A Surge of Enthusiasm in Afghanistan

On corruption, the scale of it is business as usual as far as the USA is concerned. Colossal levels of corruption have been the cost of backing the KLA in Kosovo, now a new model narco-state. US foreign policy operates by backing ruthless proxies who then get rewarded for supporting the US.

As Chaterjee makes plain in The Guardian today,

Abdul Hasin, who was given $100m for a variety of projects which he has not repaid. Hasin happens to be the half-brother of the vice president of the country, Mohammed Qasim Fahim.

A little less than a year ago, I visited the heavily guarded headquarters of Abdul Hasin's business conglomerate – Zahid Walid – in the wealthy Kabul neighbourhood of Wazir Akbar Khan, not far from the even more heavily fortified US embassy.

Neither Hasin nor Fahim were wealthy when the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, but as the de facto leader of the Northern Alliance, Fahim was perfectly placed to profit from the new opportunities created by the collapse of the Taliban.

Ramin Seddiqui, the managing director of the Zahid Walid's diesel import business, filled me in on how the business grew: first, a series of lucrative contracts to pour concrete for a Nato base, as well as portions of the US embassy being rebuilt in Kabul and the city's airport, which was in a state of disrepair.

Yet the level of corruption in Afghanistan is considered by Washington a price worth paying as it needs to bribe the warlords to be onside in order to be able to advance its interests, most obviously in finally getting the TAPI pipeline constructed in 2012. There is little doubt about that.

As John Foster wrote on September 3 2010,

Pipelines are more than commercial ventures. They are geopolitically important because they connect trading partners, and influence the regional balance of power. Turkmenistan’s natural gas can only get to market through pipelines. The Russians have a pipeline north to connect with a network serving Europe. The Chinese have a pipeline east, connecting with their network and going all the way to Shanghai.

The U.S. and European Union are moving to gain access or control. Former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski called such geopolitical jockeying “the grand chessboard.”

The Pentagon recently announced hard mineral discoveries in Afghanistan worth nearly $1-trillion. A spokesman said, “This is that whole economic arm that we talk about but gets very little attention.”

Absolutely.

The same that was true of Kosovo was true of Afghanistan: shoddy realpolitik cloaked with a humanitarian and ethical fig leaf. Just as Kosovo was crucially concerned with extending US hegemony into South East Europe, gaining stakes in Kosovo's minerals and guarding the AMBO pipeline, Afghanistan is about TAPI.

As well as those new resources discovered in Afghanistan providing an extra stimulus in "staying the course" as suddenly reported by the NYT on June 13 2010,

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.

“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.

“This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy,” said Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines.

American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan. The American-led offensive in Marja in southern Afghanistan has achieved only limited gains. Meanwhile, charges of corruption and favoritism continue to plague the Karzai government, and Mr. Karzai seems increasingly embittered toward the White House.

So the Obama administration is hungry for some positive news to come out of Afghanistan. Yet the American officials also recognize that the mineral discoveries will almost certainly have a double-edged impact.

Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.

The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain control of the resources.

Just last year, Afghanistan’s minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine.

The BBC also carried a report of the sudden discovery of these huge resources. Naturally, this was never tied to the issue of the official reason why NATO is in Afghanistan but only as news in so far as it offered a potential solution to the problem of Afghanistan's development. Even so, it was interesting.

Not least as it took the US media some three years to report the geologists discoveries collated back in 2007.

A joint team from the Pentagon, US Geological Service and USAID has calculated Afghanistan's mineral deposits are worth at least $900bn.

Geological surveys discovered large quantities of iron and copper as well as valuable deposits of lithium.

But questions are being asked about the timing of the release of information.

The details of a US Geological Service survey of the country were released in 2007. The US assessment of the worth of the deposits was completed in December last year.

The BBC's Jill McGivering says that at a time of growing despair about Afghanistan and its government, the portrayal of the country as a potential goldmine could help to bolster international resolve and paint the country as a prize worth fighting for.

Lithium is an increasingly vital resource, used in batteries for everything from mobile phones to laptops and key to the future of the electric car. Bolivia boasts the largest reserves.

President Hamid Karzai's spokesman, Waheed Omar, was quoted by news agency AP as saying: "The result of the survey ... has shown that Afghanistan has mineral resources worth $1 trillion.

"This is not an overall survey of all minerals in Afghanistan. Whatever has been found in this survey is worth $1tr."

The findings were made by the US Geological Survey under contract to the Afghan government, he said.

The New York Times cited an internal Pentagon memo which said Afghanistan could become "the Saudi Arabia of lithium".

There are already plans to exploit mineral wealth in Afghanistan with Chinese backing for a copper mine at Aynak in Logar province.

Don't Mention the TAPI Pipeline.

"Protecting pipelines is first and foremost a national responsibility. And it should stay like that. NATO is not in the business of protecting pipelines. But when there's a crisis, or if a certain nation asks for assistance, NATO could, I think, be instrumental in protecting pipelines on land".

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, former NATO Secretary General, January 2009.

It might have been thought that the tenth anniversary of 2001 September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the subsequent decade of failed military intervention in Afghanistan would have led to a better perspective on the aims and objectives of the War in Afghanistan.

Yet ten years on most media still will not uncover the facts beneath the propaganda and explain to the public why NATO is in Afghanistan. Why British troops have died in such numbers in Helmand province. Why so many Afghans and increasingly Pakistanis have had to die.

Whilst drawing attention to the contradiction between most of Obama's stated intentions and the absence of any action in closing down Guantanamo Bay, stopping the practice of "extraordinary rendition", suspending habeus corpus in the case of "terrorist suspects", Michael Boyle in the Guardian provides no indication why.

The truth is that the "War on Terror" after 9/11 2001 was part of an attempt to exploit the attacks as a pretext to implement a foreign policy based on military intervention in lands whose occupation would lead to once and for all changes in the regime and guarantee US global hegemony.

Obama is the simply the inheritor of that foreign policy and in line with his foreign policy mentor Zbigniew Brzezinski regarded both the placement of the missile shield in Europe ( though not its complete cancellation as a project ) and the invasion of Iraq as mistakes.

Apart from that the goal of ensuring hegemony through control of oil and gas continues. Afghanistan has been interpreted consistently in the light of taking it for granted that it was about a War on Terror, Freedom for Women, Humanitarian Aid, Liberal Intervention and so on.

President Obama has in some respects proven more willing to use force against terrorist suspects than President Bush. He has increased the number of CIA-run drone strikes in the Afghanistan and Pakistan border region. These strikes, while effective in targeting militants, have killed an unknown number of civilians.

They have been waged in the shadows, without public acknowledgment and without clear lines of authority or control inside government. By expanding the number and geographic reach of these strikes – first deeper into Pakistan, then onto Yemen – the Obama administration may be inadvertently stirring hornet's nests that will generate even more terrorist attacks on the United States.

Not only has the war through Drones been enacted "in the shadows" , the pipeline of which one dare not speak its name in the mainstream media has also been cast into the shadows, despite it being mentioned explicitly by Brzezinski as a key interest and the fact the TAPI runs through Kandahar.

That's where most British troops have died in 2010. Its centrality as a NATO War aim has been studied in detail by John Foster, an eminent academic and petro-economist and seen as crucial by Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation. It is routinely mentioned as a war aim in the writings of think tanks.

Foster wrote in The Globe and Mail on 3rd September 2010 of the Disconnect between Pipelines and Transparency,

Terrorism is still touted as a reason for the Western presence in Afghanistan, but economic development is increasingly emphasized. Afghanistan occupies a strategic piece of real estate: It shares borders with Iran and Turkmenistan, two countries with immense petroleum reserves. George Krol, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, told Congress last year that one U.S. priority in Central Asia is “to increase development and diversification of the region’s energy resources and supply routes.”

