Masopher's Mind

Southern Afghanistan is a harsh place. No I lie. Much of Pakistan, much of Afghanistan are harsh places, Southern Afghanistan is a desert that scarcely supports anything larger than insects. Except for one place. There is a sliver of land in Kandahar/Helmand which is a tight fan of green huddled around a river basin. This is where the sparse life manages to grow and this is where a lot of death exists. In this place, death and misery are grown on pretty poppy plants and shipped to Iran and through Turkey into the West. It also finds its way to Karachi and to the East or Dubai. In this place, young men from western nations die for a cause that they barely understand or in fact need to understand. Here young Afghans follow old Afghans and are joined by Pakistanis and Arabs to fight for honour and money. This is the green zone. It is the cradle of life and at the same time the shroud of death.

In this cradle, Brits fight for a young nation, one which will owe its gratitude and its existence to the NATO alliance that has shed so much red blood in the green fields and yellow dust.

I speak on Southern Afghanistan this week because of two significantly linked events:

Case 1: Helmand, Afghanistan 4th of November. A young man from a certain tribe feels bullied and ostrasized  fighting his countrymen for a cause that has yet to be satisfactorily conveyed. He begs to leave and is denied. Brain addled by opiates he picks up a belt fed squad assault AK-47 and opens fire firstly on his chief antagonist, his commander and then the philosophical reasons for his plight, the British troops present.

Case 2: less than a day later, Fort Hood,USA, the 5th of November. A slighly older man, a psychiatrist who happens to counsel the victims/perpetrators of the violence in the same region is feeling conflicted bullied and ostrecized. In a twist of fate the men he councils are at war with members of his religion and heritage. He has requested a transfer but cannot leave because beaurocracy and staff shortages continue to plague the military even in a recession. Brain addled by his opiates (religion, Americanism and sugary snacks) he picks up two field pistols and opens fire on soldiers about to be sent to Afghanistan and government officials.

The strain of the war that Americas troops and Afghans people must live in is great. In the atmosphere of ceaseless violence, radicalization becomes an option and death gives birth to even more killing, more insanity and more death.

Peace.

The other day I was teasing one of my Pakistani friends about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. What did he think Pakistan would do if 3 US warships pulled into Karachi harbour and Aabrams tanks started rolling towards Islamabad? Would they shoot at themselves? Wipe themselves off the map to save themselves?

He was a bit set back; the US is, after all, behind all things in the conspiratorially minded, but despite the ever present notional threat what would his country men do if thier suspicions were ever confirmed?

He then replied that Pakistan would spite the invading US forces by firing thier longest range missiles at Telaviv or Jerusalem. His solution was to bomb the Jews and kill the millions of Jewish and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. This is of course allowing a quick recalibrating of the missiles pointed at new Deli and Mumbai and a trouble free GPS guided flight to it’s maximum projected range over the four intervening states, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Jordan.

The commander in this scenario has now added attemped holocaust to his crimes and done nothing about the forces bearing down on his position. I say attempted because Israel in it’s own paranoia of Persian attack is probably well defended from missile attacks and seeing a missile from the east will almost certainly obliterate Tehran in response. So the commander has also essentially triggered the murder of millions of Iranians and scattered nuclear debris over Jordan and Iraq. The Muslim world east of Pakistan would come to a quick pause. And half the possible reinforcements against the American invader would be now dead or visible in the dark.

My solution would be less messy. My commander would fire at India, guarenteeing a sure retaliation which would obliterate American forces as well as the denizens they would be “liberating”. My friend and I are obviously not strategists because were this our actual policy, we would be first strike-d by American ICBMs or space based weapons long before we got any birds in the air.

I guess the moral of this story is the only reason for any country to have even one nuclear weapon is to turn it’s own region into a wasteland. “Attack us and we’ll make our place more worthless than it already is”. It’s like the story of the guy that goes to prison and eats and bathes in his own shit to deter potential rapists. I don’t think it ever occurs to him that consuming and wearing fecal matter may be more degrading than enjoying the strong rythmic pounding of a man who obviously values his fealty more than the system that put him there.

Maintaining a nuclear deterent is costly, cumbersome and worthless in the long run. Despite having the ability to vaporize the topsoil off the whole planet and darken the world for centuries, America and the UK with it’s me-too (second hand) Trident have not deterred hostile attacks state sponsored or otherwise. Developing nations which follow this dead end path prove only that they are mired in 19th century imperialist thinking and 20th century hand me downs. The only beneficiaries of nuclear proliferation are the people who have no country and no army to lose and everything to gain by the use of weapons of terror.

I’ll be totally honest with you. (For once!)<No Im kidding I’m almost always honest>{but then again…} I am feeling quite demotivated at work and I don’t know enough about webpages or SEO to make this site cool or attractive enough to get lots of viewers which might encourage me to write more.

I have a few stalkers and a few family members saying “hrmm good writing” but aside from the web statistics I dont get any feedback. So with afore mentioned negative feedback and work and no feedback here, I dont have the “umph!” to do that which I love, which is to do some real research and write poetic opinions on the world as it develops.

But I got sick of not writing or half writing something and decided to say something, which is better than nothing.

20 years ago, the Berlin wall came down. Socialism/communism failed mightily. And yet I encounter some very intelligent people blowing the trumpet of socialism, communism or both. Idealism aside, the proof of history surely can show that centralized control cannot work?

Its a great idea, a system that redistributes wealth to where it is needed most, a system where great masses of people are not locked into generations of poverty and ignorance for the sake of the enlightenment and enjoyment of the few.  An egalitarian system where each to his own according to his desires and talents and mankind goes forth with only progress competition and exploration as drivers…

But even that is idealistic. People will always take competition too far and it will result in conflict. and then again, the victor of conflict is in the long-run the one that can survive future conflicts and is that not progress and self exploration of dynamic systems. Nature is run by the survival of the fittest. Bodies with large mass pull bodies with small  mass harder that the other way around, the faster, smarter, fitter, more attractive animals survive and mate while the slower, dumber, unfit, less attractive ones die off.

The entire expanse of Russia, China, South Asia along with socialism minded sundry of the earth went up against the hardened capitalists of Western Europe and America and ultimately failed. The system that expanded over the world, fought fascism, monarchies kinships and dictatorships faced off against communism and won. It is not perfect, it is not fair, it is not gentle but because of it, 7 billion people now live to perhaps invent its worthy successor.

Capitalism is king of the hill, for now, and I will not mourn it when it is usurped. But props where props is due. It does well and it did a lot better for the people living under it than the alternatives we have seen through history. And when capitalism fails to the bright new challenger there will be some that will still study it and say how great it was and how with the right conditions it would have worked perfectly but that will just be history repeating itself.