by Al Martin
Clueless in Afghanistan
Our man in Kabul ("Abdul," not Geraldo)
reports the latest news from Afghanistan. The
US troops are still trying to integrate with the
Afghani peasantry, and even though the
CNN-Department of Defense has reported
that only one twelve hundred pound crate of
food has landed on a hut, killing the people
inside, it's not true. There have, in fact, been
many incidents like this. Our man didn't know
exactly how many there were, but he believes
there have been perhaps dozens and dozens
of these incidents. Not only have we been
smashing their huts, but we have been
dropping them on the peasantry's most
valuable resource -- their camels. Since the
US has been dropping crates of food over
populated areas, it's almost impossible not to
smash many of their adobe huts.
The mayor of one village said that "every
time we see the crates dropping, we sound the
village emergency bell, and everyone in the
village grabs their camel and runs like hell to
the caves." The local peasantry (and I'm not
making this up) have begun calling them,
"Yabba dabba doo."
"Yabba dabba doo" can be loosely
translated as "falling crates that knock down
huts and squash camels."
Meanwhile Secretary Rumsfeld has said
that the United States is determined to feed
the Afghani people. He admits that we're
dropping all this stuff on them -- and they
don't even know that it's food. They've never
seen stuff like this before.
The tribal chieftain was seen holding up an
MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) of spaghetti and
meatballs. He says that they didn't know what
it was, but that they determined finally that it
was lamb's brains and tomato sauce. But he
said he couldn't figure out why there were little
lumps of horseshit in it. He was referring to the
meatballs.
One of the crates of food had busted
open, and it had what looked like thousands
of packages of Kraft's marshmallows. The
poor Afghans, of course, don't know a
marshmallow from a hole in the wall.
The chieftain was holding the marshmallow
and squeezing it. He said that he thought, by
the texture of the thing, that it was some sort
of suppository.
Since there's a greater American troop
presence now, they're going into these Afghani
villages to make friends with them and tell
them that "we come in peace". And of course,
they don't understand any of the local
language. When the US went into this thing,
we had almost no Arabic-speaking people in
the armed forces, and especially none who
could speak the local language.
When the troops go in there, the only thing
they understand is that they keep hearing the
peasants say, "Yabba dabba doo." So now
the American troops have nicknamed the
Afghan peasants "flintstones." They thought
initially that the peasants were trying to
communicate with them by saying something
humorous, something they heard on TV.
So our troops would yell back at them,
"Yabba dabba doo," and immediately all the
peasants look up in the sky, then grab their
camels and run like hell.
And the American commander says, "We
can't figure out what's going on." It's the sheer
ineptitude that becomes humorous. We go into
these things, and we don't have people that
speak the language. Logistically we don't even
know where the people are. Our own troops
were saying that only half of the Global
Positioning Units work at any given time. And
they're not being given reliable maps because
the Department of Defense didn't even have
any.
Then the soldiers say, "Look, half the time
we don't know where we are; we don't speak
the language; we don't know what's going on."
But the tribal chieftains couldn't
understand why we were spoiling good lamb's
brains and tomato sauce with lumps of
horseshit. Then we're dropping MREs that
have macaroni and cheese in them. The
Afghans took it as an insult. They thought it
looked like vomit in a bag.
Then they showed the beans and franks.
Apparently that's the most popular item - the
beans and franks. They think the franks are
some sort of sheep's member, and that's the
one thing that's really valuable because
evidently sheep's members are thought to give
their virility a boost. So they're much
enthralled with the beans and franks.
The very incompetence of our armed
forces is what's so humorous. You can't
believe what the US Government says about
the war in Afghanistan. They said that we
accidentally dropped one five hundred pound
bomb on a cave -- without realizing that our
Northern Alliance allies were inside the cave
looking for the Taliban. Inadvertently we
sealed our own allies in the cave, and they're
making a big to-do about it -- how we're
rushing excavation equipment there to dig out
our allies, whom we bombed into the cave in
the first place.
Meanwhile, the Pakistanis are leaking out
information that bin Laden may already be
dead, sealed inside a cave somewhere. Then
it'll cost $1.3 billion of the US taxpayers'
money to excavate all the thousands of caves
we've already bombed. But it will be a very
convenient story, when bin Laden's head is
finally paraded before the world.
The situation between India and Pakistan
keeps deteriorating. India has withdrawn its
help regarding the "war on terrorism" and
declared the Pakistanis to be "terrorists."
