The dim-witted but Presidential-looking tool of corrupt political bosses Warren G. Harding was sold to the American public after WWI by promising a “return to normalcy,” and for anyone except idiotic bullshitters about the “War on Terror,” Harding’s humdrum slogan represents a very appealing alternative to the chaos which American invaders inherited and intensified in Afghanistan.

Intelligent readers will probably be amazed to learn that what you might call “normalcy” has already returned to a couple of provinces in Afghanistan, meaning that tribal elders have expelled foreign militants, pacified the Taliban, accepted a pile of money from our grateful coalition, and re-instated the glacial tranquility of their primordial way of being, enlivened only by ancient festivals and a few low-key shoot-outs between Hatfields and McCoys.

This relatively happy state of affairs in Nangarhar Province, for example, was immediately (or sooner) misinterpreted by Western media and the Pentagon in three different ways:

1. It can’t happen.

2. It can happen, but it’s all about money.

3. It quickly failed.

It’s probably impossible for our fundamentally immodest and benighted nation to accept this modest and self-evidently appropriate outcome of our lethal misadventures in Afghanistan, and leave behind a weak central government exercising only sporadic authority over almost entirely autonomous tribes, which is to say, Afghanistan as Afghanistan was always and ever shall be, whenever it isn’t occupied by foreign imbeciles.  

An opinion survey of Afghanistan’s Kandahar province funded by the U.S. Army has revealed that 94 percent of respondents support negotiating with the Taliban over military confrontation with the insurgent group and 85 percent regard the Taliban as “our Afghan brothers”.

The survey, conducted by a private U.S. contractor last December, covered Kandahar City and other districts in the province into which Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is planning to introduce more troops in the biggest operation of the entire war.

“Our Afghan brothers!”

This is the end of the line for the United States in Afghanistan, and if anyone was waiting for handwriting on the wall to announce it, there it is.

Soldiers from the U.S. Army First Battalion, 26th Infantry take defensive positions at firebase Restrepo after receiving fire from Taliban positions in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan’s Kunar Province on May 11, 2009.  (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder)

More than 40 U.S. soldiers have been killed, and scores more wounded, in helicopter crashes, machine-gun attacks and grenade blasts in the Korengal Valley, a jagged sliver just six miles deep and a half-mile wide. The Afghan death toll has been far higher, making the Korengal some of the bloodiest ground in all of Afghanistan, according to U.S. and Afghan officials.

In the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday, the American presence here came to an abrupt end.

For U.S. commanders, the Korengal Valley offers a hard lesson in the limits of American power and goodwill in Afghanistan. U.S. troops arrived in 2005 to flush out al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. They stayed on the theory that the American presence drew insurgents away from areas where the United States had a better chance of fostering development. The troops were, in essence, bullet magnets.

“Bullet magnets!” Put that on all those recruitment posters that Army recruiters plaster all over inner-city neighborhoods!

And at the very end, we paid off the Taliban to permit us to run away in peace, for 6,000 gallons of fuel, and some rusty equipment.

If U.S. troops were allowed to leave peacefully, the Americans wouldn’t destroy the base, the crane and the fuel. (Village chieftain Shamshir) Khan assured (Local US commander Captain Mark) Moretti that the valley’s fighters would honor the deal.

So that’s the end of our stupid adventures in the Korengal Valley, but until that very moment, we were just as stupid as always.

Moretti had been boycotting weekly meetings of the elders and avoiding Zalwar Khan as a way to pressure them into greater cooperation. He also hoped that by ignoring Khan he could force him to build a relationship with Afghan government officials.

“You are the only American commander I have known who refuses to see me,” Khan said in Pashto, his face just inches from Moretti’s. “You are the only one who doesn’t sit at the weekly shura. Why?”

“The shura is a waste of time,” Moretti replied. “All we talk about is dead goats.”

“All we talk about is dead goats…”

…in a valley too poor to graze sheep on scarce bottom-land, and where nothing except goats can scratch out a living on the rocky slopes. Three or four goats is the difference between milk for children and cheese in the winter and even a little meat on very special occasions for most of the families in the Korengal Valley.

But Americans don’t want to talk about dead goats!

And now we can forget about everything else in the Korengal Valley, too, along with the names of so many brave soldiers who died there…

Staff Sgt. Thaddeus S. Montgomery, of West Yellowstone, Mont. and PFC Richard A. Dewater, 21, of Topeka, Kan., and Staff Sgt. Nathan M. Cox, 32, of Walcott, Iowa, and Pvt. Joseph F. Gonzales, 18, of Tucson, Ariz. and Staff Sgt. Kristopher D. Rodgers, 29, of Sturgis, Mich., and Sgt. Joshua C. Brennan, 22, of Ontario, Ore., and Spc. Hugo V. Mendoza, 29, of Glendale, Ariz., and Pfc. Juan S. Restrepo, 20, of Pembroke Pines, Fla., who left his name to “Firebase Restrepo” in Korengal Valley, and Pfc. Timothy R. Vimoto, 19, of Fort Campbell, Ky., Sgt. Edelman L. Hernandez, 23, of Hyattsville, Md., and Spc. Christopher M. Wilson, 24, of Bangor, Maine, and Cpl. Angelo J. Vaccaro, 23, of Deltona, Fla., and Cpl. Fernando D. Robinson, 21, of Hawthorne, Calif., and Sgt. Russell M. Durgin, 23, of Henniker, N.H., and PFC Richard A. Dewater, 21, of Topeka, Kan., along with 25 other American soldiers and many more Afghan civilians.    

