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Nov. 30, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
15:43
1520 True News: Obama, Afghanistan, and the Graveyard of Empire

An elegy for the endless idiocies of imperialism.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing very well, and my sincere condolences go out to the Obama supporters, who I hope in rational fairness are now the former Obama supporters, for the tragic news that he has decided to add 30,000 more troops.
to the occupying forces in Vietnam through to some unspecified time period in the future, perhaps a year or two, where then there will be a supposed withdrawal, which of course will not happen.
It's really impossible to understand what is going on in Afghanistan unless you have even a smidgen of the history of this hellhole ranked, I think, 219th out of the 229 countries in the world in terms of poverty.
It has been rich in natural resources since, I guess, before the time of Genghis Khan and the Mongols who invaded in the early Middle Ages.
It has been Islamic for many hundreds of years.
And its nickname among world powers is the Graveyard of Empires because people go in to this hellhole with troops and weapons and machinery and leave mostly colonialist, colonial bodies behind.
So this Graveyard of Empires is about to swallow up another one.
To put things in context, the Soviet Union It was at war in Afghanistan for 9 years and 35 days.
If the United States is in Afghanistan by Veterans Day 2010, the US will have been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviet Empire from October 7, 2001 to the present.
And they will have just as much to show for it, which will be a smoldering wreck of an economy, which is exactly what happened.
To the Soviet economy and was the express intention of those fighting in Afghanistan.
What was then the Mujahideen and the insurgency then has just the same continuance now.
They're just fighting a different superpower middling in Middle Eastern affairs, which is the US rather than the USSR. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
The British and the Russians throughout the 19th and early 20th century both tried to gain control over Afghanistan and its natural resources.
And in 1838, an entire British army was destroyed by Afghan warlords.
They're known for their ferocious fighting, which, as you can well imagine, being a poor...
A group of semi-literate tribes, people sitting on top of a huge rack of natural resources, you have to get pretty fierce to guard even what scraps of freedom you may dream of.
The English relinquished their control, at least over the foreign fairfares of Afghanistan, in August of 1919, after the First World War, of course.
And this was perhaps the first of the lessons of modernity that the Afghan warlords learned.
Which was, if you have a meddlesome Western power in your neck of the woods, and you can break their spirit by a war disaster or an economic disaster, which of course both happened to England in the Second World War, they lost their taste for fighting at least for a short amount of time, then said superpower will withdraw from your country.
And they learned this with the British, and they learned this with the Russians, and they are now in the process of applying said lesson to the Americans.
Now, I'm sure as we all know, in 1979, the United States began funding Islamic fundamentalist jihadists, known as the Mujahideen, to provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Because, you see, the Americans well knew that if you can provoke a superpower to invade Afghanistan, the graveyard of empire, then said superpower will hit the wall financially and militarily, but particularly financially.
Without the finances, you can't have a military.
Bin Laden did sort of fight against Soviets, and then in 1988 he formed Al-Qaeda with the express intention of expanding the anti-Soviet resistance efforts into a worldwide Islamic movement.
Now, after eight years of the US being in Afghanistan, the insurgents has already gained dominant influences in eleven of Afghanistan's 34 provinces.
And it's really, really important to understand the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan split the entire country into these isolated valleys that are run by warlords.
It's really more like a bunch of serrated cantons of the Swiss model than any country that you and I would sort of recognize, which is one of the reasons why it is the graveyard.
of empires. It's like pouring a bucket of water into a series of small pools.
It never goes anywhere and just collects in these little pockets, which is where power ends up collecting in Afghanistan.
So, McChrystal, the lunatic who's in charge, head psycho, in charge of the forces in Afghanistan, wanted 400,000 troops, and Obama has stayed clear of that, and wants to boost the Afghan army to 134,000 troops, and the National Police Force to 82,000 by 2011.
And McChrystal, like everybody who's in the military, says, it's not enough, we need more, because the military, like...
More. I mean, that's what they do, right?
So, Obama wants to increase the military to 240,000 and the police to 160,000.
And James Dubick, he was a retired army general who trained the Iraqi military and is now a senior fellow at the Independent Institute for the Study of War.
He argues the Obama administration needs to embrace McChrystal's goal.
He says, There's a significant psychological effect on the Taliban.
If we announce we're going to build an Afghan security force of 400,000, we're going to miss that opportunity.
I don't think you have to be that smart to realize just how retarded all of this is.
It's completely embarrassing.
There's this bizarre thing that people do that they sort of imagine that they're having influence over other people or other cultures, like they're moving pieces on a chessboard that have no will or volition of their own.
It's really, it's so embarrassing what is happening over there.
And it just shows that a former community organizer is no genius in the realm of war, just as you would expect.
So here's the reality.
Here's the true news of the situation.
First and foremost, if you were the Taliban and you wanted to get back into power because you're power-hungering lunatics, then If you hear that the US wants to expand the Afghanistan military and police, what is it that you're going to want to do?
Well, you're going to want to get as many of your followers to be trained in combat by the United States and to be armed by the United States.
That's the first thing you're going to want to do.
It's like why gangs in the drug trade send people into the military so that they can get trained at the taxpayers' dollars and then come back and prey upon each other.
So, as the Taliban, you're going to want to get as many people as humanly possible into these vastly expanded training programs for urban guerrilla warfare run by the United States, so that when the United States begins to pull out, you can then use all of your U.S.-trained and armed followers to take over the country again.
And here is exactly what is going to happen.
There's no question of it.
It's dominoes.
It's absolutely going to happen.
These people aren't stupid.
Underestimating your enemy is the fundamental cause.
It's one of the fundamental effects of decadence.
