Newshoggers Archive: The Talibs

Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.

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Friday, October 16, 2009

The Talibs

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton don't get it but the perennial trouble maker Ted Rall does:

Not only is every Taliban not al-Qaida, there�s no such thing as a
Taliban, as in: �That guy is a Taliban.� Members of the Taliban are
called Talibs. You invade a country, send in 100,000 troops, presume to
decide what form of government it should have and who should rule it �
yet you still don�t know something as basic as what the members of the
nation�s majority political movement are called? Still wondering why
�they� hate us?
Last and not least, actually, while it�s true that the neo-Taliban
(as South Asian experts call them) sometimes pay stipends to their
fighters, it�s one hell of a stretch � not to mention reflective of an
utter misunderstanding of the situation � to depict them as a bunch of
greedy and/or desperate entrepreneurs trying to scrape together a few
afghanis to make ends meet. (Afghanis are the national currency.
Afghans are the people of Afghanistan. Neither the president nor news
reporters know this.)
The neo-Taliban are merely the most recent reflection of a
historical truth: Afghans set their political differences aside when
it�s time to kill invaders. Nothing the United States can or will do
can or will change what we are: a hostile occupation force. Nothing the
U.S. can say will change why the Afghans think we�re there: to kill
them and steal their land.

Now we wouldn't like it if someone occupied the United States. The Afghans are no different. Afghanistan has nothing to do with 911 or US security. The attacks of 911 were planned in Germany, the perpetrators were trained in the United States and most of them were Saudis. The Taliban offered to turn Osama bin Laden over to a third country but the neocons and the Bush/Cheney administration needed a war so we occupied Afghanistan and Iraq.

1 comment:

geoffOctober 16, 2009 at 4:12 PM
Ron, you have to recognize you are an Empire. Quit resisting. You are. So you get all the strangeness that come with that, some of which is, to even those that know they are in an Empire confusing. Relax, enjoy yourself. It maybe short-lived. I sort of hope not, eh.
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