The Absurdity Of The War On Terror Is Becoming Clear
14
Febraury, 2013
As
France realizes the difficulty of a "short" campaign in
Mali, one can't ignore the pattern of impotence and unintended
consequences at the heart of the war on terror.
In
the days following French President Francois Hollande's victory
lap around
the country, the U.N. declared Mali a humanitarian disaster.
Literally weeks
after Hollande
said his own troops would leave in weeks, the U.N. said it is
sending 6,000 of its own troops.
"As
the situation evolves, attacks and reprisals risk driving Mali into
a catastrophic spiral of violence," said the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay during a Security Council
meeting Tuesday.
Meanwhile,
undeterred by America's flying robots, Yemen's super-potent Al
Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula put
out a call for
global jihadis to pilgrimage to Mali to wage Holy War on infidel
occupiers (— exactly like Iraq, circa 2006, where
Libyan fighters
learned their craft).
Current
reports are that the toughened Malian insurgents are chilling
out in the mountains of
Gao, where they plan and stage
attacks with
near impugnity — a scenario right out of Afghanistan in 2002. With
an influx
of weapons from
Libya, and global jihadists joining the battle, the fighting could
last for ...
That's
just it, no
one knows for
how long. The two most recent counterinsurgency fights started a
decade ago and are still going.
Iraq,
Baghdad. Operation Iraqi Freedom.
While
Mali is Iraq-like, actual Iraq still
suffers suicide
bombers. Thailand just killed
19 militants fending
off a truly ballsy assault. Syria has devolved into
a stalemate between
a hair-trigger dictator and the narrowly less-than preferable
extremist element Jadhat al-Nusra. Lebanon is getting
sucked into Syria's
civil war, and al Shabaab in Somalia is
receiving arms from
Iran.
Folks
are already pointing
to an imminent fight with
the Islamic Boko Haram and others in Mali's neighboring Niger, and
fighting in Mali isn't even finished yet. Neither is fighting in
Libya, according to the website SOFREP, whose recently
published e-book claims
that the Benghazi attacks were in part a reprisal for the U.S.'s
continued targeted raids in the green mountains.
AP
Photo/Ibrahim Alaguri
|
As
Obama expands and equips the Pentagon's Africa Command with more
operators, ramps up the African drone program and its secret
strikes, and France's coalition fights to regain control in
Mali, while
the world considers
a possible
pivot toward
Niger, instability seems to be increasing in several other places at
once.
Indeed,
the Global War on Terror (GWOT), if it wasn't at the start, has
become a game of Global Whack-A-Mole — with SEALs, drones, and
now French
Legionnaires as
hammers.
And
let's hope the West's arm doesn't get tired. Al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula, Al Shabaab, and North Africa's Al Qaeda in the Islamic
Meghrib didn't even exist until the insurgency in Iraq was at its
most pitched — in 2006. Not to suggest causality, but the
correlation is undeniable.
Furthermore,
Mali wouldn't be getting arms and fighters if Libya hadn't been
"liberated" — and some of its prominent groups ignored
by the American government. Not to mention Yemen: the more it's
groups get whacked with that hammer, the more concerted their
efforts become.
For
every mole America takes out, two more rise up.
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