"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience."
--Declassified Pentagon document, "Information Operations Roadmap" (2003)
So it seems we've found rare minerals in Afghanistan! From the Huffington Post:
By now everyone has just about lost their damn minds about this New York Times article detailing Afghanistan's "discovery" of vast amounts of mineral wealth. Yes, it's way crazy old information (like the 70's old). Yes, it's Soviet Pentagon propaganda. If you've been reading us here, you already know ISAF's counter-insurgency strategy is a flaming wreck, and you already know what they're going to do about that. Propaganda and misinformation are all part of it.
So that's why we're in Afghanistan... to find/enrich ourselves with the minerals, the kind of unobtanium stuff "humans" went after in Pandora.
Whoever at Pentagon psy-ops is trying to justify our idiotic, costly occupation of the graveyard of empires that is clearly turning out to be a disaster, has, by invoking the blockbuster movie Avatar, totally misinterpreted the film, which, while essentially entertainment, did not exactly paint a favorable image of humans' exploitation of natural resources.
Or perhaps the uniformed guy/gal in a cubicle has a wicked, if not mean, sense of humor.
Doesn't it take a five-year old to realize that "unobtanium" -- let's use the word as a generic term for mineral wealth -- is unobtainable in Afghanistan under current, if any, conditions? (We ordinary Americans, taxpayers that we are, know down deep we can't afford imperial misadventures such as getting "unobtanium," especially in light of the oil disaster in the Gulf.)
Meanwhile, I suppose, some inside-the-beltway pundits think "public diplomacy" will solve the madness of the U.S. Afghan occupation, by a country (ours, the beloved country) deep in debt, with oil being spilled, unchecked, over its ecologically fragile, historic Gulf and beaches, with its urban crime rampant, with its educational system failing, and with a military that has no idea where, in "Afghanistan" it's actually "fighting" -- or why. (Most U.S. troops there and elsewhere in Central Asia and the Middle East, I'm willing to bet, think they're on planet Mars, despite their so-called, much-hyped "intercultural" training.)
But hey, guys, get real! Why are we Afghanistan, wherever the hell it is! To get unobtanium!
Yes, guys, let's celebrate our getting unobtanium from the "bad guys" (a favorite of the military for enemies they cannot define; such was the term used by General Petraeus at his presentation at Georgetown I attended some years ago).
Unobtanium all the way... Go, go unobtanium team, go all the way...
And make sure BP does the proper drilling job.