What's Pashto for "Contra"?

Apparently the U.S. intelligence community is organizing and funding something - either "paramilitary units" or "death squads" - in Afghanistan.

"The U.S. has trained and supported paramilitary groups in Afghanistan that have committed summary executions, forcibly disappeared people and have been behind more than a dozen serious abuse cases in the last 18 months, a human rights organization said Thursday.

Afghan strike forces, which have been accused of raiding medical facilities and killing civilians in night raids on their homes, sometimes in front of their families, are largely trained and overseen by the CIA, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Thursday."

Here's the thing.

We the People have never really come to any sort of sensible terms our use of mercenary militias in places like Vietnam or Nicaragua. The covert ops guys descended from Donovan's OSS have always had a fondness for using local jamokes to do the dirty work that regular joes either can't or won't, or, worse, get all fucked up personally or organizationally from doing.

Guerrilla wars are filthy because of their very nature. They're civil wars, and civil wars are fundamentally ugly. Adding irregulars and guerrillas just adds to the basic ugliness.

The problem I have with this isn't so much that it's a thing. If Afghans are going have a civil war, I'd just as soon that it be with Afghans and not Americans. And if they're going to have a guerrilla war, I'd just as soon it be with Afghan guerrillas and not Americans leading or driving Afghan guerrillas.

And it's not the basic brutal ugliness of this fight, either. Are these militias murdering people and doing other war-crime stuff? Sure they are. That's what happens when you give people firearms and turn them loose on people who don't have them without some sort of organizational control. "Militia" is just a sanitized term for "mob of murderous fucksticks" that lurks inside every armed group of people who have no institutional control over how they use those arms.

No, it's that we don't seem to learn that arming one mob to kill another mob (along with poor random bastards that have what "our" armed mob wants, or just for pure shits-and-giggles) doesn't do a goddamn thing geopolitically to solve civil war problems without some sort of genuine political solution available. There were negotiations going on that were supposedly leading to some sort of heading-towards-a-solution back in late summer, but part of the Art of the Deal appears to be screwing up that sort of deal, so we're back to Square Zero, only with...death squads?

Honestly. It's like we're the fucking Bourbons ("Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien apprendre.") except with worse taste in entertainment and mistresses.

President Baldrick's Cunning Plan

As part of the massive GOP performance art project to convince their idiot rubes base that the patrie is en danger of being overrun by hordes of illegal flesh-eating zombie immigrants (or something) the Trump Administration has announced that it will cut off all aid to three Central American (or, "Mexican", as we MAGAts like to call them) nations; Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

We can save a lot of time and nonsense by beginning this discussion with the acceptance that there is no actual "border crisis", that immigration is not an existential threat to the United States, and that anyone who attempts to convince you that #1 and #2 are actual things is trying to sell you something rather like a bridge, or some Nigerian oil minister connections.

The thing about this, though, is that given the conditions on the ground in central America this is either the stupidest Stupid Trump Thing Ever or perhaps the most cunning of Steven Milleresque Cunning Plans.

Life in much of Central America is pretty Hobbsean; nasty, brutish, and short. We, the People, own a shitload of the responsibility for that, given our repeated and malicious meddling in Central American affairs ranging from the support of loathsome caudillos from Arias through Somoza to Rios Montt all the way back to the diddling of American corporations such as United Fruit and the filibustering days of people like William Walker.

One of the main reasons there ARE troubles south of the US-Mexican border is because the U.S. has helped ensure that conditions in those places - never conducive to good government and social stability to begin with, given their Spanish-colonial and post-colonial history - have made it difficult for the locals to simply survive.

When I talked about this almost ten years ago I pointed out the obvious:

"The real issue - the one Which Dare Not Speak Its Name - is that the institutional poverty, misgovernance and social maladjustment of most Latin American countries is so profound and so destructive that to address it would take every penny that the U.S. has spent on poorly planned foreign adventures and more. Much more.

So instead we get this idiotic argument that all we need to do is fence these little heatherns out and everything wil be Good. God will once again be White and in His Heaven, the food will magically get harvested, processed, cooked and served by Real (i.e. white) Americans who will suddenly, magically, want to work for the pittance we want to pay for these jobs to prevent our food, clothing and service costs from reflecting what it would cost to pay humans actually living wages to do these things.

As Hadrian himself might have said: Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet.

It is your business when your neighbour's house is on fire."

If, indeed, your neighbor's house is on fire it would seem the heights of ignorance to turn off the little garden hose you've been using to help wet down the flames.

But that would be assuming that you WANT to put out the fire.

As I've also said here before; the GOP in its current incarnation has nothing substantive to offer the non-plutocrat/non-theocrat constituency. Its entire policy agenda consists of returning the U.S. to the social, political, and environmental conditions of 1899. A New Gilded Age, in other words, with everything that implies for those of us not Rockefellers, Goulds, or Carnegies.

So, if the GOP is to gain power in a representative polity it MUST present the temporarily-embarassed-millionaires with another reason to vote Republican. Hence the booga-booga scares about tricksy transgender ladyboys lurking in the girls' bathroom. Hence the frantic insistence in the God-given right to Own Every Semiautomatic Weapon Ever Made. Hence the - as here - insistence that the Browns are Coming To Kill Us All.

And I think this is what this is.

If you treat it as actual foreign policy it's blindingly moronic. You have internal problems in neighboring nations, so you ensure that the relative pittance you've been devoting to helping those neighbors ameliorate the problems doesn't get used as a lever to try and force their dysfunctional governments into being more functional, but simply goes away. You're not trying to solve anything with it. You're just pulling it out from under them.

But...if you treat it was a sort of stupid-person's-idea-of-a-smart-idea that's really intended to ensure that those problems continue and provide you with your immigration Reichstag fire?

That's actually a stupid kind of cunning. You're making trouble for your nation, but making political gains for your party.

And that, my friends, is the State of the Nation.

WASF.

This in from the traffic desk...

Sinkhole in Guatemala City:Buffy Summers: Now, we can do this the hard way or... well, actually, there's just the hard way.
Darla: That's fine with me.
Buffy Summers: Are you sure? Now this is not gonna be pretty. We're talking violence, strong language, adult content.
Two thoughts: Traffic through this part of town is pretty much hosed.

And I wonder who has the contract for providing the City of Guatemala City with backfill? And is it too late to get a bid in?