1ac myth 1ac -critical Introduction of us armed Forces Aff
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- Epistemological violence justifies a larger crusade on otherness. This division places us on a path towards genocide.
1ACMyth 1AC -Critical Introduction of US Armed Forces AffUnited States military forces have been occupying Afghanistan for 12 years. RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan has provided recent accounts of the violence and oppression that continue and have worsened.[The next two quotes are from Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), July 3rd, 2013 (Organization established in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1977 as an independent political/social organization of Afghan women fighting for human rights and for social justice in Afghanistan “Afghan women burn in the fire of the oppression of the occupiers and fundamentalists” http://www.rawa.org/rawa/2013/03/07/rawa-statement-on-iwd-2013-english.html) “The persistence of the current instability and the West's support of the ‘Northern Alliance’ terrorists in Afghanistan proves that the US and her [its] allies pay no attention to human rights and women rights, but seek only their political and economical interests. Today, even the most optimistic people in our country, confess that Afghan women have not been liberated, and have become a commodity for the Western propaganda. Thanks to the presence of the US, women are gang-raped by warlords, are flogged in many Taliban-controlled areas, are preys of acid attacks, or are mercilessly stoned to death” Even though our occupation has been justified under the illusion of saving women, the legal situation has not provided assistance to women.“In this country, laws are just pieces of paper that aid only in deceiving people, and are never practically applied … When criminal husbands, fathers, or brothers kill women under different contexts, they are never punished. In many cases, women are convicted by the judicial bodies and thrown into jails for the crime of ‘running away from home’, where they are further raped by the jail keepers. In such a hostile situation, most women find self-immolation the only solution to free them from a slow torturous death. The suicide rates among our women has risen in an unprecedented manner” The prevailing western representations of Afghanistan justify a flawed ideology that American Forces are here to save the brown Other from chaos. This practice of otherization ensures epistemic violence.Crowe 2007 (Lori, Grad Student in Pol. Sci. – York U., “The “Fuzzy Dream”: Discourse, Historical myths, and Militarized (in)Security Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan and the ‘West’”, http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf) In his re-theorization of foreign policy, Campbell exposes the essential role binaries play in the processes implicated in state identity formation: It emphasizes the exclusionary practices, the discourses of danger, the representations of fear, and the enumeration of threats, and downplays the role of affirmative discourses such as claims to shared ethnicity, nationality, political ideals, religious beliefs, or other commonalities.76 Looking specifically at the relationship between the US and Afghanistan, the US has defined its own identity (as good, modern, normal, etc.) in relation to its difference from the Afghan ‘Other’, cultivating its demonization on the basis of perceived danger and moral valuations (superior/inferior) that are spatially constructed. Claims that the West is constructing a peaceful, democratic, and liberal nation (values claimed to be at the core of “our civilization, freedom, democracy and ways of life”) are motivated by the need to transform “their barbarism, inhumanity, low morality and style of life”.77 Eisenstein explains that ‘Others’ are constructed or fabricated in order to deal with the fear of not-knowing: “Creating the savage, or slave, or woman, or Arab allows made-up certainty rather than honest complex variability and unknowability.”78 Unfortunately, this is not a novel phenomenon unique to the contemporary situation in Afghanistan: articulations of security that rely on definitions of ‘otherness’ as threats to security, argues Campbell, replicates the logic of Christendom’s ‘evangelism of fear’. Obstructions to security/order/God become defined as irrational, abnormal, mad, etc. in need of rationalization, normalizations, punishment, moralization, etc.: “The state project of security replicates the church project of salvation”.79 As is commonly known, under Christendom it was such ‘discourses of danger’ that were instrumental in establishing its own authority and disciplining its followers. Similarly, by relying on discourses of danger to define who “we” are, who “we” are not, and who “they” are that we must fear, the state constructs enemies who’s elimination/domination is necessary to preserve the states own identity (and security): “All powers are geared against a single “alien.” And all the rationalizations are raging against the advent of “Evil.”80 Thus, the “war on terror”, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, becomes, in the words of Baudrillard, an endless war of prevention to “exorcise” “evil”; an ablation of a non-existent enemy masquerading as the leitmotiv for universal safety.81 These elements of oppositional binaries is closely related to the second element: contemporary discourse has developed from and further perpetuates a particular ideology that emanates from a neo-liberal capitalist and imperial agenda that is founded upon neo-colonialist attitudes and assumptions. “The US campaign to ‘fight terrorism’, initiated after September 11th” explains Nahla Abdo “has crystallized all the ideological underpinnings of colonial and imperial policies towards the constructed ‘other’.”82 This emerges in the “heroism” myth mentioned above; for example, Debrix explains how narratives around humanitarianism serve an ideological purpose in that it “contributes to the reinforcement of neoliberal policies in ‘pathological’ regions of the international landscape.83 It also emerges in the militarization myth, insofar as neoliberal