Robert Fisk: Everyone Seems to Be Agreeing with Bin Laden These Days

Published on Saturday, September 19, 2009 by The Independent/UK

Everyone Seems to Be Agreeing with Bin Laden These Days

Only Obama, it seems, fails to get the message that we’re losing Afghanistan

by Robert Fisk

Obama and Osama are at last participating in the same narrative. For the US president's critics - indeed, for many critics of the West's military occupation of Afghanistan - are beginning to speak in the same language as Obama's (and their) greatest enemy.

There is a growing suspicion in America that Obama has been socked into the heart of the Afghan darkness by ex-Bushie Robert Gates - once more the Secretary of Defense - and by journalist-adored General David Petraeus whose military "surges" appear to be as successful as the Battle of the Bulge in stemming the insurgent tide in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq.

No wonder Osama bin Laden decided to address "the American people" this week. "You are waging a hopeless and losing war," he said in his 9/11 eighth anniversary audiotape. "The time has come to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby." There was no more talk of Obama as a "house Negro" although it was his "weakness", bin Laden contended, that prevented him from closing down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In any event, Muslim fighters would wear down the US-led coalition in Afghanistan "like we exhausted the Soviet Union for 10 years until it collapsed". Funny, that. It's exactly what bin Laden told me personally in Afghanistan - four years before 9/11 and the start of America's 2001 adventure south of the Amu Darya river.

Almost on cue this week came those in North America who agree with Osama - albeit they would never associate themselves with the Evil One, let alone dare question Israel's cheerleading for the Iraqi war. "I do not believe we can build a democratic state in Afghanistan," announces Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the senate intelligence committee. "I believe it will remain a tribal entity." And Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, does not believe "there is a great deal of support for sending more troops to Afghanistan".

Colin Kenny, chair of Canada's senate committee on national security and defense, said this week that "what we hoped to accomplish in Afghanistan has proved to be impossible. We are hurtling towards a Vietnam ending".

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/19

We will never "win" in Afghanistan.

Or Iraq.

Especially when we don't even have a definition of what a "win" would be.

You cannot -ever- "win" a nation by invading it & bombing its' children.

That should be total simple common sense.

We have already "lost" all the people - American, Iraqi, Afghani and from other countries, there is nothing that can be done for them. We have already "lost" 800 billion dollars in the wars that could have done so much more and will never be won back. It's all lost already.

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