November 24, 2010
PLACEBO WEAPONS PROVE INEFFECTIVE IN AFGHANISTAN KABUL - In nine years of fighting in Afghanistan, the United States and NATO forces have tried everything in their effort eradicate Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. In 2001 the United States removed the corrupt, intolerant, anti-western Taliban government, whom Ronald Regan helped install in the first place, and installed the corrupt, slightly less intolerant, anti-western government of Hamid Karzai. Yet this was not enough. In 2002, the war in Afghanistan took a strange turn, about eight hundreds miles to the west, in Iraq. Al Qaeda was taken by surprise by this move, mainly because they were in a totally different country in the other direction. One president and seven years later, American attempts at taming Afghanistan have turned into a historicaly daunting counter-insurgency, with a whole host of new tactics: robots bombing Pakistan controlled by American kids who think they are actually playing Call of Duty, a “surge” of thousands of new American troops that would un-surge after a year and a half, “government-in-a-box” in Marjia that supplied neither government nor a box, a “fair election” that was neither fair nor an election, a hard-line on Karzai, a soft-line on Karzai, a “medium-chubby”-line on Karzai, and now, in a desperate attempt to bring this war to a sensible close, NATO has begun supplying Afghan troops with imaginary weapons, but so far, it has met with limited success. “We were facing a classic conundrum,” said a Pentagramon official familiar with the program, “how do you arm and train a force that would eventually replace you if you can’t trust the force not to defect and fight against you?” “Hypothetical guns,” he said, “is the only logical conclusion.” Though like many ideas that sound so good on paper, the NATO-run Placebo Weapons program has been met with numerous challenges. “For one, they don’t work very well, so functionality is obviously a problem,” the official said, “and I think the soldiers are starting to catch on. They do have very active imaginations, the little tikes, and make adorable ‘bang bang’ sounds with their mouths, but when faced with the actual guns of the highly motivated enemy, it makes things difficult. In terms of the real guns winning.” “It’s a learning curve,” General Patraeus said at a recent press conference about the program. “The good thing is that when the units desert us and join the other side, they can’t use our own weapons against us. Which honestly right now is the best outcome we can hope for.” Deficit concerns are also a motivating factor in government’s continued support of the program. With the war’s cost at about $100billion a year (seven times the size of Afghanistan’s GDP), many have been wondering how wise it is to spend money on a war that even in the best case scenario, if the war took a complete 180 tomorrow, would still cost billions more dollars, hundreds of American lives, thousand of civilian lives, and an Al Quada that can simply relocate to several other failed states and lawless regions of the world - particularly Somalia, Sudan and Yemin, the source of last year’s Christmas Underpants Spectacular and this year’s plot to send bombs via UPS, which were fortunately intercepted by this guy. For the roughly two trillion dollars we spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it seems reasonable to assume that the United States could have built the Death Star capable of pinpointing terrorists and killing them with precision lasers from space. It’s a cost that forces many Americans to ponder the logic of the War on Terror. Should it continue to be conducted like a traditional war? How do you execute a policy of containment with an enemy that is uncontainable? How much less safe would Americans be if we left Afghanistan tomorrow? “These are important questions to ponder,” the General said, “but for now we’re going to give this invisible gun thing a few more months. Things can’t possibly get any worse.”

PLACEBO WEAPONS PROVE INEFFECTIVE IN AFGHANISTAN

KABUL - In nine years of fighting in Afghanistan, the United States and NATO forces have tried everything in their effort eradicate Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. In 2001 the United States removed the corrupt, intolerant, anti-western Taliban government, whom Ronald Regan helped install in the first place, and installed the corrupt, slightly less intolerant, anti-western government of Hamid Karzai. Yet this was not enough.

In 2002, the war in Afghanistan took a strange turn, about eight hundreds miles to the west, in Iraq. Al Qaeda was taken by surprise by this move, mainly because they were in a totally different country in the other direction.

One president and seven years later, American attempts at taming Afghanistan have turned into a historicaly daunting counter-insurgency, with a whole host of new tactics: robots bombing Pakistan controlled by American kids who think they are actually playing Call of Duty, a “surge” of thousands of new American troops that would un-surge after a year and a half, “government-in-a-box” in Marjia that supplied neither government nor a box, a “fair election” that was neither fair nor an election, a hard-line on Karzai, a soft-line on Karzai, a “medium-chubby”-line on Karzai, and now, in a desperate attempt to bring this war to a sensible close, NATO has begun supplying Afghan troops with imaginary weapons, but so far, it has met with limited success.

“We were facing a classic conundrum,” said a Pentagramon official familiar with the program, “how do you arm and train a force that would eventually replace you if you can’t trust the force not to defect and fight against you?”

“Hypothetical guns,” he said, “is the only logical conclusion.”

Though like many ideas that sound so good on paper, the NATO-run Placebo Weapons program has been met with numerous challenges.

“For one, they don’t work very well, so functionality is obviously a problem,” the official said, “and I think the soldiers are starting to catch on. They do have very active imaginations, the little tikes, and make adorable ‘bang bang’ sounds with their mouths, but when faced with the actual guns of the highly motivated enemy, it makes things difficult. In terms of the real guns winning.”

“It’s a learning curve,” General Patraeus said at a recent press conference about the program. “The good thing is that when the units desert us and join the other side, they can’t use our own weapons against us. Which honestly right now is the best outcome we can hope for.”

Deficit concerns are also a motivating factor in government’s continued support of the program. With the war’s cost at about $100billion a year (seven times the size of Afghanistan’s GDP), many have been wondering how wise it is to spend money on a war that even in the best case scenario, if the war took a complete 180 tomorrow, would still cost billions more dollars, hundreds of American lives, thousand of civilian lives, and an Al Quada that can simply relocate to several other failed states and lawless regions of the world - particularly Somalia, Sudan and Yemin, the source of last year’s Christmas Underpants Spectacular and this year’s plot to send bombs via UPS, which were fortunately intercepted by this guy.

For the roughly two trillion dollars we spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it seems reasonable to assume that the United States could have built the Death Star capable of pinpointing terrorists and killing them with precision lasers from space. It’s a cost that forces many Americans to ponder the logic of the War on Terror. Should it continue to be conducted like a traditional war? How do you execute a policy of containment with an enemy that is uncontainable? How much less safe would Americans be if we left Afghanistan tomorrow?

“These are important questions to ponder,” the General said, “but for now we’re going to give this invisible gun thing a few more months. Things can’t possibly get any worse.”

12:41pm  |   URL: http://todayinpictures.tumblr.com/post/1670836530/placebo-weapons-prove-ineffective-in-afghanistan
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