COINTELPRO & Afghanistan

COINTELPRO & Afghanistan do not have much to do with each other, but looking into the first got me to thinking about how nations get to be the way they are. I have been thinking about Afghanistan lately and what we should do, so the two topics got connected by "nation building" and this is what we get.

Tam put up a post this morning that mentioned COINTELPRO, which I had not heard of, so I just had to look it up. The Wikipedia article on it makes it look like an evil government conspiracy, and it pretty much was (is?). The FBI was targeting a whole bunch of groups. They start listing them and they are all peaceful, liberal, "good" groups, and then they mention the Ku Klux Klan. What? How did that EVIL organization get lumped in with all those good groups? Which just goes to show that not everybody has the same idea of good and evil.

Then we come across this little blurb:

The Church Committee documented a history of FBI directors using the agency for purposes of political repression as far back as World War I, through the 1920s, when they were charged with rounding up "anarchists and revolutionaries" for deportation, and then building from 1936 through 1976.

Which made me think that these operations, however we view them now, had a part in making our country what it is today. Whatever that may be.

Let me change direction here and talk about Afghanistan for a minute. We have gotten ourselves into a quagmire there, much like the Russians did umpteen years ago. A big part of the problem is we are a nation with 21st century sensibilities fighting a bunch of 15th century barbarians, with guns, in the mountains.

I am thinking we need to pull back to a small area near a border with a friendly country. Oops, wait a minute, are there any countries bordering Afghanistan that are friendly to the US? Let's see who the candidates are:


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Iran is definitely not friendly. Pakistan may be "friendly", but I wouldn't trust them with a pack of cigarettes. Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan used to be part of the USSR. China has a little bit of border, but I'm pretty sure they aren't our friends. That whole part of the world is pretty much a disaster. It's a desert populated with Moslems. There isn't any green until you get to Pakistan, or up into the mountains in Central Asia.

Okay, this is looking grim. I am thinking the only way we are going to eliminate the Jihadists & Al Qaeda is to bring that area into the present, and they are so far lost in the past that it is going to take lot of doing and a lot of time to accomplish that. If we could establish a secure toehold with a school, a civilized community and a trading post, and we could build on that for a hundred years, well, then we might achieve something. This business of pouring billions of dollars into a hole in the ground is a waste of time, money, and people.

Of course, the big problem is money. The only thing I know of that Afghanistan has that the rest of the world wants is opium. I suspect that it is the single largest export, bigger than anything else by a factor of ten. Outside of opium, Afghanistan is importing ten times as much as it is exporting. I guess that's not surprising since the US is involved.

I was going to say Afghanistan needs to become self-sufficient, and not depend on opium, but I'm wondering if that might be even more impossible than the current war we are fighting there.