone (not just the US) is interested in the Middle East because everyone wants to control the oil pipelines. Money is the motivating factor here, nothing more.

IMHO, the solution here is to lessen our dependency on oil (both foreign and domestic) and to withdraw from the Middle East altogether.

Tue Feb 28, 11:07:00 AM EST
ppatin said...

I heard nonsense about the US being in Afghanistan for oil when we first went in. A decade later and I still don't see any pipelines being built...

There's no big conspiracy from Halliburton or the oil companies or anyone else. We simply went into Afghanistan without an exit strategy or plan for an endgame and since then it has been like Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby.

Tue Feb 28, 11:53:00 AM EST
Dave said...

The pipelines are mostly in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, but a very large sphere of influence over those pipelines emanates from Afghanistan and other surrounding territories in which terrorists reside. If host governments aren't willing to protect US interests (i.e. the pipelines), many very powerful people in this country lose a lot of money.

We certainly didn't (and still don't) have an exit strategy for Afghanistan, but calling the notion that oil is one of the primary motivating factor for our presence there "nonsense" is shortsighted.

Lobbyists have enormous influence over the decisions in Washington, and the lobbyists with the most money get heard. Campaign finance reform may help this in the future. Sure, the "war" on terror has a lot to do with the US presence in the Middle East, but so does control of the pipelines. How can one consider that a conspiracy theory? It's simple economics...

Tue Feb 28, 03:20:00 PM EST
Maurice Bradbury said...

No, I don't believe that it was ever about oil in Iraq or Afghanistan. Iraq was about Donald Rumsfeld's personal power, enriching all of the contractors the government works with, and not least the Bush administration feeling the pressure to do something post-9/11 because they couldn't go after our oil buddies Saudi Arabia (where most of the hijackers were actually from) or go after the bin Laden family, because they are friends of the Sauds, who are friends of the Bushes.

Before Obama was elected I sat on a plane next to a guy from the NSA who predicted, "if you think there's no objective or plan in Iraq, Afghanistan is 10 times worse and will take twice as long to get out of." One practical problem of ending both wars is that there is so much *stuff* that has to be hauled out. It took about two years in Iraq to move out all the equipment. And perhaps if we say we're leaving the troops who have to move all the stuff out will be in danger. As will be people who we leave behind who we worked with there.

Interesting point about the opium-- where do they get medical morphine? Is it synthesized in a lab, or do they need opium poppies to make it?

Wed Feb 29, 10:05:00 AM EST
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