globalisation relies on the institutionalization of neo-colonialism and the commodification and (re)colonization of labor via militarized strategies of imperial politics. That is, as Agathangelou and Ling point out, “Neoliberal economics enables globalized militarization”.84 Embedded in this normalization of neo-colonial frames are the elements of linearity and thus assumed rationality of reasoning in the West. As Canada stepped up its role in direct combat operations (which included an increase of combat troops, fighter jets, and tanks with long-range firing capacities85), Stephen Harper appealed to troop morale on the ground in Afghanistan, stating: “Canada and the international community are determined to take a failed state and create a "democratic, prosperous and modern country."86 (my italics) Proposed solutions to the conflict(s) in Afghanistan have been framed and justified not only as ‘saving backwards Afghanistan’ but also as generously bringing it into the modern, capitalist, neoliberal age. Moreover, this element represents an continuity of colonial power, presenting the one correct truth or resolution, emanating from the ‘objective gaze’ of the ‘problem-solving’ Western world. Representations of Afghanistan present Western voices as the authority and the potential progress such authority can bring to the ‘East’ as naturally desirable. This ‘rationality’ also presumes an inherent value of Western methodology (including statistical analysis, quantification of data, etc) and devalues alternative epistemologies including those of the Afghan people. This is problematic for several reasons: 1) It forecloses and discourages thinking “outside the box” and instead relies upon the “master’s tools” which include violent military force, the installation of a democratic regime, peacekeeping, and reconstruction and foreign aid – alternative strategies are deemed “radical”, “unworkable”, and “anti-American”; 2) it prioritizes numbers and statistics over lived experiences. By relying on tallies of deaths, percentages of voters, and numbers of insurgents for example, the experiences of those living in the region are obfuscated and devalued, and; 3)it reproduces a colonial hierarchy of knowledge production. Old colonial narratives of have re-surfaced with renewed vigor in the case of Afghanistan is contingent on and mutually reinforced by opposing narratives of a ‘civilized’ and ‘developed’ ‘West’. For example: “Consider the language which is being used…Calling the perpetrators evildoers, irrational, calling them the forces of darkness, uncivilized, intent on destroying civilization, intent on destroying democracy. They hate freedom, we are told. Every person of colour, and I would want to say also every Aboriginal person, will recognize that language. The language of us versus them, of civilization versus the forces of darkness, this language is rooted in the colonial legacy.”87 This colonizer/colonized dichotomy is key to the civilisational justification the US administration pursues (“We wage war to save civilization itself”88) which, as Agathangelou and Ling explain, is motivated by a constructed medieval evil that threatens American freedom and democracy, the apotheosis of modern civilization, and therefore must be disciplined/civilized. In his Speech to Congress on September 21, 2001, Bush portrays the irrational Other as Evil and retributive seeking to destroy the ‘developed, ‘secure’ ‘prosperous’ and ‘civilized’ free world: These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life…Al Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the world, and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.”89 This production of othering and re-institutionalization of colonial discourse has been enabled by and facilitated ‘culture clash’ explanations.90 The danger of such theories, warns Razack, lies not only in their decontextualization and dehistoricization, but also on its reliance on the Enlightenment narrative and notions of European moral superiority that justify the use of force. This is evident in the unproblematic way in which outside forces have assumed a right of interference in the region spanning from the 18th century when imperial powers demarcated the Durrand Line (which created a border between British India and Afghanistan with the goal of making Afghanistan an effective ‘buffer state’for British Imperial interests91) to the American intervention that began in the Cold War, followed by the Soviets in the 1980’s and the Americans, Canadians and British today. In fact, The West’s practical engagement in Afghanistan reveals how it has served to reporoduce this neo-colonial myth as well as the complexities and paradoxes which simultaneously de-stabilize that myth. Epistemological violence justifies a larger crusade on otherness. This division places us on a path towards genocide.Mignolo & Tlostanova 06 [Walter & Madina, Prof of Literature & Prof of the History of Culture, “Theorizing from the Borders,” European Journal of Social Theory, p.205-6, 208] The modern foundation of knowledge is territorial and imperial. By modern we mean the socio-historical organization and classification of the world founded on a macro-narrative and on a specific concept and principles of knowledge. The point of reference of modernity is the European Renaissance founded, as an idea and interpretation of a historical present, on two complementary moves: the colonization of time and the invention of the Middle Ages, and the colonization of space and the invention of America that became integrated into a Christian tripartite geo-political order: Asia, Africa and Europe. It was from and in Europe that the classification of the world emerged and not in and from Asia, Africa or America – borders were created therein but of different kinds. The Middle Ages were integrated into the history of Europe, while the histories in Asia, Africa and America were denied as history. The world map drawn by Gerardus Mercator and Johannes Ortelius worked together with theology to create a zero point of observation and of knowledge: a perspective that denied all other perspectives (Castro-Gómez, 2002). Epistemological frontiers were set in place in that