We should be told why a father and son were killed on Sunday. What had they done?
Not much, it seems. Yet they received capital punishment for it. They have about fourteen male descendants and eighty male relatives and two hundred male mosque-going friends who will want to avenge them, yet we did the right thing when we killed them on Sunday, Smith says, and Mr Karzai must calm down, and not get his knickers in a twist about it.
I repeat, they did nothing wrong. And they were killed for it. And we must stay in the neighbourhood for eighteen months, no matter what reprisals come of it. This is the Prime Minister’s decision, and she is a fucking fool.
Let us put it this way. Let us imagine it is 1921 in County Kerry. An IRA man disguised as a policeman shoots three Black and Tans and runs away. The Black and Tans raid a village looking for the culprit. In the course of their midnight raid they kill a priest and a choirboy. When Eamonn De Valera protests, they say ‘it was done within the guidelines’ and no-one will be charged with anything.
This is the fix we are now in. Everyone detests us, five hundred young men will stalk us, twenty of us will be shot. And the disguised young ‘rogue recruit’ will get away.
Yet the Prime Minister is firm in her resolve we stay there. And if Karzai says we should leave she will defy him, and say ‘We have our mission’ like many a wounded missionary in other days. More and more votes will trickle away and she will stick to her, um, guns. What a fucking fool she is.
So desperate are we that we have invented another category, ‘insurgent’, to describe these latest innocent corpses. They are not Taliban. They are not Taliban supporters. They are not al-Qaeda. They are not ‘rogue Afghan soldiers’. They are ‘insurgents’, that is, people who don’t like being colonized. I’ll say they are. And so is ninety percent of the country.
So how do we treat ‘insurgency’? Why, we shoot it down. Shoot men with five sons and five brothers who will come for us. Shoot boys with fifty cousins who will come for us.
Any study of history shows how wrong this is. How for seven bundred years in Ireland it did not work, and bred martyrs, and sorrows, and suffering, and hatred of England. And het we are ‘firm in our resolve’ to keep on doing it.
What a fool the Prime Minister is.
What a fool.
Name:
Can’t see how anybody could disagree with this analysis, Bob, except the already dead who will argue for abstract principles like war on terror, staying the course, working with our allies, meeting international obligations, making the world a safer place, blah de fucking blah and so on.
Political arsehats like Gillard rarely confront acute agony or misery or the smell of human blood and viscera. They never taste the stench of cordite or gunfire smoke or feel the sweat stinging their eyes when the body reacts in physiological panic in the heat of conflict.
Not at all. In the modern theatre it’s swan in on unannounceds flights, then frock up in helmet and body armour for the docile camera crew and neutered journalists, a few feel good minutes with ‘our boys’, a few more platitudes on how the whole of Australia is behind them, and thanks for staying the course, then off to the next engagement, life being what it is for the very model of a modern politician, so many issues to be across.
I’d run a 100 miles from these pricks with their penchants for turning pigs ears into silk purses, these professional liars, these living dead who through sheer viscosity are ready to add more dead to the pool.
And the beat goes on, the people die, the terror continues, and we weep, either silently or in unassailed grief at the slaughter of the innocents.
It’s called an omnishambles (from The Thick of It).
This is our 2nd invasion of Afghanistan, the 1st being the hippy swarms of the 60s and 70s. The hippies’ “nihilism and irresponsibility as well as the loose morals” deeply shocked the Afghans, and arguably contributed to the rise of the Taliban.
‘hippy swarms’, snort, guffaw….
When in the world has there ever been a ‘hippy swarm’. Go back to your crocheting, old dear, it’s time to cancel your subscription to the Reader’s Digest.
Insult makes a poor argument, Canguro.
Insult? What, the use of ‘old dear’?
Argument…where’s the argument? My sense of that term is something like a discussion in which reasons are advanced for and against some proposition or proposal.
You throw in an unsupported statement about swarms of dirty Australian hippies and their nihilistic irresponsibility and amorality leading to the ‘arguable’ rise of the Taliban, and then expect the readership to sit back and stroke their chins and say, ‘hmmm, good point, Frank, I never thought about that. Those fucking hippies. I knew they were a no-good bunch of hedonistic drug-taking aresholes, all that sex and dope…’, Why feign hurt feelings when someone responds in kind?
Whatever, as the louche youth are wont to say. It’s not quite in the same league as terms like heartless, or bastard, or good riddance, or being fantasised about as a cadaver ready to hauled onto a slab and sawn through the sternum, etc., but I suppose, sigh, if you’re offended, then I’ll apologise. It seems to be the way the world works these days.
Someone pokes, another squawks and then the poker mea culpas the pokee, and the game continues.
But, perhaps I misinterpreted the source of the offence. Was it, instead, a suggestion that you crochet? Or that you read the Digest? I think there’s greater scope for indignation in these two aspersions than in the ‘old dear’ tag, don’t you? I mean, who crochets? That’s so… hippyish.
What a lot of hot air trying to inflate my comment with your suppositions. Dirty? Hippies by and large weren’t dirty. Australian? Do you know how many American, European et al were there?
Oh yes, I used to crochet.
And, you know my thoughts? How?
You weren’t there, Canguro, were you?
From Nigel Jones: Looking at the omnishambles he presides over, I’m driven to the conclusion that if David Cameron were a Soviet-style sleeper, inserted into the Tory party in his youth on a secret mission from its enemies to destroy it from within, he could not have done a better job.
My conspiracy theory is that the love children of John Howard were secreted into the Labor Party, and when the time came, he blew his dog whistle, and out they came, fully formed John & Jeanette mini-mes.
