OMNI
AFGHANISTAN NEWSLETTER #28,
AUGUST 28, 2022.
WITHDRAWAL
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; #27, Oct. 23, 2021;)
Contribute to OMNI: www.omnicenter.org/donate/
What’s at stake: These essays expose “the profound and bipartisan malfeasance of our government” and the lies used to initiate, perpetuate for 20 years, and justify our longest war. Together the authors offer strong opposition to US militarism and empire and to war in general.
CONTENTS Afghanistan #28
2021: Dying Throes of US Occupation
Kathy Kelly. Harms Committed and Profiteers Enriched.
Sam Pizzigati. America’s Merchants Of Death . . .
Ann Jones, “Afghanistan (Again).” (Author of They Were Soldiers).
Jeremy Kuzmarov.“1979 Assassination… Set Groundwork for America’s Longest War.”
UN News Wire. “UN urges inclusive Afghan government as crises loom.”
US Might Team with Taliban v. Caliphate?
AFSC and UN: Afghan People Need Help.
ANSWER Coalition. “U.S. Drone Massacres Family in Kabul as Final Act.”
John Pilger. Brzezinski: “ the great game of smashing countries.”
Mark Leon Goldberg. “An Afghan Human Rights Activist Speaks Out."
Gregory Shupak. US Media Disinformation.
PEACE
Susannah George. “The Leaked U.S. Plan to end the war in Afghanistan.”
Margaret Flowers. “The Peace Movement Must Press For Diplomacy, Not More War…. “
ANSWER Coalition. “Biden Acknowledges that the US has been defeated in Afghanistan war.“
David Adams. “AFGHANISTAN IS NOT THE END.”
2022: The War Ends
David Corn. “The Afghanistan Debacle.”
Tariq Ali. “The Debacle in Afghanistan.”
Danny Haiphong. “The US Legacy In Afghanistan.”
TeleSUR Desk. “Chaos, poverty and hunger – The U.S. legacy in Afghanistan.”
Craig Whitlock. “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War August 31, 2021.”
Julie Hollar. Two essays on US Media.
Biden
Al Jazeera. Costs of the War: the Withdrawal.
Zachary Scott. “Biden Lies (Again). . . .
ADG. Pullout starts new U.S. era, president says.
Jon Rainwater, US Sanctions v. Afghan People
Democracy Now. “Afghan Activist & 9/11 Mother Condemn Biden’s Seizure of Afghan Funds.”
UN Wire. ”Further restrictions on Afghan women draw criticism.”
M. K. Bhadrakumar. “China’s diplomacy on a roll in Kabul.”
Marge Piercy. “Out of Afghanistan.”
Contents of #27
TEXTS OF Afghanistan #28
2021: Throes of War Ending
Harms Committed and Profiteers Enriched
Kathy Kelly. “We Are All Accountable.” The Catholic Worker (Oct.-Nov., 2021). The author expesses her revulsion over the harms committed by the US against the Aghans during the invasion and long occupation, and over the enrichment of the war profiteers, the military contractors and all complicit with them (see her title). Kathy Kelly is one of our era’s steadiest and most courageous opponents of US global military’s mass killings in wars of aggression.
US CORPORATE WAR COMPLEX $$
America’s Merchants Of Death Then — And Now
By Sam Pizzigati, Common Dreams. Popular Resistance (8-24-21). The tag “merchants of death” has long since disappeared from our American political lexicon. But the problem Nye named remains. Our contemporary corporate moguls are continuing to get rich off the preparations that make wars more likely and massively multiply death counts when the actual shooting starts. America’s longest war — the war in Afghanistan — offers but the latest example. We won’t know for some time the total haul of our corporate executive class off the Afghan war’s twenty years. But Institute for Policy Studies analysts Brian Wakamo and Sarah Anderson have come up with... -more-
Tomgram: TomDispatch via uark.onmicrosoft.com
Ann Jones, “Afghanistan (Again).” October 31, 2021.
Ann Jones began her remarkable book Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan this way: "I went to Afghanistan after the bombing stopped. Somehow, I felt obliged to help pick up the pieces. I was a New Yorker who had always lived downtown, and for a long time after the towers fell I experienced moments when I couldn’t get my bearings… Four thousand collateral civilian deaths in Kabul brought no consolation for the death of thousands from around the world in the fallen towers of the city that had so long been my home. I thought America had lost its bearing, too. So I left.”
Fortunately, in all these years since, Jones, a TomDispatch regular who grimly tracked the American casualties of that war home from the battlefield in her now-classic book They Were Soldiers, has never lost her bearings. Perhaps you won't be surprised to know, in fact, that she began her very first piece for this site back in 2006 this way: "Remember when peaceful, democratic, reconstructed Afghanistan was advertised as the exemplar for the extreme makeover of Iraq? In August 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was already proclaiming the new Afghanistan 'a breathtaking accomplishment' and 'a successful model of what could happen to Iraq.' As everybody now knows, the model isn’t working in Iraq. So, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s not working in Afghanistan either. The story of success in Afghanistan was always more fairy tale than fact -- one scam used to sell another."
And sadly enough, that scam Jones saw so clearly then was still a scam in August 2021 when the U.S. chaotically withdrew from Kabul, leaving the Taliban (only faintly) in control of the city and the rest of the country. Back in 2006, she had, ominously enough, titled the last section of that first TomDispatch piece of hers, "The Road to Taliban Land" and while she was indeed talking about a literal road, she also saw, even then, just where this country's disastrous first war of the twenty-first century was leading. And lead it did. Today, she returns to Afghanistan in her own fashion to think over just what really happened there. Brace yourself. Tom
"Now Is the Time to Be Angry’: Remembering Forgotten Afghanistan “ By Ann Jones.
I know, I know. It's the last thing you want to hear about. Twenty years of American carnage in Afghanistan was plenty for you, I'm sure, and there are so many other things to worry about in an America at the edge of... well, who knows what? But for me, it's different. I went to Afghanistan in 2002, already angry about this country's misbegotten war on that poor land, to offer what help I could to Afghan women. And little as I may have been able to do in those years, Afghanistan left a deep and lasting impression on me.
So, while this country has fled its shameful Afghan War, I, in some sense, am still there. That’s partly because I've kept in touch with Afghan women friends and colleagues, some living through the nightmare of the Taliban back again and others improbably here in America, confined in military barracks to await resettlement in the very country that so thoroughly wrecked their own. And after all these years, I'd at least like to offer some thoughts on the subject, starting with a little history that most Americans know nothing about.
So be patient with me. War is never over when it‘s over. And it would be wrong to simply leave Afghanistan and its people in the dust of our disastrous departure. For me, at least, some thoughts are in order.
Starting the War: PEACEMAKER MURDERED
“1979 Assassination of U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs Set Groundwork for America’s Longest War.” By Jeremy Kuzmarov on Oct 29, 2021 03:07 am.
