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June 3, 2011
There is a sense of déjà vu about the spin from Canberra around the deaths of the Australian troops in Afghanistan. The official line is that "we are making "progress" (against the Taliban insurgency); that the training of Afghan troops so that they can operate independently is on track.
These glowing reports are then coupled to claims that early withdrawal would not serve Australia's national interest. It would create a vacuum and become a have for international terrorism once again. The Australian presence is set in stone according to both Gillard and Abbott in federal parliament ---until the job is done. They remain silent about Pakistan giving covert support to the Taliban.
This rhetoric is drearily familiar isn't it. We heard this kind of rhetoric for the last decade. It's kinda never ending, eternally repeating itself, in a weird loop. It only gets sidelined when one of the Afghan soldiers we have trained turns his gums on our troops and kills them. Of course, the politicians are not going to interpret these regular events as the Afghans wanting the foreigners to get out of their country quick smart.
The politicians cannot think in terms of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires, even though that is plausible interpretation of history. As in Washington, there is a refusal to believe that Afghanistan could actually be the "graveyard" for the American role as the dominant hegemon on this planet.
This time it will be different. The US empire, backed by its allies, under the rubric of the war on terrorism, would invade Afghanistan, build bases, occupy the country, install a government of its choice and knock off the rag tag terrorists. This time it would be different. Triumphalism ruled--the Greeks called it hubris. Did not the US win the Cold War? Unlike every other empire, the US empire would not end up on the ash heap of Afghan history.
The decade of the US empire in Afghanistan shows otherwise. It is a record of destruction, civil war, corruption and an inability to build anything of value. The politicians, in struggling to acknowledge this reality, realize that it is only a question of time before the US leaves Afghanistan. In continuing to talk about progress being made in the graveyard, they deny that the progress in graveyard is about death. What we are left with are the memories of death.
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Reading Robert Fisks' reporting from Afghanistan during the Russian invasion is sobering and only confirms your comments - even a mainstream commentator like Nicholas Stuart in the Canberra Times recently has confirmed that the writing is on the wall. The governor of the Uruzgun province is a war lord linked to the drug trade. Australia is paying protection money for its supply convoys - one third of that money paid goes to the Taliban according to Stuart.