Module: Trump: Afghanistan, Taliban, American Withdrawal
01 Sunday Sep 2024
Category Archives: Asia
The Latest Bombing Possibility: The False Flag Operation–Always a Show of Contempt for Constituents
14 Monday Nov 2022
Tags
Erdogan, false flag operations, Forensic Ambivalence, Illiberal Democracy, Istiklal Avenue Bombing, Medieval vs. Modern, pro-democracy, Turkish Autocracy
Ambitious men with nothing to offer and old ones with even less may take an interest in designing and exploiting the political value of an explosion guaranteed to make them look strong — or strong again.
Erdogan Rounds Up His Usual Suspects
Nothing could be more dumb or predictable than the rounding up of PKK suspects in the near immediate aftermath of yesterday’s explosion in Istanbul.
ISTANBUL, Nov 14 (Reuters) – Turkey blamed Kurdish militants on Monday for an explosion that killed six people in Istanbul and police detained 47 people including a Syrian woman suspected of planting the bomb.
No group has claimed responsibility so far for Sunday’s blast on the busy pedestrian Istiklal Avenue, and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) denied involvement in it.
Spicer, Jonathan, Ali Kucokgocmen, Ece Toksabay. “Turkey blames deadly bomb on Kurdish militants; PKK denies involvement.” Reuters, November 14, 2022.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been waging against the Kurdish community for many years but with periodic sustained ceasefire arrangements with the PKK. However, on July 20, 2015, a suicide attack against Turkish leftists had Erdogan’s government blaming the Kurds while the Islamic State was claiming responsibility. Erdogan’s own Sunni extremism appeared to have surfaced in the authoritarian’s somewhat twisted stance toward ISIL. The sense of confused politics may be gotten through this paragraph in Wikipedia–
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack the following day.[15] ISIL had allegedly made the decision to pursue more active operations in Turkey just days before the attack.[16][17] The attacker, Şeyh Abdurrahman Alagöz (20), a Kurd from Adıyaman, reportedly had links to Islamic State militants.[18] Both the Turkish government and police were accused of turning a blind eye to ISIL activities as part of their collaboration with ISIL and failing to give leftist and Kurdish gatherings the proper law enforcement protection given to other gatherings.[19] Two Turkish police officers were subsequently prosecuted over the bombing.[20] It was possibly the first planned attack by ISIL in Turkey, although previous incidents such as the 2013 Reyhanlı bombings, the 2015 Istanbul suicide bombing, and the 2015 Diyarbakır rally bombings have also been blamed by some on ISIL. Soon after, the Turkish government launched Operation Martyr Yalçın, a series of airstrikes against mostly Kurdish militant positions in Northern Iraq and Syria. Large-scale operations against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), but including some ISIL targets, began on 24 July; however, most arrests were of PKK members.[21] This led to the resumption of the Kurdish-Turkish conflict (2015-present).
Wikipedia. “Suruç bombing”.
Apparent evidence for picking up a suspect: “Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag told Turkish media a woman had sat on a bench in the area for more than 40 minutes, leaving just minutes before the blast took place” (BBC, “Istanbul: Six dead, dozens wounded in Turkey explosion, Nov. 14, 2022).
Among the dead (and quoting from the previous cited article)–“…a government ministry employee and his young daughter….”
Of course, anything’s possible, and with autocratic ambition and power in place, politics as theater engineered for power is possible too. With an election taking place in 2023 and a quaking bog of a collapsing economy associated with him, the autocratic Erdogan may not have been without motivation for the once unheard of practice in the top echelon of both secretly setting the fire and publicly putting it out.
One would not bring up even the notion of a “False Flag Operation” with any liberal humanist leader of any open democracy anywhere, but for more than 20 years, Erdogan has displayed himself as another “populist” autocrat merely propping the very much nominal “democratic” of a Turkish state that has repeatedly proven anti-democratic, illiberal, and deeply repressive, and not exactly unlike what Putin has had going in Russia.