New evidence links Zbigniew Brzezinski, the CIA and European fascists who formed the Safari Club to the crime.
Dubs had sought to prevent Soviet and U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, which made him a target of neoconservatives.
As America’s oldest living president, Jimmy Carter is widely revered for his down-to-earth and folksy manner and for having taken many principled stands on political issues.
However, during his presidency in the late 1970s, it was Carter who enmeshed the United States in its longest war in Afghanistan by arming Islamic fundamentalists. The United States aimed to unseat Afghanistan's socialist government that came to power in a 1978 revolution and induce a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in order to give the Soviets their Vietnam. [...]
Afghanistan was crucial to the designs of the global Right because it provided an opportunity to strike a blow at the Soviet Union and avenge the lost war in Vietnam.
But there was one man standing in their way—U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs—who had to be killed […]
The post 1979 Assassination of U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs Set Groundwork for America’s Longest War appeared first on CovertAction Magazine.
General says teaming with Taliban on strikes ‘possible’ (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette), Sep 02, 2021
| Thu, Sep 2, 4:34 PM (15 hours ago) |
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General says teaming with Taliban on strikes ‘possible’
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[Taliban not so bad after all? Maybe our leaders have learned some history of the Pashtun. –D]
AFGHANS NEED HELP
AFSC (9-4-21)
Tell policymakers: Assist Afghans seeking safety: With Afghanistan now under Taliban rule, many people in Afghanistan continue to fear for their lives, rights, and freedoms. The U.S. government has a responsibility to assist Afghans wishing to emigrate—while also working to support humanitarian aid and protection of human rights for those who remain.
UNITED NATIONS
Officials urge support for Afghans facing crisis
More than a third of people in Afghanistan are facing acute food insecurity, and World Food Programme stockpiles in the country are set to run out at the end of this month without at least $200 million in emergency funding, warns Deputy Special Representative and Humanitarian Coordinator in Afghanistan Ramiz Alakbarov. Afghan refugees seeking security elsewhere should have support and safe admission to other countries to prevent them falling prey to traffickers, writes Philippe Leclerc, representative for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Turkey.
Full Story: The Hindu (India)/Press Trust of India (9/2), Hurriyet (Turkey) (9/3)
Humanitarian disaster looms in Afghanistan.
UN WIRE (9-3-21).
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is pleading for safe, unimpeded access for humanitarian workers in Afghanistan, urging the global community to support the Afghan people "in their darkest hour of need." UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore has voiced alarm over the plight of women and children under Taliban rule in the country, while a spokesperson for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has said UN agencies intend to remain in the region to provide much-needed aid.
Full Story: Daily Times (Pakistan)/Associated Press of Pakistan (9/1), CNBC (8/31), Voice of America (8/31)
THE OCCUPATION
US Ends Its 20 Year Posse to Arrest and Extra-Legally Execute a Criminal Al Queda Leader and Capture His Criminal Saudi Followers Hiding Out in Afghanistan and Pakistan--another US War Crime.
But hardly the last:
“U.S. Drone Massacres Family in Kabul as Final Act.”
ANSWER Coalition via uark.onmicrosoft.com 8-31-21
Dear Dick,
As U.S. forces were preparing to evacuate Afghanistan after 20 years of war, the Pentagon conducted a deadly drone strike in a residential area in Kabul that killed all 9 members of a family who lived next door to the target.
This final act, and perhaps it will not be the last bombing, is emblematic of what the U.S. war in Afghanistan has meant for the people of that country. Over 250,000 Afghans have died, including 71,000 civilians, since the U.S. invaded the country on October 7, 2001.
The people of Afghanistan had nothing to do with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but they have paid a heavy price. So too have the thousands of young U.S. military personnel who were killed or wounded in this senseless war.
The 20-year long Pentagon operation is presented to the people of the United States as a noble cause that at some point went off the rails. Initially justified as an effort to destroy Al Qaeda, the occupation of Afghanistan was presented as an effort to protect the rights for girls and women.
As in Vietnam, the people of the United States were lied to by the government about the war—the causes and motivations for the war and how it was conducted. For 20 years, the people of the United States were told that there was a hopeful light at the end of this tunnel. But the generals and politicians knew otherwise. They knew there was no such thing as "winning". But they concealed the truth from the public.
This was not a benign or humane occupation. In December 2014, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a scathing 6,700 page report documenting how the CIA and the Pentagon had engaged in a massive torture program against people who were arrested or kidnapped. Using the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, the CIA and the Pentagon engaged in a program of systematic torture of thousands of people held at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and in other Secret prison sites, and at Guantanamo. Torture methods included beating, binding, in concerted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation, to the point of hallucination, the denial of food, drink, or medical care for wounds, as well as water boarding, walling, sexual humiliation, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement to small coffin-like boxes (report by the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, December 2014).
The United States has frozen all of Afghanistan’s assets in an effort designed to impose collective punishment on the people as retaliation for the U.S. defeat in this 20-year long debacle. The ANSWER Coalition, which has opposed the war since its onset, demands that the United States government unfreeze all of Afghanistan’s assets and that the U.S. pay reparations to the people of Afghanistan for the death and destruction caused by this 20-year long imperial adventure.
Brian Becker
National Director, ANSWER Coalition
More analysis on Afghanistan:
• U.S. massacres entire civilian family in drone strike as it exits Afghanistan. Listen to the podcast episode from the Socialist Program with Brian Becker here
• Blood Money: War Veteran Mike Prysner Breaks Down Who Got Rich Off 20 Year Afghan War. Watch the BreakThrough News interview here
• ANSWER Coalition's National Director, Brian Becker, interviews Ann Wright, retired U.S. Army colonel and U.S. State Department official in Afghanistan. Click here to listen to the interview
Please make an urgently needed donation to the antiwar and anti-racism movement today. We can only carry on this crucial work with contributions from supporters like you.
https://www.answercoalition.org/answer_statement_afghanistan_exit_august_2021
SOVIETPHOBIA
John Pilger: “Afghanistan, the great game of smashing countries.
Editor. Mronline.org (8-27-21).
In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”. “Do you have any regrets?” I asked. “Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?” - John Pilger
Editor. Mronline.org (8-20-21).
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. In this period, you were the national security advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?
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By: Mark Leon Goldberg on August 25, 2021
Zubaida Akbar is an Afghan human rights activist living in Washington, D.C. She is desperately trying to get vulnerable people out of the country, including a group of female journalists who are almost certainly marked for execution by the Taliban.We kick off discussing what she is hearing from her friends in Kabul as people attempt to flee the Taliban’s retribution. We then have a very heavy conversation about the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan.
By and large there is a dearth of Afghan voices in western media right now – and I am very thankful to Zubaida Akbar for coming on the show to offer her perspective. I’ll admit that I had a giant lump in my throat at the end of this conversation, but I think it is important that we in the media give voice to those who can bear witness to what is going on right now in Afghanistan.
