The war in Afghanistan is pretty much over, at least that's how the Leaders of the Free World ^TM would like it to seem. Yeah, there's all this crap about it being a war on terrorism which is ongoing, etc. But the basic reality is that there were two reasons America started this war; revenge, and an excuse to become more powerful. Not exactly morally right.

Revenge hasn't yet been had. Yeah, they've killed lots of Muslims, many of them innocent civilians, and caused many thousands to starve to death, but until Bin Laden is actually captured, the revenge won't be complete. But the US government's continued desire for power is never going to be satiated. Already the prehistoric xenophobes who control the world's biggest nuclear arsenal are using this as an excuse to construct their stupid fucking missile defence system. The reason? Because it will provide protection against biochemical and radioactive weapons which might be used be terrorist.

Newsflash! NO IT FUCKING WON'T. In what way is nuclear missile defence system going to have helped in any way in the recent conflict? How is going to help against anthrax delivered in the mail? By blowing up the fucking post office? Or how is going to stop hijackers? By nuking New York to stop them from crashing into it? No. It's going to have one purpose and one purpose only; to make America really fucking powerful. To have a great big load of missiles pointing right at whoever they like, so they can have complete power over the whole world. Gee, that's a great idea! We should really support that.

Amazingly, the war in Afghanistan was pretty painless. But that's only because the country was so fucked up in the first place that nothing, short of nuclear amargeddon, could have made things worse. The Taliban have been ousted. Great. Well done to the US for dropping a couple of bombs, but mostly well done to the Northern Alliance for actually putting their lives in danger, something the US military might want to experiment with in the future. Four (five?) thousand people died in the twin towers, but many times that died because of the Taliban; as always, the real victims of this are in Afghanistan, not in the West. The sooner Afghanistan can be made a safe and free country the better. To be honest I don't care if that means contravening religious freedom, because all I really care about are all those people, you know, starving to death. The West needs to take an aggressive approach to making Afghanistan peaceful, if that's possible. In Serbia we left a bastard in power and solved little. In Afghanistan there's no room for pussyfooting around. Culture and religion are basically human mental constructs; death and hunger are real, and that needs to be the priority. I don't give a shit if Afghanistan has to become an official protectorate of the UN, providing there's peace and food.

In the US, on the other hand, there's peace and a lot more food than necessary. There's no excuse for contravening freedoms. In a country like Afghanistan you have to deal with the important stuff before bothering about who worships what. In the West there's no excuse. There's no state of war or emergency in America, simply because no amount of new laws, racist FBI policies or stupid fighter planes flitting about in New York are going to help matters. Terrorism will attack regardless, and will always find a way through. Pissing all over the Constitution of the United States of America, as Dubya Bush is doing, is going to solve nothing. Except, naturally, make the government more powerful.

Which brings us back to power. In essence, that's what this conflict is about, like every other conflict in history. The US have power, the terrorists don't. The terrorists take a tiny part of power from the US, who use it as an excuse to expand their own power. In their extreme stupidity, the terrorists thought they could take power from the US. Instead, after September the 11th the world is even more fucked up than before. It's true that for the Afghani people, life will be incredibly hard rather than impossible, and hopefully other Fundamentalist regimes will fall. But America is now not a very nice place to be if you decide to disagree with the President. The war is not over, because there was never a war in the first place.
 

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