OMNI
AFGHANISTAN NEWSLETTER #27,
October 23, 2021.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice
(#8 April 15, 2011; #9 June 10, 2011; #10 July 3, 2011; #11 July 13, 2011; #12 Sept. 5, 2011; #13 Oct. 2, 2011; #14 Oct. 15, 2011; #15 Feb. 14, 2012 ; #16 April 27, 2012; #17 May 3, 2012; #18 Oct. 20, 2012; #19 Jan. 14, 2013; #20 August 17, 2013; #21, Feb. 4, 2014; #22, Feb. 22, 2015; #23, August 22, 2017; #24, Dec. 27, 2020; #25, August 22, 2021; #26, Oct., 14, 2021)
Contribute to OMNI: www.omnicenter.org/donate/
These essays expose the lies used by our leaders to justify our longest war. Together they offer a strong opposition to US militarism and empire. They say to us all, get off Twitter (an insult to bird intelligence, and look up twit), turn off Facebook (choosing feeling over thinking), and drop off the unnecessary in our lives to press our warrior leaders to end their global predations and let us build peace and justice. --Dick
CONTENTS #27
John Potash, CovertAction Magazine. Purpose of the US invasion and Occupation.
David Adams, Beyond Afghanistan….Afghanistans. Transcend Media Service.
Richard Falk, Crimes in Kabul and Washington, D.C. Transcend MS.
Ed Rampell, US Defeat a Wakeup Call to US Leaders and Public?
CovertAction Magazine.
Alba Ciudad, US Massacres of Civilians in Afghanistan. Orinoco Tribune.
TomDispatch, Vijay Prashad, US Purposes and Results.
Brian Becker, US Empire and Afghanistan 1978 to Present. ANSWER Coalition and
The Intercept.
As’ad Abu Khalil, US and Soviet Occupations and Defeats in Afghanistan Compared.
Rabbi Waskow v. “most media coverage.”
UNAC, “we have not been told the truth throughout the 20 year occupation and war.”
Scott Ritter, “It Was All Based on Lies,” Popular Resistance.
ANSWER Coalition, Biden Acknowledges Defeat and Return to Caliban of 20 Years
Ago.
Contents #26.
Call me if you would like to become the editor of this mini-anthology. --D
TEXTS
ASSESSMENTS OF US LONGEST WAR
Was America’s Longest War for Opium, Oil and Propping up the Stock Market?
Journals/Covert Action 10-15-21
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David Adams | Transition to a Culture of Peace – TRANSCEND Media Service
1 Sep 2021 – As Karl Marx put it, spending money on the military is like throwing money into the sea. It produces nothing of value. And eventually an economy that produces nothing of value will crash from its own internal contradiction. This is the contradiction that led Johan Galtung to predict the end of the American Empire by the year 2020.
Crime and Punishment in Afghanistan
Richard Falk | Global Justice in the 21st Century – TRANSCEND Media Service
29 Aug 2021 – Atrocity in Kabul, Geopolitical Crime in Washington,
TRANSCEND Media Service brings to you its own Peace Journalism Perspective plus a digest of the week’s relevant News, Analyses, Papers and Videos — in various languages.
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By Ed Rampell on Sep 04, 2021 04:26 pm
As the Afghanistan Armageddon unravels, this humiliating, devastating defeat for U.S. and its allies’ imperialism and the 20th anniversary of 9/11, plus the June 29 death of war monger extraordinaire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are wakeup calls. They offer those in the U.S. the chance to reflect upon, reconsider and rethink Washington’s disastrous, interventionist foreign policy.
After 20 years of war, the retreat of U.S. forces from the Afghan Theater—an ass-kicking of Biblical proportions—is a reminder of the limits of American power and over-reach.
The U.S. foreign policy establishment has again been exposed for its extraordinary imbecility, incompetence, arrogance, and brutality of Greek tragedy dimensions. As Kabul, like Saigon in 1975, slips from U.S. imperial control, and the September 11th sneak attack is commemorated, along with our ongoing racial reckoning, the USA also has a rare golden opportunity for an imperial reckoning, a perestroika in how the U.S.—the global capitalist police—interacts with the rest of the world. […]
The post Ass-Kicking in Afghanistan Offers Opportunity to Reorient U.S. Foreign Policy—Or Will it Just Be Another Groundhog Day?appeared first on CovertAction Magazine.
