By Richard Engel, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent, November 19, 2013
KABUL – While many Americans have been led to believe the war in Afghanistan will soon be over, a draft of a key U.S.-Afghan security deal obtained by NBC News shows the United States is prepared to maintain military outposts in Afghanistan for many years to come, and pay to support hundreds of thousands of Afghan security forces.
The wide-ranging document, still unsigned by the United States and Afghanistan, has the potential to commit thousands of American troops to Afghanistan and spend billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.
The document outlines what appears to be the start of a new, open-ended military commitment in Afghanistan in the name of training and continuing to fight al-Qaeda. The war in Afghanistan doesn’t seem to be ending, but renewed under new, scaled-down U.S.-Afghan terms.
“The Parties acknowledge that continued U.S. military operations to defeat al-Qaeda and its affiliates may be appropriate and agree to continue their close cooperation and coordination toward that end,” the draft states.
The 25-page “Security and Defense Cooperation Agreement Between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan” is a sweeping document, vague in places, highly specific in others, defining everything from the types of future missions U.S. troops would be allowed to conduct in Afghanistan, to the use of radios and the taxation of American soldiers and contractors.
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… and Fukushima isn’t really pre-cooking the prawns and migratory Tuna in the Pacific Ocean!
” Wait, maybe it’s because so many people are SO SICK there is not enough space to take care of them. In the U.S. anyway it seems like at least half the population is managing a serious chronic illness, mostly autoimmune, usually with drugs.”
Your quote above deserves a website all of its own. The message about the food chain and all its pollutants is huge.. as we know. It’s getting even harder now that seafood (not just animal products but sea vegetables) is soaking up diverse nuclear by-products.
But as always, awareness is the key – more pressing than ever as it may be. And in that respect surely your point about astrology providing a context is huge. It is a container/vehicle for all these disparate strands of information (conflated as it is with equal if not greater amounts of disinformation and propaganda/reaction – ‘like’ the Disney link.. Jeez.. people like to romanticise the snow at Christmas).
I’ve always maintained that awareness is a broad spectrum phenomenon and actually, more to the point, it should be a bodily phenomenon rather than simply a mental one (I think of the 4 of Swords in tarot here as the 4ness bringing groundedness to the agitated airy quality of the swords – no coincidence that this card represents recovery/recuperation/rest after a period of sickness).
The challenges are many and varied but once people wake up in their bodies as well as their minds they will begin to crave what is healthy, rather than the high sugar, glam and short-lived rubbish, that all our senses are continually bombarded with.
Keep up the good work, man!
Hey there Alex,
I paused at the word ‘nonetheless’. The central question of my approach to journalism is how to create interest in higher priority issues than the latest Disney movie. The the second question is what is it about ‘the media’ as we know it that creates such persistent interest in bullshit?
I would say that much of it involves pandering to advertisers, and ‘the media’ as we think of it becoming little other than a vector for commercials. What we think of as the cool programs sometimes seem to me nothing other than a way to attract a demographic of viewers to put adverts in their face.
Such media can never get to the point of why we have money to keep soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan at the cost of $1 million per soldier per year, but we theoretically don’t have money to make sure everyone can go to the doctor, or more significantly, to eat actual food and stay healthy.
This morning I heard a discussion on ‘the media’ about how if the ACA actually worked, there would not be enough doctors to take care of them. Gee, maybe that’s because if many graduate from their BA or BS with $100,000 to $250,000 in debt, how much debt do you have to go into to be a doctor?
Enough that either you would not do it, or if you did you might want to go into Botox, one current high-profit side of the industry. Wait, maybe it’s because so many people are SO SICK there is not enough space to take care of them. In the U.S. anyway it seems like at least half the population is managing a serious chronic illness, mostly autoimmune, usually with drugs.
My current mantra teaching my editors is: put the story into context. Tell the story and give the context. One reason astrology is so rich, and so vital, is that it provides a form of context; it provides the opportunity for a perspective shift, and that is helpful seeing things another way, maybe even for seeing things as they are, in addition to helping us see ourselves for who we are.
Hey! Did you hear? There is no global warming. The world is about to freeze.
http://movies.disney.com/frozen/video/trailers
Eric your podcast shows that the investigative journalism credentials are well allied to your astrological acumen. A trained critical eye is priceless in these matters. I wanted to comment on this article however, rather than the FM comments area because of this news about plans for extended occupation of Afghanistan.
In general terms, folk seem able to accept the military-industrial complex sponsorship of war, in principle (I should have said SOME folk). However, the motivations I think are less clear to people in specific cases. They may wonder why, say, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Iran run different courses and what the underlying strategies are. I think it is useful to clarify, as per Chomsky, that U.S. Foreign Policy largely involves “exporting democracy”..
In the case of say Gaddafi or Saddam (who were client puppets going back decades) you find two classical ‘dictators’ who basically secure control as an autonomous individual ruler. They are easily portrayed as crazies but are harder to remove than say an internal problem like JFK. Nevertheless, it is relatively straightforward to replace them with a stooge, after you have removed them, since the nature of such dictatorial rule is that it intrinsically oppresses internal dissent.
In the case of Afghanistan’s Karzai it would appear that there is a more diffuse tribal power and a much more complex and nuanced political structure. In the interests of exporting democracy and sequestering resources for corporations, it therefore takes a much more sustained protocol to replace deeply engrained cultural, socio-political institutions.
Of course, the narratives deployed differ too. The much simpler “mad dog dictator” tag line has to be replaced with that of “persistent covert, training camp operations”.
I think it is worth moving from economic analyses of pure profit underpinning operations from shadow govt and bringing emphasis to interpreting these occupation strategies.. as these provide clues to what is happening on the ground (rather than the fiction that is reported).
All that said, these issues are so persistent precisely because the general public remains largely disinterested in what is really happening and would rather focus upon day to day matters of which Hollywood Blockbuster they should take the kids to see in the Christmas vacation and whether popcorn or candy should be the accompaniment of choice.
Nonetheless, I thank you for the service you offer here and the integrated analysis of astrology and current affairs, which otherwise thin on the ground – except in the form of the doom mongering, apocalyptic brigade…
For those who listened to my new edition of Planet Waves FM, I explain the perpetual war principle of the Kennedy assassination.
I also cover it here, though the podcast and the article compliment one another. I will have more to say in Friday’s edition.
http://planetwaves.net/astrologynews/483879232.html