The Saigon moment v 2.0

Def: Epic fail – Slang: a spectacularly embarrassing or humorous mistake, humiliating situation, etc., that is subject to ridicule and given a greatly exaggerated importance.

The entire world is now riveted on the news coming out of Afghanistan. The Taliban, in a few short weeks, have taken over all but the whole of the country after a 20-year occupation by American and NATO forces. Fingers are pointing everywhere: How could this have happened? Who is to blame for this disaster? How could we abandon Afghanistan like this? If we had just waited a few more weeks Afghanistan could have been saved…and so on. Some commenters are calling this Biden’s ‘Saigon moment’, and people are wringing their hands about the plight of women in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. What is the truth, why has this happened and what does the astrology of Afghanistan say? Read on to find out…

This is a post in two parts. We’ll start with the current chart for Afghanistan. There are many charts for the country we call Afghanistan, but the one we will examine here applies to the current state, established after the American invasion in 2001 as a result of 9/11 (so we are told) and established under NATO occupation. The current Afghan state was established on 22 Dec 2001 at 1:12 PM in Kabul. The chart is below (bigger):

We will discuss the chart in a bit, but first some background is needed before we do. What has just happened is the end of America’s longest war for this century. After about 2 trillion dollars of our tax dollars spent and the cost of over 200,000 lives from both sides, Anthony Blinken has just stated that the American objectives in Afghanistan have been completed. Maybe, but most comments I have seen cast doubt on his premise. He stated we were there to defeat the people who caused 9/11 (also subject to dispute), and to make sure they could not do such a thing again. He went on to say it wouldn’t matter if we stayed another year or even 10 is not in the national interest. That last bit is true, as we will see.

But what exactly were the interests and objectives in going into Afghanistan? Those have shifted over time, pointedly in the previous decade, and they were outlined by Col. Larry Wilkerson (ret.) a few years ago – to be able to stir up China and disrupt the Chinese BRI initiative, to be able to jump on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal should the situation there become too unstable, to be able to field troops anywhere in the region should they be needed because doing so from the Mediterranean would be logistically too costly if not impossible and to be able to control or interdict energy flows through the region. He also predicted at the time the US would probably be in Afghanistan for those very reasons for decades to come. Times and politics have changed dramatically in the past few years.

There were unspoken reasons for going into Afghanistan in 2001. At the turn of this century the US was intent on securing energy supply and controlling the pricing of the same, a key reason for the War in Iraq in 2003. It might surprise you to know, but Washington was initially on board with Taliban rulership over Afghanistan. One of the main reasons Washington soured on the Taliban in the ‘90s was because of an oil pipeline. The Clinton administration had initially brought Taliban reps over to observe oil operations in Texas. UNOCAL, connected with ‘W’’s administration, gave the Taliban lavish treatment in Houston:

UNOCAL, another big energy company, [was] in bed with the Taliban, along with the U.S. government in a major, continuing effort to construct pipelines through Afghanistan from the petroleum-rich Caspian Basin in Central Asia. Beneath their burkas, UNOCAL is being exposed for giving the five star treatment to Taliban Mullahs in the Lone Star State in 1997…

Then, the next year the Taliban changed their minds and began to lean toward one of UNOCAL’s competitors, Bridas, which incensed the Washington establishment and Big Oil. Up until that point, there had been no mention of human and women’s rights abuses regarding the Taliban. The Taliban had been a major player in Afghanistan since 1992, but they controlled the region through which the US had planned to run pipelines through Afghanistan. After the Taliban began to lean toward Bridas – because it would mean revenue for Afghanistan – we suddenly became aware of the Taliban’s terrible record on women’s rights and human rights in general. Of course, there is never any mention of Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women:

Thus, as it became clearer that Taliban policy-makers were beginning to lean toward Bridas by late 1997, the Clinton administration responded by suddenly paying heed to human rights/women’s groups who had been protesting Taliban conduct for the past two years. In November 1997, after years of relative quiet, Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright publically condemned the Taliban’s treatment of women during a visit to an Afghani refugee camp in Pakistan. She also made it plain that the US government was ‘opposed’ to the Taliban regime, stating: “It’s very clear why we’re opposed to Taliban. We’re opposed to their approach to human rights, to their despicable treatment of women and children and their lack of respect for human dignity…”