China calls for investigation into U.S. massacres of civilians in Afghanistan
Editor. Mronline.org (9-5-21).
On Wednesday, September 1, Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said that the massacres of civilians committed by the US military in Afghanistan during 20 years of occupation and war should be fully investigated.
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A bit of hope that doesn’t come from Miami
Vijay Prashad/ mronline.org (4-24-21).
After twenty years, the United States government–and the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)–will depart from Afghanistan. They said that they came to do two things: to destroy al-Qaeda, which had launched an attack on the United States on 11 September 2001, and to destroy the Taliban, which had given al-Qaeda a base.
April 23, 2021 | Newswire 
The Real Story: U.S. imperialism and Afghanistan (1978 - Present)
These are episodes of The Socialist Program, a podcast providing news and views about the world for those who want to change it hosted by ANSWER Coalition National Director Brian Becker. You can follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
PART 1 | The Real Story - When U.S. empire waged war vs. Socialism in Afghanistan 1978-1990s
The United States has been intervening in Afghanistan since 1979. Trump and now Biden promise to end U.S. involvement in the Afghanistan war. But imperialist domination in the country continues. Brian is joined by Sohrob Aslamy, a doctoral student at Syracuse University in the Department of Geography and the Environment. Part 1 focuses on the history—the real reasons—behind U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, starting in the 1970s.
Listen to Part 1 of the series here
Part 2 | The Real Story - Is the U.S. actually leaving Afghanistan?
The Biden administration has announced that the United States will be withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan by September 11 of this year, and that this withdrawal will take place regardless of conditions on the battlefield. What's behind this move? Is the U.S. empire's longest war really coming to an end? Brian continues the discussion with Sohrob Aslamy.
Listen to part 2 of the series here
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A shocking exposé in The Intercept reveals CIA-backed death squads in Afghanistan have killed children as young as 8 years old in a series of night raids, many targeting madrassas, Islamic religious schools. The United States played key roles in many of the raids, from picking targets to ferrying Afghan forces to the sites, to providing lethal airpower during the raids. This was part of a campaign of terror orchestrated by the Trump administration that included massacres, executions, mutilation, forced disappearances, attacks on medical facilities, and airstrikes targeting structures known to house civilians.---Intercept (viaCasa Cry January 2021)
U.S. defeat in Afghanistan—A contrast with the Soviet experience
As'ad AbuKhalil. Mronline.org (8-17-21)
The U.S. has been defeated today in Afghanistan not by a super power with an advanced military, but by a rag-tag army of fanatical locals who perfected and consolidated their fanaticism under U.S., Saudi and Pakistani tutelage in the 1980s to fight the Soviets.
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The Shalom Center Board has had no chance to discuss the events of the last week in Afghanistan. So these thoughts come to you as my own.
There are lessons both for US foreign policy and for our internal domestic life from the 20-year failure of the US invasion of Afghanistan. Most of the media response is blinding us to what we could learn.
Most media coverage and most conversations have assumed that "Afghanistan is a foreign policy problem." But there are uncomfortable aspects of the 20-year "forever war" that point right here at home. I will sketch them close to the end of this essay.
To sum up the "foreign policy" part: The US intervention began legitimately as a defensive anti-terrorist action after 9/11.The American Empire turned that into a "forever war" against Afghanistaa. This past week, the American Empire lost that war. That doesn't mean the Afghans who won are democratic or magnanimous, and it doesn't mean that all the frightened Afghans are bad guys. . But American democracy and the American Republic won a snall but important victory against the Empire, if we have the good sense to claim it.
I notice that most of the media are describing the fall of the Kabul government as the Taliban versus Afghanistan. But the Taliban are Afghans [PASHTUN ethnicly, mainly Sunni Islam]. They have deep roots in Afghan society. They were and perhaps still are the ultra right-wing version of Islam. (There are similar energies among some jews, Christians, Hindus, even Buddhists.) Their public proclamations in the last few weeks have promised an open-hearted relationship with civilians throughout Afghanistan.
They have already shown that their fighters have more commitment to their vision of their country than the “official” army bought by two trillion American dollars. That “army” faded away into less than smoke as soon as American power was withdrawn.
Perhaps the Taliban promises will turn out to be fake, or turn out impossible to fulfill if civil servants and police officers who are panicked by the political earthquake flee or refuse to work, and are coerced.. We may learn that the Taliban are still as oppressive as they once were.Or we may learn that they have learned. Either way, it will have to be Afghans who organize to change their own country.
