Australia seems to hold more inquiries into itself than almost any other country. We inquire into everything, from Indigenous deaths in custody, child sexual abuse, and same sex marriage to bank misdemeanours, casino operations, pandemic responses, and alleged war crimes. There’s one exception to our obsession with self-scrutiny: Australia’s wars.

In Unnecessary Wars, historian Henry Reynolds memorably observes that after a war Australia never asks why we fought, with what result, or at what cost. We ask only how we fought, as if war was a football game.

The Australian War Memorial has lost sight of its original purpose of commemoration, as well as of the sombre warning ‘lest we forget’. The AWM’s preoccupation, with Brendan Nelson as Director, became the celebration of past wars, and the promotion of weapons, mostly imported at great cost from companies which sponsor the AWM. Its Board, which is chaired by Kerry Stokes and includes Tony Abbott, doesn’t include one historian.

The government is cutting back history teaching at universities. Instead of learning what we still can of our history, Australia repeats and repeats it. We have not won a war since 1945. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, we have lost three more.

Australians pleaded for an inquiry into the Iraq war, similar to the British one under Sir James Chilcot, which reported in 2016 on the shortcomings which led to that disaster. In Canberra, neither Government nor Opposition would have a bar of it. Instead, they commissioned an official history of the wars in East Timor, and the Middle East, which has yet to appear.

This month’s debacle in Afghanistan was entirely predictable, and was indeed predicted, including by Americans in the military, as the ‘Afghanistan Papers’ showed in 2019. Well before then, the ‘Afghan War Logs’ published by WikiLeaks showed that the ‘forever war’ would end in defeat. Julian Assange is still locked up for his part in doing that.

Even those too young to have known Vietnam at first hand could recognise the pattern in Afghanistan: a false reason for war, a misunderstood enemy, an ill-conceived strategy, a series of stooges running a corrupt government, a defeat. In both wars, successive US presidents (and Australian prime ministers) refused to admit what the result would be.

The CIA in Afghanistan replicated the opium trading operations it ran in Vietnam and Cambodia. When Taliban MKI took over in 1996, they shut down poppy cultivation, but after NATO arrived in 2001, heroin exports became business as usual. American observers say Taliban MKII in 2021 may need the revenue from drugs to run their devastated country, particularly if the US and its allies impose punitive sanctions, or cut off World Bank and IMF support to Afghanistan.

Playing the human rights card is always the last recourse of defeated Westerners. We heard about the barbarous Taliban trampling on the rights of women and girls whenever allied enthusiasm for the war in Afghanistan declined. Then there would be a troop surge, the result of which was to kill thousands more civilians, including women and girls.

Now, if we’re wringing our collective hands again, it may be in confusion: are most Afghan women still oppressed by the same barbarous Taliban, and many children afflicted by malnutrition and stunted growth? Or are most Afghan women benefiting from 20 years of access to education, jobs, and health care? If those were such high priorities, why did Trump cut off US funding for family planning services? (Biden, to his credit, restored it in February).

With so many dead and injured, the capacities of all women and men will be needed, as Taliban leaders have said. To what extent Islamic principles will apply is not for us, the countries which lost the war, to decide. So why is the US contemplating sanctions, which will further impoverish the country? Of course, as with all past American wars, there’s been no mention of reparations, which would help Afghanistan do its own nation-building in its own way. That would be too much to expect from such sore losers, including Australia.

Afghanistan has for centuries been at the strategic centre of the ‘great game’ between East and West. With the latest war lost, the power balance is swinging decisively towards East Asia – something Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani has been predicting for more than two decades. China is recruiting nations across Central Asia, not to fight wars, but to benefit from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Central and Eastern Europe Community, and the Belt and Road Initiative. Iran and Pakistan are now engaged, and Afghanistan can be expected to follow. China is gaining influence across the region through peace and development, not war and destruction.

If Australians ignore the change in the global power balance that is happening before our eyes, we will suffer the consequences. If we can’t defeat the Taliban, how will we prevail in a war against China? Our losses will be incomparably greater. Perhaps when they meet in Washington in September, the PM may wish to ask if President Biden still believes America is back, and wants a war with China. But Biden didn’t even bother to call Morrison to discuss the Kabul rout. So much for our investment in the Afghanistan war, which was supposed to buy us access in Washington.

The lessons of our history are plain. Before we repeat them by taking on China and inviting a worse disaster, ANZUS at 70 needs a thorough review, and Australia needs another independent, public inquiry – this time into the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

READ MORE: https://johnmenadue.com/best-we-forget-why-we-go-to-war/

We should teach "YES MINISTER" as history in our schools. This comedy show knows far more about history than a ton of history curriculums. The question is Jim Hacker the naive bumbling minister that history needs to let Sir Humphey manage the inertia of public service history? Are "satirical" sites like yourdemocracy.net helping in improving our knowledge of history? 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The State Department’s Afghanistan Chargé d’Affaires Ross Wilson on Wednesday faulted Americans who were trapped in Afghanistan for failing to heed his department’s warnings about the country deteriorating.

“You warned about this in a cable,” CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell asked Wilson in an evening interview. “Were you ignored?”