US MEDIA DISINFORMATION
As Kabul Is Retaken, Papers Look Back In Erasure
By Gregory Shupak, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. Popular Resistance (8-24-21). Corporate media coverage of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the country’s US-backed government has offered audiences more mystification than illumination. The Boston Globe, LA Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. The editorial boards of these papers consistently trivialized South Asian lives, erased US responsibility for lethal violence, and made untenable assertions about Washington’s supposedly righteous motives in the war. The editorials evince a callous indifference to the toll of the war on... -more-
The Crimes Of The West In Afghanistan
By Fabian Scheidler, Common Dreams. Popular Resistance.org (8-22-21). The headless flight of NATO troops from Afghanistan and the havoc they leave behind are only the last chapter in a devastating story that began in October 2001. At that time, the US government, supported by allies including the German administration, announced that the terror attacks of September 11 should be answered by a war in Afghanistan. None of the assassins were Afghan. And the Taliban government at the time even offered the US to extradite Osama bin Laden—an offer the US did not even respond to. Virtually no word was said about the country of origin of 15 of the 19 terrorists... -more-
PEACE
Comprehensive analysis followed by bits and pieces of the US disarray.
The leaked U.S. plan to end the war in Afghanistan
March 10, 2021 at 1:26 p.m. CST
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A leaked State Department document presents the clearest picture yet of a political settlement to the Afghan conflict that would satisfy the Biden administration and pave the way for the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country.
The United States delivered the document to the Taliban and Afghan government last week as frustration grows in Washington over long-stalled talks between the two Afghan sides and as violence rises across the country. It comes as the Biden administration is conducting a review of U.S. Afghanistan policy and the agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban, which calls for the full withdrawal of U.S. troops by May 1 if the militants met specific conditions.
The Washington Post obtained the eight-page proposal and verified its authenticity with two senior Afghan officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment on a sensitive policy proposal. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the document.
The years-long U.S. diplomatic strategy behind the push to end the conflict in Afghanistan has largely been shrouded in secrecy. Under the Trump administration, only a four-page summary was released after the United States and the Taliban reached a peace deal in February 2020.
In contrast, sections of the draft peace agreement go into detail, especially in the suggested structure of Afghanistan’s future government. In some instances, the number of people on powerful councils and commissions is specified. Afghan news organization TOLO first published the document on Sunday.
U.S. proposes interim power-sharing government with Taliban in Afghanistan
Overall, the document calls for Afghanistan’s current government to be replaced with temporary leaders, a new constitution to be drafted and a cease-fire to be brokered. Within those proposals are elements both sides have described as nonnegotiable, so the plan is unlikely to be implemented in its current form.
Below are some of the most important issues raised by the proposal.
Who will govern Afghanistan
One of the key stumbling blocks in talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban is the militant group’s claim that President Ashraf Ghani’s government is illegitimate — an issue that is addressed in the latest U.S. peace proposal with the establishment of an interim government.
After eking out a slim election victory for a second term, Ghani has repeatedly refused to step down despite the Taliban’s unwillingness to negotiate with him or his administration.
And while Ghani’s government has expressed openness to amending the Afghan constitution, it opposes rewriting it. Language in the U.S. proposal does set parameters for how the constitution can potentially be rewritten, stating that Afghanistan’s “2004 constitution will be the initial template.”
Afghan government officials and supporters of democratic structures fear that a new constitution could pave the way for the Taliban to secure significant power in a future government. Such authority could give the militants the ability to roll back women’s rights, curb civil liberties such as freedom of speech and craft an archaic justice system.
The role of Islam and the question of elections
The draft agreement appears to attempt to balance the Taliban’s demand that Afghanistan be ruled by Islamic law and the Afghan government’s appeal for the country to be governed democratically.
The U.S. proposal calls for elections to be held after the formation of an interim government. While it does not specify when, this could be viewed as a compromise to the leaders in Kabul because the Taliban has described elections as a red line in the past, deeming them a Western-imposed construct.
Islam also plays a prominent role in the draft peace plan. According to the document, a “High Council for Islamic Jurisprudence” would provide guidance and advice “to all national and local government structures.” But in cases where the council disagrees with the country’s judiciary, the position of the country’s Supreme Court would be “final and binding.”
How to end the fighting
The proposal calls for a cease-fire to begin with hours of the deal signing. The end of hostilities is described as similar to the successful temporary reduction in violence that preceded the signing of the U.S.-Taliban agreement, but this move would be “permanent and comprehensive.”
The United States and the international community for months have called for violence levels to be reduced. Afghanistan remains the most violent conflict in the world, with the Taliban and Afghan forces clashing across the country as the militants look to expand their territory.
The U.S. draft also calls on the Taliban to “remove their military structures and offices from neighboring countries,” a reference to Pakistan.
The Taliban deny the existence of such sanctuaries outside of Afghanistan and would probably refuse to agree to a document calling for their elimination. But reports including from the Pentagon claim Pakistan has long hosted Taliban leaders and their families and provided medical treatment to the movement’s fighters. The longtime relationship would be complicated to untangle. Pakistan denies supporting the Taliban. [Here and far too frequently in this and other Afghan War reporting the huge reality of the Taliban’s ethnic Pashtun roots is overlooked. Present eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan are ancient Pashtun, whom the British empire divided in half better to control them. –D]
Sharif Hassan in Kabul and Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.
Updated March 10, 2021
What you need to know about the Afghan peace process:
Latest: U.S. proposes interim power-sharing government with Taliban in Afghanistan
The leaked U.S. plan to end the war in Afghanistan
U.S. forces in Afghanistan cut to 2,500, lowest level since 2001
How life under Taliban rule in Afghanistan has changed — and how it hasn’t
U.S. to resume processing thousands of stalled visas for Afghans who aided Americans
Susannah George is The Washington Post's Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief. She previously headed the Associated Press’s Baghdad bureau and covered national security and intelligence from the AP’s Washington bureau. Follow
The Peace Movement Must Press For Diplomacy, Not More War, In Afghanistan. By Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. Popular Resistance (8-24-21). Col. Ann Wright was in Afghanistan to open the US Embassy in 2001. She recounts how the recommendation then was to get the US military out as quickly as possible. Instead, the Pentagon spent 20 years lying to the public and causing great suffering to the Afghan people. Wright exposes the truth about why the US stayed in for so long and explains the politics of the country. She has started a campaign to push for maintaining diplomatic relations with the new Taliban government and is calling for the CIA to cease involvement with local militias that could evolve into a civil war. -more-
Biden acknowledges that the US has been defeated in Afghanistan war.
