Who is scrambling faster? The Taliban taking Kabul or Helen Clark protecting her reputation?
Stuff’s Luke Malpass is despicably running defence for NZs blood drenched Afghan military adventures by declaring…
When then-Prime Minister Helen Clark committed troops in 2001, it was for the right reasons – both politically and morally. Her comments to Stuff yesterday were the best summary of the dreadful situation.
“It’s just sad now to see the situation and think of so much blood and treasure that was spent, and we’re back where we were,” Clark said on Monday. “It’s like a mediaeval theocracy has just returned to power and that’s what was driven out 20 years ago and here we are again.”
…Really? Stuff is whitewashing our military invasions already are they?
I was deeply involved in the anti-war movement in NZ 20 years ago and I don’t remember seeing fucking Luke Malpass anywhere.
Who is scrambling fastest? The Taliban taking Kabul or Helen Clark desperately trying to protect her reputation?
Luke and Helen might like to pretend no one was pointing this horror out, but as Mike Treen’s devastating letter to Helen Clark 20 years ago reminds everyone – WE FUCKING TOLD YOU SO!
Let’s just remind everyone again.
After the CIA funded the most radical elements of the Afghan militia to fight the Soviet’s – INCLUDING ironically funding Osama Bin Laden, the US walked away from Afghanistan with various fanatics still armed to the teeth with their CIA funded weapons.
These factions turned on each other and inspired the rise of the Taliban.
The US oil industry then tried to work with the Taliban and America pursued business interests regardless of what the Taliban were doing to women, then September 11 happened and to punish a terror attack that was conducted by a mostly Saudi team of terrorists, America invaded Afghanistan as a pretext for invading Iraq.
In the years between then and now we propped up corrupt Afghan regimes, wasted trillions and pretended that the Afghan people would welcome our occupation.
Well they fucking didn’t.
We should never have invaded Afghanistan and watching those who championed that invasion now trying to defend it shows the breathtaking delusion they main under.
Afghanistan was a CIA inspired black ops clusterfuck that has blown back in our faces, like it always fucking does.
Malpass and Clark will justify how moral NZ was to agree with this occupation, but those of us who fought their war thirst 20 years ago will remind them of how wrong they always were.
We bombed a Bronze Age people into the Stone Age & called it progress.
Fuck us.
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I wanted to puke when I read Clark’s hypocritical comments yesterday, and if she thinks she’s fooled the great unwashed public, she can think again. Few were ever fooled. Clark and co are the fools for thinking that we were fooled. She is not the smartest.
Everyone with family in Afghanistan armies, is shedding tears about the tragedy that is Afghanistan and all of its people, all of them, and the politicians for whom war is a career move, and human waste and pain are collateral damage, are beneath contempt, and that includes big-mouthed Helen Clark.
I concur Snow
Auntie, who was fiercely anti Vietnam.
Aunti, who said no troops to Iraq
But Auntie did send troops to Afghanistan – why?
Was she threatened with sanctions?
Or was she lured as was Holyoake, with clandestine offers of more beef to US hamburger industry?
And then she seemed to be nice to America when she was chasing the top UN job
But Uncle Sam never forgot.
Bomber is right on the mark here
And you.
Disappointing.
And as far as sending a NZ Hercules to Kabul?
https://www.rt.com/news/532237-germany-merkel-kabul-airport/
Give Merkel a call first.
Bit of arse covering going on IMHO ?
Oh come on. It would be nice. Never going to happen. At least I don’t think an apology or what ever is required only that Clark shuts the fuck up.
I’m not a boy.
…’Malpass and Clark will justify how moral NZ was to agree with this occupation, but those of us who fought their war thirst 20 years ago will remind them of how wrong they always were’…
————–
Clark the neo liberal feminist baton passer. Didn’t like the woman. Too Frankenstienish in looks to me, too feministic while our men were drowning and too Blairite and too damn preoccupied with a seat in the U.N. Sick of Blairites holding her up as some sort of paragon of virtue. She wasn’t.
What we have here in Afghanistan is the predictable outcome of a people who didn’t want us or the Russians or anyone else invading their country and who have been battle hardened to beat back invaders for a thousand years. Even a 12 year old could have seen the outcome after the USA pulled out our troops.
And while Hillary Clinton used the Clinton Foundation to funnel arms to ISIS via cash payments from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain to the USA military industrial complex , with Obama signing off on drone strikes for 5 years every Tuesday,… is it any wonder the Americans dragged their feet while there was profits to be made?
It took the Russians to defeat ISIS in Syria.
Meanwhile, in a fairy tale story way back when just 20 years ago,…we had Clark committing the local boy scout troup’s aka the SAS as ‘advisors’,.. as ‘trainers’. Like hell they were.
Imagine if 3 trillion dollars had been used to develop that land instead of turning it to dust. Imagine all those lives saved, imagine all that human potential. Imagine if Clark and Key weren’t such Americophile fuckwits.