double move: frontiers that expelled to the outside the epistemic colonial differences (Arabic, Aymara, Hindi, Bengali, etc.). Epistemic frontiers were re-articulated in the eighteenth century with the displacement of theology and the theo-politics of knowledge by secular ego-logy and the ego-politics of knowledge. Epistemic frontiers were traced also by the creation of the imperial difference (with the Ottoman, the Chinese and the Russian empires) and the colonial difference (with Indians and Blacks in America). Both epistemic differences, colonial and imperial, were based on a racial classification of the population of the planet, a classificatory order in which those who made the classification put themselves at the top of Humanity. The Renaissance idea of Man was conceptualized based on the paradigmatic examples of Western Christianity, Europe, and white and male subjectivity (Kant, 1798; Las Casas, 1552). Thus, from the Renaissance all the way down, the rhetoric of modernity could not have been sustained without its darker and constitutive side: the logic of coloniality. Border thinking or theorizing emerged from and as a response to the violence (frontiers) of imperial/territorial epistemology and the rhetoric of modernity (and globalization) of salvation that continues to be implemented on the assumption of the inferiority or devilish intentions of the Other and, therefore, continues to justify oppression and exploitation as well as eradication of the difference. Border thinking is the epistemology of the exteriority; that is, of the outside created from the inside; and as such, it is always a decolonial project. Recent immigration to the imperial sites of Europe and the USA – crossing the imperial and colonial differences – contributes to maintaining the conditions for border thinking that emerged from the very inception of modern imperial expansion. In this regard, critical border thinking displaces and subsumes Max Horkheimer’s ‘critical theory’ which was and still is grounded in the experience of European internal history (Horkheimer, 1937). ‘Critical border thinking’ instead is grounded in the experiences of the colonies and subaltern empires. Consequently, it provides the epistemology that was denied by imperial expansion. ‘Critical border thinking’ also denies the epistemic privilege of the humanities and the social sciences – the privilege of an observer that makes the rest of the world an object of observation (from Orientalism to Area Studies). It also moves away from the post-colonial toward the de-colonial, shifting to the geoand body-politics of knowledge. They Continue… Accordingly, our first thesis is the following. ‘Borders’ are not only geographic but also political, subjective (e.g. cultural) and epistemic and, contrary to frontiers, the very concept of ‘border’ implies the existence of people, languages, religions and knowledge on both sides linked through relations established by the coloniality of power (e.g. structured by the imperial and colonial differences). Borders in this precise sense, are not a natural outcome of a natural or divine historical processes in human history, but were created in the very constitution of the modern/colonial world (i.e. in the imaginary of Western and Atlantic capitalist empires formed in the past five hundred years). If we limit our observations to the geographic, epistemic and subjective types of borders in the modern/colonial world (from the European Renaissance till today), we will see that they all have been created from the perspective of European imperial/ colonial expansion: massive appropriation of land accompanied by the constitution of international law that justified the massive appropriation of land (Grovogui, 1996; Schmitt, 1952); control of knowledge (the epistemology of the zero point as representation of the real) by disqualifying non-European languages and epistemologies and control of subjectivities (by conversation, civilization, democratization) or, in today’s language – by the globalization of culture. The epistemological constructions of the Afghanistan other are apart of a larger discourse of militarism. Presidential war powers have no limit on them by congress, which places Obama at the head of a global military network.Dr. Paul Craig Roberts 13 is former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, has held numerous university appointments. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research, "America Shamed Again: Are US Lawmakers 'Owned' by the Israel Lobby?" 2-19-13, www.globalresearch.ca/america-shamed-again-are-us-lawmakers-owned-by-the-israel-lobby/5323415, DOA: 7-31-13, y2k Americans are a colonized people. Their government represents the colonizing powers: Wall Street, the Israel Lobby, the Military/Security Complex, Agribusiness, Pharmaceuticals, Energy, Mining, and Timber interests. Two elected representatives who tried to represent the American people–Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich–found representative government to be an inhospitable place for those few who attempt to represent the interests of the American people. Like Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Gerald Celente, I stand with our Founding Fathers who opposed America’s entanglement in foreign wars. In an effort to prevent entanglements, the Founding Fathers gave the power to declare war to Congress. Over the years Congress has gradually ceded this power to the President to the extent that it no longer exists as a power of Congress. The President can start a war anywhere at any time simply by declaring that the war is not a war but a “time-limited, scope-limited, kinetic military action.” Or he can use some other nonsensical collection of words. In the first few years of the 21st century, the executive branch has invaded two countries, violated the sovereignty of five others with military operations, and has established military bases in Africa in order to counteract China’s economic penetration of the continent and to secure the resources for US and European corporations, thus enlarging the prospects for future wars. If the Republicans succeed in blocking Hagel’s confirmation, the prospect of war with Iran will