As of publishing, no trustworthy investigation of Sunday’s bombing at a popular shopping mall has been conducted (given the overnight spread of associated arrests or detentions), and given the autocratic and feudal-medieval character of Erdogan and his regime, none may be expected.
And on the other hand, “According to Istanbul police, 1,200 security cameras have been checked near the site of the explosion. Police have conducted raids at 21 different addresses the female suspect has been identified to have links with” (Al Jazeera. “Turkish police arrest 46 people over Istanbul explosion.” November 14, 2022).
It’s possible as well that given the chaos attending radical enterprises in their configurations, numbers, and relationships that one or more in the dragnet “done it” and leadership(s) elsewhere may not known of related plans for “action”.
Call the attitude here “Epistemological Ambivalence”, the possibility remains that the leader who has displayed contempt for his society’s journalists and others has indeed put on a bloody little play–and if not, who among Turkey’s journalists and publishers are left to believe him out of independent reason rather than fear?
Related Online
Al Jazeera. “Turkish police arrest 46 people over Istanbul explosion.” November 14, 2022.
Askew, Joshua. “Soaring inflation and a collapsing currency: Why is Turkey’s economy in such a mess?” EuroNews, October 11, 2022.More than two-thirds of people in Turkey are struggling to pay for food and cover their rent, according to a survey by Yöneylem Social Research Centre, fuelling a surge in mental illness and debt.
Butler, Daren and Birsen Altayli. “Turkey’s kingmaker party keeps options open ahead of Erdogan’s election test.” Reuters, September 8, 2022: “ISTANBUL, Sept 8 (Reuters) – A pro-Kurdish party set to play a key role in Turkish elections next year said it is open to talks with other opposition parties on finding a joint candidate who could end President Tayyip Erdogan’s two decades in power.”
Mansoor, Peter R. “False-Flag Operations.” Hoover Institution, February 23, 2022.
U.S. Department of State. “Executive Order 13224.” Bureau of Counterterrorism.
Erdogan has converted his popular mandate into power and used that power to remake Turkey’s relations with the rest of the world. He has expanded Turkish influence in Syria and northern Iraq and tilted Turkey—a NATO member—toward China, Iran, and Russia. His use of power has also generated dissent among feminists, leftists, and the secular middle class. Under Erdogan’s watch, Turkey has become the world’s largest prison for journalists. Filmmakers, novelists, photographers, and scholars are also among the imprisoned. Turkey has banned gay and transgender pride marches since 2015; Wikipedia has been blocked since 2017.
Genc, Kaya. “Erdogan’s Way: The Rise and Rule of Turkey’s Islamist Shapeshifter.” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2019.
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FTAC: Aghanistan, Corruption, and Greed
28 Tuesday Sep 2021
While the Modern West most certainly appears to be at war with feudal-medieval, narcissistic, and totalitarian forces and tendencies worldwide, there seems a part in which the Modern face off with the Modern over the management of corruption and greed. This note From the Awesome Conversation may be accompanied by a minimum of inline or separate references, but I do believe each claim or implication easily substantiated with a little bit of online research effort on the reader’s part.
From the Awesome Conversation (Now Growing Old as I Grow Old) 🙂
Inline URLs have been added to the original plain text.
***
HE was thinking “Putin”, whose black market provided the Taliban with arms and materiel and whose white market sells defense goods to allies on Afghanistan’s border. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/20/trump-peace-deal-taliban/ Grand Game thinking and Rare Earth Minerals have been a part of this tug-of-war between Moscow and Washington as has been the intent of “updating” Islam or Islamists hewing to impossibly archaic beliefs and execrable behavioral standards. Russia now has the Taliban where it has needed them — in power, out in the open, and free of any kind of support from Washington. 🙂
Moscow’s “Absolutism”, “Active Measures”, “Hybrid Warfare”, and Medieval “Realpolitik” have been somewhat proven against EU/NATO, which by “Reflexive Control” (see “Business Insider, Zawahiri, Russia“) has itself been pushed toward the “New Nationalism” with Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Turkey motivated most of all to march forward into the feudal-medieval past.