A new study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Johns Hopkins University advocates that Afghanistan become a regional hub for transportation, electricity and the TAPI pipeline. An endorsement by General David Petraeus, the American commander in Afghanistan, asserts: “Sound strategy demands the use of all the instruments of power.”

The study claims: “Today, the U.S. is paying the salaries of all Afghan soldiers and civil servants.” Under these circumstances, how can the Afghan government make independent decisions? The Pentagon recently announced hard mineral discoveries in Afghanistan worth nearly $1-trillion. A spokesman said, “This is that whole economic arm that we talk about but gets very little attention.”

In March, G8 foreign ministers agreed that “military-only responses” are insufficient, and that “solutions must include support for development.” They endorsed a new initiative to facilitate infrastructure projects referenced by Pakistan and Afghanistan. Their joint declaration included the planned TAPI pipeline, but it was not mentioned publicly.

Western politicians rarely talk openly about pipelines or trade routes. After visiting Afghanistan in May, German president Horst Köhler created a hullabaloo with a statement that linked German military deployment and trade routes. He resigned, and claimed later he was referring to sea routes, not Afghanistan.

Planning for the TAPI pipeline continues, despite security concerns. The Asian Development Bank, the project sponsor, is an international development bank whose members include the U.S., Canada and several other NATO countries with troops in Afghanistan.

Any bank financing for the project requires the approval of member countries. With such a heavy military presence, U.S./NATO influence on Kabul is obvious. The same countries are making military and development decisions.

TAPI is a multibillion-dollar project, and the Afghanistan National Development Strategy includes plans for 1,000 industrial units along the pipeline route. Who will provide security?

The continuation of the myth that Afghanistan and the drone attacks in Pakistan are part of a deficient and heavy handed "War on Terror" are comforting myths: the reality is that US foreign policy is about getting the TAPI pipeline built, despite the contention of Conor Foley that there was no evidence.

In fact the evidence is voluminous. The Guardian urgently needs to get columnists who will challenge the official claims about a "War on Terror" and put the record straight, so that the public really understands what is at stake in Afghanistan beyond spin, dissimulation and evasions.

Bibliography

John Foster, Afghanistan, the TAPI Pipeline, and Energy Geopolitics Journal of Energy Security March 3 2010.

John Foster, The Disconnect between Pipelines and Transparency The Globe and Mail September 3 2010.

John Foster and Millie Morton, Afghanistan, the Pipeline, and Politics The Peace Magazine April-June 2010 Volume 26.

John Foster, Pipeline Through a Troubled Land, Foreign Policy Series, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, June 19 2008

New Atheist Missionaries-Nick Cohen and A C Grayling

... behind many of the demands of today's religious apologists that we "respect" Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and even the Scientology cult lies a desire to keep the plebs in their place by protecting their ridiculous but politically useful beliefs.

Nick Cohen's interpretation of religion in The Observer is confused. For a start he keeps conflating the absence of religion with atheism when much of Hindu thought is, in fact, atheist and where the absence of traditional religion hardly means that societies are "atheist" as opposed to merely secular.

In secular societies, religion can continue to exist as secularism is historically an outgrowth of Christianity. It means that temporal and spiritual power is to be separated. Despite claiming not to be a "militant atheist", Cohen's creed does depend on a belief system that makes fantastical claims.

The idea that a society free of religion is necessarily better than one with it ignores the extent to which all societies can have a plurality of value systems that can coexist without conflict and have dome so for generations. Some trends in religious based thought are illiberal and intolerant. Some are not.

Islamism is a "political creed" and an ideology. It has not arisen directly out of traditional Islamic teaching in all cases and the versions of Islamism which preach apocalypse and terror and modernistic in believing that the world will be saved by destroying what are considered the destroyers of Muslim lands-the degenerate West and its oil intensive economies.

The notion that by changing people's beliefs one can change behaviour is a conceit entertained by those whose secularism and atheism derives from the more intolerant elements of religious thought and that all societies everywhere are converging towards or should be compelled by Progress to do so.

This is a myth with no more evidence to back it up than a religious faith. Since the high point of secular thought in the 1970s, religion has returned to many parts of the globe. This has annoyed those who so confidently predicted its demise and those who think like Cohen that it has spread by cowardly "appeasement".

The fall back explanation as why the inevitable has not happened is that religion is simply prescribed for the plebs by the powerful, a conceit that can only be held by those who actually hold to the snobbish idea themselves that the masses are blinkered and mentally shackled by religion.

Not all of those who condemn atheism are pious themselves, as the presence of journalists among their number suggests. Rather, they believe in piety for the masses and fear that without religion the lower orders will lose their moral bearings.

Along with Nick Cohen, the most dreary proponent of this kind of thinking is A C Grayling, who takes up Bertrand Russell's conviction in internationalism and militant Enlightenment but without his wit and with a shrill moralistic tone and the faith in the victory of the progressive intelligentsia that Russell lacked.

John Gray wrote witheringly of A C Grayling's obsession with removing the mental shackles and "fear" inculcated by religion showing, it becomes actually more obvious that the fear of the deluded masses is behind the anxiety of the secular and atheist intelligensia, as the philosophy preaches ,

...the same sermon: history is a record of crime, oppression and superstition; but salvation is at hand through rational inquiry, the gift of the Greeks that was lost in the Dark Ages and rediscovered in the Enlightenment.

Repeating this as Grayling does, over and over again, suggests that he believes the lesson has still not been understood, and throughout his extensive corpus of polemical writings he has the manner of a querulous teacher hammering rudimentary lessons into the heads of refractory schoolchildren.

For Grayling, it seems, few if any of the difficulties of ethics and politics are insoluble. The remedies for human ills are obvious, or would be so if only humans were not blinded by superstition. Never doubting that he is free of this vice, Grayling writes as one conveying the simple truth.

The notion that atheism in free societies will necessarily create better ones has no evidence to back it up: Sweden's social democracy might well have much to do with its peaceful and tolerant evolution in the twentieth century, if the experiments in eugenics are ignored, the kind once supported by the Fabian Society and progressives.

Yet that has much to do with Sweden's history, it granting of aid due to the guilt at having remained neutral when faced with Nazism in World War Two and the desire to expiate it through well meaning actions. It has little to do with atheism as such. And its secularism derives from its pietistic Lutheran inheritance.

Cohen lumps together under "religion" the beliefs and practices of states and regimes whose religions are as different as Sweden's secular society is from the USSR or other unfree atheist states where religion was proscribed by the state.

Saudi Arabia uses its petrodollars to promote its brutal Wahhabi theology

That is, the petrodollars the elite gets from the West's over dependence upon Saudi oil and which props up the consumer society that grew up in the post war period in the West where religion was eclipsed by consumption and entertainment. This trend had nothing to do with people accepting atheism.

Atheism did not persuade many in Britain philosophically in the 1960s and 1970s. Religion of the traditional type, especially Non-Conformism, simply in the context of British culture became irrelevant and dated. The Church of England was never that influential, especially in the cities.

Yet one argument that disproves the idea that atheism necessarily produces better and more rational people in a free society is the level of support given by both prominent religious fundamentalists and militant secular progressives to the invasion of Iraq ( e.g Hitchens, Berman, Michnik, et al )

When atheists criticised the Iraq War, as Dawkins did ) they did not emphasise the fact it was an oil grab but, curiously, tended to opine that Bush was a frenzied idiot and a messianic tub thumping fundamentalist, despite the absence of that from the thinking of most neoconservatives.