If I were an Afghan, with the Americans gone I would be opposing the Taliban with all my might. Inside the United States, I oppose their equivalent – the ultra-right-wing militias that were part of the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6.
I am not an Afghan, and I know that I and my government have no ethical legitimacy in trying to jam my money and my Army down the throats of Afghans. No ethical legitimacy and no practical effectiveness. It only wounds my own America as well as Afghanistan when my government tries to do that.
The ethically legitimate act of the US in Afghanistan was with approval by the UN Security Council, as international law and US treaty law provide, to break up Al Qaeda after its attack on the Twin Towers. That was accomplished in six months, not 20 years.
Even that could have been done more ethically, without using torture on those arrested, without endless prison in Guantanamo but with trials in US courts under US law.
Instead, the “forever war.” The result of US governmental hubris, and the result of that hubris was an insurgent movement with high morale and clever strategy.
Why was most of the US government and media so stunned by the swift collapse of the puppet government in Kabul? Because most of the US military and foreign-policy Establishment had blinded themselves to how weak was their effort to impose an American system on Afghanistan. They were not even consciously lying; they could not believe in the strength of the ragtag uprising and the weakness of an imperial imposition.
The swift and total collapse of the Kabul government and its army was not evidence that President Biden made a mistake. It was, rather, evidence that his assesssment of the Afghan reality was much closer to correct than that of the stay-onners..
America had plenty of evidence, if we had paid attention. Not just the failures of the British Empire twice in the 19th century and the Soviet Empire once in the twentieth, when they tried to occupy Afghanistan. But also the failures of the US government when it invaded, occupied, and tried to control Vietnam and Iraq.
There were even two lessons in our dealings with Iran. First, success in the difficult negotiations that led to an Iran with no nuclear-weapons program without a ruinous war. Second, the Trumpist stupidity and cruelty that threw away that great success, imposed murderous sanctions even in the midst of pandemic, and convinced Iran that the US could not be trusted.
All this left behind destruction and death. Even in Vietnam, almost 50 years later, with a reasonably decent society at home and at peace with the US, people were still dying from US Agent Orange and US land mines and cluster bombs. And in the US, what could two trillion dollars have accomplished to avert climate crisis, create jobs in the Rust Belt, reduce racial inequality?
Finally, I promised to look at the Afghanistan at home. I wrote that the Taliban were the much stronger Afghan equivalent of the comparatively weak mob on January 6.There is already a blurry Afghanistan growing INSIDE us. How do we grow ourselves in a different direction ?
How do we keep that mob from growing into an American Taliban? The answer depends on us – you, me, millions of us.
·Is the growing power of huge corporations becoming a kind of "Kabul government" -- with few roots in American neighborhoods and democratic American life? Is that the origin of a "forever war"? Is it the root of violent disaffection?
·Can we turn America from its imperial hubris – which was here from the beginning, in the form of slavery and genocide and the destruction of much of our land -- passenger pigeons, bison, forests, the prairie?
·Can we turn America once again to regrowing its democratic roots and hopes – which were also there from the beginning?
·Can we find in ourselves a vigorously nonviolent version of committed citizenship and high morale -- more commited to imaginative and effective soul-force than the American would-be Taliban are to violence?
·Can we free ourselves of the “occupying force” of huge corporation – and thereby also outwork and outlive and out-ethic and out-morale our own Taliban?
Can we make an America that is not an oppressive empire at home and abroad,
laying waste an exhausted Earth,
but a democratic republic replenishing Earth?
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UNAC (8-18-21).
Afghanistan Events are happening very fast in the world today but perhaps none faster than the rapid advance of the Taliban and the fall of the US puppet regime in Afghanistan. It is reported that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country with four cars and a helicopter full of cash. |
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Biden acknowledges that the US has been defeated in Afghanistan war
ANSWER Coalition via uark.onmicrosoft.com 8-16-21
Dear Dick --
The lightening fast collapse of the Afghan government and the panicked evacuation currently being carried out by U.S. forces in Kabul caps two decades of brutal and arrogant occupation of the country. In the end, the political situation in Afghanistan today is the same as it was before the invasion -- with the Taliban in control. It is important to note that prior to the 9/11 attacks the U.S. government had no problem dealing with the Taliban despite their repression of basic rights, including banning girls from receiving an education.
