Who Watches the Watchers?

In these troubled times, I often find that I must seek out answers to the many incongruant events that plague our time; I seek to try and make sense of what is occuring in the world around, for the world I see is bleak and dismal - oh, certainly not for me, not for the other people lucky enough to live in the West, where our Corpocracy keeps us fat, rich, and ignorant. For the other 9/10's of the world's population however, the outlook is not good. War, famine, disease, poverty, these are the issues they face on a day to day basis, while we sit in comfort, profiting from their squalor. And we are conditioned to accept this, conditioned by the very societal mechanisms that SHOULD be the watch dogs, that should be howling wildly at how our so-called enlightened democracies as we trounce about the globe leaving a tide of bodies in our wake, all in the name of progress, safety, empowerment, or some other tripe. I am refering of course to the media, those vast and powerful entities that dispense our daily news, that spin and weave it to suit their purpose.
What that purpose may be is tricky to pin-point; well, not tricky, but elusive, unless one thinks critically about the issue, and so few do, for they have been conditioned since Kindergarten to behave. The media, or at the very least, the major media players, who dictate the agenda to the lesser players, are vast corporations, much like the rest of our societies. They make their money from advertisement revenues, and the people who want to place advertisements are corporate elites, who have the money and the desire to place the ads. The media then, is in the business of "selling privileged audiences to other businesses." (Noam Chomsky). Ownership of the major media outlets is highley concentrated, and therefore, run by a select privileged group - one need only think of Rupert Murdoch and the Times of London, once a highly reputable paper, now a rag that spills out the company line, to further indoctrinate an already passive and compliant population. With a few bold exceptions, the "news" we are fed is nothing more than political propaganda, that seeks to maintain the corporate grip our "democracies" have over the globe.
Furthermore, it is exceedingly difficult to critisize our governments within that media. One must have incrontrovertible evidence, and analysis in order to do so. If, however, one wishes to follow a patriotic agenda, one can do so with ease, and need not worry about evidence or analysis. As we saw in 2003, charges against an official "enemy" do not require substantiation. It is enough to make the charge, and the media will be sure that it is published. Not so for critiques of our own regimes - indeed, any such dialogue is dismissed as "controversial," "unpatriotic," or "conspiracy theorising." Even I have been accused of such things, here on my own blog page, which few people will ever access, let alone broadcast across the globe.
Noam Chomsky, in his 1988 dialogue with CBC, "Necessary Illusions," casts his "controversial" light upon the subject of democray and the media. He states that in the West, there is a patriotic agenda to the media that we are spoon fed. The media attributes this idea that the U.S. government has the "best intentions" when dealing with the Thrid World; even when the media feels that the methods are unsavoury and need to be changed there is this implicit undercurrent to the dialogue that it is for the "greater good", despite the atrocities. However, as Chomsky states, "good intentions are not properties of states, and that the United States, like every other state past and present, pursues policies that reflect the interests of those who control the state by virtue of their domestic power." Simply stated, we do not engage in our shadow wars in order to bring freedom, but rather to extend our own sphere of political and economical influence into nations that have resources we need and crave, be that oil, or the creation of a natural gas pipeline that will run the from the former Soviet Stans to the Indian Ocean.
Chomsky takes his argument further, and in the process, makes it even more galvanized and bullet proof, as though it needed it:

One needs no evidence to condemn the Soviet Union for aggression in Afghanistan and support for repression in Poland; it is quite a different matter when one turns to U.S. aggression in Indochina or its efforts to prevent a political settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict over many years, readily documented, but unwlecome and therefore a non-fact. No argument is demanded for a condemnation of Iran or Libya for state-sponsored terrorism; discussion of the prominent - arguably dominant - role of the United States and its clients in organizing and conducting this plague of the modern era elicits only horror and contempt for this view point; supporting evidence, however compelling, is dimissed as irrelevant. As a matter of course, the media and intellectual journals either praise the U.S. government for dedicating itself to the struggle for democracy in Nicaragua or critisize it for the means it has employed to pursue this laudable objective, offering no evidence that this is indeed the goal of the policy. A challenge to the underlying patriotic assumption is virtually unthinkable within the mainstream and, if permitted expression, would be dismissed as a variety of ideological fanaticism, and absurdity, even if backed by overwhelming evidence."