Likewise with Afghanistan. It takes much religious faith will the belief to an almost hallucinogenic degree that it was a "humanitarian war" on the part of the US government as opposed to a geopolitically calculated invasion to get a pipeline built, advance US power in Central Asia and win the War on Drugs.

Those like Peter Bracken who delude themselves with the theology that there is correct consciousness of those who see the wars as stridently part of Good against Evil are unaware of the scale of the rationalisation that even secular thinkers and atheists will put up to avoid confronting reality.

When bien pensants such as Grayling have indulged in spasms of indignation about Iraq they only went into print to condemn General Dannatt for proclaiming his religious faith and that it was irrelevant to the military and his mission.

......if General Sir Richard Dannatt were genuinely and fully consistent in his views as an evangelical Christian, he would not be a general or indeed any kind of soldier (except a "Christian soldier" in the meaning of the hymn).

His trade is war, war involves killing, the rather thin ethics of the founder of his faith implies pacifism and explicitly demands turning the other cheek rather than shooting and bombing: and so we see what professions of faith are really worth, in the long tradition of bishops blessing tanks.

But it is no surprise to find inconsistency and hypocrisy among the bulwarks of faith, and the general might share views about the good that the profession of killing does (not least, one supposes, to those who deserve it) with the crusaders and Torquemada and other more vigorous theorisers of what faith licenses and requires.

That will not make his views less inconsistent or unpalatable, but at least less hypocritical.

If so, then it was hardly pertinent for Grayling to bother commenting on that and claiming that it was inconsistent for a Christian to kill as opposed, presumably, it is for an atheist. If so, then at least some consideration as to why Iraq was invaded or whether it was a Just War could have been offered.

Grayling sententiously opined,

Members of the armed services have volunteered for a hazardous profession. It is remarkable and admirable how much courage and dedication they display, and how much sacrifice they make - so hackneyed, these terms, yet far more true than hackneyed, which is why they always bear repeating - in the execution of the duties they have been rigorously trained to perform.

Their duty, courage and sacrifice belongs to the army and through it the country; what they think about matters of value, life and death belongs to themselves.

It was odd that Grayling castigated a man as a hypocritical killer if he was a religious man in a war, a view held by some Christians such as the Quakers, but as admiral, dedicated and courageous in doing a duty so long as they do not proclaim any religious feeling or what they think.

If "matters of value" do not matter, then soldiers could not appeal to conscience in opposing torture. Unless, rather like Christopher Hitchens they come close to rationalising the need for torture because the "Islamofascist" opponents in Afghanistan do not play by the rules of the Geneva Convention.

Nothing General Dannatt said comprimised his ability as a general: he had a duty to do and Grayling as a "free thinker" was in a position to look at why it was that troops were in Iraq being killed and towards what ends: they were not religious but secular and based on what its authors considered a rational geopolitical scheme

The hypocrisy was more a quality evident in Grayling than Dannatt, that of avoiding such a question or looking at the ethics of invading nations to control their oil and hence maintain the profligate Great Car Society and consumerism that makes the invasion of such nations necessary was never considered.

Blair contended that he is a man of faith and clearly this "faith" is yet another rationalisation for his messianic idea that force can be used as the midwife of history, to rid the globe of Evil Forces and put the oil under the control of benign powers who make it work for the Good of All.

In that sense religion was merely the extension of Machiavelli: that is of political expediency, of being seen to have all the Christian or religious virtues, including praising the Quran and setting up TheTonyBlairFaithFoundation ( supported by Coca Cola ) whilst departing from its teachings for gain.

None of that ever seems to penetrate into the awareness of those preaching Britain's global mission to root out and defeat Jihadi Islamists or Islamosfascists everywhere as if it was a threat to the West comparable to Hitler's Nazi Germany and the USSR during the Cold War, a "seamless totalitarian threat".

Cohen and Hitchens were quite clear that "liberal interventionism", the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were a moral cause against fanatical religious based fundamentalist fanatics at home and abroad. Those like Grayling provide the unwitting rationalisation for such global crusade too through their ideology.

One reason for that is Grayling denies that the crimes of the twentieth century totalitarian regimes had anything to do with atheism. John Gray put this faith to rest thus,

The worst acts of the twentieth century were committed by atheist regimes that claimed a scientific basis for their policies. This fact is mentioned nowhere in Grayling's dictionary, and throughout his writings he is adamant in denying that the crimes of Nazism and Communism had anything to do with atheism. Instead, he asserts, they were due to the repressive character of the regimes.

He advances this proposition as something like an a priori truth, which may be prudent as it is certainly not supported by historical evidence.

Lenin and Stalin made plain, in both words and deeds, that the destruction of religion was essential to the achievement of their goals. A type of atheism was at the core of the Communist project, and the same was true of Nazism. Both made concessions to religion when circumstances dictated-Stalin during the Second World War, Hitler in his cultivation of "German Christianity" and his overtures to the Vatican.

They also concocted state cults-around Lenin in the USSR, and around Hitler and an ersatz paganism in Nazi Germany. (A similar pattern was evident in Maoist China.) The long-term aim remained the extermination of every variety of traditional religion-a goal that could only be realized by repressive means.

.....Anyone who remembers British left-liberal opinion as it was in the seventies will immediately recognize it here. Socialism and democracy, the horrors of religion and the near inevitability of ongoing secularization-these ephemera of a half-forgotten past are presented as ruling ideas of the twenty-first century.

The Taxpayer's Alliance and the Tea Party Movement

As a land with forthrightly "Atlanticist" orientation, it was bound to be the case that the latest idiot populist movement from the USA was going to come to Britain. The Guardian reported, on Thursday 9 September 201o that,

British anti-tax campaigners are taking advice from leaders of the rightwing Tea Party movement in the US in a bid to import the mass-protest techniques that have seen a million activists march on Washington DC to call for lower taxes and smaller government.

The Taxpayers' Alliance, an influential campaign group that calls for tax cuts and low government spending, is being advised by Freedom Works, a powerful Washington organisation credited with helping to destabilise the Obama administration through its mobilisation of 800,000 grassroots activists.

Libertarian US Tea Party organisations attended a conference in London today to share tactics with British and European taxpayer lobby groups, and described their activities as "an insurgent campaign" against their government's tax and spending policies.

The move reflects an increasing desire within rightwing circles to establish a British version of the Tea Party "uprising", and a growing belief that expected union action against the coalition government's programme of cuts could be harnessed to mobilise vocal counter-demonstrations.

This pseudo-populist initiative is essentially a media creation and a perfect example of what the future might hold as regards staged revolutions choreographed by huge corporate interests who can dominate the media agenda and co-opt politicians who then can pretend they are "reacting" to the "will of the people".

There is nothing unusual about the Tea Party proselytising for "Freedom" in the UK as Freedom Works, the organisation behind the Tea Party, has been endorsed by those wonderful exponents of American Freedom and intellectual fire power everywhere, the Bush Family.

"Folks, you've got to get to know this organization ... They have been doing a great job all over the country educating people."

-President George W. Bush

To be endorsed by this dimwit should be the kiss of death as far as the notion of educating the folks is concerned, though Bush II was not entirely as cretinous as he tried to portray himself, even if Sarah Palin seems to represent a new departure here.

In Britain, there is no reason why the Taxpayers Alliance will not be supported by those like Richard Littlejohn and given coverage by Sky News just as Bush and his regime was backed by Fox News, both of which are owned by Rupert Murdoch, a key donor to the Tea Party, though he has publicly lied about not supporting it.

A key figure is Steve Forbes, the businessman and "libertarian thinker" who was a signatory to the Project for the New American Century and very much an Establishment figure, having worked for Radio Free Europe during the Cold War. He is on the Board of Directors at Freedom Works.