This is Faiz Mohammed and his bride, Ghulam Haider, who was 11 years old on the day of her wedding in Afghanistan, in 2006.

We chased the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan in 2001, and if you still believe the Bush/Obama propaganda, we are now and were always on the verge of installing a more enlightened form of Islam where the demonic Taliban formerly ruled.

But it was surprisingly difficult to find a “more enlightened form of Islam” to install in Afghanistan, even if the “goal” of nine years of mass murder by the CIA and other American agencies hadn’t suddenly changed from driving the Taliban out of Afghanistan to making a deal with those same demons.

Karzai has endorsed the idea of talking with all levels of the Taliban, and his aides insist that women need not worry about the equal rights the Afghan constitution guarantees them.

(Apparently among the “equal rights” which the Afghan Constitution guarantees for women was Ghulam Haider’s “right” to marry Faiz Mohammed when she was 11 years old.)

But after we make our deal with the demonic Taliban, the condition of women in Afghanistan will supposedly improve, because the Taliban will peacefully share power with our more enlightened Islamic allies.

And where will Obama find those more enlightened Islamic allies, after he makes a deal with the Taliban?

Roshan Kasem was 8 years old on the day of her betrothal to Said Mohammed in Ghor Province, Afghanistan, in 2006.

Maybe Obama can find a more enlightened form of Islam among his allies in Yemen!

A 13-year-old Yemeni child bride who bled to death shortly after marriage was tied down and forced to have sex by her husband, according to interviews with the child’s mother, police and medical reports.

The practice of marrying young girls is widespread in Yemen and has drawn the attention of international rights groups seeking to pressure the government to outlaw child marriages.

A February 2009 law set the minimum age for marriage at 17, but it was repealed and sent back to parliament’s constitutional committee for review after some lawmakers called it un-Islamic.

The issue of Yemen’s child brides received widespread attention three years ago when an 8-year-old girl boldly went by herself to a courtroom and demanded a judge dissolve her marriage to a man in his 30s.

In September, a 12-year-old Yemeni child-bride died after struggling for three days in labor to give birth, a local human rights organization said.

So apparently Yemen isn’t exactly the best place to look for a “more enlightened form of Islam” to substitute for the Taliban, and maybe we should look in Bahrain instead!

Lawmakers in Bahrain have no plans to close a loophole that allows girls below the age of 15 to be married in the Gulf island state, despite legislation intended to ban the practice.

The government prompted a storm of controversy last year when it pushed through a law which set the minimum marriage age for girls at 15. Lawmakers from the largest opposition bloc in the Bahraini Parliament had opposed the legislation, saying it went against Islamic principles.

If you squint at my graphic from the Bank of International Settlements, which is denominated in billions, you can (barely) see that the amount outstanding in over-the-counter financial derivatives is on the order of…

Six hundred thousand billion dollars. more than six hundred trillion dollars, $600,000,000,000,000, which works out to $100,000 for every living human being.

It gets worse.

These stats from the Bank of International Settlements only include over-the-counter derivatives, and that’s only about half the market!

In the other main category of “listed derivatives,” there’s approximately the same amount of derivatives all over again, and that brings the grand total of financial derivatives on Planet Earth to slightly more than one QUADRILLION  dollars, and that’s about $200,000 for every living human being, but…

It gets worse, at least for us (potentially) very, very unlucky Americans, because we account for about one fourth of the global economy, with a GDP of $16 trillion out of a global GDP of about $65 trillion, and that means that our share is about one fourth of all those financial obligations, which is approximately $300,000,000,000,000, three hundred trillion dollars, or a little more than…

One million dollars for every living American.

And since all my figures only account for the most recent statistics available from BIS and other sources, and all those numbers were actually increasing when last reported, for example, from $547 trillion in December 2008 to $604 trillion in June 2009, the total amount of financial derivations today is almost certainly even more monstrous than what I described.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Note: Although “official sources” constantly deny that anyone will ever be forced to cover all these monstrous bets, it’s instructive to consider what actually occurred in Iceland, rather than trusting the opaque assurances of financial insiders.

After derivatives bankrupted three Icelandic banks in 2009, liability was assigned to the entire nation of Iceland, in the amount of about $18,000 for every citizen.

An equivalent disaster in the United States would amount to about $5.4 trillion, and since the credit of the United States is already fully extended, to say the least, an additional $5.4 trillion in federal debt could only be generated by a tsunami of “fiat currency” from the Federal Reserve, with approximately the same outcome as Weimar Germany attained when they tried to print their way out of monstrous debts, and 50,000,000 marks wouldn’t even buy you an egg.

Even among the micro-elite of economists who have won the Nobel Prize, Amartya Sen is a super-star, because once upon a time he proved something that actually matters.