So,… in retrospect, all we have for all our efforts ringing in our ears is….
”GET SOME GUTS!!!”
Fuck off, Key, … just fuck off, pony tail puller.
Forgot about the wicked little Pony Tail Puller.
Careful of your comments on, Key, The Kraut and I’m Wrong have weak bladders and Alzheimers.
Russia never fought Islamic State (Al Qaeda in Iraq) they fought the Islamists fighting the Syrian regime (which included al Qaeda in Syria, al Nusra) – they were two different groups.
Islamic State was defeated by an alliance of the US/NATO, Kurds (in Syria and Iraq) and Iraqi Shia militias.
OK, seems your ears and my ears hear different things from the news reels.
Frank- Dunno why you would tempt Helen to lie, and say that she fucked up, when chances are she knew exactly what she was doing, and saw nothing wrong in doing it – the end game, Frank.
Given that National continued our involvement in Afghanistan I do wonder why that isn’t also being questioned. Whilst we remain in 5 eyes and continue to believe that we will be protected by USA if attacked expect more of the same from both parties.
Just pixelate Clark’s face please, we know what she looks like. Plus Tony Blair and John Key, thank you.
‘Helen Clark protecting her reputation?’
Ha! What reputation?
We know for certain s she was a manipulative sociopath and a liar who we deeply embedded in militarism and destruction of the environment, along with various financial scams.
Afghanistan. Helen Clark’s war. Labour’s war. The left’s war. The latest and hopefully the last foreign war of the colonial regime. Decisively and indisputably lost.
But the regime is in denial. It talks as though it can send a Hercules aircraft and a new contingent of SAS soldiers to Kabul.
It cannot. The Taliban are in charge in Kabul and all of Afghanistan. No one flies in or out except with their approval.
Helen Clark is in denial. She talks as though the war could have been continued for a further twenty years. She clearly has no thought for the hundreds of thousands of Afghan lives lost to her catastrophic ideologically driven war, but is willing to countenance the same toll being extracted from the same people in perpetuity for the sake of her chimera of feminist imperialism.
But the war is lost. It cannot be saved.
She blames a “failure of intelligence” implying that no one told her that the war was over. Ywr everyone knew that the war was over as soon as the United States withdrew. More to the point, every Afghan knew it was over, which meant that the collapse of the Kabul government was going to be very rapid. If there had been even a small representation of die-hard anti-Taliban forces in Kabul things would not have got to this point. Once defeat was evident the only options were to flee or to go over to the other side. There could be no basis for a long drawn out resistance. Helen Clark’s own intelligence would have told her that much.
So now the colonial regime is making noises about saving those Afghans who had served the interests of the occupying forces, specifically the New Zealand military. They have a moral obligation to do that, but the regime pays little heed to moral obligations. It is probably nothing more than talk.
But as tangata motu we ourselves have no obligations to Afghans who collaborated with an occupying colonialist power against their own people. We already have more than enough of such folks here on our own whenua, and while we may accept them as individuals who due to their own moral failures find themselves in desperate circumstances, that is as far as it goes.
The situation on the ground in Afghanistan has changed dramatically, but the colonialist regime in the Realm of New Zealand has not changed a jot. It continues to pretend that it was justified in invading Afghanistan, it tries to pretend that the war was not lost, or would not have been lost but for the cowardly betrayal by the United States or the inexplicable failures of the intelligence services. This is the kind of balderdash that almost invariably comes with loss of a war and that powered the rise of the Nazi party in post-war Germany.
The USA f%&ked up in Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Lybia and now Afghanistan, the people in those countries were a lot better off b4 the USA went to rescue the people of those countries. When will the USA ever learn ?
“Afghanistan. Helen Clark’s war. Labour’s war. The left’s war. The latest and hopefully the last foreign war of the colonial regime.”.. Is it an inner ear problem, or can you not tell the difference between left and right? The Afghan adventure was right out of the colonialist playbook, which, to the uneducated, is about as far from left wing as is possible to get… Beginning to despair of the ignorance of basic realities being shown by the “intelligentsia” of NZ nowadays.. We’re making Aussie boguns look smart…
Nothing says scramble more than an overloaded Chinook spluttering away from a crowded roof top with it’s tail between it’s legs.
Bit hard to get out by Sea link Vietnam as I think Afghanistan is land locked ?
Clark is a bit quick off the mark to say what the Taliban will or won’t do and expecting an immediate change with regard to the rights of Afghani women from 20 years ago. She also ignores the fact that there is not a functional Afghan government as yet and that the Taliban have clearly stated their inclusive aspirations having just won a civil war with possibly the lowest death toll ever for such a conflict.
NZ has had over four decades since the feminist movement, including Clark, seriously began the task of changing NZ’s attitudes toward women having equal rights. It is STILL a work in progress, especially for those on the bottom rungs of the social ladder.
Hear hear, well put.