August 31, 2019
After 18 years of war in Afghanistan– America’s longest – US and Taliban negotiators are said to be close to an agreement that may see the withdrawal of many of the 14,000 US soldiers in that remote nation.
That’s the official version. President Donald Trump keeps changing his mind about the number of US troops to be withdrawn. The latest version from the White House has 5,000 US troops remaining in Afghanistan as a permanent garrison to guard the major air bases at Bagram and Kandahar and protect the US-installed puppet Afghan government in Kabul.
Without US troops to defend it, the Afghan regime of Ashraf Ghani would be swept away in days. Even Trump has admitted this. Keeping the Ghani regime safe in Kabul would at least provide a fig leaf to claim the US-backed government was still in charge.
The pro-war right in Washington is crying to high heaven at this prospect. Senators and congressmen who never heard a shot fired in anger are ready to fight to the last 18-year-old American soldier and keep the trillion-dollar war sputtering on.
To date, 2,426 American soldiers have been killed in combat in Afghanistan, with some 20,000 wounded, many of them permanently maimed. Thousands of US-paid mercenaries and foreign troops dragooned into this conflict have been killed or wounded. Heavy Afghan civilian casualties, mostly caused by air strikes, are covered up by US occupation authorities. Without 24/7 US air support, American forces would have long ago been driven from Afghanistan, as were their British and Soviet predecessors.
Proponents of the Afghan War insist that ‘terrorists’ will take over if US troops withdraw. By now, it’s unclear who the so-called ‘terrorists’ really are. Previously, the US branded Taliban as terrorists. But now that the US is negotiating with Taliban to end the war, Washington claims the threats are the Islamic State from Iraq and something called ‘the Khorasan Group,’ a figment of Washington’s imagination.
The US warns that if Taliban wins, it will turn Afghanistan into a base for international terrorism. This is absurd. Taliban today controls more than half the nation by day, and 80% by night. There is plenty of room left for anti-US groups.
Contrary to US claims, Taliban was never a terrorist group. I was in Afghanistan and Pakistan when Taliban was created. Civil war in Afghanistan after the Soviets pulled out led to wide scale banditry, rapine and anarchy. A preacher named Mullah Omar, a veteran of the anti-Soviet war, cobbled together a force of ethnic Pashtun (Pathan) fighters and students to attack the bandits, rapists, and opium-producing Communist forces causing mayhem. This rag-tag movement came to be known as ‘talibs,’ or religious students. Thus was born Taliban.
Mullah Omar and his Pashtun fighters went on to drive the Communists from Kabul and take most of the country. According to the UN, Taliban eliminated 90% of Afghanistan’s opium production and brought a rough justice to the nation.
But then came the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Caught sleeping on guard duty, the embarrassed Bush administration claimed Taliban was somehow behind 9/11 because it had given refuge to Afghan war hero Osama bin Laden. There was no hard evidence against bin Laden but he became the target of America’s wrath and desire for revenge.
Washington demanded Taliban turn over bin Laden. But the Afghan mountain warriors held to their tradition of defending guests and refused, claiming bin Laden would never have gotten a fair trial in the US. But they offered to send him for trial in another Muslim nation like Turkey or Egypt. The US spurned this offer and invaded Afghanistan, oblivious to its title ‘Graveyard of Empires.’
And so, under the banner of the faux War on Terrorism, the US bombed and rocketed Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest but proudest nations, for 18 years, using B-1 heavy bombers and fleets of killer drones against mountain tribesmen armed with old rifles and fierce courage.
America faces historic defeat in Afghanistan. By not winning, it loses. How this loss would affect the rest of America’s empire remains to be seen. But the sooner America ends this shameful colonial war the better.
Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2019
This post is in: Afghanistan, USA
A good commentary on the situation. It is of course time to leave Afghanistan and to find some more picturesque space in Laddakh / Kashmir. Only we have to see how Mr Modi conducts himself to allow this to happen in the name of tourism development in Kashmir.
Excellent commentary. This paragraph particularly caught my eye: “[the] pro-war right in Washington is crying to high heaven at this prospect (of ending the war in Afghanistan). Senators and congressmen who never heard a shot fired in anger are ready to fight to the last 18-year-old American soldier and keep the trillion-dollar war sputtering on.”
Of course they want to keep the Afghan war going – that’s how the armchair generals are helping the military-industrial complex to flourish. And they couldn’t care less how many American or Afghani lives are lost or how much destruction is being caused. The Vietnam War was used for the same purpose and to maintain full employment on the home front. The military-industrial machine always wants the US involved in some war or another, as otherwise it would have a hard time justifying its current size.
One of the biggest actual reasons for America to invade Afghanistan was when the Taliban destroyed the opium trade and big Pharma was having no part of that. America had the trade 100% restored in six months. Proof of this was when soldiers were on patrol, they were under orders not to touch the poppy fields they found.
So if you have a family member with an opium addiction remember, who helped make it possible, and thank the American military. Someday when we can admit it the war in Afghanistan will be remembered for what it truly is, the Second Opium War.
An excellent summary… what might be added is that the FBI had no evidence that Osama was involved with 9/11; he was wanted as a suspect in an earlier embassy bombing.
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It’s also interesting that Bush made special provisions to allow some other bin Ladens to flee the country when airspace was ‘shut down’.
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What’s truly sad is that the rest of the world allows this to happen.
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Dik