Althought the dialogue is 20 years out of date, it is amazing how relevant it remains to this day. All one needs to do is change the names of places (although, sadly, poor Afghanistan will remain in the mix) and the major players, and it is shockingly accurate. Of course it is easy to condemn Osama bin Laden. The man who is widely believed to have been the mastermind of 9/11 is responsible for the deaths of more than 3000 people, truly an act of deplorable carnage, which can shake the hardest souls when they see those planes made into missiles as they strike the Twin Towers. It is amazing, therefore, that we as a society, do not react with a similar outpooring or grief and rage when other, equally deadly missiles rip into Baghdad suberbs, or devistate a mountain village in Afghanistan. It is simple math, really, at the root of it - 3000 human beings were slain in cold blood on 9/11; to date, conservative estimates place the death toll of the War on Terror in the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS. Are Arabs and Afghans not human beings as well? To steal a line from Shakespeare, if you prick them do they they not bleed? And in this equation of death and bllod, something is amazingly out of proportion. Somehow, 3000 has equalled 500,000 in the minds of people in the West. Of course, the media has done its job well, and it is not only about the lives of human beings - it is about something far greater, it is about freedom and democracy, equality and justice - grand notions, that are greater then the lives of actual people, for they represent the greater good. If a few human beings are slain in the pursuit of these noble goals, don't the ends justify the means? And here we are back to the issue of proof - where is the proof that this is in fact the goal of the Western Agenda in Iraq and Afghanistan? If asked, would the average human in either nation feel that their lives have improved? Do we ask them? Or do we simply continue to exist in our sheltered bubble, content to believe the lies and company policies that the corporations want us to believe?

Well, I for one am not content to believe what I am told to think - I prefer to follow the thinking of Chomsky, that "intellectual without a pause."

Good Vs. the Taliban - What Do We Really Know about The Afghan Conflict?

The NATO coalition that currently holds sway in the ravaged nation of Afghanistan is at war, for freedom and democracy of course, battling the terror represented by the terrible “black eyed Talibs” – the dreaded Taliban. This is the simplified, spoon fed version that all of us in Canada and the West are familiar with. There are two factions at play in that sad nation, the side that supports us, and the Taliban. Cut and dry, black and white, end of the story. And so when our brave war correspondents beam their reports across the globe to us in our living rooms, it is easy to maintain that belief – “Canadian soldier killed in a gun fight outside of Khandahar by Taliban insurgents” - and our eyes glaze over and we think to ourselves, “those damn Taliban,” before we finish our evening meal.
And that very belief reveals just how staggeringly little we know of this nation, that all of us can believe, from the common citizen up to the upper echelon of CSIS, that this is the case. Us, or the Taliban, choose your sides. The deeper, less obvious (and never reported) truth is so convoluted and dense, that it is not worth trying to wrap our minds around it – however, as a nation at war, is it not incumbent upon us to try and understand what we can about the people we are so carelessly killing in the name of justice and peace and freedom and democracy, and whatever other tired slogans we decide to hide behind as we indulge in the slaughter of a people?
Afghanistan is not a nation like we have in the West, a nation wherein the people define themselves by being of that nation. It is a nation of tribal allegiances. No Afghan identifies himself as, lets say, Ali of the Afghans; rather he is Ali, first and foremost a Muslim, and secondly he is of the Pashtuns, or the Aimaqs, the Tajiks, or the Hazara. Those are the four main tribal grouping in the nation, and it is to that tribe that the people define their identity. As such, there are tensions between the different tribes, at that very highest level. For example, the Taliban draw their ranks from primarily the Pashtun people. During their ascent to power, they waged an ethnic war against the Hazara, who were not only Shia Muslims, but also of a direct Mongolian descent, visible in their features, setting them apart. The Taliban wreaked a terrible vengeance upon them in 1998, and tried to eradicate as many of them as possible for those differences. The Hazara resisted, and fought back from the fastness of their central mountain homes. And when the American led invasion occurred, they largely supported them – this illiterate population had no idea what the World Trade Centre was, or had very little idea as to who George Bush was, all they knew was that the Americans were fighting their tribal adversaries, the Taliban. Do they trust or like the government of Karzai? The resounding No is overwhelming - why? A centralized government is not trusted by the people of the Hazara tribe, they would prefer their own government in their own portion of the country, thank you very much.
Similar stories can be found all over this shattered land. Ismail Khan, the governor of Herat, opposed the Taliban as well, but views the West with distain, as he himself is a Muhjahedin, a holy warrior, from his days of fighting the infidel Russians. American aid was helpful, but also a hindrance to him, as he sought to create a nearly autonomous state of his own on the western edge of Afghanistan. He is, for lack of a better word, a Warlord. And it is at this point that the tribal system, which governs the identities of the people, becomes even more confusing. Quite aside from the tribal system, there is also a thriving, ancient, and still functioning feudal system in place in the hinterland of the country. Feudal lords hold sway in many places, and demand obedience from the people over whom they rule. This places them and all of their forces (which in some cases are not negligible) in direct conflict with the new caste of warlords, who gained prominence during the last 30 years of conflict, as well as the new found “democratic” government of Hamid Karzai. Any removal of power from this traditional feudal system is seen as a threat, one that the feudal lords are more than willing to fight against, no matter what their tribal allegiance. And so, a Tajik lord, who is at war with the Taliban, is also at war with the coalition forces who attempt to remove the source of his power and replace it with a new democratic system. Never mind that the people in rural Afghanistan have no real notion as to what democracy is, or how it works, it is what they are told to do, at odds with the lords who oversee their lands and crops.
So when there is a gun fight outside of Pashtun territory, there is a very good chance that it is not our men battling the Taliban, but rather the forces of the local feudal lord, or possibly the warlord, who is rebelling at the erosion of their political clout. But no, whenever blood is spilled, it is always against the Taliban, for it is imperative that our forces of “goodness” are at odds with “evil”, as simple and black and white as that. If our forces are at war, not with the enemy we have identified (the Taliban), but rather against diverse local militia, then it raises concerns as to what we are doing in that nation – it is no longer a fight for freedom, it is a bloody occupation for material gain, because if that is the case we are in fact fighting and killing the very men we so arrogantly claim to be liberating. We are not simply removing a hostile government, we are trying to change the very fabric of a society that has existed for centuries unchanged, and we are trying to institute these changes over night, because we understand so very little about the people and their way of life.
Let me be very clear on this – we are not at war with the Taliban, but rather we are at war with anyone who opposes our rule in that nation, because we do not, and make no attempt to truly understand the population, their various allegiances, and their lifestyle. We simply paint the entire conflict with this all encompassing brush, and claim that whenever shots are fired they are fired, not by reasonable everyday Afghans, but by the heartless “black eyed Talibs”. The truth is not so simple. It is usually very reasonable men who take up arms against us, because we represent the destruction of their entire way of life, a way that stretches back, unchanged, a thousand years. We will force “modernity” upon them, and heaven help those who oppose us … if they do, the desert will be littered with even more “Taliban” dead.
The Scottish author, Rory Stewart, is all to familiar with this brand of “know-nothing imperialism”, as he undertook a very courageous trek, walking on foot across the entire country of Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul, in 2002, just after the war had begun. Such an act of courage is almost unbelievable, and I strongly urge anyone to read the account of his journey, in The Places In Between. On his adventure, he met and stayed with many diverse people, from feudal lords to Taliban fighters to international aid workers. To say that he has an insider’s view of the conflict is an understatement. He was met with tremendous acts of kindness, as well as acts of hostility, in some very unpredictable places, but it afforded him a very unique perspective on the opening conflict of this war on terror. He maintains that policy makers in Afghanistan, all very educated men and women from wealthy Western families, knew “next to nothing about the villages where 90 percent of the Afghan population lived. … But what did they understand of the thought process of Seyyed Kerbalahi’s wife, who had not moved five kilometres from her home in forty years? Or Dr. Habibullah, the vet, who carried an automatic weapon in the way they carried briefcases? … The people of Kamenj understood political power in terms of their feudal lord Haji Mohsin Khan. Ismail Khan wanted a social order based on Iranian political Islam. Hazara such as Ali hated the idea of centralized government because they associated it with subjugation by other ethnic groups and suffering under the Taliban … Without the time, imagination, and persistence needed to understand Afghans’ diverse experiences, policy makers would find it impossible to change Afghan society in the way they wished to change it.” As he explains, the think tanks and NGO’s responsible for rebuilding Afghanistan society had employees who, a “year before had been in Kosovo or East Timor and a year later they would be in Iraq or offices in New York and Washington.” In short, the re-builders were not invested in the nation for the long haul, making any drastic change, and all such changes in the rural traditional hinterland would be drastic, next to impossible.
Stewart theorizes that this nonchalant attitude or lack of understanding at the highest bureaucratic level (the UN, or NATO) is a new form of imperialism, one that is much more dangerous than the clichéd imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. I will include all of the argument at this point, as I feel that it is of primary importance in viewing the conflict in Afghanistan, but also in beleaguered nations all over the globe:

