ROBBIE THE PICT: COMMENTARY ON PROPOSED SCOTTISH TALKS ON ENDING THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

PROPOSED US-TALIBAN TALKS IN SKYE 

Hi Gordon, 

May I offer a personal perspective, claiming nothing more than a little Scottish common sense and an incomplete but concerned observation of current affairs? The primary aim of any such conferring is to reach an accord acceptable to the concerned parties.  The need to confer arises from continuing human-on-human violence which the human spirit demands must cease. 

In military terms that translates as a ‘we need a cease-fire’. Because of the multifarious complexity of the problem, wherein there are several agendas and multiple international inputs and demands, it is necessary to return to the core issue, which is the American presence in Afghanistan.

       The explanation currently offered to the world as to why American troops are in somebody else’s country is that America has declared ‘perma-war’ on a global scale against ‘Terrorism’.  This is not a people, but a practice, an extreme resistance or aggression technique employed from the beginning of recorded history.  In my own country William Wallace and Robert the Bruce were thus terrorists, in America the Confederates were terrorists, in France the Maquis were terrorists, in Poland the resistance to Hitler and so on through thousands of examples.

America’s ambition to defeat this practice of fighting back or fighting for has required a personification of terrorism to justify the sheer arrogance of the declared mission.  Despite their group reputation, a wise percentage of the American people were not going to support global terror-laundry just for its own sake and this seems to have produced the myth of Osama bin Laden and the even more noumenal Al Quaeda.

The verity of ‘Osama al Quaeda’ is not important in detail but it has thus far succeeded as a bogey-man in order to separate American tax-payers from billions of their dollars, which seem to principally enrich the arms industry in America and the Zionists in both America and Israel.  The latter are the most vociferous proponents of a definition of terms, whereby acts against the interests of Israel are deemed terrorism and similar acts by Israel are automatically self-defence.  This is normal imperialism which the Scots have observed from close hand but we would urge America to avoid that hypocritical mind-set.  

To return to the issue at hand, the American World War on Terror has brought them into the fields and homes of a country called Afghanistan.  Afghanistan is a sovereign nation populated by a sovereign people and America, in arriving like the world’s policeman, is a de facto invader.  An American simply has to ask himself ‘If, say, Russians or Chinese, or even aliens, arrived in America and acted exactly as the US troops presently do in Afghanistan, but scaled upwards, would I contemplate resisting them, even if they said they were here to clear out the Mafia?’

Passive resistance has its limitations, and although lots of Ghandi’s letting your tyres down at night can be annoying, you can see how resistance might grow and so might the ‘cosa nostra’, were that the declared target.  The Mafia could understandably say to the people, ‘Hey, we may be gangsters but we are your gangsters.  This team are out of order even being here.  Give us a hand and we’ll work together to get rid of them’.  Thus the common enemy syndrome kicks in and the invader is in deep trouble a long way from home.  You might also like to re-examine the terrain and ask how you sustain troops a long way from barracks.  Even Alexander the Great and Russia giving up is a hint.

I thoroughly commend the Veterans Today initiative in writing an open letter to the Taliban, asking ‘why are we (the USA) fighting you?’, but the real courage might be for the USA to answer a question the Taliban might ask, namely ‘Why are you here in our country and killing people?’   

Time has passed and we have more global intelligence than 8 years ago.  Several agendas have been flushed out, variously concerning oil, drugs, Neo-Cons and Zionists.  Perhaps the USA has to revisit the premise on which it arrived in the premises.  At the moment it looks like a police drug squad who have raided the wrong house and will not admit it.  Instead they occupy the house and get grumpy when the residents want them out.

The Taliban too may have learned things in the past years.  Their treatment of women and their styles of justice may become modified, but they under under no obligation to justify themselves.  They are the invaded, not the invader.  Their sovereignty has been violated by America and, as yet, there is little evidence of justification. 

The surrounding inter-tribal and international intrigues are potentially endless, and some parties may even be trying to keep it that way, so the first step can only be for the two principals, Afghanistan and the USA, to confer with a view to accord.  The accord must take the form of a cease-fire and the conditions of that cease-fire are thrashed out between these two parties.  Any other input at the first stage simply churns the mud.  Two tanks in a mud-hole is negotiable, six or seven is a problem.

If asked, I would therefore respectfully invite the two opposing principals, Afghanistan and the USA only, to complete the following submission to sanity in not more than 200 words:

"We will immediately terminate all violence to civilian and military personnel in Afghanistan when:………."

These two preliminary papers would give a potential arbiter something positive to work on at any eventual meeting of minds.  The buzzards hovering around Afghanistan, whether British, Russian, Pakistani, Indian or Israeli will just have to deal with whatever such an accord came up with.  Afghanistan, as the sovereign superior, should have the big say in how she determines her destiny.  Let’s see who is quick to promote re-engagement and who is squealing because their agenda is compromised.  Let’s test all those ‘special relationships’ with a unilateral act of human decency.

With the greatest respect to all concerned, and in understanding of difficult times.

Robbie the Pict

Skye Law.