It would be helpful to remember this when we hear about alleged human rights abuses in China. Continuing:

By January 1998, the Taliban regime had responded by signing an agreement with Unocal to begin raising funds for a pipeline, but made no commitment to actually engage Unocal in its construction. Thus, Unocal’s Vice President of International Relations appeared before the US Congress in February 1998, basically calling for the removal of the Taliban regime. By March that year, Unocal formally announced that it was delaying the project.

The preceding is key to understanding why the US was keen to go into Afghanistan in the first place. It wasn’t about Bin Laden. That was secondary and a cover story. It was about removing the Taliban, who were blocking American efforts to capitalize on Afghanistan as a regional oil transport hub. Such a hub would deny Iran and Russia transport routes for their oil. That was the thinking at the time. The US was never able to dislodge the Taliban, though, much as Washington tried. Though we were told the Taliban had been roundly defeated after 2001, in 2017 the Taliban controlled 30% of Afghan territory, by estimates. After 15+ years, efforts at ousting the Taliban had consistently failed, despite troop surges under Obama and continued bombing under Trump. Yet, we were constantly told by the media and the generals that we were ‘making progress’.

We should also be aware that there is an estimated trillion dollars-worth of mineral reserves in Afghanistan, discovered in 2007, as well as a very lucrative drug trade, which goes a long way toward funding various jihadi groups by Western powers and other black ops. It was hoped by Western interests they would be able to capitalize also on mining rights in Afghanistan. Hence, we had another inducement to stay.

Then, to add to our understanding of why we went to Afghanistan, it was all part of the Great Game – big power geopolitics. The Taliban was formed in Pakistan and went into Afghanistan (the border between the two nations is quite porous) to fight the Russians during their stint in Afghanistan in the ‘80s. This was immortalized in true Hollywood propaganda style in a little film called Charlie Wilson’s War, where a US Senator ‘along with three other guys’ supposedly funded and supplied the Mujahedeen with weapons and defeated a humiliated and incompetent Soviet army. So the story goes. It was an entertaining little piece of fiction, supposedly based on a true story.

The fact is, the Soviets didn’t invade Afghanistan. The socialist Afghan government at the time invited them in to fight terrorism and to prop them up, terrorists whom the US were funding even then. After the situation was stabilized and a withdrawal agreement had been struck between the Afghanis and Soviets, the Soviets made an ordered withdrawal, and the socialist government lasted another three years after, until the Soviet Union collapsed and the support for the Afghans dried up. From Lester W. Grau, (American military historian):

“There is a literature and a common perception that the Soviets were defeated and driven from Afghanistan. This is not true. When the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, they did so in a coordinated, deliberate, professional manner, leaving behind a functioning government, an improved military and an advisory and economic effort insuring the continued viability of the government. The withdrawal was based on a coordinated diplomatic, economic and military plan permitting Soviet forces to withdraw in good order and the Afghan government to survive…”

Our Western revisionist history casts the Soviet withdrawal as their having been driven out in humiliating defeat. The truth is a little different, as the preceding quote states. And history has a way of being unkind to people who seek to distort the truth, as we are seeing with the current US withdrawal – karma, we might say. Regarding US funding for the Taliban and associated groups, from a previous link:

“…the Taliban – groups and leaders with similar ideologies and methods, including Usama bin Laden – were wholehearted supported by the US, with Saudi Arabian and Pakistani assistance, during the 1980’s, when fighting the USSR and its Afghani ally, the Najibullah regime. Of course, acknowledging that the Taliban-style ‘militant’ was an ally and his ‘ideology’ was considered an asset, not to be fought but nurtured and supported, is no great revelation. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged exactly this in an appearance before the House Appropriations Committee in late April, 2009…”

“Let’s remember here [said Hillary Clinton]… the people we are fighting today we funded them twenty years ago… and we did it because we were locked in a struggle with the Soviet Union. They invaded Afghanistan… and we did not want to see them control Central Asia and we went to work… and it was President Reagan in partnership with Congress led by Democrats who said you know what it sounds like a pretty good idea… let’s deal with the ISI and the Pakistan military and let’s go recruit these mujahideen. And great, let them come from Saudi Arabia and other countries, importing their Wahhabi brand of Islam so that we can go beat the Soviet Union.””