ANSWER Coalition via uark.onmicrosoft.com Mon, Aug 16, 5:40 PM (15 hours ago)
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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AFGHANISTAN IS NOT THE END
11:33 AM (2 hours ago) |
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Dear Friends,
I have just posted my culture of peace blog for September, entitled :
AFGHANISTAN IS NOT THE END
You will find it at https://decade-culture-of-peace.org/blog/?p=1254
In case you have not already received it, this month's CPNN bulletin is
entitled, AFGHANISTAN AND HIROSHIMA/NAGASAKI. You may find at
https://cpnn-world.org/new/?p=24810.
If you wish to make a comment on the blog or bulletin, you may write to
me at coordinator@cpnn-world.org and I will put your comment on line.
Thank you for your interest in the culture of peace.
David Adams
David Corn. “The Afghanistan Debacle: How Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden Bamboozled the American Public.” An essential read from David Corn’s This Landnewsletter. Mother Jones. August 16, 2021. DAVID CORN Mojo’s Washington, DC, Bureau ChiefBio | Follow.
Editor’s note: This must-read essay from David Corn appears in his new newsletter, This Land. We’re still piloting the project, but given the gravity of what’s happening in Afghanistan and David’s spot-on analysis, we wanted to make sure as many readers as possible have a chance to read it. This Land is a new paid newsletter written by David three times a week to get behind-the-scenes updates and his unvarnished take on the stories of the day, and more, and subscribing costs just $5 a month—but we’re giving everyone a sneak peek today for this important story. (You can sign up for a free 30-day trial of This Land to get more from David here.)
The Taliban takeover in Afghanistan and the calamitous collapse of Kabul are the result of years of American failure to understand that nation and that war—an immense failure that was covered up by the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.
It was Bush and Dick Cheney who led the United States into what would be the longest-running quagmire in American history. And they did so with little strategic thought about what to do after chasing Osama bin Laden out of Afghanistan and running the al-Qaeda-friendly Taliban out of power. Most notoriously, before figuring out how to proceed in Afghanistan after the initial attack, they launched the even more misguided war in Iraq on the basis of lies and, in similar fashion, without a clear plan for what would come after the fall of Saddam Hussein. As a result, over 4,400 American soldiers would perish there, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians would die in the years of post-invasion fighting. Meanwhile, nearly 6,300 American GIs and contractors would lose their lives in Afghanistan. The arrogance and ineptitude of Bush, Cheney, and their henchmen have led to the horrible images and tales we have seen reported from Afghanistan in the past few days—which themselves are the continuation of many years of horrible images and tales from the double-debacle of these two wars.
But the Obama and Trump administrations were complicit in the Afghanistan catastrophe, particularly for perpetuating the national security establishment’s delusions—and lies—about the war. In 2019, the Washington Post obtained access to a trove of confidential US government documents about the Afghanistan war that were produced as part of an inspector general’s project that investigated the root failures of the war by conducting interviews with 400 insiders involved with the effort, including generals, White House officials, diplomats, and Afghan officials. The findings were damning. As the Post put it, “senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”
That was a helluva secret to keep from the public. A sharp indictment came from Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who was the White House Afghan war czar for Bush and Obama. In 2015, he told the project’s interviewers, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing.” The guy in charge of Afghanistan remarkably added, “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” Lute also observed, “If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction.” Yes, imagine if we did—though the vast corruption that undermined the massive US rebuilding endeavor was well reported repeatedly over the years. As were the continuous failures within the war itself. Yet Congress, the media, and the citizenry paid insufficient attention to this never-ending, going-nowhere conflict.
Several officials interviewed noted the US government—military HQ in Kabul and the White House—consistently hoodwinked the public to make it seem the US was winning in Afghanistan when it was not. Remember the steady stream of assurances the Afghan military was becoming more capable of beating back the Taliban? That was BS. A senior National Security Council official said there was pressure from the Obama White House and the Pentagon to concoct stats showing the American troop surge was succeeding: “It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory, and none of it painted an accurate picture. The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war.”
John Sopko, who headed the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which ran the project, bottom-lined this for the Post: “The American people have constantly been lied to.”
Think about that. Americans have paid about $1 trillion for the war in Afghanistan. Thousands have given their lives; many more have suffered tremendous injuries. And the public was not told the truth about this venture. It was bamboozled by successive administrations. The Post had to twice sue SIGAR to force the release of these papers under the Freedom of Information Act. The Trump administration preferred to keep this material under wraps.
These documents were somewhat akin to the Pentagon Papers, the 7,000-page long history of the Vietnam War that was leaked to the media by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 and showed that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had routinely deceived the public about supposed progress in that war. (The Afghanistan papers, unlike the Vietnam study, were not classified.) Yet the Post’s big get did not detonate a major controversy, as the Pentagon Papers did. This holy-shit scoop was duly noted, and then, as is often the case, we all moved on. The Afghanistan war had long since become a non-story, relegated to p. A15, if covered at all.
Now we are worried, perhaps angered, by the fall of Kabul, and we fear for the Afghans—especially the women and girls, the human rights activists, and those who aided US forces and Western journalists—who are about to become inhabitants of the Taliban’s fundamentalist hellscape. But however we reached this point—and whether or not President Joe Biden committed a grave error with the US troop withdrawal and its management—one thing is clear: US presidents, military officials, and policymakers were not straight with the American public about Afghanistan. We never had an honest debate about what was being done there and what could—and couldn’t—be accomplished. (For a snapshot of the absurdity of the Afghanistan war, see this recent thread from Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat.)
As Afghans in Kabul, including President Ashraf Ghani, fled the incoming Taliban this past weekend, the blame game kicked in. Who lost Afghanistan? Well, it wasn’t ours to lose in the first place. But everyone is to blame, for everyone lied or got it wrong: Bush and Cheney, Obama and Biden, Trump and Pence, and now Biden and Harris. When Trump in February 2020 signed a “peace deal” with the Taliban obligating the US troop withdrawal that has just occurred, he told Americans that he expected the Taliban would act responsibly. He claimed the Taliban was “tired of war.” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper called it a “hopeful moment.” Months later, there was intensified fighting. In July, President Joe Biden, who had the choice of abiding by this deal or confronting an anticipated expansion in Taliban attacks, presented a false impression of what to expect with the troop pullout Trump had negotiated: “The jury is still out, but the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
Ending the US military involvement in Afghanistan is a noble goal. But while it was too easy for the United States, in the wake of 9/11, to launch a forever war in the land that previously defied the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and other outsiders, extrication was never going to be smooth and cost-free. History doesn’t lie. And with no honest dialogue about the war, this brutal finish is even more shocking.
