Chamblee54

In the aftermath of 911, the United States needed to get revenge. Afghanistan was invaded. There was little discussion, and the decision was a popular one. The heroin dealers, whose supply of product was endangered by the Taliban, were especially enthusiastic.
Ten and a half years later, there is plenty of heroin. Other than that, there is little improvement. Thousands of Americans have been killed and wounded. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, at a time when the Government is going deeper and deeper into debt. Untold thousands of people have been killed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Dubyatiefstan. The end of the tunnel gets darker, and further away, every day.
There is a story at Informed Comment, Afghanistan’s Taliban – a differing view of drones. It seems like the people in Stan Land are used to having our flying death machines overhead. … ‘It’s the Americans trying to view our naked wives’.”
Poetry of the Taliban is a book coming out soon. In the mad rush to demonize and destroy, it is forgotten that it is human beings we are fighting. “But this is just really guys who write poetry and are Taliban, and then talk about issues they relate to, in sometimes very artistic fashion, in sometimes very simple language. And on a very wide range of subjects. I think also that the Taliban poetry thing had a very different quality when we moved down from Kabul to Kandahar. Because even though a lot of our friends aren’t pro-Talib at all, they would have these tapes with these songs, and would listen to it all the time and it would be on always.”
“I’ve been through the poems looking for references and it doesn’t really come up. The cultural universes of Taliban poems, the songs of the Pakistan Taliban, they’re far more tightly controlled. Interestingly this is another argument to support their being different groups, because the way they go about the songs is different operationally. In Pakistan it goes through a strict production factory, more or less, to make sure the poems properly represent the line they want to take. It’s much more a propaganda product than the stuff that the Afghans come up with. And in the 260 poems we have in our collection there’s not a single mention of drones, and these are poems taken from the south east as well as the south [of Afghanistan].
In the 260 poems we have in our collection there’s not a single mention of drones.”The only thing which comes up and does so twice is the image of Ababil, the green bird, which is a Koranic metaphor for when Abraham is fighting against Nimrud and God sent the green birds to support him. This, I know from talking to Pakistani journalist friends of mine, comes up quite a lot in the drone literature of the Pakistan side, the green birds. The two are often paired together in curious ways. But it’s not really used that way in Afghanistan… Drones don’t really feature in the cultural or aesthetic. Obviously in the videos which come out, which are coming from the east, you’ll have the drone animations and things like that. But that’s coming from the contact with the Pakistanis.”
It should be noted that the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan was drawn by the British, and is disputed today. Much of the territory in Pakistan was in Afghanistan at one time. This is some of the wildest land on earth. It has seen many would be conquerors over the centuries. It will be there when the Americans take their toys home. This is a repost. This is written like H.P. Lovecraft.