Two Tribes

I keep reminding myself we're allies of the corrupt puppets in Kabul, Afghanistan who are, from any height, virtually indistinguishable from the corrupt whack-job religious zealots and corrupt opiate laced camel dung merchants who are battling them for the bragging rights to a country so poor, if there is a God and He ever thinks about Afghanistan, He weeps.

I'm old enough to have seen all of this before, with the part of the Karzai government in Kabul played by Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, or cousin or uncle and followed by an unceasing river of corrupt imbecilic morons who took turns in the streets of Saigon, South Vietnam making themselves king. I don't remember any of their names forty years on and neither does history. They lost.

Between their avarice and their cowardice with a double dollop of incompetence, they spent more time feathering their own nests than in worrying about their own people. I knew the race was run when CBS Evening News showed Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire to protest the oppression by their own government, the one we kept calling the 'good guys.'      

We in the Land of the Round Door knobs explained it away in a hundred different phrases but I'll tell you, as a kid who wasn't even yet a teenager, I smelled something over the odor of burning flesh that I recognized as crap. And we're back to doing it again, yet again half a world away with Afghan stunt doubles this time.

This past weekend while we were celebrating Patrick's 30th Birthday, while Kara and Russ were rejoicing that Jordan was healing properly while Adam and Margaret welcomed Suze and Ryan to the mystic swamps of Jersey, we, the most powerful nation in the history of the world allowed the unthinkable to happen and stared into the face of Hell and didn't even blink. You might have missed this-I don't know how.

I'm not sure what winning looks like in this sorry, dirty, little hellhole of a country. I have the growing sense that no one in Foggy Bottom or the Puzzle Palace or the Rose Garden knows either. We just want this war to go away, and don't care who dies for us to get our wish. And to review, this is what happened.

Her blood is on Karzai's hands as well as those of the fundamentalists who see women as furniture and just in case you'd like to forget, on ours as well. When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
-bill kenny