Now and Then

OoooooohWEE that was good. I get it! He's saying anyone who's against bombing Afghanistan to smithereens and contributing to the starvation of possibly millions is soft on fascism, just like WW2! Gosh, it takes a strong man to come out and put it that way, to draw those important parallels -- to keep our moral compass atuned!
Having had the privledge to read this deft and humorous rejoinder I now feel better about Donald Rumsfeld saying today that the US would not rule out using tactical nuclear weapons in Afghanistan.

I was in favor of tactical nukes against the talibanians by sundown the day America changed forever.
As today I am in favor of low detonation fuel air explosives over the talibanians. The carpet bombing seems to be working. And if the intel is right on the correct caves then the deep penetration munitions have certainly hit their mark. But I'm in favor of strong personal defense. I'm in favor of anything that quickly kills talibanians. The torture and death the talibanians inflict on the more innocent tribes of afghanistan is wholly more horrid than a few tacnukes to end the horrors. And if 'they' turn to vapor and cant be officially martyred, cant collect the 70 virgins. So, piss on 'them'.

helps put some things in historical perspective.

To the people who keep talking about "starving people" and assessing the blame on the US:

The Afghans were starving before we started dropping bombs, and will continue to starve after we stop. But, one thing is for sure, the US will continue to provide the VAST majority of AID to feeding Afghans-- far surpassing any effort made to date by their muslim brother and sister countries.

Great article-- I bet in 1941 people pointed to the starving Japanese people as an argument to not attack Japan.

In the late 70's through the 80's the US and CIA, working in tandem with the Saudis and the Pakastanian Intelligence Service engineered and financed the fundamentalist insanity that we now see in Afghanistan. The US spent billions on this "covert" effort. Zbignew Brzezinski, a high-up in the Carter Adm., admitted in a 1998 interview that the US started backing these forces prior to the Soviet invasion, not after, and gloated that these moves pulled the USSR into a trap, a "Vietnam".
To US geo-strategists this made perfect sense. For the people of Afghanistan it meant years and years of horrible war -- in which the Russians killed more than a million, and, in the process, the Islamists became ascendant. It is known that Bin-Laden worked with forces that were on the CIA pay-roll. It is known that the US prefered the Islamist's to secular and progressive opponents of the Soviet invasion, such as RAWA. The US deliberately drew upon the most reactionary forces within (and without) Afghani society.
The soviet puppet regime fell three years after the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Once the Soviets departed the US turned its attention elsewhere. The Northern Alliance, now the US' chief tool in Afghanistan, ruled between 92-96. They killed between 25,000 and 50,000 people in Kabul, administered mass rapes of women and children, and engaged in wide-spread criminality of other sorts -- heroin dealing, pillaging etc.
The Taliban were organized by the Pakistani intelligence (ISI) as a wedge against the Northern Alliance and as a means of extending Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. The US was none to displeased when the Taliban took control because they were seen as a potentially stabilizing force. UnoCal and the Taliban signed a deal in 97 to work toward the construction of oil and gas pipelines connecting Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan. The US, and particularly the american oil and gas corps, as usual cared about human rights only to the extent that they could be used for political advantadge -- which is to say the US really cared not at all about massive rights violations under the Taliban.
The two posters above think that self-righteous mass brutality can smooth over the contradictions and somehow make the world more secure. Instead, hundreds of civilians have been killed by US bombs (although you have to go to foreign media services to find this out) and the bombings have massively decreased aid agencies' ability to transport and distribute food to millions of Afghanis who are living on a life-line. There are now reports that literally millions of Afghanis will possibly starve to death in the coming months if the bombing campaign isn't halted to allow massive food shipments into the country.
In the eyes of brain-washed and infinitely arrogant americans this is acceptable and adds up to America the Great Benefactor. Fortunately, they constitute only a fraction of the world's population -- most thinking people know otherwise.