The ANSWER Coalition was among the first organizations in the United States to mobilize in opposition to the war at its onset in 2001, and has consistently protested this senseless occupation that has inflicted death and suffering on millions. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have died over the course of the war, and millions have been forced to flee their homes.
For 20 years, hundreds of thousands of foreign troops cycled through the country while a ferocious air war waged by U.S. bombers and drones took a grave toll on Afghan civilians. Those responsible for these war crimes and the entire criminal enterprise of the war should be held to account.
The frenzied evacuation of Kabul has dealt a blow to the image of U.S. imperial might around the world. Members of the military, political and media elite are engaged in a blame game over who is responsible, with many essentially adopting the position that the withdrawal was a blunder and the U.S. occupation should have gone on literally forever. But all those who initiated, managed and profited off of the war -- and those who sold the war to the public -- share blame for the immense suffering it has caused.
The following statement originally published by Liberation News provides addition details and analysis.
U.S.-backed Afghan government surrenders to the Taliban
The unopposed entrance of Taliban forces into Kabul marks the bitter conclusion of a 20-year long military adventure by U.S. imperialism that senselessly inflicted death and suffering on an enormous scale. The fact that the U.S.-backed Afghan government surrendered without a fight is the clearest indication that it was nothing more than an extension of U.S. imperialist power. The stark reality showed itself: either the U.S. imperialist occupation that began 20 years ago would be sustained literally forever, or this government would collapse upon the exit of U.S. military forces. The Taliban coming to power in the mid-1990s was the consequence of the CIA war against the socialist government of Afghanistan that had come to power in 1978 during the Saur Revolution. The U.S. was perfectly willing to do business with the Taliban prior to September 11 in spite of their odious policies including their prohibition on the education of girls. The hope and promise of the earlier socialist period was crushed by U.S. intervention and the later collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then, the people of Afghanistan have lived under one reactionary government after another.
The complete and almost instantaneous military and political collapse of the Afghan government has led to a situation where the Taliban is presiding over the panicked evacuation of its opponents from inside the capital city. Since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, hundreds of thousands of Afghans died, millions were forced to flee their homes, tens of thousands of working class enlisted soldiers from the United States were killed or injured — and in the end the political situation in the country is returning to a situation where the Taliban dominates the country.
The U.S./NATO invasion of Afghanistan began October 7, 2001 in retaliation for the September 11 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Bush administration refused the Taliban government’s offer to hand over Osama bin Laden for trial in a Muslim country if the United States would present evidence showing that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attack. Instead, Bush declared “no negotiations with terrorists” and launched the invasion. The Bush administration used the September 11 attack as a pretext to launch a sweeping assault against Iraq and other Middle Eastern governments. The invasion of Afghanistan was simply conceived of as a box-checking endeavor by the neo-conservative government to wage a new round of aggression under the banner of the “war on terror”. This imperialist wave of aggression toppled the government in Iraq and Libya and hoped to topple the governments in Syria and Iran as well. It has been a disaster for the people of the Middle East and South Asia.
The pace of the Taliban’s advance was stunning. In just nine days, the group took over every major city in the country and then marched into Kabul without firing a shot. This was possible because the Afghan government’s forces in most cases put up virtually no resistance. Where fighting did occur, it frequently was carried out by elite special forces or local militias. When the moment of truth arrived and it became clear that the U.S. military really was leaving the country, the Afghan National Army did not fight.
After the 2001 invasion, the United States spent hundreds of billions of dollars creating and supporting the Afghan government’s military. But this military served a government that had no political legitimacy. Its source of authority was the U.S.-led foreign occupation of the country, corruption was rampant and it failed to develop an appreciable base of support among the country’s people. It was clear that the government would not be able to hold out for long against the Taliban, so rather than fight and die to prolong the inevitable the security forces mostly chose to step aside.
Read more here
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CONTENTS #26, October 14, 2021
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2021/10/omni-afghanistan-newsletter-26-october.html
Historical Timeline of Afghanistan
Farah Stockman. What was the War about? Profiteering and Corruption.
UN News Wire 10-13, Taliban and Women
Julie Hollar, Failure of US Mainstream Media in Reporting on Women
Brian Terrell, US’ Longest War Not Over
Tom Engelhardt, Fall of the US Empire
END AFGHANISTAN NEWSLETTER #27, 10-23-21