We played this game in Afghanistan and Iraq as well. Not to mention Haiti, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, … the list goes on. Great book on it that came out recently - The Fort Bragg Cartel - which initially revolved around US military officers trafficking Afghani heroin sold by the Northern Alliance back to the States under the cover of aid convoys and relief efforts. But it goes down a rabbit hole of cut-out organizations and black ops networks employed by the US for all sorts of sabotage, spying, and assassination work.
Most famously, there was the fake CIA vaccination campaign that was used to hunt Osama bin Laden, and poisoned millions of people against the idea of western medical aid workers as benevolent agents.
most of the expense doesn’t go to murdering brown people
At its heart, every one of these campaigns is intended to facilitate the murder of foreign adversaries (most commonly, brown people - try not to dig too deeply into why). Whatever kindness they provide is only to facilitate some act of terror in the near or distant future.
I mean, there have been at least a few instances of humanitarian missions that actually help, even if there has to be some sort of military justification for it like “building goodwill” or having it combined with some joint military readiness exercise with the host nation. There was that Haiti earthquake in 2021 (and 2010), the relief supplies to Mozambique following the cyclone, Haiti again with Hurricane Matthew in 2016, the Nepal earthquake, that typhoon in the Philippines in 2013, a cyclone in Bangladesh, the Indian Ocean tsunami back in 2004, plus Operations Support Hope, Restore Hope, or Provide Comfort for Rwanda, Somalia, or the Kurds in Iraq+Turkey. I’m not sure you could count Operation Pacific Angel, though it’s arguably more helpful in that it’s building capacity instead of just giving direct aid, and Operation Christmas Drop seems almost silly I guess (even though sometimes it’s medical supplies instead of toys). It’s hard to paint those efforts as ultimately about killing people (it’s possible though, I might just be ignorant).
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of nasty shit too, whether it’s destabilizing OPEC member nations or their relations to drive down oil prices or just fucking up Afghanistan with no good plan and no real reason, it’s not like I’d consider it a positive force overall even in a macro geopolitical sense, let alone the stupid unsanctioned bullshit its smaller factions take part in (and the CIA, as always, can just fuck right off), I just wouldn’t characterize “every one” of the campaigns to be about murder.
Former Green Beret Recounts Horrors at ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ Aid Sites
:-/
We played this game in Afghanistan and Iraq as well. Not to mention Haiti, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, … the list goes on. Great book on it that came out recently - The Fort Bragg Cartel - which initially revolved around US military officers trafficking Afghani heroin sold by the Northern Alliance back to the States under the cover of aid convoys and relief efforts. But it goes down a rabbit hole of cut-out organizations and black ops networks employed by the US for all sorts of sabotage, spying, and assassination work.
Most famously, there was the fake CIA vaccination campaign that was used to hunt Osama bin Laden, and poisoned millions of people against the idea of western medical aid workers as benevolent agents.
At its heart, every one of these campaigns is intended to facilitate the murder of foreign adversaries (most commonly, brown people - try not to dig too deeply into why). Whatever kindness they provide is only to facilitate some act of terror in the near or distant future.
I mean, there have been at least a few instances of humanitarian missions that actually help, even if there has to be some sort of military justification for it like “building goodwill” or having it combined with some joint military readiness exercise with the host nation. There was that Haiti earthquake in 2021 (and 2010), the relief supplies to Mozambique following the cyclone, Haiti again with Hurricane Matthew in 2016, the Nepal earthquake, that typhoon in the Philippines in 2013, a cyclone in Bangladesh, the Indian Ocean tsunami back in 2004, plus Operations Support Hope, Restore Hope, or Provide Comfort for Rwanda, Somalia, or the Kurds in Iraq+Turkey. I’m not sure you could count Operation Pacific Angel, though it’s arguably more helpful in that it’s building capacity instead of just giving direct aid, and Operation Christmas Drop seems almost silly I guess (even though sometimes it’s medical supplies instead of toys). It’s hard to paint those efforts as ultimately about killing people (it’s possible though, I might just be ignorant).
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of nasty shit too, whether it’s destabilizing OPEC member nations or their relations to drive down oil prices or just fucking up Afghanistan with no good plan and no real reason, it’s not like I’d consider it a positive force overall even in a macro geopolitical sense, let alone the stupid unsanctioned bullshit its smaller factions take part in (and the CIA, as always, can just fuck right off), I just wouldn’t characterize “every one” of the campaigns to be about murder.