And you have a better solution Bob?
If the PM is a fool so are most of the World’s leaders, for they nearly all support the same line as she.
Ah so the worlds leaders all support the war? So that makes it all just hunkey dory.When the troops pull out it will be business as usual in Afghanistan, our men have died there,just like in Vietnam ,for fuck all. I am still waiting for the domino theory to kick in.
As soon as the U.S. elections are out of the way, we will have Iran next. I wonder what bullshit they’ll conjur up for that?
The solution is to give every Hazara asylum here, and each breadwinner fifteen acres on the Western Plains.
They do not Doug, most have left and are leaving because it is a zero sum game with many deaths and no results.
The problem with being a partisan hack Doug is that you refuse to see the facts behind the lies told and that makes you a fool too.
Bombing and blasting Afghanistan to bits to pay for the crimes of a few Saudi Arabians was always dodgy but American historians have shown that it was all planned starting with Clinton to get the wealth out of the ground and the pipeline from the Caspian Sea.
Meanwhile Bowen wants to flog Afghan refugees to Nauru and Manus Island for no reason except that over 94% of them are known to be refugees and he pretends to be outraged because Julie Bishops says Tamils should be sent home in a dirty deal with the criminal Sri Lankan government.
Just as Bowen made a now lapsed dirty deal with Afghanistan to force home Afghan refugees.
His latest reaction to Bishop is that under the refugee convention we are not allowed to expel refugees without process of the law, yet that is precisely what he is now wanting to do.
100,000 refugees fled Syria last month, we are still whinging about the 1900 others who arrived here.
Again, Marilyn, a rant, some abuse, no facts, no logic, just a parroting of phrases. What nonsense your third paragraph is – what serious American writers, other than hacks as biased as you, have made the allegation about Clinton and the Caspian? Where are the facts to back up what you say?
As I have said to you before, stop commenting and leave these discussions of serious issues to serious people. You are not one of them.
Excuse me, no facts? Just a rant?
Dawsbob, you have never had anything to say about anything but cheap shots at me.
It is well known from Charlie Wilson’s war what it is all about, it is will known now that Clinton and Bhutto formed the taliban to kick out the mujihadeen formed by Carter and Reagan because they destroyed most of the country after the Russians went broke and left, why bother to claim facts are rants because you are too lazy to see if they are facts well known to the rest of the world.
Bush was still arming and loving the taliban until May 2001 and had the attack planned and approved in July 2001.
And the taliban offered up Bin Laden on 14 October 2001 but Dubya rejected that because proof was required to turn him over to the UN.
There was no proof and here we are 11 years later pretending men playing poker were killed in action and gunning down old men who have done nothing and drowning refugees who have escaped.
Sheesh, not a word of a lie there mate.
“Clinton and Bhutto formed the taliban…”
Isn’t that a lie there?
“mujihadeen FORMED by Carter and Reagan”?
How many vets will kill themselves before 2015?
How many of the grunt’s progeny will be ready to frag, tag and bag the next civilisation of choice?
Stop the boats.
See Hitler, copped a lot of flak. Bush, Blair and Howard – and how many others? How many leaders both civilian and military have been complicit in reaping gross incompentency since 2001? If Bush was strung up and stoned tomorrow, what does it change?
This statement- “All power plants that burn coal should be shut down” makes me a greater threat than the Taliban to Australia’s national security. Thats enough for ASIO to spy on me in anyway “they” see fit. Twenty four months, every call you make, every text message, every email, every website clicked: recorded, stored, filed.
Operation Aussie Freedom I think they call it.
Believe it or not, Charlie Wilson’s War was a movie, Marilyn.
A lot of fact and some shrewd guesses, but “it ain’t necessarily so” if you see this particular point.
It was a factual movie, based on a factual book that has never been discredited by anyone and it is not the only source of the facts.
I have read the book as well, and have read many others about Afghanistan.
And the mujihadeen were started and armed by the US under Carter and REagan, the taliban was started by Clinton and Bhutto with Saudi funding.
Why do the woefully ignorant still have to claim I am not telling the truth.
Well, Marilyn, let us not forget that other Tom Hanks movie – Forrest Gump – which contained such real political facts as Forrest blowing the whistle on the Watergate burglars, teaching Elvis how to swivel his hips and coming up with the smiley face logo.
Anyhow, Marilyn, I do not intend to comment any more on your posts and will let them speak for themselves. Life is too short to argue with someone so far removed from reality.
So, all the best.
Is your source a Hollywood movie then?
Ginny Lowndes: I like your conspiracy theory.
On popular blogs such as Wendy Harmer’s, I am getting a sense of a stirring of anti war mutterings. Will it turn into a groundswell? One of my nightmare scenarios is of a triumphant Tony taking us out of Afghanistan to popular acclaim.
He’d be more likely to ride a tank into battle.
Don’t take away that possibility from me Ms.Kendall, Tony lies awake at night and dreams of bringing the troops in a pass by up Constitution Avenue, Ambrosian Federation like. He is built for hubris, his ears are purposefully shaped to hear confession or to be more easily filled with the fawning of his underlings. “Women want him, men want to be him”, both Ellis and Bananaman agree on this, how can such a two be wrong. Tony will usher in a new heroic age. Do not ruin this for me.
Ginny Lowndes: Is it Neil Jones, politician, you quote?
Interesting headline in the New York Times: “British Premier Reshuffles Cabinet Promoting Officials linked to Murdoch Case.”