What was it all about General McChrystal?

The BBC News online today is running a piece entitled US commander signals peace talks with Taliban in which we learn that General Stanley McChrystal is expecting peace to break out once our 30K troops and NATOs 7K troops get involved on the ground in Afghanistan.

No.  It is not going to work that way and General McChrystal certainly knows that.  There is another set of circumstances going on here.  Even a blind man could see that.

The Taliban, whatever that nebulus term actually signifies to our puzzle palace princes at the Pentagon will sue for peace when they get exactly what they want.  The problem for us is to determine what exactly they actually want from us now.  I suspect they want us to go home.  I don’t think another 37K Western troops is going to make a change in their paradigm.

You know what I think?  This whole fiasco is so expensive and so incredibly minimal in return on investment now that we are going to sue for peace anyway and McChrystal knows that.  So, to save face, he is saying that we will sue for peace in order to bring calm to the Af-Pak area.

We are sueing for peace because events both financial and social here at home and abroad are kicking our ass.

Lets not delude ourselves into thinking we have done anything more than completely destroy whatever political capital we had with the powers-that-be in the Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan area.  Our Big Money boys wanted access to something and to be frank you can take your pick as to what it was.

 Either we have now gotten what we wanted or we lost it.

Its hard to tell because we are not sure if it was a new pipeline from Turkmenistan to the Gulf of Arabia or control and complete access to the Afghan poppy fields for our “rich and famous” drug trade profiteers both in and out of government.

Or it could have been some sort of military placement of American bases in a ring around the Caspian Sea (which apparently we now have) in order to keep Russian expansion in check  or maybe just some bloodletting overseas so that we could have huge arms sales and the emerging market manipulators could get their fingers into several pies that to this day go unidentified. 

It is hard to tell what we wanted.  It could have been anything.  But based on General McChrystal’s comments to European reporters over the weekend it sounds as if either the return on investment is not healthy enough to continue or our ill gotten gains are now completely within our sphere of influence.

We either won or we lost.  It is impossible to tell.

It is a crazy set of circumstances for working class soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines when they were maimed and killed, fought, were injured or died for unclear reasons that only our power elites’ inner circle can identify.  It is worse when the fight is called off and these guys never really knew what the fight was about in the first place.

What was all the pain and suffering for the working class Americans that were involved in this bloodletting over the last eight and a half years all about?

Can you answer that General McChrystal?  Do you dare?

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)