Afghan Follies Redux - Trust Us

Vietnam. Cambodia, Afghanistan, SWAT, ????, Iraq: trust us, we will help you if you come in to be reconciled, to give up fighting us. Those saying it always mean it at first. If the government is not real and just the machine set up by the occupier, it is a promise almost always swallowed up by corruption fed by the occupier's agenda changing.



Why don't we learn, why do we believe this kind of "war" can be clean and good, why do we repeat past mistakes?



How does Captain Cat continue to do good work, in the face of such dispiriting truth? I wish her well. You should read what she has to say and think about it - then take action.

Amplify’d from captaincat.typepad.com

Despatch from the moon

Last month I flew to Khost for a week, where the day after I arrived a young man blew himself up along with thirteen other people whilst he was waiting for the provincial governor to drive by.  I climbed up onto a roof and watched people fleeing the scene – faceless figures draped in blue shuffled hurriedly along a path through dun fields of sleeping maize, boys on bicycles, a man on a motorbike, patu flapping wildly behind him in dust kicked up by his wheels.

Almost two years ago to the day, I met a Maulawi and reconciled Talib, cousin of Southeastern insurgent commander Jalaluddin Haqqani (see interview here). I want to see him again, to ask how things have been going.

“We need 30-35 reconciled commanders,” they told me; I said it takes time to talk to people, to convince them. “So bring us shopkeepers with beards” was their response.

“I regret joining this process; all of my brothers regret it as well. We have received no assistance from the government, nothing that they promised. We gave up everything in Miram Shah and now we have nothing. Our six families share a single room. Read more at captaincat.typepad.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bvibb