The American public has been conned about Afghanistan for two decades by successive administrations. Did any of those lies do the Afghan people any good? That’s a tough question to answer this week. The 20 years of fighting did keep the Taliban at bay, and for many Afghans that was a true benefit. But the lies certainly were an offense against the American public and the Constitution. The war in Afghanistan—prosecuted in ignorance and sold with hubris and falsehoods—has been a scandal of the highest order, a fundamental violation of the national trust. An awful aspect of this fiasco is that the perpetrators and protectors of the Afghanistan fraud have not been held accountable, while the Afghans now suffer. This is their tragedy. But it was built upon the profound and bipartisan malfeasance of our government.
DEFEAT, AUGUST 15, 2021
Tariq Ali, “The Debacle in Afghanistan.”
TARIQ ALI, 16 AUGUST 2021, HTTPS://NEWLEFTREVIEW.ORG/SIDECAR/POSTS/DEBACLE-IN-AFGHANISTAN Sonny San Juan via uark.onmicrosoft.com Sat, Aug 21, 10:04 PM
The fall of Kabul to the Taliban on 15 August 2021 is a major political and ideological defeat for the American Empire. The crowded helicopters carrying US Embassy staff to Kabul airport were startlingly reminiscent of the scenes in Saigon – now Ho Chi Minh City – in April 1975. The speed with which Taliban forces stormed the country was astonishing; their strategic acumen remarkable. A week-long offensive ended triumphantly in Kabul. The 300,000-strong Afghan army crumbled. Many refused to fight. In fact, thousands of them went over to the Taliban, who immediately demanded the unconditional surrender of the puppet government. President Ashraf Ghani, a favourite of the US media, fled the country and sought refuge in Oman. The flag of the revived Emirate is now fluttering over his Presidential palace. In some respects, the closest analogy is not Saigon but nineteenth-century Sudan, when the forces of the Mahdi swept into Khartoum and martyred General Gordon. William Morris celebrated the Mahdi’s victory as a setback for the British Empire. Yet while the Sudanese insurgents killed an entire garrison, Kabul changed hands with little bloodshed. The Taliban did not even attempt to take the US embassy, let alone target American personnel.
The twentieth anniversary of the ‘War on Terror’ thus ended in predictable and predicted defeat for the US, NATO and others who clambered on the bandwagon. However one regards the Taliban’s policies – I have been a stern critic for many years – their achievement cannot be denied. In a period when the US has wrecked one Arab country after another, no resistance that could challenge the occupiers ever emerged. This defeat may well be a turning point. That is why European politicians are whinging. They backed the US unconditionally in Afghanistan, and they too have suffered a humiliation – none more so than Britain.
Biden was left with no choice. The United States had announced it would withdraw from Afghanistan in September 2021 without fulfilling any of its ‘liberationist’ aims: freedom and democracy, equal rights for women, and the destruction of the Taliban. Though it may be undefeated militarily, the tears being shed by embittered liberals confirm the deeper extent of its loss. Most of them – Frederick Kagan in the NYT, Gideon Rachman in the FT– believe that the drawdown should have been delayed to keep the Taliban at bay. But Biden was simply ratifying the peace process initiated by Trump, with Pentagon backing, which saw an agreement reached in February 2020 in the presence of the US, Taliban, India, China and Pakistan. The American security establishment knew that the invasion had failed: the Taliban could not be subdued no matter how long they stayed. The notion that Biden’s hasty withdrawal has somehow strengthened the militants is poppycock. MORE HTTPS://NEWLEFTREVIEW.ORG/SIDECAR/POSTS/DEBACLE-IN-AFGHANISTAN
The fact is that over twenty years, the US has failed to build anything that might redeem its mission. The brilliantly lit Green Zone was always surrounded by a darkness that the Zoners could not fathom. In one of the poorest countries of the world, billions were spent annually on air-conditioning the barracks that housed US soldiers and officers, while food and clothing were regularly flown in from bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It was hardly a surprise that a huge slum grew on the fringes of Kabul, as the poor assembled to search for pickings in dustbins. The low wages paid to Afghan security services could not convince them to fight against their countrymen. The army, built up over two decades, had been infiltrated at an early stage by Taliban supporters, who received free training in the use of modern military equipment and acted as spies for the Afghan resistance.
This was the miserable reality of ‘humanitarian intervention’. Though credit where credit is due: the country has witnessed a huge rise in exports. During the Taliban years, opium production was strictly monitored. Since the US invasion it has increased dramatically, and now accounts for 90% of the global heroin market – making one wonder whether this protracted conflict should be seen, partially at least, as a new opium war. Trillions have been made in profits and shared between the Afghan sectors that serviced the occupation. Western officers were handsomely paid off to enable the trade. One in ten young Afghans are now opium addicts. Figures for NATO forces are unavailable.
As for the status of women, nothing much has changed. There has been little social progress outside the NGO-infested Green Zone. One of the country’s leading feminists in exile remarked that Afghan women had three enemies: the Western occupation, the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. With the departure of the United States, she said, they will have two. (At the time of writing this can perhaps be amended to one, as the Taliban’s advances in the north saw off key factions of the Alliance before Kabul was captured). Despite repeated requests from journalists and campaigners, no reliable figures have been released on the sex-work industry that grew to service the occupying armies. Nor are there credible rape statistics – although US soldiers frequently used sexual violence against ‘terror suspects’, raped Afghan civilians and green-lighted child abuse by allied militias. During the Yugoslav civil war, prostitution multiplied and the region became a centre for sex trafficking. UN involvement in this profitable business was well-documented. In Afghanistan, the full details are yet to emerge.
Over 775,000 US troops have fought in Afghanistan since 2001. Of those, 2,448 were killed, along with almost 4,000 US contractors. Approximately 20,589 were wounded in action according to the Defense Department. Afghan casualty figures are difficult to calculate, since ‘enemy deaths’ that include civilians are not counted. Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives estimated that at least 4,200–4,500 civilians were killed by mid-January 2002 as a consequence of the US assault, both directly as casualties of the aerial bombing campaign and indirectly in the humanitarian crisis that ensued. By 2021, the Associated Press were reporting that 47,245 civilians had perished because of the occupation. Afghan civil rights activists gave a higher total, insisting that 100,000 Afghans (many of them non-combatants) had died, and three times that number had been wounded.
In 2019, the Washington Post published a 2,000-page internal report commissioned by the US federal government to anatomise the failures of its longest war: ‘The Afghanistan Papers’. It was based on a series of interviews with US Generals (retired and serving), political advisers, diplomats, aid workers and so on. Their combined assessment was damning. General Douglas Lute, the ‘Afghan war czar’ under Bush and Obama, confessed that ‘We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan – we didn’t know what we were doing…We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we’re undertaking…If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction.’ Another witness, Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy Seal and a White House staffer under Bush and Obama, highlighted the vast waste of resources: ‘What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion? … After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.’ He could have added: ‘And we still lost’.
