posted on December 27, 2002 05:18:54 PM new
But we all knew that they did not really expect to "root out terrorists and Osma bin Laden".
Or liberate the poor people from the Taliban
That pipe line was on the agenda before Bush ran for president.
Asked whether Afghanistan had sufficient security for such a high-profile project, Karzai said, "Very much so." "I believe it can be considered among the best in the region," he said. However, potential investors have been wary of the risks of doing business in a country where U.S.-led coalition forces are stillhunting down remnants of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters.
LOL!
This was exactly the problem that unocal had. They couldn't build a pipeline in the middle of a war zone.
posted on December 27, 2002 10:10:11 PM new
You were right all along Borillar, but the other side is that Afghanistan needs this to help rebuild their country. I don't see any other way it could be paid for unless the U.S. paid for everything.
posted on December 28, 2002 01:13:14 AM new
Rebuild that country? What system of equitable distribution is made and put into place to ensure that? What is to stop Karsai from becoming another Saddam? No one knows, so is Afghanistan to trust to luck and kindness of sadistic leaders alone? Besides, the Arabs have had oil jobs for decades and most still live in the most abject poverty underneath the shadows of the sky towers of the rich Saudis who take all of the wealth for themselves. What makes you think that this will be any different?
Come back to me with this idea of yours when an enforceable system of wealth sharing is put into place in Afghanistan.
posted on December 28, 2002 06:12:25 AM new
Viewing this as nation building is wrong. It reminds me of the problem with Dam building in India described so well by Arundhati Roy in this article. It's a little off topic but really a very interesting comparison.
This pipeline, like India's dams is greed, pure and simple - a grab by a few for power and money.
"Dams are obsolete. They’re uncool. They’re undemocratic. They’re a government’s way of accumulating authority (deciding who will get how much water and who will grow what where). They’re a guaranteed way of taking a farmer’s wisdom away from him. They’re a brazen means of taking water, land and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich. Their reservoirs displace huge populations of people leaving them homeless and destitute. Ecologically, they’re in the doghouse. They lay the earth to waste. They cause floods, water-logging, salinity, they spread disease. There is mounting evidence that links Big Dams to earthquakes"
"The Indian State is not a State that has failed. It is a State that has succeeded impressively in what it set out to do. It has been ruthlessly efficient in the way it has appropriated India’s resources—its land, its water, its forests, its fish, its meat, its eggs, its air—and redistributed it to a favoured few (in return, no doubt, for a few favours). It is superbly accomplished in the art of protecting its cadres of paid-up elite. Consummate in its methods of pulverising those who inconvenience its intentions. But its finest feat of all is the way it achieves all this and emerges smelling nice. The way it manages to keep its secrets, to contain information that vitally concerns the daily lives of one billion people, in government files, accessible only to the keepers of the flame—ministers, bureaucrats, state engineers, defence strategists. Of course we make it easy for them, we, its beneficiaries. We take care not to dig too deep. We don’t really want to know the grisly details."
"To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You rob them of volition. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies, who prospers, who doesn’t. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it. How easily you could press a button and annihilate the earth. How you can start a war, or sue for peace. How you can snatch a river away from one and gift it to another. How you can green a desert, or fell a forest and plant one somewhere else. You use caprice to fracture a peoples’ faith in ancient things—earth, forest, water, air. Once that’s done, what do they have left? Only you. They’ll turn to you, because you’re all they have. They’ll love you even while they despise you. They’ll trust you even though they know you well. They’ll vote for you even as you squeeze the very breath from their bodies. They’ll drink what you give them to drink. They’ll breathe what you give them to breathe. They’ll live where you dump their belongings. They have to. What else can they do? There’s no higher court of redress. You’re their mother and their father. You’re the judge and the jury. You’re the World. You’re God."
posted on December 28, 2002 11:01:47 AM new
That last paragraph that you quoted, Helen, easily desribe's Bush's effots to subdue and to control all aspects of Amrican's lives.
