Is there is, or is there ain't...

Two young Wisconsin men
arrested for sexually assaulting
woman with a live snake.

Is there is, or is there ain’t…a plan to build a gas pipeline through Afghanistan? There is, and has been since at least 1995. This planned pipeline, to move gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan, India, and elsewhere, thus bypassing Russia, has been planned for years but has encountered many problems since the original idea. There were apparently agreements signed in 2002, 2008, and more recently in 2010 (there were probably others as well). As I understand it, the two major stumbling blocks have had to do with the Taliban who control part of the territory that would be required, and, more importantly, the absence of a single, stable Afghanistan government. Naturally the Oil giants, especially UNOCAL, and others have been involved at one time or another. In any case, there is no doubt this is still a plan waiting to come to fruition, and a plan that the U.S. has been interested and involved in since the beginning. With this in mind I would assume that it was not merely coincidental that Hamid Karzai, a former UNOCAL consultant, somehow wound up becoming President of that troubled country (without a single, stable government). I also guess that a quote I recently came across, “either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold or we will bury you under a carpet of bombs,” made by someone (I’m not sure who) must have just been a joke or something. Of course Karzai has failed to establish a strong central government, some of the original companies, like UNOCAL, have dropped out, and the Taliban have still not agreed to this and want us out of their country entirely, but this does not mean the desire is not still there to have such a project.

I bring this up not because I know much of anything about the plan and its actual history, but only to point out that it quite definitely does exist. We would hardly be aware of its existence if all we ever watched was the MSM in the U.S., where this project is very rarely mentioned. I find this neglect fascinating, given the space that is allotted to when we are or are not going to pull our troops out of Afghanistan, and given our various claims of being there to fight terrorists (there are said to be only about 50 left), to improve the plight of Afghan women, to spread democracy, to help them build a nation, and other completely false claims. We are there for the same reason we are in Iraq, Oil, and control of resources in the Middle East. There is little doubt in my mind that our sliding scale of withdrawal, now said to be 2014, is related to this pipeline, and I would bet there is no genuine plan to withdraw by 2014, or ever, at least until the oil giants have signed their agreements as they have in Iraq, or as long as the black gold lasts. I also doubt we will remove all our troops from Iraq either. Wikileaks apparently has indicated there are memos and such suggesting that we are not there to fight terrorists but to pursue oil. I believe it. Given the absence of information about this in our press it is not surprising our government would like to keep Wikileaks from publicising it. It’s not a complete secret of course, but it has been very carefully avoided by the MSM. It’s exactly the same kind of baloney we were fed about our invasion of Iraq, “it’s not about oil,” and etc.

In a strange way I’m glad to have my long-standing beliefs about this verified, it’s nice to know that President Obama is not entirely stupid enough to stay in Afghanistan for no reason at all, which I had begun to believe as we heard nothing of substance about the real reason for our continued presence. This does not mean I approve of our being there because I don’t. It also puts Lindsay Graham’s recent comment that we should maintain permanent bases there in a somewhat different light even though I still think it’s a really stupid idea. We should get our troops out of both Iraq and Afghanistan as soon as feasible, should never have allowed all this to happen in the first place, and make some serious attempts to wean ourselves from the oil nipple.

As we still have not convinced the Taliban to let us build this monstrous pipeline, and as there is still not a stable government in Afghanistan, and if our dream of Pipelineistan still lives, we are not going to withdraw until we have accomplished the mission, a mission that has nothing whatsoever to do with democracy, terrorism, or the well-being of Afghan women. But just think of all the oil we could have bought with the amount of money we have spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, and more importantly, think of all the innocent lives that would have been spared.

LKBIQ:
The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
Daniel Webster

TILT:
Playing cards are believed to have originated in India.