THE
ROVING EYE US shocked and awed by the
Taliban By Pepe Escobar
Talk about a double whammy. It was not
enough for Standard & Poor's to downgrade the
United States' credit rating; with impeccable
timing, and apparently a single shot, the Taliban
in Afghanistan simultaneously downgraded the
empire's colossal war machine.
As much as
the US power elite refuse to accept that the US
financial crisis was caused by years of George W
Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and
mega-corporations; massive bailouts of banks and
insurance companies; and astronomic military
spending on the Pentagon's declinations of The
Long War, the power elite will
also refuse to acknowledge
that the "new" war strategy in Afghanistan is also
a failure.
Chinook down The
sound of that Chinook CH-47 transport helicopter
shot down by a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade
(RPG) in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul, on
Friday, killing 38 people - including 19 US Navy
SEALs and seven Afghan commandos - was the full
digital sound of the empire being shocked and awed
into disbelief, no matter Pentagon efforts to
practically order the media "not to read too much"
into the crash.
Wardak - along with
neighboring Logar - is now prime Talibanistan real
estate. They are entrenched, know the terrain in
detail and even have time to prepare complex
operations. On top of it, the Taliban are "making
progress" (Pentagon jargon) not only in their
public relations skills and in adapting new
weapons to the battlefield, but also in the
mechanics of delivering a major psychological blow
to the Western occupying forces.
The SEALs
are part of a humongous, 10,000-strong Joint
Special Operations Command (JSOC) task force,
based in Afghanistan, which has been involved in
as many as 70 raids a day in AfPak, capturing -
according to Pentagon spin - 2,900 "insurgents"
and killing more than 800 from April to July.
JSOC's global reach has been deconstructed in a
piece by Nick Turse (see A
secret war in 120 countries Asia Times Online,
August 5).
The SEALs killed in Wardak were
part of the same unit, Team 6, involved in the
Abbottabad raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama
bin Laden in early May. But instead of flying the
army's 160th Special Operations Aviation
Regiment's state-of-the-art stealth helicopters,
the SEALs in Wardak were part of a rescue
operation, riding a pedestrian National Guard
Chinook.
As they were lifting off, they
fell into a Taliban trap and were hit by a
modified RPG - what the chirurgical Danger Room
blog at the Wired website identified as an
improvised rocket-assisted mortar (IRAM), sporting
a bigger warhead than a shoulder-fired RPG.
According to Taliban spokesman Zabiullah
Mujahid, that was indeed "a weapon that is similar
to an RPG ... and we are trying to get more of
this weapon".
So assuming the IRAM - which
has emigrated from the Iraqi battlefields - is now
a player in Afghanistan as well, one might call it
a warped return of the Stinger remix; during the
1980s Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union, a
major game-changer was for the US to drop hundreds
of lethal Stingers into the hands of the
mujahideen, wreaking havoc among the choppers of
the mighty Red Army.
A close comparison
between the Abbottabad and Wardak operations may
raise a forest of eyebrows - apart from puncturing
the myth of Navy SEALs as invincible,
larger-than-life hunter-killers. In Abbottabad, as
version after version of the raid was being fed to
the media, it was finally established that a
stealth helicopter simply "crashed". No one knows
if this was a pilot error or the helicopter was
shot at.
The fact is the "crash" left an
intact tail section of the stealth helicopter
inside the compound - that tail section that left
the Pentagon freaking out it would be "sold" to
the Chinese by the Pakistanis. It's quite a
stretch to believe this crash generated no
casualties - according to the Pentagon/White House
spin.
And because the Bin Laden raid
narrative was redacted over and over again,
febrile minds are already linking these casualties
to the Wardak death toll - implying the SEALs who
actually died in the Abbottabad crash have now
died "again" in Wardak. It doesn't help that the
initial versions of the Wardak hit (later
corrected or redacted) identified the SEALs as the
same ones who took part in the "kill Osama" raid.
Pass the joystick After the
Wardak hit, new Pentagon chief Leon Panetta came
up with the usual "stay the course" in Afghanistan
speech while corporate media regurgitated that
"all foreign combat troops are scheduled to leave
by the end of 2014" - when everyone knows the
Pentagon will never roll over, die and accept that
kind of exit.
What Wardak will do is to
bolster the Pentagon's case that the government in
Kabul is mightily unprepared to maintain security
across the country - no matter the fact that the
majority of Afghans want foreigners out, for good.
While the White House/Pentagon are singing their
remixed version of The Clash's Should I Stay or
Should I Go, all the Taliban have to do is
wait and see, in silence (they hate pop music).
They know that Kabul taking over national security
will only bolster their strategic position.
It's astonishing (or maybe not) that the
Washington power elite simply does not register
how the empire was mercilessly downgraded by the
Taliban over this past month. The Taliban killed
President Hamid Karzai's half-brother, drug lord
and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset Ahmad
Wali. They killed people at his funeral. They
killed Karzai's head of tribal relations and a
member of parliament. And they killed the mayor of
Kandahar, Ghulam Hamidi.
Not a long time
ago - the autumn of 2010 - the talk was of the
US/North Atlantic Treaty Organization going to
take over Kandahar in a major counter-insurgency
drive and win the war against the Taliban for
good.
Today the claim has been laid to
rest by facts on the ground. Yet its conceptual
artist - in typical Washington fashion - has been
kicked upstairs. In Iraq, General David Petraeus
pulled an illusionist trick, convincing everyone
in Washington that his 2007
surge/counterinsurgency drive was a success.
In Afghanistan, Petraeus was hit by a
Hindu Kush rock on his head. Anyway, he's been
promoted to CIA chief, so others will take the
blame. And while more Chinooks will go down in
Afghanistan, he can at least have fun with the
joystick, playfully concentrating on droning the
Pakistani tribal areas to death.
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