"The Air Conditioned class has very little in common with the sweating masses"

A Muslim friend from that part of the world emailed me a link to the recent NY Times article about the CIA employing Afghan President Karzai's brother and prefaced it with these comments:

How simply it works: pay a collaborator to keep the insurgency going so that the issue is alive (central asian energy, China / Russia encirclement ...) and the new Great Game is played at the cost of 600 American lives this year alone... And you need not pay for the insurgency which sustains itself from the opium trade. The Taliban insurgency legitimises the West's occupation of and war on the poor of Afghanistan.

What this story points to is what's going on in Pakistan. The Military top brass and the political elite are in cahoots with the likes of CIA, et al whose agenda for the region they have adopted as their own in exchange for $1.5 billion a year [the actual amount is substantially more, of course]. The Air Conditioned class has very little in common with the sweating masses and have no choice other than be the accomplice of the ruling clique. That in essence is what is going on there.

[Note: I asked my correspondent what was meant by "war on the poor of Afghanistan" and the response is at the end of this post.]

We'd already had glimpses of that relationship in Pakistan in George Crile's book, Charlie Wilson's War. If you saw the movie, that was more like musical comedy whereas the book was a very readable, but also well researched and fact rich look into what happened in the 1980s. For some other sources on this topic see Tomdispatch which makes my point about the movie, but stronger:

Open Steve Coll's aptly titled book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, at almost any page and you're likely to find something that makes a mockery of the film Charlie Wilson's War.

The Times story begins like this:

Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A.

By DEXTER FILKINS, MARK MAZZETTI and JAMES RISEN
Published: October 27, 2009

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House...

For the whole Times article go here.



Response to the question about "war on the poor":

What I meant by the "war on the poor" is the simple statistic provided by some international article: $233 billion on the war effort and $1.5 b.on humanitarian aid. In the last three days, Hillary has changed her ways and actually engaged with the people of Pakistan by visiting a saint's shrine and engaging with students at a university rather than returning after talks with the President. She has dished out a billion dollars in Pakistan over three days (already committed but symbolically given out at universities and the like).

What I mean by the war on poor is that "collateral damage" is almost always the poor. The drones and their super efficient missiles rarely ever kill the rich. The immoral leaders of our wretched land have such rosy lives ...even in their death they have tens of doctors to let their soul out softly. Robert Mugabe is said to have a team of Chinese doctors permanently settled in Harare to give him aphrodisiacs at age 86.

As a former Finance Minister of Pakistan (and a great intellectual at Columbia Mahboobul Haq whose Poverty Curtain was akin to the drawing of the Iron or the Bamboo curtain across the developing world) once remarked privately (and told to me personally by the Minister's teacher): "Sacrifices are always paid by the poor...and thanks God I am not poor)

While million dollar tanks or hummers roll by and while the million dollar planes bomb the hell out of all, the poor have no running water or sanitation...

So all wars are essentially against the poor whose leaders are already on the payroll of the UFOs. [Unidentifiable Foreign Organization.]

At the end of the day, the world is about winners and losers. Someone makes money at the expense of the others. Although I espouse an abundance mentality (i.e. that there is enough for all of us if we just shared it fairly), the human race is about a hundred or so Warren Buffets controlling so much wealth that it exceeds many national economies. This imbalance means that someone's wealth comes at someone else's expense. Every time that a Nike shoe is bought in the US, Nike and Wallmart make x number of dollars to add to their overflowing tills (their shareholders make money) - but do the Indonesians or the Pakistanis who produce those shoes get a fair deal - or for that matter do the Wallmart employees get a better rate because their employer is better off. No their wages are determined by that immensely creative contraption of Mr. Adam Smith: the invisible hand of the market. As someone said, a sucker is born every minute: so for every fat banker there a thousand "sub-primes" and their foreclosures who have paid for flabby middle parts.

Empires are not built form nothing. In past ages they were built from the blood and bones of the vanquished, now while the poor buggers remain alive they continue to provide producers with their muscles and captive markets. [You must have heard of the Fair Trade Label whose coffee is five times more expensive than the Maxwell House on our tables ..because they pay Ethiopian traders five times what the MNCs [MultiNational Corporations] pay].

In the process of creation and consumption of wealth, some people create more than they can consume and others have to consume more than they can produce - i..e they are too poor to provide for two meals. What happens to that wealth? They invest to make it produce more wealth ...from where.

Money is not created out of thin air. So when the US spends on Mr. Karzai to get results it wants, Mr. Karzai also goes out to make his money - from whom. The drug lords who make their money from the addicts of Kabul - and New York. Technically, these addicts are rational actors but are they really? What about learned helplessness of the slaves - now called African Americans.