Illuminating the Arts-Policy Nexus 

Dear Vanni, Your observations about U.S. behavior toward Pakistan seem absolutely correct. But the question remains: why supply weapons and money to the main supporter of the Taliban? The story we were told about Afghanistan and Pakistan has been a lie from the beginning. On Sept. 11, 2001, only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE recognized the Taliban as legitimate. Russia, India, and Iran supported what we call the Northern Alliance. Instead of calling them our allies, our govt. identified Pakistan as our "key", "most important", and even our"indispensable" ally in the war of terror. This dishonesty was never pointed out by the mainstream press. There must be an explanation for waging a war that can't possibly meet its stated goals. Every U.S. general who took on the job in Afghanistan had to have known this when they went in. Karzai's acceptance of corruption or lack of interest or inability to stop it made U.S. stated policy doubly impossible. The answer must be that the real goal is different from the stated goal. Cheney and Bush, and now Obama, have shown themselves to be monsters capable of sending U.S. soldiers to die and cause massive death and destruction in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The goal must be economic and it doesn't have to be just one thing. The coalition of the greedy includes mineral thieves, shoddy construction companies, bad road paving companies, weapons makers, maybe drug dealers, and war profiteers of all persuasions. My money (so to speak) is on the natural gas thieves. All of this is just to say that they are not blundering into endless war, they are not stupid about following their plan. They are stupid about caring about any of God's children except for their immediate families. If they kill 6,000 of our soldiers and Marines and about 1.5 million Iraqis and Afghans, and they spend 3 or 4 trillion dollars of our tax money in order to make a few hundred billion in profit, well, that is a price that they are willing to have us pay. The biggest problem for the peace movement is that serial killers of children are still invited on "Meet the Press" and treated as if they have something useful to tell us. As Wendell Berry said about Richard Nixon, they force us to take seriously what we don't really respect.