As Freedom Works states,

In addition to FreedomWorks Foundation, Mr. Forbes serves on the boards of The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, the Heritage Foundation and The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He is on the Board of Overseers of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and on the Board of Visitors for the School of Public Policy of Pepperdine University. He served on the Board of Trustees of Princeton University for ten years.

Such a figure as Forbes means that the Tea Party and Taxpayers Alliance are not simply as comical as those in Britain would assume: these are media men practised in the dark arts of spin, dissimulation and media manipulation. They wield power and influence and intend to spread it cynically.

A close pal of Forbes is David "Axis of Evil" Frum who wrote for Forbes Magazine. Forbes has media outlets in "New Europe" such as Latvia and Poland where flat tax rates have been introduced or posited for the future in Poland's case.

The presence of the Tea Party in China might have something to do with the fact Forbes set up with Fosun Media, one of China’s largest private conglomerates. monthly publication in February 2003. He has set up media in Romania and Turkey as well to advance his interests.

"You guys are everywhere."
- Florida Governor Jeb Bush

Freedom Works supports a number of policies that coincide with Cameron's New-ConDem regime in Britain, including offering more "choice" in schools ( i.e the involvement of business and the private corporations ) of the sort proposed by the neoconservative chump Michael Gove ( writer for Murdoch's Times ).

This is the very Michael Gove who argued recently that,

I believe in value for money. It is maybe a concept that was alien to the last government and it may not be a concept that the BBC would like to see applied to public expenditure, but I believe that it is important that the taxpayer gets protection for the money that it spent on his or her behalf.

Naturally, whilst the Tea Party and Taxpayers Alliance are against taxes, this libertarian agenda is curiously absent when it comes to supporting militarism and the military industrial complex as well as supporting "state intervention" in Iraq.

Hardly surprising, as the Tea Party is bankrolled by Murdoch, supported by Forbes and Koch Industries, those heavily involved in the oil industry

Jane Mayer ran an article in The New Yorker which according to one source in the NYT,

... found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron.

Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

These guys are everywhere. And soon in one form or another they will be over here, constantly meddling in the affairs of the UK, promoting the interests of those like Murdoch and a crude version of neoliberalism of "libertarian" anarcho-capitalism of a very authoritarian and nasty kind.

The Taxpayer's Alliance is, in reality, the alliance of the super rich and an extension of the US nationalism, the best democracy money can buy and very little to do with the principle of "no taxation without representation". If little people feel they are not already represented, then the cynical idea is that taxation should only go on "defence".

Yet, as foreign policy under the Bush II regime proved, in practice this means the collossal expenditure on military hardware and war, some 21% of the USA's total amount.

Needless to say, there are no indication that cuts are supported here or in carbon emissions, not least as in the UK the TPA is supported by big oil and "climate sceptic" Nigel Lawson.

Pipe Dreams in Afghanistan

"The most unpleasant truth in the long run is a far safer traveling companion than the most agreeable falsehood." Emerson

More and more evidence, if more were needed, that the construction of the TAPI pipeline is the central objective of the Afghanistan War exists for those who are prepared to put two and two together to make four instead of five as most windbag columnists in the mainstream media are willing to do.

The Economic Times of India reported on 28 Aug, 2010, TAPI to bring significant economic benefit to the region: US.

US has welcomed the proposal of tran-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAPI), running through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India - saying that this would bring significant economic and political benefit to the region.

If realized, the "TAPI pipeline could bring significant economic and political benefits to the region," a senior Administration official told PTI.

The official was responding to questions on news reports that leaders of Turkmenistan and Afghanistan would meet in New York next month to discuss TAPI project, to which the countries of the region have agreed to.

Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, said in Kabul this week that he would meet his Turkmenistan counterpart Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session to discuss the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India natural gas pipeline.

The official, however, said US is not aware of the details of the agreement.

"We understand that there are many issues that need to be addressed before the project can be implemented," the official said.

First proposed in 1995, it was originally called TAP or Trans-Afghan Pipeline but with Pakistan and India now involved it was renamed TAPI.

The gas pipeline would stretch 1,043 miles from Turkmenistan's Dauletabad gas field to the northwestern Indian town of Fazilka.

The USD 3.3 billion pipeline's annual throughput of 33 billion cubic metres will be delivered to consumers in Pakistan and India after transiting Afghanistan.

The project is expected to generate revenue to Afghanistan.

Despite the fact that security in Afghanistan has been a key deterrent for the project to take off, US has been supportive of the project, as this would bring much needed revenue to Afghanistan.

Simultaneously, the US has been opposed to the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, as such a project, it believes, would help Iran economically.

Not one peep has been heard in the British press as to the real reason why British troops are dying in Helmland nor what has been at stake. Yet in most economic newspapers or energy industry information outlets it has been reported for a long time.

Yet here in the Economic Times reporting it as clearly as day as established fact whilst this is not considered worthy of news. There is little hope if no politician nor leading journalist is prepared to discuss what is really at stake in Afghanistan.

The absurdity of this revolves around why, if at all, the government in Britain, all politicians in Parliament and mainstream media commentators simply never admit the centrality of the TAPI. Why is sending troops out to die for a pipeline not considered good for people to know ?

It is simply common knowledge in India that one of the key objectives of the Afghanistan War is concerned with the TAPI pipeline, not just as a means of controlling Turkmenistan's gas and diversification of pipeline routes but also as a way of isolating and containing Iran's interests.

Naturally, the claim of the US spokesman that the US does not know the details of the agreement is mendacious as they have known since the 2008 Asian Bank agreement to fund the TAPI pipeline that it will be built when the area is finally secured.

That is, if southern Afghanistan is secured. Yet that the TAPI is central to the reason why Afghanistan is still being fought can no longer be in doubt. Then again it has been known for a long time

Yet that is only clear with virtually no Al Qaida left in Afghanistan and the illogicality of the official versions of truth put out by the British government that Afghanistan is about helping Afghanistan's women, despite Karzai's regime supporting the right of men to rape their wives.

After all as the Turkmenistan.ru reported, the TAPI gas pipeline has been designed by British company Penspen, so obviously British companies are benefiting from the business of war of "enlightened self interest" and "liberal intervention".

The usual retort that the pipeline was first mooted back in the 1990s with the Taliban in power is often held up as a weak argument that the USA did not invade Afghanistan only to build a pipeline, which misses the point completely.

the USA did not invade Afghanistan only to secure a pipeline but the prospect of a pipeline was a central part of consolidating its geopolitical ambition in Central Asia as well as securing the country against what was believed to be the threat of Al Qaida post 9/11 2001.

The problem is that whenever the TAPI pipeline is mentioned it is supposed that it is an attempt to demean the possible idealism of those wanting the Afghan people to have a better life, even if that somehow coincides with Western energy interests.

The assumption is that only paranoid "Marxoid" left wingers who just hate the USA more than they do the Taliban could conceivably hold to such a view when, in fact, it has nothing to do with being some sneering Leninist bitter at the defeat of the Soviet Union there by 1989.

That is not to say that such types do not exist: Seumas Milne, one time editor of The Guardian who refers to the Taliban as a "resistance" movement, as if these psychopathic thugs were somehow heroic, is the epitomy of such a person who gets a thrill from the West "losing".

The reality remains though that the TAPI is the one persistent geopolitical objective that the NATO forces are there to procure, having invested billions of dollars and men in the occupation it would be humiliating to pull out without having achieved anything.

The fact remains though that the war in Afghanistan is not winnable for a number of reasons, most obviously the sheer demand for drugs such as opium negating any such attempt to suppress the opium crop: the higher prices and demand will always make it lucrative.