Add the arc of Soviet / post-Soviet alliances x Areas of Control x Regions of Influence, and one may glimpse the persistently barbaric and feudal world Moscow has in mind for the global future.
Not only Zawahiri but Jeffrey Epstein as well had Moscow stays in Russia], and the medieval emphasis on “kompromat” — and potential public embarrassment — may have come through most clearly during the Trump Administration (and Trump especially had relationships involving criminal elements and substantial sums of Russian money — start with Craig Unger on all of that).
One more note on Afghanistan: the fate of that state would seem inseparable from corruption and greed on the part of all involved, from the native warlords to American industries fueled by Big Defense contracts and supported by complex battle systems requiring the cooperation and presence of ready assets, especially air-related, and the administrative and technical abilities needed to run and sustain operations.
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Related Online
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FTAC: The Modern of the World v Feudal-Medieval Barbarity — What the Taliban Represent
11 Saturday Sep 2021
No introduction.
True scope: East-West Rivalry; Moscow v Washington; Political Absolutism – i.e., the power of the sovereign to destroy property and persons alike with impunity – v Democratic Distribution of Power & Rule of Law. Flies in the ointment: black markets; corruption; guerrilla wars; low intensity conflicts; wars by proxy.
Start here with 9/11: https://www.businessinsider.com/exploring-al-qaedas-murky-connection-to-russian-intelligence-2014-6
For fair good reason, the nuclear powers seldom directly confront one another. Financial and political arrangements and families have become deeply entangled above the table and below it, and there’s not much we ordinary people can do about it but ride out the storms with awareness that ultimately the modern world, as we would know it, is well at war with feudal-medieval power as well as barbaric and primitive forces in nature expressed through history.
We’ll survive.
And the Taliban?
The Taliban are already failing Afghanistan, and Afghanistan, by way of our investment and presence across 20 years, has now to choose for itself — out of sight but in the hearts of Afghans and through resistance — what it wishes to be.
One may hope the warlords and others have no wish to become or remain themselves irrecoverably backward.
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Taliban: The Whole World Is Watching
06 Monday Sep 2021
And what is the world watching?
Potentially barbaric medieval ethical, moral, and spiritual decision-making in near real time for which the modern of this 21st Century need have no respect.
Here are two old examples of that kind of decision-making — According to the lore, Muhammad had had Safiyah’s husband killed for his treasure, and the murder was done in the most gruesome and torturing way: a fire was made on his belly to force his confession of knowledge of where the whole of that treasure had been buried. In proximate time, the prophet had taken Saifyah as war booty and later elevated her status to wife and free woman. How nice.
In near history, the rape of a 13-year-old Aisha Abrahim Duhulow by three men was followed up by stoning her to death for adultery. The private act of her tormentors has never been punished while her punishment unto death took place in a stadium before a thousand or so spectators.
How would such “justice” serve had what was meted to Safiyah or Aish involved your wife, daughter, or mother?
In such primitive manner, Muslims become the victims of more malign, narcissistic, and strident Muslims who have chosen to cover their own piratical behavior with familiar dogma.
Sweet words?
Foul deeds.
Two reports related in ethical, moral, and “spiritual” dimensions have surfaced recently in Afghanistan.
BBC. “Afghanistan: Taliban accused of killing pregnant police officer.” September 6, 2021. To be fair, the BBC has reported, “Details of the incident are still sketchy as many in Firozkoh fear retribution if they speak out. But three sources have told the BBC that the Taliban beat and shot Negar dead in front of her husband and children on Saturday.”
We shall have to wait and see whether the “New Improved Taliban” step up to the challenge of undertaking an empirical investigation using modern forensic methods amidst popular challenge. What integrity will they put on display; with what broad acceptance and trust may their findings be met? So we shall see.
Here’s another telltale with fear in the wind —
Looking pale and shattered having already suffered a beating at the hands of Taliban thugs, Gulafroz spoke in English, saying: ‘I was one of the very senior policewomen in Afghanistan.