Critics have accused this new breed of administration of neo-colonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitive, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn’t their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.
Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or the stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neo-colonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation, and oppression.
Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan.

So let us not be bamboozled into this media frenzy of the “Us versus the evil Taliban,” with the rest of the happy Afghans cheering us on in the struggle. Many of those same Afghans want us gone from their homes, for us to stop the killing of their people, be they Aimaq, Tajik, Pashtun or Hazara. This is not a struggle of good versus evil, and it never has been – it is the struggle of a nation being torn asunder to answer to the wrath of the Gods of War, that imperial juggernaut of our time, the United States of America, and I am sad to admit, Canada is a pawn in their service. When the Harper government tries to extend our term of service in the Asian desert, we need to demand why, and the reasons need to smack of the truth. No more shadowed lies and half-truths. We are not at war with the Taliban. Do we fight them? Yes, we most certainly do, but we are not at war with them exclusively. The very socio-political fabric of Afghanistan is in turmoil, and is at the centre of this conflict. We need to understand more about that, more about the people, more about the history, before we attempt to alter it further – because without that understanding, we will alter nothing, except to create the “charming illusion” that we are fighting a War on Terror. And that is another subject that requires some light of truth to be shed upon it…
How many more Afghan men, women and children will be slain? How many more coalition soldiers? For what cause, and for whose benefit? Be they Taliban or be they field hands, or be they warriors fighting for their local warlord, who is busy maintaining his hold on power. How can we so callously end the lives of so many when we do not even bother to understand the dynamics that are fuelling the many faceted dimensions of the conflict? Sadly, we seem not to even care – because our failure to understand the nature of the conflict does not impact our lives, and the tremors or death will only be felt by a small percentage of us in the West; but in Afghanistan, our lack of understanding is destroying an entire nation.