Someone hung a 15 y.o. boy yesterday in Helmond province in Afghanistan and stuffed five U.S. one dollar bills in his mouth as a warning to others.
Who hanged the boy? As reported:
The Taliban warned villagers that they would face the same punishment if they were caught with dollars," said Wali Mohammad, the district police chief in Sangin.
Who was the boy? He shall remain nameless, faceless, quickly a dimishing ghost in our rapidly deteriorating memories, probably with a shock of black hair falling across his forehead, with caramel colored skin - but what catches the eye for a split-second is definitely the five $1.00 bills stuffed into his mouth. Do not consort with the enemy. This is what will happen to you. The Taliban are ruthless people.
But, we already know that. And, with so much death abounding, why bother? After all, the Taliban have their own pictures of maimed and dead children vanished by ruthless airstrikes from above. In this race to the bottom, we've already drilled mud.
So, really, why bother with this single dangling teenager who might have grown up to join the ranks of Islamic fundamentalists and hang one of our boys on some future date? We can all see that this will only go on and on, tit for tat, rock on rock, our 10 or 20 killings to their one, unbalanced surely but foretold by superior technology, and what's unfair about that? Plus, collaborators have always suffered.
After all, he was Afghani and although there's precious little oil, his nation remains an alternative pipeline route through the CentGas project which remains a pipe dream at the moment (you'll forgive the pun), but can be resurrected, unlike the nameless hanging boy, and although it would have to go through Pakistan, which is looking dicier with each approaching moment, to get to the Caspian Sea, it would be a Halliburton contract and that means juice.
If that's not enough there's simply the dead boy's geography. Karzai wants permanent U.S. bases, and he's been backed by John McCain, among others, and Afghanistan straddles Pakistan from the north and borders Iran to its west, China from its east. So strategic, it almost makes me forget the hanged boy ... Sigh, so strategic in the GWOT is it any wonder I get dreamy and the image of the boy goes blurry in that neo-con wet-dream?
Afghanistan is the "good war", isn't it? Can't 'everyone' get behind the destruction of the Taliban who covered for bin-Laden who, if he did not orchestrate the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. certainly approved, but who knows and besides, the Taliban are anti-democratic, theist, deist thugs and shouldn't that be enough to make the rubble bounce in Afghanistan after a decade of Soviet war and fifteen more years of civil war until there was nothing left and the Taliban looked like alka selzter for the Afghani soul; their mistake, our excuse, talabani resurgence, endless war, one hnged boy, it's still a good war, isn't it?
Why is there no call for withdrawal from Afghanistan? Why not bring those roughly 24,000 soldiers home, rather than call for an increase? Why should the justification that if we leave, Afghanistan will become a failed state not justify staying in Iraq as well, also rapidly descending into failed state status with de facto ethnic cleansing and partition as we write?
Oh. This must be part of the GWOT, the Endless War, the Forgotten War or ... perhaps for the good of the Afghani people and the regrettably hanged boy. Really, let's forget him. Let's forget the cheerful, just, righteous Afghani war. He's just my singular sorrowful image for today; he doesn't have to be yours, and tomorrow there will be another, perhaps a young polar bear drowning or little girl in Myanmar felled in ongoing protests and after all, to be human is to be an abyss of grief.
Back to our regularly scheduled programs.