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Sunday, August 1, 2010

Shocking Video From the War in Afghanistan

The Guardian in U.K. has published an excerpt of a film highlighting "the horrific chaos of a stalemate that is taking its toll in blood" in Afghanistan. I just wish this video was required viewing for millions of Americans who never have to see or hear the brutality of the longest war in U.S. history in Afghanistan.









The Netherlands started withdrawing over a thousand of its troops from the war in Afghanistan. After a year of duty with NATO forces, the country has left behind an increasingly grim war effort to which the United States supplies 2/3 of all soldiers. The war in Afghanistan has indeed become a bloody stalemate with the U.S. apparently giving up on winning hearts and minds and now focused on fomenting a civil war to provide cover for them to leave. According to Brian Becker, national coordinator of the ANSWER anti-war coalition, the strategy of the Obama administration in Afghanistan is the same one pursued by President Richard Nixon at a similar phase in the Vietnam war.
"The Obama administration and its generals are borrowing a page from Nixon and Kissinger’s murderous “Vietnamization” plan, which became the announced policy in 1969. Since there was a rising tide of anti-war sentiment at home, Nixon and the Pentagon wanted the Vietnamese to kill each other in greater numbers as a way of diminishing U.S. war dead."
Validating Becker's comparison, Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the famous Pentagon papers during the Vietnam war, has come out swinging against the current war effort in Afghanistan. He has even drawn parallels about how propaganda has been used in both cases to manipulate the American public.
"I would say in a very crucial way they are deceiving us. President Obama in his state-of-the-union speech said that he would begin withdrawing troops in July 2011. Although other officials, like Robert Gates, almost immediately backed away from that, they all collaborated in implying, with Obama, that July 2011 would represent the high point of our troop presence there.

I feel quite confident that unless the public and Congress demand that that timetable is adhered to, there will be more troops in 2012 than there are in 2011, and more troops in 2013 than there are in 2012. In other words, I believe we are currently in the process of an open-ended increase, which is limited by the fact that we don't have a draft."
There is no way that this war could sustain its self politically if the images and brutality of the effort was made known to the American people. That is why it is so tragic that more U.S. media outlets have not published videos like the film above. Perhaps, blogs including my own can help fill the void.

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