Likewise, the Pakistanis have declared the
Indians to be "terrorists." It should be
remembered that Pakistan was initially behind
the Taliban, as well as the Kashmiri so-called
"separatists." Pakistan also armed the Tamil
so-called "separatists."
India has reinforced its conventional forces
on the Kashmiri border with Pakistan and is
dispatching the rest of its forces to its border
with China. Apparently both Pakistan and
India have their nuclear arsenals on a full state
of alert. The Chinese have quietly begun to
increase their conventional strength on their
western borders and have moved an
undetermined quantity of thermo-nuclear
mobile launchers into its western theater.
Russia has privately told the Chinese that
should they attempt to attack India, the
Russians will attack the Chinese, whereupon
both Chinese and Russians have privately told
George Bush and Tony Blair that allied
conventional forces best be withdrawn "for
their own safety." They don't want the United
States drawn in that way, but, of course, the
Bush Administration will take that gamble
because it's so desperate to keep American
troops in Afghanistan as part of its long-term
strategy.
This strategy in the so-called "war against
terrorism" is an effort to continuously take
more and more rights from the American
people and consolidate that power in the
White House. This is a very important
long-term strategy. The Bush Administration
has a lot of vested political capital built into
this propaganda. If suddenly our troops in
Afghanistan were to be withdrawn, Bush
would wind up with egg on his face. And it
would disturb their timetable.
In other news, the Department of Defense
has reported that they want to resume testing
of the completely grounded V-22 Ospreys.
They have finally been forced to make
substantial admissions that there are numerous
design faults and spare part problems. They
want to resume flight-testing, but even they
said they would not put soldiers on the
aircraft. Testing would be resumed by remote
control. (See previous story)
The V-22 is still officially classified as a
prototype aircraft. Instead of humans, though,
they want to put small animals, like dogs, on
the aircraft. They will be hooking them up to
respiration and heart-monitoring machines to
see how they react to various stresses as the
aircraft goes through various maneuvers.
When the ASPCA heard about, they
immediately filed for an injunction in the
California Superior Court, asking the judge to
block the Department of Defense from doing
this, since the V-22 Osprey was obviously
hazardous to the animals.
The judge, after reading the safety reports
of the V-22 Osprey, declared the aircraft to
be "a flying death trap." And the ASPCA was
given their injunction.
With more reports of more American
soldiers being injured by American faulty
equipment, maybe we should wage a whole
new kind of warfare. If we're going to make a
serious worldwide effort on the "war on
terrorism," we should first arm all the
"terrorists" with American weapons because
then we wouldn't have to fight them at all.
They would eventually all die of attrition. As
the helicopters we gave them crashed, as the
missiles we gave them blew up on launch, as
they get electrocuted through faulty spare
parts, eventually they would all die out. That
should be our new "battle plan."
Then there was the announcement of the
crash of the Global Hawk, the unmanned
experimental surveillance drone, in
Afghanistan. This was supposedly the first one
used in Afghanistan. They had been using the
Dragonflies, but they all got lost - or they
crashed.
The Dragonflies are only about $350,000
a piece. They're really nothing more than
glorified model airplanes. So General Tommy
Franks, the commander of US forces in the
region, declared that if all the $350,000
Dragonflies are crashing, perhaps we should
use the new $16 million Global Hawk. They
launched it, and it was supposed to be the first
time it's been used in a combat theater. The
Global Hawk takes off, then promptly
proceeds to fly in the wrong direction six
hundred miles -- until it crashes in Pakistan. It
was supposed to be going west to Kandahar.
It landed in the hinterland of Pakistan on
another hut killing two more peasants. It's just
another $16 million of the American people's
tax money wasted on another system that
doesn't work. A GAO report said that the US
Army's own Inspector General's Office said it
wasn't ready and it didn't work. But they
launched it anyway, and, for the first stretch of
a hundred miles or so, it was apparently
sending back signals indicating that it was
flying in the right direction -- when it was really
flying a hundred eighty degrees the other way.
It finally crashed in a Pakistani village and
two more villagers met their demise. The tribal
chieftain of the village had evidently heard
about these "yabba dabba doos" from the
Afghani peasants.
After the incident, it was reported that the
Pakistani tribal chieftain told his flock to grab
their camels and head for the caves - until the
Americans stop dropping "yabba dabba doos.
. ."
It should be remembered that "Yabba
dabba doos" are roughly translated as "falling
objects that smash huts and squash camels."
AL MARTIN |
