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 Afghanstookit 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 http://www.almartinraw.com/column20.html )

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 FOR PRAVDA.Ru

AL MARTIN is America’s foremost whistle-blower on government fraud and corruption. A retired US Navy Lt. Commander and former officer in the Office of Naval Intelligence, he has testified before Congress (the Kerry Committee and the Alexander Committee) regarding Iran-Contra. Al Martin is the author of “The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider” (2001, National Liberty Press, $19.95; order line: 1-866-317-1390) He lives at an undisclosed location, since the criminals named in his book have been returned to national power and prominence. His column “Behind the Scenes in the Beltway” is published regularly on Al Martin Raw: Criminal Govt. Conspiracy (http://www.almartinraw.com)