Emphases added. Remember that also when people talk about Daesh/ISIL and their origins as they acted in Iraq and Syria. And we hear nothing about the treatment of women by Daesh/ISIL in Idlib. They are cast as ‘resistance’ against Assad.

Lastly, before we get to the astrology, we fast-forward to the Trump administration’s efforts to supposedly pull the troops out of Afghanistan. That was the story we got, but the truth is a little different there, too. The Trump administration, which was pushing to get the TAPI pipeline finished and through Afghanistan – as a hedge against Russia and Iran – had met with the Taliban, who had vowed to protect the pipeline. This is where the present situation gets more interesting, as in history having reflections of the past. The peace negotiations with the Taliban were actually a ruse to keep the US in Afghanistan after a fashion indefinitely.

The person tasked with leading the Trump talks with the Taliban was none other than Zalmay Khalilzad, the same man who had headed the talks with the Taliban under the Clinton administration. Khalilzad is anti-Taliban, a neocon and a founding member of the PNAC. He was also instrumental in helping to set up the mujahedeen. This strongly suggests that the main reason Trump wanted the troops out was to appease the Taliban, though American contractors in Afghanistan would have been left in place to oversee the TAPI pipeline construction and maintenance. And that would include military contractors, who are not regular American troops. From the same link:

Khalilzad was also a key figure in the CIA-backed Operation Cyclone under the Carter administration and later the Reagan administration, where he personally helped greatly expand the controversial program. That operation created, armed and financed Afghanistan’s Mujahideen forces, which included the very individuals who would go on to create both Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It is one of the longest and most expensive covert programs in the history of the CIA and also involved Saudi and Pakistani intelligence.

So, now we are decrying the very group we created. The Western public is largely unaware of the preceding information. It is all a matter of public record nonetheless, if people care to investigate it. Let’s be clear about what has just happened, then. A group that Washington fostered, largely created, funded, armed and openly supported in their takeover of Afghanistan in the ‘90s has now taken over the country again. So long as they play ball with American business and corporate interests, we (meaning Washington and the media) are all OK with their human rights record. The fact that we are not re-invading Afghanistan tells us there is more to what is happening than meets the eye. So, are the Taliban a ‘necessary evil’ in the eyes of Washington, or are they ‘bad guys’ or resistance fighters?

Now, with Biden in office, no sooner had he announced the pull-out date of 9/11, the Taliban sprang into action, because Washington had broken the original contract of the May pull-out, decided under Trump. They acted slowly at first in April, then accelerating from there, to the rapid collapse of the Ghani government we have just witnessed. This was not some ad hoc revolution, but one that was well planned and executed. The Taliban of today are not the same as that of 20 years ago. They had help with strategy. My guess would be from Pakistan. The plan worked by securing the outlying areas, cutting supply lines and working in to the center. They also had years to put sleeper cells in place in major strategic points and major cities. With the preceding as background we can move on to the astrology.

What follows in the astrological analysis is a classic study in midpoints. The immediate standouts in the chart are the Capricorn Sun at an Aries point (the 1^st degree of Capricorn), with Taurus rising and the Moon just about to go void-of-course in Pisces, in partile square to Venus. That aspect in particular applies especially to women, both planets being associated with women. The Moon also rules the homeland and infrastructure in this chart, all of which will be illustrated as we go along.

There are two main midpoints to consider in the 2001 chart: MC=Uranus/Pluto and ASC/MC=Mars/Saturn. Both of these midpoints are currently being activated. The Uranus/Pluto midpoint is our ‘revolution midpoint’ and the Mars/Saturn midpoint is our ‘death axis’, the latter denoting generalized weakness, especially when aspecting or aspected by the Sun, as it is currently.