This is precisely why the TAPI is seen as all the more crucial in bringing investment into what has been termed a "failed state" but which will never be able to replace the money made by poor opium farmers as it would only put money and power in the hands of the powerful.

As the New Europe Journal reported on August 22 2010 ( TAPI pipeline across Afghanistan gains momentum ),

.....the ever-warring Afghanistan is a link in the chain of this transnational project. To it, TAPI could mean five billion cubic meters of gas for internal needs and $300 million of transit profits. That, in turn, could create certain employment and source-of-income opportunities for Afghanistan’s eleven million unemployed.

There are two important “buts” in the TAPI project, though: the unstable situation in Afghanistan and the complex Pakistan-India relationship. These “buts”, however, are counterbalanced by just as weighty arguments.

The richness of Afghanistan resources is a known fact today. These riches can completely cross out the country’s “drug specialization” and provide huge profits to investors from totally peaceful businesses.

Speaking at the Kabul International Conference on Afghanistan, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the country’s explored natural resources alone were estimated at $3 trillion.

In his bilateral meeting in Kabul with the OSCE Chair-in-Office, State Secretary and Foreign Minister of Kazakhstan Kanat Saudabayev, Karzai noted Kazakhstan’s experience in exploration and transport of resources, especially in the oil and gas sector, was very important for his country.

The second “but” is the Pakistan-India relationship. But here, too, experts believe, a compromise can be found, driven by a future energy hunger.

Also, Afghanistan’s important partner, the United States, is supporting TAPI, and the Asian Bank of Development is willing to fund the project. It is no coincidence that straight after his visit to Astana earlier this summer, US Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy Richard Morningstar flew to Ashgabat.

In a meeting with the Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, the White House’s envoy said that the US was ready to provide extensive support to Turkmenistan’s planned major energy projects.

The high US official also had a number of meetings at the Ministry of Oil and Gas Industry and Mineral Resources of Turkmenistan, the State Agency for Managing and Use of Hydrocarbon Resources, and at the state concern Turkmengas.

No sooner had Morningstar left for home, the technical group of this grandiose project held its regular meeting in the Turkmen capital.

The Turkmenistan newspaper reported in this connection that the meeting “discussed a number of specific technical aspects of implementation of the earlier agreements, to step up the joint activities.”

The article emphasized once again that all the four countries would benefit from the project: Turkmenistan – as the supplier of gas, Pakistan and India – for their economies’ energy needs, and Afghanistan – as a consumer and transit state.

The Turkmen paper referred to the TAPI project none other than “a new grandiose energy bridge of global importance.”

There can be no more denial of the importance of the TAPI pipeline. But only greater discussion as to the continuation of a war based on contradictory objectives, where the War on Drugs ensures that the idea that the TAPI project will cancel out drug cultivation is a delusion.

Videogame Nasties are Less Nasty than the Reality.

The apparently humorous columnist Marina Hyde of The Guardian has criticised Dr Liam Fox for suggesting that video games in which players can select to play the Taliban in combat mode is dangerous and unpatriotic.

Yet the subtitle of the article If Liam Fox can rant over a videogame it's no wonder we're losing the war, tends to imply that Afghanistan just could be a war that might be won but for the comic stupidity of those responsible for directing it.

"Dr Fox appears to have surpassed even his own exacting standards of idiocy this week, by calling for a forthcoming video game set in Afghanistan to be banned.

Though the latest Medal of Honor is essentially a first-person shooter following US troops as they seek to crush the Taliban, players can take the role of the enemy in its multiplayer mode. "It's shocking that someone would think it acceptable to recreate the acts of the Taliban," Fox fumed showily. "I am disgusted and angry. It's hard to believe any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game."

The response from the game's manufacturer is pityingly understated. "Most of us have been doing this since we were seven," it runs. "Someone plays the cop, someone must be the robber. In Medal of Honor multiplayer, someone must be the Taliban."

It's vaguely troubling, isn't it, that the press officer for a games company has an infinitely more rational take on the Afghan war than the secretary of state for defence. In fact, the whole business forces a call to the MoD.

Condemnation of Dr Liam Fox is easy. For he is merely playing part in a role play game himself. It's obvious that Afghanistan is being fought for grand geopolitical interests that are considered too complex for the British oligarchy to explain to the plebs. The TAPI pipeline.

To admit British troops are dying for that is never on the news, not an aim considered worthy of dying for, even if this banal reality is the only factor that explains why British troops are out there. For the "war on terror" or some heroic greater cause.

Hence a bit of fake outrage about "patriotism" is entirely in order and entirely predictable in relation to a video game as Fox has to put the mantra forward that this is a real war in in the patriotic interest of defending the country against" evil enemies" Not about a pipeline.

Fox is thus not "idiotic". He is just maintaining the propaganda line in the long war to preserve the Western resource conflict that allows Marina Hyde to be able to enjoy her high standard of living in a consumer society. The hypocrisy runs deep. Few of us are not implicated.

Yet as usual the easy line from smug "liberal" journalists is that it is only the Establishment that is stupid and not the Fourth Estate which comes across as just as idiotic in failing to grasp what is really at stake in politicians devoting time to the trivial.

The problem with most media commentator is that they are largely superflous, adding nothing to helping people understand the way the world actually works, adding more media to media and spinning off words into the void.

Politicians are not "stupid" and often know what they are doing. Liam Fox's comments on video games seem trivial but what seems trivial often has a serious subtext to it that it should be the job of real journalists to interpret.

Liam Fox's comment on video games reveal the fact that there is virtually no examination of the underlying reality of what on earth the War in Afghanistan is really about in the media, which tends to just lead to the received opinion that this war is "stupid".

A war which is continually assessed according to whether it advances "liberal" or "humanitarian" agendas as if that was a given fact because it is the explicit aim given by politicians and "think tank" experts is itself stupid whilst the war is not.

A war for geopolitical hegemony in Central Asia and for the construction of the pipeline to integrate Afghanistan into these designs to give NATO the upper hand in controlling the competition for natural resources, that is the flow of gas from Turkmenistan, is "rational".

Rational in the sense that it is an objective that is considered attainable and desirable as part of a military and economic plan that is amenable to examination on the basis of the ambitions and interests of the contending players beyond the spin and "narrative" as officially stated.

Of course, rationalisations for war can be quite irrational when broken down by a searching and forensic analysis. What is really irrational is the spectacle of a civilisation intent on pursuing illusory ends according to objectives that simply cannot be met.

University Degrees-The Myth of the Necessary Benefits of University Education.

It's that tedious time of the year again when A-Level results come out and the annual ritual of damning them for being easier or praising students for being more hard working will appear in the media again.

Pictures of banal students jumping for joy with pseudo-ecstatic expressions on their vacuous faces will be splashed on the front pages as they grab those grades which will, it is thought, put them in good stead for the future, as if by emphasising it, it will necessarily become true.

Unfortunately, this con trick is waring thin. But willing self delusion is the order of the day in most aspects of contemporary life in 2010. From ramping up grades or massive levels of debt and spending money on the consumer goods that alone define people's identity and well being.

The fact is that A Levels have become easier in the last two decades, that pupils do work harder and, above all, that ultimately neither trends really matter that much because the nature of British society no longer needs intelligent and sceptical individuals anyway.

It needs those with the ability to channel intelligence towards pre-set agendas, to be a "mental proletarian" in a bland suit who fits his knowledge to the advertising creeds, mission statements and the imperative to manipulate others to buy new goods and new experiences.

For Britain's forte in PR, advertising, selling "heritage", travel and tourism means that arts degrees are themselves hardly worth much in themselves any more. Our civilisation no longer values those willing to ask questions about the way we live.

This is the essence of Bullshit Britain.