Who was the enemy? The Taliban, Pakistan, all Afghans? A long-serving US soldier was convinced that at least one-third of Afghan police were addicted to drugs and another sizeable chunk were Taliban supporters. This posed a major problem for US soldiers, as an unnamed Special Forces honcho testified in 2017: ‘They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live…It took several conversations for them to understand that I did not have that information in my hands. At first, they just kept asking: “But who are the bad guys, where are they?”’.
Donald Rumsfeld expressed the same sentiment back in 2003. ‘I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq’, he wrote. ‘I read all the intel from the community, and it sounds as though we know a great deal, but in fact, when you push at it, you find out we haven’t got anything that is actionable. We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.’ The inability to distinguish between a friend and an enemy is a serious issue – not just on a Schmittean level, but on a practical one. If you can’t tell the difference between allies and adversaries after an IED attack in a crowded city market, you respond by lashing out at everyone, and create more enemies in the process.
Colonel Christopher Kolenda, an adviser to three serving Generals, pointed to another problem with the US mission. Corruption was rampant from the beginning, he said; the Karzai government was ‘self-organised into a kleptocracy.’ That undermined the post-2002 strategy of building a state that could outlast the occupation. ‘Petty corruption is like skin cancer, there are ways to deal with it and you’ll probably be just fine. Corruption within the ministries, higher level, is like colon cancer; it’s worse, but if you catch it in time, you’re probably okay. Kleptocracy, however, is like brain cancer; it’s fatal.’ Of course, the Pakistani state – where kleptocracy is embedded at every level – has survived for decades. But things weren’t so easy in Afghanistan, where nation-building efforts were led by an occupying army and the central government had scant popular support.
What of the fake reports that the Taliban were routed, never to return? A senior figure in the National Security Council reflected on the lies broadcast by his colleagues: ‘It was their explanations. For example, [Taliban] attacks are getting worse? “That’s because there are more targets for them to fire at, so more attacks are a false indicator of instability.” Then, three months later, attacks are still getting worse? “It’s because the Taliban are getting desperate, so it’s actually an indicator that we’re winning”…And this went on and on for two reasons, to make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the troops and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would cause the country to deteriorate.’
All this was an open secret in the chanceries and defence ministries of NATO Europe. In October 2014, the British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon admitted that ‘Mistakes were made militarily, mistakes were made by the politicians at the time and this goes back 10, 13 years…We’re not going to send combat troops back into Afghanistan, under any circumstances.’ Four years later, Prime Minister Theresa May redeployed British troops to Afghanistan, doubling its fighters ‘to help tackle the fragile security situation’. Now the UK media is echoing the Foreign Office and criticising Biden for having made the wrong move at the wrong time, with the head of the British armed forces Sir Nick Carter suggesting a new invasion might be necessary. Tory backbenchers, colonial nostalgists, stooge-journalists and Blair-toadies are lining up to call for a permanent British presence in the war-torn state.
What’s astonishing is that neither General Carter nor his relays appear to have acknowledged the scale of the crisis confronted by the US war machine, as set out in ‘The Afghanistan Papers’. While American military planners have slowly woken up to reality, their British counterparts still cling to a fantasy image of Afghanistan. Some argue that the withdrawal will put Europe’s security at risk, as al-Qaeda regroups under the new Islamic Emirate. But these forecasts are disingenuous. The US and UK have spent years arming and assisting al-Qaeda in Syria, as they did in Bosnia and in Libya. Such fearmongering can only function in a swamp of ignorance. For the British public, at least, it does not seem to have cut through. History sometimes presses urgent truths on a country through a vivid demonstration of facts or an exposure of elites. The current withdrawal is likely to be one such moment. Britons, already hostile to the War on Terror, could harden in their opposition to future military conquests.
What does the future hold? Replicating the model developed for Iraq and Syria, the US has announced a permanent special military unit, staffed by 2,500 troops, to be stationed at a Kuwaiti base, ready to fly to Afghanistan and bomb, kill and maim should it become necessary. Meanwhile, a high-powered Taliban delegation visited China last July, pledging that their country would never again be used as a launch pad for attacks on other states. Cordial discussions were held with the Chinese Foreign Minister, reportedly covering trade and economic ties. The summit recalled similar meetings between Afghan mujahideen and Western leaders during the 1980s: the former appearing with their Wahhabi costumes and regulation beard-cuts against the spectacular backdrop of the White House or 10 Downing Street. But now, with NATO in retreat, the key players are China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan (which has undoubtedly provided strategic assistance to the Taliban, and for whom this is a huge politico-military triumph). None of them wants a new civil war, in polar contrast to the US and its allies after the Soviet withdrawal. China’s close relations with Tehran and Moscow might enable it to work towards securing some fragile peace for the citizens of this traumatised country, aided by continuing Russian influence in the north.
Much emphasis has been placed on the average age in Afghanistan: 18, in a population of 40 million. On its own this means nothing. But there is hope that young Afghans will strive for a better life after the forty-year conflict. For Afghan women the struggle is by no means over, even if only a single enemy remains. In Britain and elsewhere, all those who want to fight on must shift their focus to the refugees who will soon be knocking on NATO’s door. At the very least, refuge is what the West owes them: a minor reparation for an unnecessary war.
By Danny Haiphong, Black Agenda Report. Popular Resistance.org (8-26-22). The mid-point of August is an important moment in history for Afghanistan and the world. It marks the anniversary of the Taliban’s ouster of large portions of the U.S. military from Afghanistan, putting a formal end to a two-decade occupation. U.S. forces left Afghanistan just as murderously as they came in. Joe Biden’s administration oversaw numerous war crimes during its haphazard “withdrawal” on August 15th 2021. This included a drone strike that killed ten civilians and at least seven children. The cost of the twenty-year total siege of Afghanistan is well documented. -more-
“Chaos, poverty and hunger – The U.S. legacy in Afghanistan.”
teleSUR Desk. Mronline.org (12-30-21). The U.S.-led mission fled the Afghanistan front of their so-called "war on terror," leaving nothing but trash, extreme poverty and universal unemployment.
Craig Whitlock. “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War August 31, 2021.”
Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives.
Distracted by the war in Iraq, the US military become mired in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict in a country it did not understand. But no president wanted to admit failure, especially in a war that began as a just cause. Instead, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations sent more and more troops to Afghanistan and repeatedly said they were making progress, even though they knew there was no realistic prospect for an outright victory.
Just as the Pentagon Papers changed the public’s understanding of Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers contains “fast-paced and vivid” (The New York Times Book Review) revelation after revelation from people who played a direct role in the war from leaders in the White House and the Pentagon to soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. In unvarnished language, they admit that the US government’s strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government. All told, the account is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who knew that the US government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground.
Documents unearthed by The Washington Post reveal that President Bush didn’t know the name of his Afghanistan war commander—and didn’t want to meet with him. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.” His successor, Robert Gates, said: “We didn’t know jack shit about al-Qaeda.”