There is no IT infrastructure, of course, in Afghanistan.
There's no bookkeeping.
The armies there don't keep any books.
They just spend and take and steal and sell.
They barely even use a calendar, which is, of course, a big problem when you want to get people to do things on a certain date.
I think it's also important to remember that the Allied and Afghan troops currently are separated by walls.
The Americans are training the Afghani troops in police and military tactics.
They're currently separated by a wall, by razor wire, by guarded gates, and machine gun nests.
The teachers and the students are separated by machine gun nests.
Well, why is that?
Well, it's because Taliban sympathizers in the Afghan military and police force have opened fire on US troops and killed them.
Because they want to get rid of the United States.
They want the United States out of the country so that they can resume dreaming of an afterlife and tormenting women.
And so, the very people that is supposed to have this great trust relationship with the United States are separated by barbed wire Razor wire and machine gun nests.
That's the level of trust that is occurring over there.
And the idea that this is somehow going to translate into some sort of renaissance for the Afghani people is lunatic.
I mean, it's mad. It's deranged. But of course, it's got nothing to do with making the country, with making Afghanistan a better place.
It's got nothing to do with that. It's to do with natural resources.
It's to do with the fallacy of sunk costs.
You know, like I've already waited for an hour to wait for a bus.
So I'm not going to walk, right?
Even though there's no bus coming.
You just stay there. So many people have died, so much money has been spent.
Pulling out seems silly now, but of course, it's the only sane thing to do.
It's got to do with war profiteering, right?
I mean, if you can get the taxpayers to fund the war, there are people who are on the supply side end, like Halliburton, we all know, right?
On the supply side end of the war, who are making a fantastic profit out of this war.
And the same is true of Iraq.
Why do things continue? Because it's profitable for some people to continue.
The bill goes to the abstract and plundered majority called the American people, and generally the future American people, or the people about to be largely owned by the Chinese and the Japanese and others.
And the profits go to particular individuals.
And please don't anybody write to me and call this capitalism.
It is the furthest thing.
It is state war and mercantilism.
It has nothing to do with the free market.
And I think it's really important when you look at something like the mainstream media, which is...
I mean, they're just...
Oh, I mean, they're just staggeringly bad.
I mean, they're so bad that...
It's like that scanner's moment where your brain just explodes looking at this stuff.
It is so bad that it is ridiculous, the degree of misinformation and avoidance of basic facts that is going on.
I mean, there are less than 100 al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan.
You've got 100,000 or 200,000 troops pouring in looking for 100 guys in mountains.
These drones that fly around dropping bombs are just killing goats and civilians and shrubs.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
But the context of the war is never put into place, and let me put it into place for you very briefly, and then you can hopefully walk away a tad wiser.
Osama bin Laden's clear statements from the very beginning From 9-11, before 9-11, 9-11 and beyond, have been very, very clear.
And this is well known to people in the United States government, well known to people in the media, especially those who covered the insurgency, US-funded and armed insurgency against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the late half of the last part of the 20th century.
Osama bin Laden is not waging war.
Al-Qaeda is not waging war against the American people.
He doesn't have any particular beef with the American people.
He's not waging war fundamentally against the American government because he's in a cave in Afghanistan, so he can't do much about the American government.
He's not waging war against the American military because the American military has way too much power and is nuclear bombs and smart bombs and, you know, all this gases and crap like that, biological warfare agents.
So no sane human being who's not suicidal is going to go up against the U.S. military.
There's one Entity or agency that Al-Qaeda has consistently said, openly said, they've published their war plans and the fact that you've probably not heard about them is predictable and embarrassing.
There's one entity that Al-Qaeda has openly stated that it is waging war against.
It is waging war against the US economy.
Al-Qaeda is waging war against the U.S. economy.
And how do you wage war against the U.S. economy as a colonial and intrusive superpower, as an imperialist superpower?
Exactly the same way that you wage war against the Romans and you wage war against the French and the Spanish and the Russians and the British and, and, and, and, and.
What you do is you harry and provoke and cost them a huge amount of money.
So you draw them into conflicts where they have to keep troops stationed a long way from home, big supply lines, big expense, big pensions.
And what you do is you harm enough troops That they're constantly worried, constantly getting bad news.
You prefer to wound troops rather than kill them because that's worse for the US economy.
If you kill someone, he just gets buried.
But if you wound him, then he has to go back to the Veterans Administration and get, you know, millions of dollars worth of aid, of medical help and rehab.
And so you draw these superpowers into these unwinnable conflicts.
And you harass, and you attack, and you try not to kill, but you create these bombs that are just going to wound these IEDs and so on.
And what happens is the economy of this imperialistic power begins to decay and decline, and eventually it falls apart.
It's what happened to the British, it's what happened to the Russians, it's what's happening to the US at the moment, which I think is important.
Have you heard about this repeatedly, that the express and open and stated intention of Al-Qaeda was to wage war against the economy of the United States?
That it was the only thing that they could think of that would get the U.S. out of the Middle East?
Was to cause an economic collapse that would mean that the, you know, like you stab a squid in the heart and its tentacles all come scurrying back.
And that's the idea, right? If the economy in the U.S. goes through a significant decline, all of the troops are going to flow home.
It happens over and over again throughout history.
And it's going to continue to happen as long as imperialistic powers plunder their own domestic population to wage war against foreigners, right?
As long as you're going to continue to send poor people from your own country to kill poor people in other countries who've done nothing to threaten you.
Then you're going to keep seeing the same phenomenon.
So I just really wanted to put that in context.
When you look at the economic catastrophes that are besetting the US economy at the moment, it can very easily be said with very great justification that Al-Qaeda, a few thousand people, is completely kicking.
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