The Moon/Venus square is also significant, as well as being activated now, forming two midpoints: Moon/Venus=Mercury/Saturn=Jupiter/Saturn. Two of these midpoints have major, hard aspects as their bases, thus making them more powerful and of significant import. To start, quoted directly from Ebertin:

• MC=Ura/Plu: Restlessness, indefatigability, prudence, vision, aspirations for innovations and reforms, mobility, the instant grasp and exploitation of every situation. (This would include all opposition groups as well as the government, since in midpoints the IC is always involved with the MC, the Meridian axis)
• Asc/MC: The personality as directed by Ego-consciousness – Connections between the Asc. and the M.C. when brought out by progressions or transits indicate important periods of life which can be characterised and coloured only through the addition and incorporation of other factors.
• Ura/Plu: + The attainment of great objectives by an immense application of effort, the bringing of new things into being, the creation of new conditions of living. – Acts of violence, upsets, subversive activities, putting the gun to someone’s head, the enforcement of decisions, an accident.
• Mars/Sat: Concentrated energy either outwardly expressed as violence or inwardly shown as destructive power, hardness, harshness or bitterness, self-willedness and self-willed obstinacy. The demonstration of one’s own interest in any enterprise or activity lasts only such time as is required for overcoming the main difficulties.

We will cover the Moon/Venus combinations presently. The Mars/Saturn square and associated midpoints are quite telling regarding the government formed under American occupation. It is one the ‘pride cometh before the fall’ aspects, in fact the primary one, showing hubris, misjudged capabilities, spectacular rise and subsequent fall, etc. Essentially, the aspect denotes bad judgement and it can be quite insidious in its effects. That is precisely what we have just witnessed with the Afghani government and its American handlers. They completely misjudged their own position and the capabilities of the Taliban, the thinking being the US would be there to protect the government and to ward off the Taliban advances.

What we have thus far, then, taking the preceding points into account, has been a potent mix of corruption (Pluto opposite Saturn, the latter ruling the sitting government/10^th house), supported by suitcases full of money (Jupiter rules foreign financing and the 8^th and 9^th houses in the 2001 chart, trine to Mars) and tribalism. In one unverified account, Ghani has fled the country with some of those suitcases, one of which they had to leave on the tarmac because it wouldn’t fit in the helicopter.

We note the Mars/Saturn square forms an applying t-square with Pluto, with Mars at the apex. That combination can indicate ruthlessness, the necessity to fight for one’s existence, violence, mistreatment, corruption and so forth. In its best expression it can indicate an indefatigable nature.

The Capricorn Sun at the Aries point can indicate great achievement or crystallization and breaking and it is seen in mundane charts where one or the other influences just described must take place. Afghanistan as a people are at a crossroads now, facing an uncertain future, shown by the transit of Neptune having transited at 45° from the 2001 chart Ceres, which we will get to in the 2^nd part.

The Moon/Venus square indicates an unsociable nature. It indicates difficulties in relationships and relating, and it has long been known the Afghanis have had little faith or trust in their government, seeing it as corrupt and out of touch with the society at large. The Moon rules the general populace in the 2001 chart, both in general and in rulership of the 4^th house, which also rules infrastructure. It is worth noting there has been very little spent on infrastructure development in Afghanistan in the past 20 years. In fact, NATO has destroyed the infrastructure of Afghanistan.

The midpoints to the Moon/Venus square read as follows:

• Mercury/Saturn: + Thinkers, philosophers. – Slow, dull, distrustful and dishonest people.
• Jupiter/Saturn: When stressfully activated, as it is now – “an unsettled life with many changes, a change of residence or of employed staff, an angry upset, vexation or annoyance.”

These midpoints go to show the general distrust of the government by the people and the results we are seeing now, because those midpoints are activated at present by transit and direction. With all the preceding in mind we can move on now to the transits and directions to the 2001 chart and what is likely to eventuate in Afghanistan. At present, the Western press is presenting a dire picture. There again, the picture on the ground in Afghanistan is different from what we are being told.

Continue to Part II…

Featured pic from Business Insider

Ebertin references from The Combination of Stellar Influences (1940)