be boosted. By abdicating its war power, Congress lost its control of the purse. As the executive branch withholds more and more information from Congressional oversight committees, Congress is becoming increasingly powerless. As Washington’s war debts mount, Washington’s attack on the social safety net will become more intense. Governmental institutions that provide services to Americans will wither as more tax revenues are directed to the coffers of special interests and foreign entanglements. The tenuous connection between the US government and the interests of citizens is on its way to being severed entirely. The occupation of Afghanistan plays a central part of preserving American militarism in the region. Harvesting rare Earth minerals and deployment to regional conflicts ensures our power. Unfortunately, our intervention brought war criminals and rapists back into power.Ian Sinclair and Mariam Rawi 2009 ( Ian is a journalist with Znet and Rawi is a member of RAWA’s foreign relations committee, “Interview with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan” April 29, 2009 http://www.zcommunications.org/interview-with-the-revolutionary-association-of-the-women-of-afghanistan-by-ian-sinclair) The US invaded Afghanistan to fulfil its geo-political, economic and regional strategic interests and to change Afghanistan into a strong military base in the region. Since Afghanistan is the heart of Asia, it would serve as a strong base for controlling surrounding countries like Pakistan, China, Iran and above all the Central. Additionally, as a superpower, it continues to occupy Afghanistan to combat rising powers like Russia and China, who are becoming greater rivals for the US in the economic, military and political fields. Asian Republics. Many argue today that the 2001 invasion was planned before 9/11, but it gave the war-mongers in the White House and Pentagon a golden opportunity to advance its agenda in the region. In the words of Tony Blair "to be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11..."Getting hold of the multi-billions drug business was another reason for invading Afghanistan and in the past few years we clearly see that the US and its allies changed Afghanistan into the opium capital of the world. Opium production increased more than 4400%, with 93% of world illegal opium produced in Afghanistan. Narcotics is said to be the third greatest trade commodity in cash terms after oil and weapons. There are large financial institutions behind this business and the control of the routes of narcotics was important for the US government and now they have reached their goal. Furthermore, Afghanistan holds a rich source of gas, copper, iron and other minerals and precious stones and the big powers are of course interested in looting it the way they are doing in poor African countries. In the past few years there have been exploration efforts of our natural resources. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimates there are about 700 billion cubic meters of gas and 300 million tonnes of oil across several Northern provinces of Afghanistan. Also the world's second-biggest unexploited copper deposit is located in our country with an estimated 11 million tonnes of copper. So besides routing the oil and gas from the Central Asian Republics through Afghanistan, the US is interested in exploiting Afghanistan's resources too. The "war on terror" and "liberation of Afghan women" were mere lies to cover the above and many other hidden agendas of the US in Afghanistan. Our peoples' dreams for liberation were shattered in the very first days after the invasion when they witnessed that the war criminals and Northern Alliance murderers and rapists who destroyed Afghanistan, were backed and brought back to power by the US and its allies after the fall of the Taliban regime. When infamous criminals like Burhanuddin Rabbani, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Karim Khalili, Mohammad Mohaqiq, Yunus Qanooni, Mullah Rakiti, Atta Muhammad, Rashid Dostum, Ismail Khan, Haji Almas, Hazrat Ali and many more were decorated by the US as champions of freedom and were installed in power, everyone knew that Afghanistan had once again become the centre of a chess game of the US and its allies who made the slogans of "democracy" and "human rights" into painful jokes for our nation. An empowered military complex ensures global instability by propping up authoritarian governments and creating resentment amongst civilians. This is slowly spiraling into extinction.Ismael Hossezin-Zadeh 10 teaches economics @ Drake University, “The Biggest Parasite,” 12-17-10, http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/12/17/the-globalization-of-militarism/ DOA: 7-31-13, y2k Many Americans still believe that US foreign policies are designed to maintain peace, to safeguard human rights and to spread democracy around the world. Regardless of their officially stated objectives, however, those policies often lead to opposite outcomes: war, militarism and dictatorship. Evidence of the fact that US policy makers no longer uphold the ideals they state publicly is overwhelming. Those who continue to harbor illusions about the thrust of US policies around the world must be oblivious to the fact that the United States has been overtaken by a military-industrial-security-financial cabal whose representatives are firmly ensconced in both the White House and the US Congress. The ultimate goal of the cabal, according to their own military guidelines, is “full spectrum dominance” of the world; and they are willing to wage as many wars, to destroy as many countries and to kill as many people as necessary to achieve that goal. The liberal hawks and petty intellectual pundits who tend to defend US foreign policies on the grounds of “human rights” or “moral obligations” are well served to pay attention (among other evidence) to the US foreign policy documents that are currently being disclosed by the Wikileaks. The documents “show all too clearly that,” as Paul Craig Roberts puts it, “the US government is a duplicitous entity whose raison d’etre is to control every other country.” In essence, the documents show that while the US