{"id":19587,"date":"2009-11-30T14:31:04","date_gmt":"2009-11-30T19:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=19587"},"modified":"2011-05-17T09:49:47","modified_gmt":"2011-05-17T14:49:47","slug":"afghanistan-at-the-edge-of-empires-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/afghanistan-at-the-edge-of-empires-end\/","title":{"rendered":"Afghanistan: At the Edge of Empire’s End"},"content":{"rendered":"

This report by the Committee majority staff is part of our continuing examination of the conflict in Afghanistan. <\/em><\/p>\n

When we went to war less than a month after the attacks of September 11, the objective was to destroy Al Qaeda and kill or capture its leader, Osama bin Laden, and other senior figures in the terrorist group and the Taliban, which had hosted them. Today, more than eight years later, we find ourselves fighting an increasingly lethal insurgency in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan that is led by many of those same extremists. Our inability to finish the job in late 2001 has contributed to a conflict today that endangers not just our troops and those of our allies, but the stability of a volatile and vital region. This report relies on new and existing information to explore the consequences of the failure to eliminate bin Laden and other extremist leaders in the hope that we can learn from the mistakes of the past.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sincerely,
\nJOHN F. KERRY, Chairman,
\nSENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE
\nNovember 30, 2009<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dear Friend and Reader:<\/p>\n

We are fast approaching the astrology of Uranus stationing direct, and the hours leading up to President Obama\u2019s Full Moon speech on America’s plan to “finish the job” in Afghanistan. On Tuesday night, he is scheduled announce another phase of what was started over eight years ago in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. by Al-Qaeda. With Uranus stationing direct at 23 Pisces, we might ask: What job is he planning to finish? And is it possible to finish any job in Afghanistan? For this, we have to look at history. Please follow along with a summary.<\/p>\n

The war in Afghanistan is President Obama\u2019s by inheritance. This inheritance did not begin in 2001 with the multinational hunt for Osama Bin Ladin. It began much earlier during the Cold War with the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, a Communist state established by the Saur Revolution in 1978. With Soviet backing, Afghan Marxists modernized the country, built roads, hospitals, and schools. Traditional marriage laws were upended for a more modern system that encouraged women’s education.\u00a0These changes met resistance from the more traditional Muslim population. Harsh landscape and language divides made it difficult for new policies to take root nationwide. Insurrection was inevitable. A civil war between the Afghan Marxists and insurgents, also known as the mujahideen, began immediately, spurring the\u00a0Soviets to invade Afghanistan in 1979 to support the Marxist government.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That year, President Jimmy Carter initiated US support for the anti-Marxist resistance with aid, food, and supplies. In the early 1980’s President Reagan aggressively pursued that same policy; this time providing aid, supplies and weaponry to intensify mujahideen resistance of the Marxist regime. In ten years of protracted war against the Soviets, much of the infrastructure built by the Marxists was destroyed. By conducting this policy of proxy Cold War using local insurgents as surrogates, the\u00a0Reagan Administration subverted Congress and a country wary of another Vietnam\u2014the metaphor for defeat. This policy, known as the Reagan Doctrine, was successful in exhausting the Soviet war machine in Afghanistan, destabilizing and ultimately collapsing the Soviet Union itself.\u00a0The doctrine was used to support the contras in Nicaragua and insurgencies in Angola, with plans for Cambodia, Ethiopia, Libya, Vietnam. The Reagan Doctrine helped provide weapons to Saddam Hussein, who used them to wage war on Iran. We also supplied weapons and intelligence to a CIA operative in the region, Osama bin Laden.<\/p>\n

As successful as it was, the price to be paid by the Reagan Doctrine was that of blowback –\u00a0the consequences of leaving behind the weaponry used in creating insurgencies against your enemies. One day, those weapons can be used against you; those enemies can turn on you.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to 1998. President Clinton bombs Afghanistan and the Sudan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, who masterminded the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania by Al-Qaeda, and who is also a friend to the Bush family. Three years later, in the wake of 9-11, a multinational force led by Americans fight the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in an attempt to capture bin Ladin and al Qaeda operatives. As Sen. Kerry reports eight years later, we lost the opportunity to bring in the conspirators in favor of pursuing a war against Iraq. But this is not news. This information has been around for years.<\/p>\n