J G Ballard had it right when he wrote, "Professional qualifications are worth nothing—an arts degree is like a diploma in origami." In the bland jargon of neoliberal drones, a degree is a "signal" in the labour market that a person has "transferable skills" in analysing data.

Yet without showing the correct consciousness in using higher order skills to rigid and one dimensional lower order ends ( marketing trash nobody really needs and "selling yourself" like a whore in the marketplace ) a person cannot get very far.

Degrees are merely a sop to the middle class opinion that our civilisation is based on liberal values when it is highly dubious that this is the reality or that many liberals who are not blinded by concupiscence can actually believe this without willing self delusion.

Not least when the myth of the advantages of higher education are set against a totalising consumer society where everything and everybody is dehumanised into a pure commodity and set of generic attributes.

The cult of the CV started off that, another import from the USA which reduces a person to a smooth and blandly functional mechanism where sceptical intelligence is feared, and where job applicants are required to answer doltish questions such as "If you could be a fruit what would you choose to be ?".

The "Knowledge Economy" is largely a myth. It consists of people transferring bits of information, exchanging it, and being able to manipulate money supplies, promote think tank thinking for a future of resource wars to prop up consumerism, and getting consumers to consume.

Most students lack any sense of being able to ask searching questions about their own society and the meaninglessness of their lives, as they brag about how pissed and stoned they were last night or else in fetishising the latest lame pop group to grind out banal music and paltry lyrics.

A-Levels have been relentlessly dumbed down and the public life cretinised: to exercise a free and sceptical intelligence that university education once gave is to make yourself a social pariah.

The art of conversation must too be dumbed down to the level of "exchanging" platitudes and attitudes.That is, where conversation still exists as people "connect" through Facebook and as the quality of experience of lived life dwindles and diminishes

Those sickened at British society only need to have the strength of mind to sit out the last declining years of our civilisation by trying to make sense of it, record it and analyse the reasons why.

This needs no degree but just a real degree of personal integrity to sit it out and see it for what it is. Those jumping for joy and tizzy schoolgirls can celebrate whilst they can in light of the fact that even with degrees, they face a more hostile, meaningless and difficult life ahead.

The cruelty and idiocy lies in creating false expectations and turning A Level and university placement in to such a hullaballoo, as if any of it really mattered to anyone but them and their parents obsessed with status

There was none of this fuss in the 1970s and 1980s when A Levels were still a real qualification. In 2010 the only thing that can be said is that the penalty of not having this qualification or a degree sometimes outweighs the effort of getting them.

In itself, however, the attainment of qualifications is meaningless and the need to find meaning in the meaningless accounts for the hysteria as it is intended in a society driven by hype to drown out deeper considerations of why such attainment is considered actually useful.

The more empty the achievement, the more the mind numbing upbeat boosterism, as with so many other aspects of a fake economy driven by nothing but the hallucinogenic qualities of a society dominated by credit fuelled booms and transient candy floss consumer fads.

Shaping Up for Things To Come

‘… could consumerism turn into fascism? The underlying psychologies aren’t all that far removed from one another. If you go into a huge shopping mall and you’re looking down the parade, it’s the same theatrical aspect: these disciplined ranks of merchandise, all glittering like fascist uniforms. When you enter a mall, you are taking part in a ceremony of affirmation, which you endorse just by your presence.’

J G Ballard The Guardian, 14 June 2008.

Though this picture of shop workers limbering up in perfect unison along the aisles of a store in the Beijing Shopping Centre is something that does not happen at the moment, this appalling sight in today's free "newspaper" Metro had me thinking that something like this could come to Britain in the near future.

The novelist J G Ballard mused increasingly on the theme of whether consumerism could lead to a sterile world of perfection not least in his last novel Kingdom Come. This a theme I've become obsessed with not least because Ballard's writing was unknown to me when I first started to ponder this when Blair came to power in 1997.

Since 1997 and Blair's carefully choreographed entry into Downing Street, which was slightly hysterical and had something totalitarian about it and the re-presentation of the British PM Blair as a saviour who could act as a megaphone for "the people's aspirations" through soundbites, real political choice and debate has been continually constricted.

With the lies that lead to the Iraq War, the curtailment of civil liberties in anti-terrorism legislation, the acceleration of social trends that are eroding civil society and reducing politics largely to the aesthetics and images that buttress the power of a new moneyed oligarchy with little time for Britain as anything other than a "market", questions need to be asked.

Consumerism, a society of the mass spectacle, the depth psychology of the advertising industry in tapping inner most insecurities and needs and the elevation of image and brand symbolism over the substance of words could lead to a combination of greater consumer freedom and greater authoritarianism.

There is no reason why China, instead of being a nation that somehow will learn to adapt towards Western liberalism in politics will not instead combine "liberalism" in economics with an ever more effective security state that will crush freedom even better precisely because people prefer consumer security and a fantasy world of perfection than freedom.

In that sense, China could be a new model to decaying Western states such as Britain. Blair had authoritarian tendencies and lauded Singapore in 1997 as a great beacon of modernity. One commentator called this trend "happy face fascism", something that has surreal possibilities that few thinkers have looked at-apart from Ballard.

On Tony Judt

Tony Judt died on August 6th 2010. One of the most impressive of contemporary historians, he had a piece in the Guardian published posthumously in which he wrote,

In Politics and the English Language, Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don't feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously ("It's only my opinion …"). Rather than suffering from the onset of "newspeak", we risk the rise of "nospeak".

Judt was accurate here to criticise the cult of the soundbite and the retreat of "public thinkers" in to the rhetoric of "think tanks" in which language and intellect are perverted to churning out texts to fit in with the prescriptions of the orthodox line at the expense of independent thought expressed in clear language.

In Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents, Judt lambasted "think tanks" and the reduction of our existence to crass utilitarian cost benefit analysis: indeed the very word "think tank" is rather Orwellian but simply accepted as a normal feature of what passes for public debate.

Increasingly people have retreated into letting the phrases do the thinking for them and few have shown enough independence of mind to challenge the way that words like "enemy combatant", "war on terror", "extraordinary rendition" conceal a hideous reality.

In The Guardian we see continual efforts at mendacious propaganda by those like Denis MacShane who elevate lying into an art form by the use of the language they use. The task of all sceptics who want to hold power to account is to interrogate the language forensically.

Judt challenged many of the complacent assumptions rationalised into mindless buzzwords used to extol a mindless upbeat boosterism, a fetish for the benefits of "growth" as if this was automatically a great good without drawbacks.

Judt was correct to look to the words. This came out superbly when he demolished the assumptions behind the bellicose liberal interventionists who were fervent in their blind faith in the merits of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars in his seminal essay The Silence of the Lambs ( 2006 ),

"For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance.

They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism.

Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’."

"In order for today’s ‘fight’ (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal enemy whose ideas we can study, theorise and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, like its 20th-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us."

Such brilliant political writing made Judt one of the few worthy winners of the Orwell Prize in 2009. The rest were more Orwellian instead of having Orwell's moral clarity. Those like Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchens et al all tried the "decent left" act and failed pathetically and miserably.

It is a pity that The Guardian and Observer could not have published more of Judt whilst he was alive. It is annoying that people seemed to be unanimous in praising his Postwar and his eminence as a historian whilst condemning his Ill Fares the Land as "a book that should never have been written".

When the propagandist Denis MacShane writes that, not least because he castigated Adam Michnik-MacShane's Solidarity hero- for his support for the Iraq War in 2003, it is clear that functionaries of an increasingly authoritarian Britain have much to fear in those who speak truth to power.

We stand in need of intellectuals like Judt to write polemics like Ill Fares the Land to open up political debate in Britain and, ineed, the rest of Europe and the USA, to speak truth to power as well as castigate the way Orwell has been traduced to be some kind of posthumous guru and oracle for a "decent left".

