Afghanistan Outlook: The Clock Is Ticking – Politics Daily

In Politics Daily we find an article today entitled Afghanistan Outlook: The Clock Is Ticking in which we read that we have spent $300 billion dollars in Afghanistan so far, the outlook is mildly encouraging and Senator John McCain is quoted as saying the following:

"We now have a narrow window of time in which to show clear signs of progress to a rightly skeptical and war-weary American public," Sen. John McCain of Arizona said two weeks ago."

Here is a quote from our ambassador there. "Eikenberry, a retired Army general who was senior commander in Afghanistan for 18 months in 2006-2007, describes Afghanistan today as "a disconnected society, divided by factionalism, plagued by corruption and illegal narcotics, and challenged by insecurity.”

And here is a quote from the article that seems to encapsulate what we will try and do there in 2010.

"In the coming year, what might change quickly in this grim picture is security. President Obama’s new Afghan initiative is committing 35,000 additional U.S. troops to the fight, bringing U.S. and allied forces to more than 150,000. And a narrowed strategy will focus largely on uprooting the Taliban from Helmand and Kandahar provinces and especially from the center of Taliban influence in Kandahar city."

So, let me get this straight.  After almost a thousand dead and many more thousands wounded, after over eight years of fighting, after spending $300 billion dollars of taxpayer money in Afghanistan alone that is and always has been sorely needed for poverty relief, infrastructure repair and mortgage rescue here in our own country we have a moderate chance of "success" in Afghanistan?

Do I have this right?

Let me state this plainly. 

We have been duped by our own oligarchs into taking taxpayer money and simply handing it over to them to fatten their already overflowing portfolios.  The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan and Yemen are simply an avenue of approach for the very, very wealthy to get their hands on government money to make themselves so wealthy that they are truly above government.  They are a power onto themselves.

People need to be in prison.  And it needs to happen now.  This is treason.

This is perhaps the largest transfer of public wealth into the hands of privateers that the world has ever witnessed.  It was based on a series of deliberate and manipulative lies carried forward by the machinery of the GOP for the benefit of their base, the very wealthy.  Wars were started on false information and manipulated data to make fat cats even fatter.

As a result, thousands of working class American Service men and women are dead, hundreds of thousands are wounded or half crazy as a result of vicious and extended combat tours numbering four or five tours of brutal combat for unclear reasons.  Without doubt we have now created a young and disconnected class of armed forces trained sociopaths who no longer see themselves as completely human and have no reason to "bond" with an American public that never really connected with them in the first place.

Less than 1% of the American population carried the burden, totally, of these brutal wars against largely peasant Muslim populations in order for American robber barons in the arms industries, energy cartels and emerging market manipulation circles to literally steal that money from taxpayer coffers.

Stand by.  We may very well see armed revolution here in this country in less than a year.

And we have done this to ourselves.

CWO3 Tom Barnes,USCG (Ret.)