‘I did everything to encourage women into the police, against the wishes of the Taliban. Now my life is in danger. Real danger.
‘Please help me and my family.’
Stewart, Will. “Top female Afghan cop beaten and hunted by the Taliban pleads for help from the West after eight-month-pregnant policewoman is executed by the terror group for removing a flag.”. Daily Mail, September 6, 2021.
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FTAC: Global QOL (Qualities of Living)
25 Wednesday Aug 2021
Posted in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, A Little Wisdom, Afghanistan
Tags
medieval v modern, Modern Aspirations, Modern Behavioral Latitude, Modern Dignity, Modern Standards, QOL, qualities of living
Instead of focusing on disaster, it would be more helpful if the Good of the world focused on improved Qualities of Living — biological, financial, psychological, social, spatial, spiritual — near and far. We need healthy communities globally as well as a healthy planet, and where there’s open conflict, we are collectively failing at both.
There’s the word from my low on-high seat, but I believe there’s some truth to having our obsessions and worries controlling our destinies in place of strong good possibilities and dreams appropriate to our individual and global existential challenges. If the latter attitude were prevalent across cultures, we would be chasing large fires with plantings conducive to producing a right human-healthy planetary atmosphere.
And why not?
Why not view natural destruction as opportunity for lending nature a hand on the positive side?
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In Afghanistan this past month, people, notable people, people in positions of great responsibility and power, allowed or enabled corruption and greed to overtake better judgment and ceded power — for the time being — to the most absolute, fanatical, narcissistic, and ruthless of malign actors who will now proceed to destroy modern education at its outermost reach and with its Draconian views dishearten its population. The Taliban, so expert in barbarism and terror, will probably fail at every modern challenge and task, further inviting into their medieval sphere greater and more controlling powers, one criminal, the other dystopian, when modern Afghani People could just as well run circles around their malignancy and regain for themselves a more authentic contemporary dignity and freedom.
And why not?
Why not view the Taliban as the egregious insult to universal dignity, freedom, prosperity, and security that it has proven itself to be?
Afghanistan, should it reenter a politically coherent and cohesive phase, would be wise to help its latest burden fly off the rails on its own.
*
While the Taliban debate their 7th Century beliefs and Afghanistan goes dark, figuratively if not literally (but that’s a real possibility), the more advanced worlds as well as the Taliban might with to reconsider the Qualities of Living involved in the management of any geopolitical space (again biological, psychological, social, spatial, spiritual): where on earth does God, nature, or the universe, for that matter, protect air, soil, and water quality? Ask the same about security for persons and property? Given that we are all part of a gregarious species, what are “social freedoms” and what might the best societies offer in latitude and range for the full suite of our human enthusiasms, interests, and shared as well as dissenting values? What are our best options in our spiritual existence in relation to choice and reason?
Are forced confinement, control, and the delivery of feudal-medieval darkness really the best the Taliban’s Kabul might do?
While the Taliban appear on track for that, the world has changed and will continue changing beyond them for the better and by the most progressing of contemporary democratic standards. Perhaps all, including the Taliban themselves, would do better to dwell on transformations more suited to defending and serving earth and her human cargo — i.e., all of the rest of the world — than to a now deeply impoverished 7th Century system of belief and hypocritical religious egotism.
Anyone who thinks that the 21st century Taliban is a new version is delusional. Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid publicly stated, “Women will be afforded all rights within the limits of Islam [Shariah].” However, they have not explained what they mean by “the limits of Islam,” given their messages are not in sync with their actions on the ground. What form of education will be provided and will women’s rights be safeguarded as before? Will women be able to maintain their positions in media and government?
Even if the Taliban stick to their words, they would still fall short of their obligations under international human rights law. The Taliban’s way of justice translates to harsh punishments, including public executions and beheading of accused murderers and adulterers. It is very unlikely that they will accept any form of criticism, which is incompatible with the universal declaration of human rights.
Mahendru, Ritu. “Afghan Lives Matter: What Price Would Afghans Have to Pay for Peace?” The Diplomat, August 24, 2021.