American troops begin occupying Afghanistan with the mission to keep the Taliban pushed back, and like the Soviet regime before, its main mission was to build roads, hospitals, and schools encouraging education of girls and women. In effect,\u00a0rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed twenty years ago using the mujahideen as our wrecking crew of the regime.<\/p>\n

The Soviet defeat is not without precedent. Throughout Western history armies invading Afghanistan meet their doom: the Greeks in 180 BCE, the Arabs in the 7th century, the Mongols and Genghis Khan in the 13th, the Persians in the 16th, the British in the 19th and the Soviet Union in the 20th. None has been able to outlast the ferocious tribal resistance of the people and harsh landscape of Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

In fact, the more sophisticated the military invading it, the more futile their attempt to conquer it. Now in the 21st century, we have entered a new world with many of the same players, but this time the political landscape from the Cold War has been upended. Our old Cold War enemies are now new allies and business partners: the needs of the Chinese, the oil-rich Russians and now the Indians weigh heavily upon this White House. Their borders touch Afghanistan and a Taliban insurgency can bleed over into their territory, disrupting a fragile economic alliance in an already tense financial period for our country.<\/p>\n

The insurgency can move straight across into a nuclear\u2013armed Pakistan, a place with similar political instability at the top. Afghanistan is, as Eric wrote, a Damocles sword<\/strong><\/a> over President Obama.<\/p>\n

According to Juan Cole at Informed Comment<\/em><\/strong>,<\/a> at best, Obama could stabilize the Karzai government and let the Afghans have their say as to the control of their country with no proxy agendas.\u00a0That is a big gamble with blood and money, given Karzai has little influence outside of Kabul, and the real battles are in the rural areas where the Taliban have a stronghold.\u00a0We\u2019re also trying to dig ourselves out of the economic hole dug by the Bush-Cheney administration caused by borrowing money from China to conduct a global war on terror against former friends Iraq. The same country Reagan armed twenty years ago to fight Iran.\u00a0We\u2019ve wasted billions rebuilding what we paid for decades ago to destroy.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A large U.S Army vehicle convoy near the town of Maidan Shar, Afghanistan on Monday. Photo: Dario Lopez-Mills\/Associated Press.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How can Obama finish something that seems impossible to end? The history of the US, Afghanistan and the Middle East is a knot of conflicting interests and incestuous relationships made worse by an increasingly myopic view of history and terrible foreign policy decisions made over the last eight years. Decisions that benefited very few while killing thousands.<\/p>\n

The Sabian symbols are a degree-by-degree method of reading the zodiac. Each degree gets an image. Uranus is stationing direct at 22+ Pisces, which we read as 23 Pisces. For this degree, we have the image: “A huge hulk of a woman medium\u00a0has gone into trance.\u00a0 Around her are entities continually forming and dissolving.”<\/em> The ghosts of past empires seem to apparate throughout this conflict, permeating our foreign policy. The Kozminsky symbol for that same degree is even more direct: “A heap of broken arms and military trappings lying in a muddy pool”. <\/em>These two versions of the 23rd Piscean degree seem to read together as both warning and a hope.<\/p>\n

I hope this president will have absorbed the history learned by so many empires lost there: that our empire is no different from any other. Since the mid to late twentieth century, when it comes to wars, we have trouble learning the lessons of history. But it seems the Afghan people know their history well. Empires rise and fall. Their fathers, grandfathers and their descendants have woven that reality into their culture.<\/p>\n

Before us is \u201cfinishing the job of Afghanistan\u201d\u2014whatever that means. Stabilizing and rebuilding a country in the Middle East makes it much less a Petri dish for new terror cells to be nurtured.\u00a0Lets pray that job to be finished is something we can live with, and takes us in a completely different direction, because the thought of anything else, particularly a repeat of what has been done before, is too much to bear.<\/p>\n

Yours and truly,<\/p>\n

Fe Bongolan<\/strong>
\nSan Francisco<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This report by the Committee majority staff is part of our continuing examination of the conflict in Afghanistan. When we went to war less than a month after the attacks of September 11, the objective was to destroy Al Qaeda and kill or capture its leader, Osama bin Laden, and other senior figures in the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[217,1610,29,1611,1788,1612,52,816,909,1614,1613],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19587"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19587\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}