[continued from previous message] 
  
 resurgent Taliban. They have also been saddled by the Americans with the 
 thankless job of eradicating the opium crops - the sole livelihood for most 
 rural Afghans. But thanks to the lack of American financial support - some 
 70 
 percent of which never benefits the locals but is instead "contingent upon 
 the 
 recipient spending it on American stuff, including especially American-made 
 armaments, " as Ann Jones notes in a devastating report in the San Francisco 
 Chronicle - there is nothing to offer the Afghan farmers in exchange for 
 giving 
 up the poppy, except a life of grinding poverty. 
  
 British forces have lost 27 men in Afghanistan in the last six weeks - 
 almost a quarter of the total 117 lost during three years in Iraq. Soldiers 
 report a lack of ammunition, armor and air cover. At times the Taliban has 
 been 
 able to keep British outposts under siege for days. A top aide to the 
 commander 
 of the UK forces in the pivotal Helmand province has resigned from the army, 
 citing the "pointless" and "grotesquely clumsy" policy that is "just making 
 things worse," The Times reports. "We said we'd be different from the 
 Americans 
 who were bombing and strafing villages, then behaved exactly like them," 
 said 
 Capt. Leo Docherty of the Scots Guards. "All those people whose homes have 
 been 
 destroyed and sons killed are going to turn against the British. It's a 
 pretty 
 clear equation - if people are losing homes and poppy fields, they will go 
 and 
 fight. I certainly would." 
  
 Docherty's assessment was confirmed last week in a damning report by 
 Senlis, a thinktank funded by international charities. "Prioritizing 
 military-based security, the United States' and United Kingdom's focus on 
 counterterrorism initiatives and militaristic responses to Afghanistan's 
 opium 
 crisis has undermined the local and international development community's 
 ability to respond to Afghanistan's many poverty-related challenges," the 
 organization said. ""By focusing aid funds away from development and poverty 
 relief, failed counter-narcotics policies have hijacked the international 
 community's nation-building efforts ... the [US-UK] poppy eradication 
 policies 
 are fuelling violence and insecurity." 
  
 In London, controversies flare over charges of "deliberate deception" by 
 the Blair government over the true nature of the mission - or else its 
 incredible incompetence in not realizing the true situation on the ground 
 before going in. The echoes of Iraq could not be clearer. And here we come 
 back 
 to square one. Blair's witting complicity in the Bush faction's secret 
 campaign 
 to manipulate America and Britain into an unnecessary war of aggression 
 against 
 Iraq - fully documented by the Downing Street Memos, the smoking guns of the 
 Anglo-American conspiracy for war - is at the heart of his loss of 
 credibility 
 and authority in Britain. These lies - and most Britons are quicker than the 
 majority of Americans to call the Bush-Blair deceptions by their true name - 
 have been the engine of his self-destruction. 
  
 But Blair's tragic flaw was evident from his first days in office. He has 
 always been eager for Britain to retain a leading role in world affairs, 
 despite the shrivelling of its empire. "Punching above our weight," he 
 likes to 
 call it: an apt phrase, for to Blair, national greatness is obviously 
 synonymous with military action - one of the traits he shares with Bush, 
 along 
 with an unshakeable belief in his own righteousness as a fervent Christian. 
 Britain's military forces have been in action somewhere around the world 
 throughout Blair's tenure: Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and, most 
 notably, 
 against Serbia, in that other American-led coalition that unilaterally 
 attacked 
 a nation without UN Security Council sanction. 
  
 Like Bush, Blair is a man in love with war - or rather, with the idea of 
 war, for he, like Bush, has never seen combat. The idea that greatness can 
 be 
 measured in blood and iron - that one can somehow prove one's manhood and 
 historical standing by sending other people to kill and die - is the tragic 
 flaw that has drawn Blair to America's wars like a moth to flame. 
  
 He could have been remembered as the man who saved his nation from the 
 brutal social ravages of Margaret Thatcher's soulless, hard-right extremism. 
 Instead he will be known forever as the lying lapdog of George W. Bush. 
 Tragedy 
 is a harsh taskmaster indeed. 
  
 [Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has appeared in print and 
 online in venues all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, 
 Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the 
 Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High 
 Crimes 
 and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the 
 political blog, Empire Burlesque. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.] 
  
  
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