government, like a global mafia godfather, rewards the pliant ruling elites of the client states with arms, financial aid and military protections, it punishes the nations whose leaders refuse to surrender to the wishes of the bully and relinquish their national sovereignty. US foreign policies, like its domestic policies, are revealed as catering not to the broader public or national interests of the people but to the powerful special interests that are vested primarily in the military capital and the finance capital. US foreign policy architects are clearly incapable of recognizing or acknowledging the fact that different peoples and nations may have different needs and interests. Nor are they capable of respecting other peoples’ aspirations to national sovereignty. Instead, they tend to view other peoples, just as they do the American people, through the narrow prism of their own nefarious interests. By selfishly dividing the world into “friends” and “foe,” or “vassal states,” as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, powerful beneficiaries of war and militarism compel both groups to embark on a path of militarization, which leads inevitably to militarism and authoritarian rule. Although militarism grows out of the military, the two are different in character. While the military is a means to meet certain ends such as maintaining national security, militarism represents a bureaucratized permanent military establishment as an end in itself. It is “a phenomenon,” as the late Chalmers Johnson put it, “by which a nation’s armed services come to put their institutional preservation ahead of achieving national security or even a commitment to the integrity of the governmental structure of which they are a part” (The Sorrows of Empire, Metropolitan Books, 2004, pp. 423-24). This explains the cancerous growth and parasitic nature of US militarism?cancerous because it is steadily expanding throughout many parts of the world, and parasitic because not only does it drain other nations resources, it also sucks US national resources out of the public purse into the coffers of the wicked interests that are vested in the military-industrial-security complex. By creating fear and instability and embarking on unilateral military adventures, corporate militarism of the United States also fosters militarism elsewhere. A major US strategy of expanding its imperial influence and promoting militarism around the globe has been the formation of international military alliances in various parts of the world. These include not only the notorious North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which is essentially an integral part of the Pentagon’s world command structure, and which was recently expanded to police the world, but also 10 other joint military commands called Unified Combatant Commands. They include Africa Command (AFRICOM), Central Command (CENTCOM), European Command (EUCOM), Northern Command (NORTHCOM), Pacific Command (PACOM), and Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). The geographic area under the “protection” of each of these Unified Combatant Commands is called Area of Responsibility (AOR). AFRICOM’s area of responsibility includes US “military operations and military relations with 53 African nations – an area of responsibility covering all of Africa except Egypt.” CENTCOM’s area of responsibility spans many countries in the Middle East/Near East/Persian Gulf and Central Asia. It includes Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. EUCOM’s area of responsibility “covers 51 countries and territories, including Europe, Iceland, Greenland, and Israel.” NORTHCOM’s area of responsibility “includes air, land and sea approaches and encompasses the contiguous United States, Alaska, Canada, Mexico and the surrounding water out to approximately 500 nautical miles (930 km). It also includes the Gulf of Mexico, the Straits of Florida, portions of the Caribbean region to include The Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.” PACOM’s area of responsibility “covers over fifty percent of the world’s surface area ? approximately 105 million square miles (nearly 272 million square kilometers) ? nearly sixty percent of the world’s population, thirty-six countries, twenty territories, and ten territories and possessions of the United States.” SOUTHCOM’s area of responsibility “encompasses 32 nations (19 in Central and South America and 13 in the Caribbean)?and 14 US and European territories. . . . It is responsible for providing contingency planning and operations in Central and South America, the Caribbean (except US commonwealths, territories, and possessions), Cuba, their territorial waters.” Together with over 800 military bases scattered over many parts of the world, this military colossus represents an ominous presence of the US armed forces all across our planet. Instead of dismantling NATO as redundant in the post-Cold War era, it has been expanded (as a proxy for the US military juggernaut) to include many new countries in Eastern Europe all the way to the borders of Russia. Not only has it inserted itself into a number of new international relations and recruited many new members and partners, it has also arrogated to itself many new tasks and responsibilities in social, political, economic, environmental, transportation and communications arenas of the world. NATO’s new areas of “responsibility,” as reflected in its latest Strategic Concept, include “human rights”; “key environmental and resource constraints, including health risks, climate change, water scarcity and increasing energy needs. . .”; “important means of communication, such as the internet, and scientific and technological research. . .”; “proliferation of ballistic missiles, of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction”; “threat of extremism, terrorism and trans-national illegal activities such as trafficking in arms, narcotics and people”; “vital communication, transport and transit routes on which international trade, energy security and prosperity depend”; the “ability to prevent, detect, defend against and recover from cyber-attacks”; and the need to “ensure that the Alliance is at the front edge