“We put out repeated warnings every three weeks to Americans going back to, I think, March or April, each one in stronger terms,” Ross said. “‘Leave now.’ ‘Leave immediately.’ Never in my 40 years of working … at the State Department have I seen such strong language used. People chose not to leave. That’s their business, there’s their right. We regret now that many may find themselves in a position that they would rather not be in, and we are determined to try to help them.”

Wilson’s boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, said Wednesday his department estimated that up to 1,500 Americans were still in Afghanistan.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby on Thursday denied rumors the United States would end evacuation attempts within 36 hours — or by August 28, three days earlier than expected. “Evacuation operations in Kabul will not be wrapping up in 36 hours,” wrote in a message on social media. “We will continue to evacuate as many people as we can until the end of the mission.”

Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/news/top-state-department-diplomat-blames-americans-left-in-afghanistan-we-put-out-repeated-warnings-to-leave/?utm_source=mostpopular

Read from top.

assange

From David Brooks

Certain years leap out as turning points in world history: 1517, 1776 and 1917. These are years when powerful ideas strode onto the world stage: the Reformation, democratic capitalism and revolutionary Communism.

The period around 1979 was another such dawn. Political Islam burst onto global consciousness with the Iranian revolution, the rise of the mujahedeen after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamization program in Pakistan and the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Arab world.

The ideas that seized the imagination of millions had deep and diverse intellectual roots. For example, the mid-20th century thinker Sayyid Qutb mounted a comprehensive critique of the soulless materialism of America, tracing it in part to the separation of church and state — the fatal error, he believed, that divided the spirit from the flesh. In the Muslim world, he argued, body and soul should not be split asunder, but should live united in a resurrected caliphate, governed by Shariah law.

This vision could manifest in more temperate ways, as clerics seeking to exercise political power, or in more violent ways, as jihadists trying to overthrow Arab regimes.

By 2006, in an essay called “The Master Plan,” Lawrence Wright could report in The New Yorker how Al Qaeda had operationalized these dreams into a set of sweeping, violent strategies. The plans were epic in scope: expel the U.S. from Iraq, establish a caliphate, overthrow Arab regimes, initiate a clash with Israel, undermine Western economies, create “total confrontation” between believers and nonbelievers, and achieve “definitive victory” by 2020, transforming world history.

These were the sorts of bold dreams that drove Islamist terrorism in the first part of the 21st century.

To the terrorists behind Thursday’s bombing outside the Kabul airport, the murder of more than a dozen Americans and scores of Afghans may seem like a step toward that utopia. The humbling American withdrawal from Afghanistan may to them seem like a catastrophic defeat for Western democracy and a great leap toward the dream of a unified Muslim community.

But something has changed over the past several years. The magnetic ideas at the heart of so many of these movements have lost their luster.

If extremists thought they could mobilize Muslim opinion through acts of clarifying violence, they have failed. Across 11 lands in which Pew surveyed Muslims in 2013, a median of only 13 percent had a favorable opinion of Al Qaeda.

In his 2011 book, “The Missing Martyrs,” Charles Kurzman showed that fewer than one in every 100,000 Muslims had become an Islamist terrorist in the years since 9/11. The vast majority rejected the enterprise.

When political Islamists tried to establish theocratically influenced rule in actual nations, their movement’s reputation was badly hurt. In one of extremism’s most violent, radical manifestations, the Islamic State’s caliphate in Iraq and Syria became a blood-drenched nightmare.

But even in more moderate places, political Islam is losing favor. In 2019, The Economist surveyed the data and concluded, “Across the Arab world people are turning against religious political parties and the clerics who helped bring them to power. Many appear to be giving up on Islam, too.” Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah Yazdi of Iran noticed the trend in his own country: “Iranians are evading religious teachings and turning to secularism.”

Globally, terrorism is down. Deaths from attacks fell by 59 percentbetween 2014 and 2019. Al Qaeda’s core members haven’t successfully attacked the U.S. homeland since 9/11. In 2017, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, began a process of marginalizing radical Wahhabism.

Experts see Islamic extremism’s fortunes slipping away. “The past two decades,” Nelly Lahoud writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “have made clear just how little jihadi groups can hope to accomplish. They stand a far better chance of achieving eternal life in paradise than of bringing the United States to its knees.”

In The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria notes that “most Islamist terrorism today tends to be local — the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabab in the Horn of Africa. That’s a major reversal from the glory days of Al Qaeda, when its leaders insisted that the focus must be not on the ‘near enemy’ (the local regimes) but rather the ‘far enemy’ (the United States and the West more broadly).”

In this humiliating month, as the Taliban takes power in Afghanistan and ISIS still spreads mayhem, it’s obvious that even local conflicts can create incredible danger. But the idea of global glory — a fundamental shaking of the world order — that burst on the world stage roughly 40 years ago has been brought low.

The problem has not been eliminated by any means, but it has shrunk.

We blundered when we sought to defeat a powerful idea through some decisive military victory. But much is achieved when we keep up the pressure, guard the homeland, promote liberal ideas and allow theocracy to shrivel under the weight of its own flaws.

The men and women, in and out of uniform, who have done this work over the past 40 years, and are still giving their lives to it, deserve our gratitude and admiration.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/opinion/terrorism-afghanistan-Islamicism.html

Hopefully, Muslim Theocracy will follow the path of Christian Theocracy and become only a flimsy idea still held by the Rod Drehers of modern times...  GOD DOES NOT EXIST.  fullstop.

assange