QOL: Qualities of Living
Biological: Environmental and Human Health
Financial: Actualizing, Beyond Basic, Individual and Family Sufficiency
Psychological: High Degrees of Freedom, Positive Outlook, Potential for Fulfillment, Good Self-Concept, Reliable Community and Personal Security
Spatial: Bases and Boundaries x Person x Family x Clan x Tribe x Nation x Ethnic x Transnational Cultures / Defenses and Retreats
Spiritual: Broad Awareness, Consciousness, Conscience x Comprehension of Community and Personal Place in Time
Related: “Better Life Index”, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
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Taliban Poised to Suffocate Afghanistan (Again)
18 Wednesday Aug 2021
Wikipedia offers a term for what happens next: “Talibanization“.
Read it and weep.
From Journeyman Pictures, “Afghani Life Under Taliban Rule (1998)” — and regarding filming (in 1998): “According to Islam and according to our society, we are not allowed . . . under Islamic rule, there is no question of ‘why’. In Islamic society, nothing is allowed such as television, such as type (stet) such as any other recording, uh, recorders to play . . . .” (1:46-2:13).
From U.S. Department of State (November 17, 2001): “Report on the Taliban’s War Against Women”: “The life of Afghan women is so bad. We are locked at home and cannot see the sun” (Nageeba, a 35-year-old widow in Kabul).
The Taliban wants to establish an Islamic government in Afghanistan, ideally as an emirate, which would be led by a religious leader and draw its legitimacy from clerics. Afghanistan is currently an Islamic republic, which is led by a president and draws legitimacy from universal suffrage and accordance with international laws and norms.
Maizland, Lindsay. “The Taliban in Afghanistan.” Council on Foreign Relations, August 3, 2021 (last update).
Welcome back to the Old New (Old Medieval) World.
How long before Darkness — the affirmation of ignorance and the revival of medieval “Islamic” codes, punishments, and tortures resume?
Having won their war, the Taliban have seen Muslims flee their presence en masse.
Having won their war, the Taliban must now defend with weapons their authority in Afghanistan.
Having won their war, the Taliban must impose their will on modern Afghani people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjYh6p0CGi8&t=5s
(August 9, 2021).
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The best and worst thing to ever happen to the Taliban?
17 Tuesday Aug 2021
Winning.
The Taliban will have to defend Afghanistan now, and they will not be able to do that without serious Chinese and Russian and other support in the navigating of modern international legal, political, and technology systems.
Worse for the Taliban: Afghanis appear to fear them, not respect them.
Apart from fighting, first the Russians — and then the Americans who helped them stave off the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan — they have done nothing for Afghanistan apart from threatening, at least, to again impose their medieval will on a modern society. In that way, their “win” may more resemble the tyranny of the Islamic Revolution in Iran than true modern cultural Afghani self-determination.
To garner respect, the Taliban would have to deliver into their own outlook and politics the most advanced of the world’s standards having to do with comprehension of the human condition, the individual yearning for autonomy and freedom from absolute power — authoritarianism — and the dogma and propaganda employed to justify its own sadism. It has missed its own complete education thus far in the collective poetry of the world and while offering assurances has been quick nonetheless to paint over a vibrant modernity with its own darkness.
Will the Taliban escape their own darkness, in essence their own culturally suffocating presence, and make the steep climb into the light of awareness, compassion, and responsibility in concert with the decent, engaged, and responsible of the world?
While today’s west will always support indigenous self-determination and respect the sovereignty of independent states, it has demonstrated that it will not respect claims to ethnic, racial, or religious supremacism within its own bounds, and it will not approve or endorse as much elsewhere in the world. As a political bloc, EU/NATO will forever abhor absolutism, bigotry, cruelty, enslavement, hate, and subjugation — and all of that whether threatened by forces or processes within or by the enemies of freedom and security without.
Related Online
American Islamic Forum for Democracy
Jason, Mike. “What We Got Wrong in Afghanistan.” The Atlantic, August 12, 2021.
Muslim American Leadership Alliance
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