in assessing the security impact of emerging technologies.” Significant global issues thus claimed to be part of NATO’s expanded mission fall logically within the purview of civilian international institutions such as the United Nations. So why is the US ruling plutocracy, using NATO, now trying to supplant the United Nations and other international agencies? The reason is that due to the rise of the influence of a number of new international players such as Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Iran, and Venezuela the UN is no longer as subservient to the global ambitions of the United States as it once was. Planning to employ the imperial military machine of NATO instead of the civilian multilateral institutions such as the UN clearly belies, once again, the self-righteous US claims of trying to spread democracy worldwide. Furthermore, NATO’s expanded “global responsibilities” would easily provide the imperial US military machine new excuses for unilateral military interventions. By the same token, such military adventures would also provide the US military-industrial-security complex additional rationale for continued escalation of the Pentagon budget. The expansion of NATO to include most of the Eastern Europe has led Russia, which had curtailed its military spending during the 1990s in the hope that, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the US would also do the same, to once again increase its military spending. In response to the escalation of US military spending, which has nearly tripled during the last 10 years (from $295 billion when George W. Bush went to the White House in January 2001 to the current figure of nearly one trillion dollars), Russia too has drastically increased its military spending during the same time period (from about $22 billion in 2000 to $61 billion today). In a similar fashion, US military encirclement of China (through a number of military alliances and partnerships that range from Pakistan, Afghanistan and India to South China Sea/Southeast Asia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Cambodia, Malaysia, New Zealand and most recently Vietnam) has led that country to also further strengthen its military capabilities. Just as the US military and geopolitical ambitions have led Russia and China to reinforce their military capabilities, so have they compelled other countries such as Iran, Venezuela and North Korea to likewise strengthen their armed forces and buttress their military preparedness. Not only does aggressive US militarism compel its “adversaries” to allocate a disproportionately large share of their precious resources to military spending, but it also coerces its “allies” to likewise embark on a path of militarization. Thus, countries like Japan and Germany, whose military capabilities were reduced to purely defensive postures following the atrocities of World War II, have once again been re-militarizing in recent years under the impetus of what US military strategists call “the need to share the burden of global security.” Thus, while Germany and Japan still operate under a “peace constitution,” their military expenditures on a global scale now rank sixth and seventh, respectively (behind the US, China, France, UK and Russia). US militarization of the world (both directly through the spread of its own military apparatus across the globe and indirectly by compelling both “friends” and “foe” to militarize) has a number of ominous consequences for the overwhelming majority or the population the world. For one thing, it is the source of a largely redundant and disproportionately large allocation of the world’s precious resources to war, militarism and wasteful production of the means of death and destruction. Obviously, as this inefficient, class-biased disbursement of resources drains public finance and accumulates national debt, it also brings tremendous riches and treasures to war profiteers, that is, the beneficiaries of the military capital and the finance capital. Secondly, to justify this lopsided allocation of the lion’s share of national resources to military spending, beneficiaries of war dividends tend to create fear, suspicion and hostility among peoples and nations of the world, thereby sowing the seeds of war, international conflicts and global instability. Thirdly, by the same token that powerful beneficiaries of war and military-security capital tend to promote suspicion, to create fear and invent enemies, both at home and abroad, they also undermine democratic values and nurture authoritarian rule. As the predatory military-industrial-security-financial interests find democratic norms of openness and transparency detrimental to their nefarious objectives of limitless self-enrichment, they cleverly create pretexts for secrecy, “security,” military rule and police state. Concealment of the robbery of public treasury in the name of national security requires restriction of information, obstruction of transparency, and curtailment of democracy. It follows that under the kleptocratic influence of the powerful interests that are vested in the military-security-financial industries the US government has turned into an ominous global force of destabilization, obstruction, retrogression and authoritarianism. RAWA says “The exit of foreign troops and our country’s independence, can be the first step in the path of the realization of values such as freedom and democracy, which are vital conditions for the emancipation of women”(Partner) and I demand that The United States Congress should amend the Authorization for the Use of Military Force and related statutes to prohibit the President from re-introducing United States armed forces into hostilities in Afghanistan after 2014.Now is a key time in US occupation of Afghanistan. The Bilateral Security Agreement does not force US forces out until 2014, but members in Washington are pressuring Karzai to extend the deadline.Ioannis Koskinas August 1, 2013 (Ioannis Koskinas was a military officer for over twenty years and now focuses on economic development projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan “The U.S.