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DID YOU KNOW that shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban tried to surrender?

For centuries in Afghanistan, when a rival force had come to power, the defeated one would put down their weapons and be integrated into the new power structure — obviously with much less power, or none at all. That’s how you do with neighbors you have to continue to live with. This isn’t a football game, where the teams go to different cities when it’s over. That may be hard for us to remember, because the U.S. hasn’t fought a protracted war on its own soil since the Civil War.

So when the Taliban came to surrender, the U.S. turned them down repeatedly, in a series of arrogant blunders spelled out in Anand Gopal’s investigative treatment of the Afghanistan war, “No Good Men Among the Living.”

Only full annihilation was enough for the Bush administration. They wanted more terrorists in body bags. The problem was that the Taliban had stopped fighting, having either fled to Pakistan or melted back into civilian life. Al Qaeda, for its part, was down to a handful of members.

So how do you kill terrorists if there aren’t any?

Simple: Afghans that the U.S. worked with understood the predicament their military sponsors were in, so they fabricated bad guys. Demand has a way of creating supply, and the U.S. was paying for information that led to the death or capture of Taliban fighters. Suddenly there were Taliban everywhere. Score-settling ran amok; all you had to do to get your neighbor killed or sent to Guantánamo was tell the U.S. they were members of the Taliban.

Doors would be kicked in, no questions asked. The men left standing became warlords, built massive fortunes, and shipped their wealth abroad. “We are not nation-building again,” President Donald Trump declared Monday night. Well, we never were, unless building high-rises with looted cash in Dubai counts.

After a few years of this charade, after their surrender efforts were repeatedly rebuffed, the old Taliban started picking up guns again. When they were driven from power, the population was happy to see them go. The U.S. managed to make them popular again.

Liberals then spent the 2008 presidential campaign complaining that the U.S. had “ignored” Afghanistan — when, in reality, the parts of the country without troop presence were the only parts at peace, facing no insurgency against the Afghan government, such as it was. Then President Barack Obama came in and launched a surge in troop levels while simultaneously announcing a withdrawal — coupled with a heightened focus on night raids, relying on the same system of unreliable intelligence that had netted so many uninvolved people already.

And now Trump says he has a new and better strategy. He says the U.S. needs to get Pakistan more involved — except, of course, Pakistan’s intelligence service has been propping up the Taliban for decades.

Gopal’s book is the definitive account of how the war went off the rails. It reads like a novel, but is an all-too-real portrait of three Afghans as they lived through the war — a pro-U.S. warlord, a Taliban commander, and a housewife. I’d suggest Trump read it — the book provides a dire warning against the sort of war effort the president is about to double down on — but it’s longer than a page, which his advisers say is the max he’ll digest. And besides, the only thing he seems interested in is the fact that Afghanistan has a bunch of minerals he thinks the U.S. is owed.

Before Trump spends the windfall he hopes to reap from mining Afghanistan, he should consider one starting reality: We are now losing a war to an enemy that already surrendered. That’s not easy to do.

(This piece is rant-ier than what I normally write because it first appeared as an email. Sign up here to get future rants.)

Phroyd

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South German Master

Saint Maurice and The Theban Legion

Germany (c. 1515-20)

Oil on Wood, 68.4 x 70.1 cm.

Collection of Marei von Saher (heir of Jaques Goudstikker), New York.

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A great movie, full of humor, feels, and cringe. 

Charlie Kaufman’s Strangely Beautiful ‘Anomalisa’

“Never one to conform to the trends of the day, Charlie Kaufman has widened his already indescribably large range of capabilities to include animation. The screenwriter, producer, director, and lyricist is best known for his weird and wonderful stories that perfectly embody the human response and delicate emotion in any situation – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, and Synecdoche New York – and his latest offering, Anomalisa, is no different.”

Article by BB Online Author Kim Crowie.

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Incredible art work! I’m in love 💞

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Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing.

José Saramago, The Art of Fiction No. 155 (via theparisreview)

This may be some great advice...

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Five of the eleven prints I have available here signed editions of 10 framed and unframed versions available

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Derek Paul Boyle // Nail Nailing Nail

derekpaulboyle.com

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4.25.16.

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Bruce L. Reed (American, b. 1977) Work in Progress continued. 4-27-16

36 x 36 Oil on Canvas Triptych

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Of course we have to use words and thoughts. They have their own beauty–but do we need to become imprisoned in them?

Eckhart Tolle (via lazyyogi)

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We can only imagine what early explorers venturing off into the new world must have felt. Medieval maps and encyclopedic bestiaries give us some idea of the strange lands they expected to encounter, inhabited by mysterious figures and loathsome, fictitious beasts. Montreal, Canada based painter Peter Ferguson, previously featured here on our blog, seems to evoke this same combination of wonder, horror, excitement, and intrigue with a unique sense of bizarre humor in his artworks.

See more on Hi-Fructose.

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I rather like this framing of the last 50 years in America, totally explains how a seemingly liberal climate became so right-wing conservative Christian. Also lays the groundwork for the proliferation of New World Order conspiracy mumbo jumbo that has further weakened and corrupted peace and new age movements into insane factions furhter supporting the agenda of crypto-fascists.

The Jesus Movement and the Church of Satan As Reactionary Psychological Warfare

By the end of the 1960′s, the United States was on the verge of Communist revolution. The youth at the time was overwhelmingly leftist; radical groups such as the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, and the SLA were taking serious aim at the institutions of US capitalism and imperialism, with widespread public support.Had the winds blown just slightly differently, the revolution would have succeeded, and we likely would be living in a unified communist world today.

But by the 80′s that had all been largely wiped away, and the US was undergoing a massive wave of reactionism, exemplified by the Reagan presidency and the rise of far-right terrorism.

So what happened?

Keep reading

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I came out to pretty much everyone today.

Then I went one scarier…and came out to my cat.

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Adam Hall: Stirring Wild