With Afghanistan and Iraq it was necessary and still remains the case that those like Hitchens projected their fantasies of global liberation on to a superpower, the USA, which was on the side of liberty and so made it irrelevant to look in detail at what was really at stake in Iraq.

Judt hit the nail on the head when trying to explain the support so many supposed "public intellectuals" for Iraq, not least why former dissidents had lost their critical faculties in supporting Iraq blindly, thinking it was in the vein of some kind of Spanish Civil War moment or lazily seeing it as a rerun of World War Two.

As Judt put it , in discussing the reason why those like Michnik and Havel cravenly supported Iraq,

"In the European case this trend is an unfortunate by-product of the intellectual revolution of the 1980s, especially in the former Communist East, when ‘human rights’ displaced conventional political allegiances as the basis for collective action.

The gains wrought by this transformation in the rhetoric of oppositional politics were considerable. But a price was paid all the same. A commitment to the abstract universalism of ‘rights’ – and uncompromising ethical stands taken against malign regimes in their name – can lead all too readily to the habit of casting every political choice in binary moral terms.

In this light Bush’s War against Terror, Evil and Islamo-fascism appears seductive and even familiar: self-deluding foreigners readily mistake the US president’s myopic rigidity for their own moral rectitude"

In Postwar Judt also commented that intellectuals like Michnik and Glucksmann supported Washington's Iraq policy because they,

" argued by extension from their own earlier writings on Communism that a policy of 'liberal interventionism' in defence of human rights everywhere was justified on general principles and that America was now, as before, in the vanguard of the struggle against political evil and moral relativism everywhere. Having thus convinced themselves that the American President was conducting his foreign policy for their reasons they were genuinely surprised to find themselves isolated and ignored by their traditional audiences".

(Postwar page 786 )

This has the ring of truth as one only needs to look at the drivel Michnik wrote in his feeble article We the Traitors in October 2003 which offered a shallow rationalisation for the Iraq War,

I remember my nation's experience with totalitarian dictatorship. This is why I was able to draw the right conclusions from Sept. 11, 2001. Just as the murder of Giacomo Matteotti [leader of Italy's United Socialist Party] revealed the nature of Italian fascism and Mussolini's regime; just as the great Moscow trials showed the world the essence of the Stalinist system; just as 'Kristallnacht' exposed the hidden truth of Hitler's Nazism, watching the collapsing World Trade Center towers made me realize that the world was facing a new totalitarian challenge. Violence, fanaticism, and lies were challenging democratic values.

This is not the place to analyze the ideology that, while disfiguring the religion of Islam, creates a crusade against the democratic world. Saddam Hussein takes part in this just as Hitler and Stalin did before him. He asserts that in the holy war with the 'godless West' all methods are permitted. Waiting for this sort of regime to obtain weapons of mass destruction would be plain recklessness.

In fact, Michnik shows himself not as a "dissident" nor even as a critical thinker but as a crude propagandist. Why on earth was the invasion of Iraq not the place to analyse the ideology in which Al Qaida was conflated with Saddam Hussein, not least as Baathist Iraq was a secular dictatorship ?

Moreover, Michnik was parroting the WMD claim as an article of blind faith and there was no connection between Al Qaida and Saddam Hussein. On the contrary, the reason Bin Laden hated the USA was precisely because he was prohibited from leading a crusade against Saddam in the First Gulf War.

The fitting of the facts to the prescriptions of the propaganda creed was an abnegation of the responsibility that Michnik took upon himself to speak truth to power, as opposed to shilling for it in the worst an most uncritical manner as a messianic crusade, a form of delusional wish thinking.

Britain's Sinister Neoliberal Domain.

The descent of Britain into an atomised and deracinated society dominated by a neoliberal ideology that is accepted and preached as Gospel by both the fake Conservatives and New Labour seems to reach ever more surreal proportions. As Peter Wilby comments in the New Statesman,

On the same day as David Cameron made his "big society" speech in Liverpool, the Times reported that an American company, Rent A Friend, is launching here. For an hourly fee, it will arrange for somebody to go to the cinema with you, act as best man at your wedding, or simply converse in a coffee shop. This should remind us that capitalists, far more than public authorities, have robbed us of the capacity to do things for ourselves.

We look to manufacturers of instant meals and high street takeaways to provide food we once cooked for ourselves. Once, if we needed exercise, we joined a few (unrented) friends to play football or went for a brisk walk. Now we buy membership of a gym club. To sympathise with the bereaved, we once wrote a letter. Now we buy commercially produced cards with standardised sentiments.

Neil Clark has backed Wilby on his opposition to this horrid ideology and the baleful effects in creating a fundamentally diseased and eerily denatured society. All in the spurious cause of promoting "choice" and individual "self-determination", as if people can be reduced to consumer items.

Just as the "personalities" and "parties" are now just branches of PR and advertising. The fake Conservatives are no different from New Labour in holding to a vulgar and reductionist utilitarian neoliberal ideology in which sovereign consumers have rights that non-consumers or lesser consumers do not.

Forget the idea of citizenship. In 2010 the concept of the morally educated citizen is seen as outdated and people are now mere consumers and some consumers are more equal than others. It is considered the only way to motivate people by brand status and differentiation. This is pathetic. Wilby looks at how education itself could be privatised,

Cameron's speech refers to the "big society" ensuring we "don't always turn to officials, local authorities or central government". He doesn't want to stop us turning to business. On the contrary, Cameron wants to connect "private capital to investment in social projects". That, I suspect, is what the "big society" is really all about.

Parents may decide to start a school, but they will soon find it's best to bring in private money and hire private management if it is to get off the ground and survive as a ­going concern.

Several private companies, most earning millions from outsourced public projects, are already offering their services. Some openly admit that they aim to create branded chains of schools which they will largely control even if they do not legally own them.

Remember what happened to those classic 19th-century self-help institutions, the building societies. Thanks to Tory legislation in the 1980s, their owners - the customers - were bribed to "demutualise" and sell out to commercial banks. For "big society", read big bonanza for big business.

It never seems to cross what passes for their minds that such a degraded worldview is both vulgar and unbecoming of honourable that treats people like commodities, as though 'human resources', a term first coined by the Nazis. Where people are assessed only according to their use value, then depersonalisation and dehumanisation will follow.

It's All in the Pipeline for Afghanistan.

The more events unfold in Afghanistan. the more the original mantra of a "humanitarian war" is stripped away to reveal a dogged determination to "stay the course" in Afghanistan despite the futility of this crusade and mounting casualty levels amongst British soldiers. The reason for this has to lie in Afghanistan being valuable and useful to the West.

Reports coming out from Afghanistan that reveal the level of carnage, such as the Wikileaks, seem to confirm that this is a war being fought to the bitter end because there is something more at stake that fighting Al Qaida, most of whose operatives are now in Pakistan, and that the "war on terror" is a mendacious lie.

It was an interesting revelation from PM Cameron recently that the deadline for Iraq is now 2015 which is, of course, the same time Obama has lined up as regards it's timing-2012-which in both cases precedes their presumed and desired re-election. Either one of them is not telling the truth about Afghanistan or both are not.

For the point is that Afghanistan will persist until the West gets the TAPI pipeline, negotiated by the Asian Development Bank in 2008 and which is now a major objective of the war. To leave without it's construction would mean none of the US, UK's, or indeed, NATO's aims had been met.

To pull out before the construction succeeds would mean a loss of blood and treasure that could not be justified on cost and benefit analysis or the supposed delusion that this was a war of enlightened self interest. Now it's just a war for straightforward geopolitical hegemony in Central Asia.

