Murdering People in Afghanistan

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee was obviously hoping to nudge President Obama towards peace rather than war in the Middle East, but the gesture doesn't seem to have worked since he has recently announced an expensive, murderous "troop surge" in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future.



Meanwhile, the Quakers and their friends continue their weekly Thursday peace vigil in front of the San Francisco Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue, which they started in the fall of 2001 when the United States started indiscriminately killing people in Afghanistan.



The latest issue of "The New Yorker" magazine has a tortured rationale in their editorial section by Hendrik Hertzberg on why the surge is necessary, which of course is just so much neoconservative posturing. There's a reason most traditional news outlets are dying, and it's partly because of years of printing just this kind of mendacity.



For an incisive, rather depressing explanation of what we're really doing in Afghanistan, click here for an essay by the historian Gary Leupp, and click here for ongoing coverage by the brilliant Jan Adams at her "Happening Here" blog. As the United States economy sinks further from its looting by Wall Street's version of organized crime, the fact that we're throwing away resources into a murderous pit is unconscionable. I pray there is a day of reckoning soon.