-Afghan game of "Chicken’” http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/08/01/us_afghan_game_of_chicken In an Afghan context, the U.S. and Afghan governments are on a collision course in a number of areas and unless cooler heads can prevail, the eventual crash will be devastating, yet totally uneven. For the United States, its international credibility will be undoubtedly damaged; but for the Afghan government, the fallout will be disastrous, and signal the beginning of the end for this period of relative progress and prosperity. Two prime examples of the stakes are the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA), which will determine the size and shape of the U.S. mission post 2014, and the tussle over taxing U.S. government contractors supporting military operations in Afghanistan. Following the ill-choreographed opening of the Taliban political office in Qatar, Afghan President Hamid Karzai put the BSA on pause. Even though U.S. officials were quick to admit that the Doha event was embarrassing and not what they had intended, they also made it clear that they had acted with Karzai's blessing. That really should have been the end of it and the negotiations should have resumed. Karzai's decision to halt the BSA talks was yet another attempt to challenge the United States when Afghan sovereignty was on the line. But with the negotiations still stalled, his move may prove to be a pyrrhic victory. One of the unintended consequences of his decision is that a "zero option" (keeping no U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014), which had little support in Washington and in NATO-member capitals, is now being considered in earnest. As far as the U.S. government is concerned, the BSA is the sine qua non for a continued U.S. military presence past 2014. In fact, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently set an October 2013 deadline for completing the BSA in an effort to force the issue with an Afghan government that is struggling to define its own vision of a post-2014 security environment. Without the BSA, however, even those who warn against the "zero option" have been adamant that total withdrawal is not only likely, but also inevitable. In other words, unless the BSA is finalized quickly, the idea of leaving no U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 2014 will continue to gain momentum, and what started out as a dangerous possibility may become the most likely course of action. The 1AC’s incorporation of alternative perspectives dismantles the colonial epistemology that has erased other’s perspectives. Understanding that history is always a constructed truth is necessary to rethink the problem at hand.Crowe 2007 (Lori, Grad Student in Pol. Sci. – York U., “The “Fuzzy Dream”: Discourse, Historical myths, and Militarized (in)Security Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan and the ‘West’”, http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf) Conclusion: The Dangers of Myth-making We need to navigate critically and cautiously through the multiple stories, silences, and complex and contradictory narratives that lie beneath the surface of imperial myths. Kaufman, for example, explains that in order to study incidences of ethnic conflict, we must begin by trying to hear the myriad narratives and different assumptions and combine insights from multiple methodological and theoretical approaches.105 We need to understand that “some people are just written out of history”106, and the stories of history are so partial and there is so much those of us in the West don’t see that we can never believe that we have arrived at a ‘truth’ or ‘reality’: History is never just simply the ‘past’. Nor is history simply its official rendering…History is made while old histories are simultaneously reproduced, without most of us ever owning the story told…Once I see interpretation is already embedded in the very process of thought I recognize that there is a before that I cannot completely ever know or recover. The very idea of history itself is destabilized as a process of storytelling with different storytellers…I therefore need to know whose story I am reading, who is telling the story, and from what timebound lens it is being told.107 Perhaps the best response is, as Peter Hulme suggests: “to read speculatively, recognizing that the story can never be fully recovered, and that which has been recovered is often distorted and manufactured.”108 There are emancipatory possibilities in a critical project of discourse deconstruction: it lies in the recognition of the detrimental effects of imperial, neo-colonial, orientalist ‘myths’ and the policy agendas that are made possible through them. By beginning to delve into the complex and interrelated factors of Afghanistan’s history in the previous section, the dangers of historical narratives that conceal these elements start to become visible: “By myth man has lived, died and – all too often – killed.”109 While pressure must be put on the messengers of violent and deliberately myths, we must also take responsibility and listen critically to the multiple narratives around us in order to realize a more “panoptic”110 vision; understanding, nonetheless, that we can never achieve a whole or complete understanding or “truth”. “As we listen to the antithetical mythologies that tear our world apart,” argues Armstrong “we need to be receptive to the counter-narrative that opposes our point of view and expresses the ‘other’ perspective.”111 One way to ‘see’ without an imperial or colonial gaze is to connect heterogeneity into a form of “collective assemblage” in a Deleuzian and Guattarian sense; that is, accept concrete multiplicities in order to see variation without conquest.112 What are the historical myths being produced as we speak? Will history books teach young children stories about ‘uncivilized’ and ‘barbaric’ Afghanistan, harborer of evil and Muslim terrorists, saved by the heroic and technologically vanguard strategies of Western militaries? All myths are political and embody a very particular and power infused representation about how the world works. We must historicize particular forms of knowledge and acknowledge their partiality by unpacking the theories that underpin the “facts” produced