Famines aren’t caused by lack of food.

This was about as much of a surprise as Jesus feeding the multitude with five loaves and two fishes, but verily “all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over,” and likewise the starving residents of Bengal in 1943 and Bangladesh in 1974 and the Sahel in 1968 (and ongoing) could have been fed, if only a messed up system of economic entitlements hadn’t starved them.

And out of the background of his already astonishing analysis, Professor Sen extracted yet another discovery even more astonishing to anyone invested enough in the problem of hunger to be surprised by anything about it.

Famines never occur in democracies with a free press.

During the Bengal famine of 1943, for example, production of rice in Bengal was actually greater than in 1941, when there was no famine. But at that time Bengal was controlled by the United Kingdom, which continued to export rice from Bengal while 10,000,000 Bengalis died of starvation and diseases related to malnutrition.

While India was ruled by England, about 25 major famines ocurred, but after India became an independent democracy…

Zero.

And meanwhile in nearby Bangladesh, where democratic institutions are weak and their otherwise impotent army dominates politics and society, famines continue to occur with depressing regularity.

Amartya Sen is as familiar to almost every post-secondary student in the Third World as almost every American is familiar with Mickey Mouse, and if you ever wonder why crowds in the Ukraine and Peru and elsewhere are willing to risk their lives to establish or protect democracy, although Americans run happily in and out of Wal-Mart while their Constitution is eviscerated, it may be because Third-World agitators understand that democracy is always a matter of life and death, and after we lose control of politics and the media, almost all of us will also almost inevitably lose everything else.  

From a recent column about Democrats and tea-baggers, by the great war-reporter Chris Hedges at truthdig.com…

We are bound to a party that has betrayed every principle we claim to espouse, from universal health care to an end to our permanent war economy, to a demand for quality and affordable public education, to a concern for the jobs of the working class. And the hatred expressed within right-wing movements for the college-educated elite, who created or at least did nothing to halt the financial debacle, is not misplaced. Our educated elite, wallowing in self-righteousness, wasted its time in the boutique activism of political correctness as tens of millions of workers lost their jobs.

The blame lies with us. We created the monster.

Tea-baggers articulate their rage like idiots, and Democrats explain it away like idiots, but all of us, black and white, middle-class and working-class, Latinos and Native Americans, old and young…

All of us were betrayed by the Democrats, and their bullshit “explanations” are more of the same.

“Republicans are even worse!”

But we weren’t betrayed by Republicans, who never promised to protect us against the mega-banks and multi-national corporations.

The Democratic Party is analogous to a completely corrupt police department, which constantly excuses its own corruption by claiming that gangsters are even worse.

The monthly jobs report from ADP always appears about a week before the BLS announces their numbers, with the additional difference that ADP only measures private-sector employment, which once again declined in March 2010 by about 23,000 jobs, in contrast to what you might call a consensus forecast that private-sector payrolls would increase by 50,000.

Republicans are busily spinning this decline as yet another demonstration that Obama’s stimulus has failed, and they are especially busy spinning right now because the BLS is expected to report a significant increase in payrolls, because their numbers include public-sector employment, which just got a boost from the Census.

“Everyone understands that temporary census hiring may inflate the statistics released on Friday, but the American people will rightly continue to ask, ‘Where are the jobs?'”

Meanwhile Tim Geithner is also busy lowering expectations to make the BLS report on Friday look like a happy surprise!

“The economy’s growing now, that’s the first step,” Geithner said during an appearance on NBC’s “Today” show. “But the unemployment rate is still terribly high, and it’s going to stay unacceptably high for a long time.”

The bottom line, or at least a line about half way to the bottom, is that for the first time in any month since February 2008, more jobs have been created than lost, which means that the spindly little line of of net change in total public and private employment will probably creep above zero!

And now that we know, or almost know that, what exactly do we know, or almost know?

Not much.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Update: The BLS posted their new unemployment numbers this morning, and just as Republicans feared and Democrats hoped, about 162,000 jobs were added to payrolls in March 2010.

And of course the usual cloud of mystery surrounds those numbers.

Since the BLS counts 15,000,000 as unemployed in their top count, and 162,000 jobs were added, you might expect unemployment to decrease in about the same ratio as 162,000/15,000,000.

In that ratio, unemployment would have fallen at least a wee little bit, maybe to 9.6%. More jobs, less unemployment! Right?

Wrong.

One catch, among many catches, is that many of the newly employed hadn’t been “officially unemployed” before they got their new jobs.

They appeared out of nowhere! Or at least, out of nowhere where anyone was counting them as “unemployed.” They weren’t officially looking for jobs, until they heard about some jobs to look for, with the Census, for example, and then…

They looked!

On March 28, 2002, Abu Zubaydah was captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan by the FBI, “identified” as a high-ranking operative of al Qaeda, and subsequently tortured by American agents at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

Abu Zubaydah’s treatment at the hands of the CIA has been called torture by Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who witnessed part of Abu Zubaydah’s CIA interrogation, multiple U.S. officials including President Obama, and by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Media and DOJ reports about torturing Mr. Zubaydah were always careful to mention his connection to al Qaeda.

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.