The TAPI Pipeline will be built through Kandahar and thus the Helmand area must be secured if this pipeline taking LNG from the Turkmenistani Dauletabad gas fields is to go ahead as scheduled to Karachi whence it can be shipped to Western nations. Not least, those such as Britain which experienced Peak Oil production in the North Sea by 1999.

Moreover, the TAPI Pipeline further NATO's strategical aims by cancelling out the threat from a rival pipeline that would bypass Afghanistan -the IPI- and upgrade both Iran and China leaving NATO with a failed state without any use value to Western nations.

More details can be found in the Canadian petro-economist expert John Foster's analysis Pipeline Through a Troubled Land ( he worked many years for BP ) or Arial Cohen's forthright justification for the Afghanistan War produced for The Heritage Foundation. The centrality of the construction of the TAPI pipeline accounts for the investment of capital in war zones by NGO's.

As James Denselow has written in the Observer,

The chaos of a war zone combined with the financial attraction of an invasion led by the world's remaining superpower has proved a potent mix for a multitude of NGOs to flock to the country.

Aid agencies have been accused of chasing contracts – which has resulted in a geographic imbalance of aid with resources focused on those areas suffering from actual conflict while ignoring areas with the security to benefit from sustainable development.

This has meant that aid has often failed to adjust to Afghan needs, for example 10-15% of all Afghan land is arable to farming yet despite 80% of Afghans relying upon agriculture only 5% of international aid goes to that sector

The reason NGOs have become part of the US military-humanitarian complex lies in an ideology of "enlightened self interest", whereby the USA and it's allies get access to pipeline transit routes in return for investments in areas torn apart by war and where reconstruction is in accordance with key geopolitical ambitions.

The reason the NGOs have not invested in areas where Taliban insurgents are not so prevalent is because there is no need to waste money on people who can already be counted on, it is supposed, and belies the notion that this war is a humanitarian one. It is only in so far as the lives of Afghans are considered a cheap investment if the West gets the TAPI pipeline.

Hence the "humanitarian" effort of NGOs has been geared towards "pacifying" areas like Helmand through which the TAPI will run. Only the Western media has retained a conspiracy of silence on that, though most people from India I speak to in London know that this is the purpose as if it's obvious.

Increasingly, it becomes obvious that the pipeline that journalists dare not speak of accounts for the what's really at stake in Afghanistan. It explains why NATO, now explicitly devoted to "energy security" and why investment is going into the war zones-it is considered a better investment.

Self regarding notions of enlightened self interest are nothing more that ideological rationalisations that can be at least partially believed in, not least by PR savvy politicians like Blair and Cameron and those too craven to challenge the consensus. It is about time people in Britain were explicitly told the truth about the TAPI and why people are dying in Afghanistan.

That is what is so depressing about Afghanistan. The military-humanitarian complex is a reality that can be figured out by putting the pieces together and going on the Internet to see just who is funding these NGOs. As Denselow puts it,

We should be clear that the third sector is simply one of a multitude of international actors whose work is being compromised by greater militarisation. Academics (human terrain teams), journalists (embeds) and diplomats (Hilary Clinton has demanded 7,000 fully armed security operatives to protect the US embassy in Iraq) are all experiencing a similar trend.

In place of Dwight D Eisenhower's concerns over a military-industrial complex we may be heading toward a military-industrial-academic-media-diplomatic-NGO complex whose eventual hegemony could prove unchangeable.

The IAM that Dr Karen Woo worked with when she was murdered by the Taliban was typical in this respect of the way that "non-political" NGOs are, in fact, political. For the IAM worked with was linked closely to groups like SenterNovem which worked closely with the Icelandic government and the Dutch government.

As usual some research on the Internet brings it up. IAM does not mention who its "corporate sponsors" are. So much for "Transparency". Yet finding out who funds them and that their role in Afghanistan goes beyond medical care into helping to install renewable energy. It works with governments and that means, of course, politicians.

As the 2009 IAM report reveals,

RESAP expanded its work last year to include Faryab province where it works closely with IAM’s Community Development Project.. However, in Badakhshan Province, RESAP is working with a private company that will take over RESAP’s work in Faizabad.

RESAP has also begun to scale down and move its Kabul workshop in preparation for transferring its work and responsibility to Afghan businesses. RESAP is grateful for the support of SenterNovem, Operation Agri, the Icelandic Government, ACDI/VOCA, Tearfund Switzerland and Afghan Bureau for Reconstruction during 2009.

The claim that IAM is "non-profit" and "non-political" cannot be sustained as it does work to further Western political goals in Afghanistan. There is a thin line between humanitarian aid, something which should be wholly divorced from governments and politics, and backing the war effort and Western hegemony.

But for those willing to pore through texts there is some information on page 25 on the supporters and where the funds come from,

Our thanks go out to our Member Agencies and numerous personal donors
as well as the following external donors:

ACDI/VOCA
Afghan Bureau of Reconstruction
Cargill International
Commune of Bernex
Commune of Meinier
Commune of Grand Saxony
Commune of Veyrier
Embassy of Japan
Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Handicap International
Icelandic Government
Irish Government
Islamic Relief
Kiwanis
NORAD – Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation
SenterNovem
SIDA – Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency
Standard Chartered Bank (Kabul)
Tear Fund Switzerland

SenterNovum on its website contains the following information that backs Denselow's point up that a military-humanitarian complex is emerging,

NL Agency came about through a merger of EVD, The Netherlands Patent Office (Octrooicentrum Nederland) and SenterNovem...NL Agency also works on behalf of international organisations such as the European Union, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and foreign governments.

Cargill International is a Minnesota based corporation with a history of human rights abuses , unethical business practices and in buying cotton in neighbouring Uzbekistan from workers without rights i.e slave labour and children.

To further reiterate the point that IAM ( International Assistance Mission ) was bound up with politics and the projection of US power, one of its main donors listed is ADCI/VOCA. According to its website,

ACDI/VOCA receives funding from USAID, USDA, the World Bank, UNDP, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Asian Development Bank, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and other development funders, and is partnering with a growing number of private sector corporations such as Mars, Inc., H.J. Heinz Company and Nestlé.

This is the very Asian Development Bank that in 2008 brokered with US approval the TAPI pipeline which will carry gas from the Dauletabad gasfields in Turkmenistan and which is a major geostrategic ambition of the US in its drive to control the oil and gas of Central Asia.

This is not to say that those working for NGOs do not have humanitarian intentions nor that they might well sincerely believe that the spin offs from NATO's hegemony over Afghanistan are worth the war and occupation. Yet such obvious links to US power will comprimise its claim to be "non-political".

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Appeal to the Guardian "What do you Want us to Talk About ? "

I wrote, most likely in vain,

How about a real look at the centrality of the TAPI pipeline in the continued conflict in Iraq and a serious assessment of the threat to civilisation caused by being overdependent upon diminishing fossil fuels such as oil and gas and the New Great Game.' ?

The omission of this makes much of the tittle tattle about 'what "we" should, could or might do' in Afghanistan mere propaganda. Unless what is really at stake in Afghanistan is understood, the war will not be or why Western governments, not least Britain's, is so obsessed with "staying the course".

With regards Iraq the journalist David Strahan in his The Last Oil Shock has documented how geostrategic desperation and oil dependency drove the USA and UK to invading Iraq in 2003. More work that explicitly sets out how most conflicts today are about pipelines and resources is vital for civilisation.

Yet in the Guardian and most mainstream media it is generally neglected. Perhaps as Freud said, people can only bear so much uncertainty to make reality bearable. But it might be better if we faced facts immediately and saw that our high octane lifestyles are contributing directly to terrorism and war.