by situated knowledge’s; “A thicker and more complex vision of humanity is urgently needed.”113 If, as Taylor pronounces, history and its myths are not indeed about the past, but rather the future, than the question we must continually ask ourselves (and of other myth producers, as we are all implicated in this process) is what kind of world is being produced through what myths and who is benefiting and who is being disappeared? For the purposes of our discussion, we accept that the affirmative defends a topical action carried out by the USFG, but also defends the discursive context within which such an action could take place. We reject the magic wand theory of fiat that imagines action separate from the conditions that make that action possible. Imagining a world where military policy is changed requires also imagining a radical change in social discursive structures. Negative political process DAs are irrelevant to this question because they assume a world that simply cannot coexist with the affirmative.Bleiker 2000 [Roland, Prof of International Relations, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics, p. 134-6] Since a systematic theory cannot capture the intricate functioning of power, one must explore different ways of understanding the frameworks within which domination, resistance and social change take place. One must search for more subtle foundations that could, maybe, provide momentary ground for understanding how human agency functions in a transversal context. But how is one to embark upon this intricate task? Foucault continues to provide useful guidance, at least up to a certain point. He approaches power by adding an extra step to understanding it. Power, he argues, is not simply the relationship between individuals or groups, a type of force that one person exerts on another. It works in a more intricate, more indirect way: [W]hat defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future. . .[T]he exercise of power. . .is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions.29 Power is a complex strategic situation, something that shapes and frames the boundaries within which actions can be carried out. Such a definition inevitably raises a number of questions. What mediates the exercise of power? What is the space that lies between actions, this mesh of social forces through which actions frame the actions of others? One mediating factor is the relationship between power and knowledge. Foucault, drawing once more on Nietzsche, argues that knowledge and power are intrinsically linked. There are no power relations which do not constitute corresponding fields of knowledge. And there are no forms of knowledge that do not presuppose and at the same time constitute relations of power.30 Power is not a stable and steady force, something that exists on its own. There is no essence to power, for its exercise is dependent upon forms of knowledge that imbue certain actions with power. This is to say that the manner in which we view and frame power also influences how it functions in practice. ‘It is within discourse,’ Foucault claims, ‘that power and knowledge articulate each other.’31 Discourses are subtle mechanisms that frame our thinking process. They determine the limits of what can be thought, talked and written in a normal and rational way. In every society the production of discourses is controlled, selected, organised and diffused by certain procedures. This process creates systems of exclusion in which one group of discourses is elevated to a hegemonic status while others are condemned to exile. Discourses give rise to social rules that decide which statements most people recognise as valid, as debatable or as undoubtedly false. They guide the selection process that ascertains which propositions from previous periods or foreign cultures are retained, imported, valued, and which are forgotten or neglected.32 Although these boundaries change, at times gradually, at times abruptly, they maintain a certain unity across time, a unity that dominates and transgresses individual authors, texts or social practices. Not everything is discourse, but everything is in discourse. Things exist independently of discourses, but we can only assess them through the lenses of discourse, through the practices of knowing, perceiving and sensing which we have acquired over time. Nietzsche: That mountain there! That cloud there! What is ‘real’ in that? Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training – all of your humanity and animality. There is no ‘reality’ for us – not for you either, my sober friends. . .33 Nietzsche’s point, of course, is not that mountains and clouds do not exist as such. To claim such would be absurd. Mountains and clouds exist no matter what we think about them. And so do more tangible social practices. But they are not ‘real’ by some objective standard. Their appearance, meaning and significance is part of human experiences, part of a specific way of life. A Nietzschean position emphasises that discourses render social practices intelligible and rational – and by doing so mask the ways in which they have been constituted and framed. Systems of domination gradually become accepted as normal and silently penetrate every aspect of society. They cling to the most remote corners of our mind, for ‘all things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their emergence out of unreason thereby becomes improbable’.34 Discourses are more than just masking agents. They provide us with frameworks to view the world, and by doing so influence its course. Discourses express ways of life that actively shape social practices. But more is needed to demonstrate how the concept of discourse can be of use to illuminate transversal dissident practices. More is needed to outline a positive notion of human agency that is not based on stable foundations. This section has merely located the terrains that are to be explored. It is now up to the following chapters to introduce, step by step, the arguments and evidence necessary to develop and sustain a discursive understanding of transversal dissent and its ability to exert human agency. 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