The Afghanistan Papers is a “searing indictment of the deceit, blunders, and hubris of senior military and civilian officials” (Tom Bowman, NRP Pentagon Correspondent) that will supercharge a long-overdue reckoning over what went wrong and forever change the way the conflict is remembered.
‘The Afghanistan Papers’ leaves a critical question unanswered
Editor. Mronline.org (5-17-22).
Craig Whitlock. The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War. 2021. While Afghanistan may finally be free of outside military occupation, Afghans are still suffering the deadly consequences of 40 years of U.S.-led subversion and war.
MEDIA COVERAGE
Julie Hollar. “Media Concern for Afghans Vanishes as US Sanctions Threaten Mass Famine.” Extra!(March 2022). US tv interest spiked during the Afghan withdrawal, and then, despite the humanitarian hunger crisis, “due in no small part to US sanctions, ‘where is the outrage’?”
Julie Hollar. “Biden’s multi-Billion Afghan theft gets scant mention on TV News.” Mronline.org (2-18-22).
Two months ago (FAIR.org, 12/21/21), I noted the striking contrast between vocal media outrage—ostensibly grounded in concern for Afghan people—over President Joe Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, and the relative silence over the growing humanitarian crisis in that country, which threatens millions with life-threatening levels of famine.
COSTS OF WAR
US WITHDRAWAL (no planning for invasion, no planning for defeat, but waste everywhere)
COSTS OF WAR: WITHDRAWAL August 2021
The withdrawal from the devastating war on Afghanistan
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From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics and Engineering Physics) <sadanand@ccsu.edu>
Date: Sat, Apr 30, 2022 at 9:53 PM
Subject: The withdrawal from the devastating war on Afghanistan
No Gun Left Behind? April 29, 2022, Al Jazeera
Almost 80 U.S. aircraft—with control panels smashed out—were left abandoned at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport when the United States pulled out last August. The United States left behind nearly 42,000 pieces of night vision, surveillance, biometric, and positioning equipment in the Taliban-controlled country.
By the time the last U.S. transport aircraft left Afghan airspace on Aug. 30, 2021, 70 percent of U.S. weapons given to the Afghan forces over the past 16 years were left in the country as well as nearly $48 million worth of ammunition.
In all, the United States left behind more than $7 billion worth of weapons and equipmentwhen it left Afghanistan last year, according to a congressional-mandated Defense Department report first seen by CNN. The equipment was transferred to the Afghan government, which collapsed even before the U.S. withdrawal last year.
The detritus is another hidden cost of the U.S. and NATO military withdrawal that ended two decades of Western involvement in the war-torn country.
The news comes as the Taliban have been on a killing spree against perceived opponents of the regime in recent weeks, and a spate of terrorist groups that the United States promised to monitor from “over the horizon” in bases in the Persian Gulf have also made a resurgence. The Taliban have also cracked down on human rights in the war-torn country, recently moving to ensure girls don’t go to school.
“With these weapons, the Taliban are feeling power to implement their barbaric rules on the people of Afghanistan,” said Zelgai Sajad, the former Afghan consul general in New York. “They are holding many military shows with these weapons in the cities and trying to convince people to obey them.”
In recent weeks, the Taliban have been seen parading through the streets of Afghanistan in U.S. armored vehicles that were first provided to the Afghan army. The United States left 23,825 Humvees in Afghanistan, including armored gun truck variants, and nearly 900 combat vehicles, officials familiar with the report said. “These weapons are potentially in the service of crushing human rights,” said Aref Dostyar, Afghanistan’s former consul general in Los Angeles.
The Defense Department insists that it’s unlikely the Taliban could use the American weapons left behind because they require specialized maintenance and technical support that was once provided by U.S. contractors.
But officials familiar with the report are concerned that the Taliban could use the small arms, at least. There are more than 250,000 automatic rifles, 95 drones, and more than a million mortar rounds that require little training to use. And if the Taliban don’t use the systems, the cash-starved militant group could pass them on to American adversaries or they could find their way into the hands of terror groups.
The Pentagon insists that U.S. forces were able to destroy or render inoperable much of the equipment and weapons provided to Afghanistan before the troop withdrawal, a figure that amounted to $18.6 billion.
“It is important to remember that the $7.12 billion figure cited in the department’s recent report to Congress corresponds to [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] equipment and not U.S. military equipment used by our forces,” said Maj. Rob Lodewick, a Defense Department spokesperson. “Nearly all equipment used by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan was either retrograded or destroyed prior to our withdrawal and is not part of the $7.12 billion figure cited in the report.”
And the Pentagon has tried to get some of the money back. In April, the Pentagon told the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction that it had tried to get back money previously provided to the Afghan government to build up its military but had failed due to the collapse of the Afghan banking system.
Sajad, the Afghan diplomat, doesn’t believe that the Taliban can use the weapons for long. “In the long term, I am not sure that the Taliban have the capacity to protect and repair these weapons,” he said. [But the best news of all is the envigoration of the US MIC by renewed military contracts.]
Zachary Scott. “Biden Lies (Again) as He Covertly Continues the U.S. Forever War Against the Afghan People.” CovertAction Magazine, Jan 18, 2022, 09:19 am.
Over the past few months, U.S. lawmakers, the Afghan government, and the international community have called on Washington to stop strangling the Afghan economy as its people continue to suffer from a U.S.-created humanitarian crisis.
On December 22nd, the Biden administration effectively rejected those calls, opting instead for half-measures that will do little to counter the effects of stringent economic sanctions imposed on the Taliban or to improve the material well-being of the Afghan people.
Contrary to the narrative of U.S. politicians and journalists, the August 2021 withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan did not mark the end of the United States’ so-called “forever war” but rather a shift in U.S. policy—from direct military intervention and occupation to one based on economic sanctions and indirect political subversion. Although the tactics changed, the goal is the same: the accumulation of wealth and power through class warfare against the Afghan people. […]
The post Biden Lies (Again) as He Covertly Continues the U.S. Forever War Against the Afghan People appeared first on CovertAction Magazine.
BIDEN AND AFGHAN TREASURY
“‘Adding Insult to Injury’: Afghan Activist & 9/11 Mother Condemn Biden’s Seizure of Afghan Funds.” FEBRUARY 15, 2022
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/2/15/afghanistan_assets_joe_biden_executive_order
GUESTS
Masuda SultanAfghan American women’s rights activist, part of the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council and a founding member of Unfreeze Afghanistan.
Phyllis Rodriguezmember of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows whose son Greg was killed in the World Trade Center attack.
Medea Benjaminco-founder of CodePink and Unfreeze Afghanistan.
President Biden is facing mounting criticism for seizing $7 billion of Afghanistan’s federal reserves frozen in the United States. Biden is giving half of the money to families of September 11 victims while Afghanistan faces a humanitarian catastrophe. We speak to two of the founders of a new campaign called Unfreeze Afghanistan, a women-led initiative to lift sanctions and other economic restrictions on Afghanistan, and a woman who lost her son in the World Trade Center attack, who says the money should stay in Afghanistan. “The suffering of the Afghan people at the hands of the United States and its allies is reprehensible. This is adding insult to injury,” says Phyllis Rodriguez, a member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, whose son Greg was killed in the World Trade Center attack and who says 9/11 families want “information, not remuneration.” Afghan American activist Masuda Sultan says continued lack of access to money and basic services in Afghanistan will inspire a new wave of underground terrorism in the country, “endangering the entire world.” Biden’s order is gravely hypocritical, adds Medea Benjamin, critiquing the administration for “putting themselves forward as these great saviors of Afghanistan” for releasing Afghan-owned assets as “aid” while taking no punitive action against Saudi Arabia, whose citizens led the 9/11 attack.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Afghanistan’s central bank is condemning President Biden’s decision to seize $7 billion of Afghan assets frozen in U.S. banks. On Friday, Biden signed an executive order to split the money between the families of 9/11 victims and humanitarian assistance for Afghanistan. The United States froze the money after the Taliban seized power six months ago today. The United Nations and many aid groups had been calling on the Biden administration, as well as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to unfreeze all Afghan funds in order to stem Afghanistan’s growing economic and humanitarian catastrophe.
Congressmember Ilhan Omar blasted Biden’s decision. She tweeted, “There wasn’t a single Afghan among the hijackers. Meanwhile, we are giving BILLIONS of dollars to the governments of Saudi Arabia & Egypt who have direct ties to the 9/11 terrorists. Even if this weren’t the case, punishing millions of starving ppl for these crimes is unconscionable,” she said.
Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai also criticized Biden’s decision. MORE https://www.democracynow.org/2022/2/15/afghanistan_assets_joe_biden_executive_order
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much, all, for being with us. Phyllis Rodriguez of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows lost her son Greg Rodriguez on the 100th floor of the World Trade Center. He worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. And Masuda Sultan and Medea Benjamin, who have just formed the group Unfreeze Afghanistan. Masuda Sultan, Afghan American, lost 19 members of her family when the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan and bombed a farmhouse they had taken refuge in outside of Kandahar. Of course, Medea Benjamin with CodePink.
Pullout starts new U.S. era, president says (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette), Sep 01, 2021
Pullout starts new U.S. era, president says Biden calls end to remaking nations using military force. COMPILED BY DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE STAFF FROM WIRE REPORTS
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Sep 01, 2021 Read more... Forwarded by Pat Snyder.
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Or will he follow Obama's "pivot" to China?
The Dems/Repugs War Party and MICCWH Complex think the China enemy will fuel the militarized jobs program and win elections.
Dick
US SANCTIONS V. AFGHAN PEOPLE
Call Today: US Policy & Afghan Famine
Peace Action 12-9-21
Dick,
A couple of weeks ago I wrote to you about the "human-made" famine in Afghanistan that U.S. policy is contributing to.[1] Many of you responded to our call to action. Thank you! Our campaign is building momentum, and reaching key policymakers, because of our members' efforts.
Thanks to the hearing from you, along with other concerned constituents, some progressive members of Congress are speaking out on the issue. That's critical because most people in the U.S. -- and even some members of Congress -- know very little about this issue.
The United States, seeking to punish the Taliban for their takeover in Afghanistan, is using its power to freeze critical aid and funds including the funds in the Afghanistan Central Bank. Humanitarian relief providers and human rights groups are calling on the U.S. to end this practice as the economy in Afghanistan crumbles and many Afghans go hungry.
This is partially a continuation of the chronic U.S. overuse of sanctions. As you know, too often the U.S. seeks to target an authoritarian government and ends up punishing civilians. But in this case the U.S. is actually not just sanctioning Afghanistan, it is freezing $9.5 billion dollars of Afghan funds at a time that the Afghan people need resources and the Afghan economy is failing.
Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) has issued a Congressional letter calling on the Biden administration to end the U.S. policies doing the most harm in Afghanistan.
Please call your Representative today and urge them to add their name as a signer to this critical letter on Afghanistan's famine.
Here’s all you need to do -
1. Dial the Congressional switchboard at 202-224-3121.
2. Ask to speak to your Representative.
3.Once connected, say (in your own words as much as you can):
“Hello, my name is (your name) and I am a constituent from (your city) and I am a member of Peace Action. I am calling because I want to ask __________ [name of Representative] to sign on to the Congressional sign-on letter Representative Jayapal is circulating regarding Afghanistan and the humanitarian crisis there. The letter asks President Biden to end the harsh economic sanctions, asset freezes, and other measures that are creating an economic and humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.
I am happy that the U.S. has pulled U.S. troops out of Afghanistan after 20 years, but I am disturbed by the reports of severe hunger and economic collapse coming out of Afghanistan. We should be supporting the Afghan people with aid, not causing more suffering after many years of war.”
Thank you to all of you who can make this call. I've been writing a lot lately, but that's because peace issues are being voted on in Congress a lot these days!
By blocking transfers from the roughly $9.5 billion in Afghanistan Central Bank accounts in the U.S. the Biden administration is starving the Afghan economy of oxygen. The Taliban are brutal and oppressive, and the administration may need to map out a strategy to deal with that. But destroying the entire nation's economy is not the way to address that. Many Afghans and aid organizations on the ground are asking the U.S. to take a more compassionate path. Cratering the Afghan economy, which is what many economists worry is happening, doesn't just target the Taliban. It destabilizes the entire country and harms the health and wellbeing of millions.
Winter can always be harsh in Afghanistan. But the pictures of suffering and deprivation coming out of Afghanistan right now are heartbreaking. U.S. foreign policy should not include holding a whole nation hostage because we have issues with the government that took over when we left Afghanistan.
Please call your Representative today.
Thank you for all you do for a more peaceful world,
Jon Rainwater
Peace Action
[1] Afghanistan Facing Famine, UN, World Bank, US Should Adjust Sanctions, Economic Policies, Human Rights Watch, November 11, 2021
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China in New Afghanistan
M. K. Bhadrakumar. “China’s diplomacy on a roll in Kabul.”
Mronline.org (4-1-22)
Last Thursday, the Acting Foreign Minister of the Taliban interim government Amir Khan Muttaqi made a stunning remark to greet the visiting Chinese Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Kabul when he said, “This is the most important high-level delegation received by Afghanistan.”
Marge Piercy. “Out of Afghanistan.”
Mronline.org (11-29-21).
This long bloody madness has ended. Can we learn to love peace at last?
CONTENTS #27
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2021/10/omni-afghanistan-newsletter-27-october.html
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 Taliban of 20 Years
Ago.
Contents #26.
END AFGHANISTAN ANTHOLOGY #28: US DEFEATED